by STEFANY ANNE GOLBERG
Philosopher author Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize. Camus accepted it. As far as Existentialism is concerned, neither was wrong.
If the members of the Nobel Academy felt slighted when Jean-Paul Sartre rejected their prize 50 years ago, they didn’t show it. The Academy set out the dinner plates and made their speeches anyway — without the philosopher. The 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, announced Anders Österling — longtime member of the Swedish Academy, and a writer himself — was being given to “the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.”
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Ultimately, Sartre refused the Nobel Prize because of the philosophical idea with which he will forever be associated: Existentialism. The core of Existentialism is this: Existence precedes essence. Think of a penknife, said Sartre in his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. Do you believe an artisan makes a penknife from an idea of a penknife that comes first? If so, you believe that essence precedes existence, and are not an Existentialist. You believe the physical existing penknife is derived from an essential Penknife, from which all penknives are brought into existence. Applying this thinking to persons, putting essence before existence means that all people are created from one universal idea of people — namely, God’s image of people.
But Sartre did not believe that people were created in God’s image. He believed that a person’s existence came first. A person exists, encounters his or her self, breaks out into the world — and defines his or her self only afterward. Only by existing can a person know who she is. “Man,” said Sartre, “is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. … Man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.”
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