Michael: Everything you think defines you—your personality, your job, your 'essence'—is a lie. Not a little white lie, but a fundamental one you tell yourself every day to escape a terrifying truth. Today, we're exploring why. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. My entire personality is a lie? That's a heavy way to start. Are you telling me my lifelong belief that I'm just 'not a morning person' is a carefully constructed fiction? Michael: According to our philosopher of the day, yes, absolutely. It’s a convenient story you tell yourself. This whole radical idea comes from one of the 20th century's most challenging and profound philosophical works, Being and Nothingness, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Kevin: Sartre... I know the name, but isn't his work famously, well, impossible to read? It has a reputation for being incredibly dense. Michael: It is! That's why we're leaning on the brilliant class lecture notes by Paul Vincent Spade, which are highly praised for making Sartre's ideas clear. And you have to remember the context: Sartre wrote this in Paris during the Nazi occupation in 1943. This isn't abstract armchair philosophy; it's a philosophy of freedom forged in a time of extreme oppression. Kevin: Okay, that adds some serious weight to it. So where does this idea—that my personality is a lie—even begin? Michael: It all starts with his most famous, and most misunderstood, slogan: "Existence precedes essence."

Kevin: Right, I've definitely heard that phrase, but I have no idea what it actually means. It sounds like something you'd see on a motivational poster. Michael: It does, but it's the absolute opposite of a simple platitude. Let's break it down. Think about a letter-opener. Before it exists, an artisan has a concept of it in their mind. They know its purpose, its design, its essence. Then they manufacture it. For the letter-opener, essence precedes its existence. Kevin: That makes sense. The blueprint comes before the object. Michael: Exactly. Now, Sartre says for human beings, it's the complete reverse. We are thrown into the world first—we exist—without a blueprint. There's no pre-defined human nature, no divine plan, no inherent purpose. We are born as a terrifying, undefined void. A "nothingness." And then, through our choices and actions, we create our own essence. Kevin: A void? That sounds... empty. So there's no such thing as a 'true self' we're supposed to find? Michael: Precisely. There is no 'true self' waiting to be discovered. You aren't born a coward or a hero. You become one by choosing cowardly or heroic actions. You aren't an 'artistic person'; you are a person who chooses to make art. This is what Sartre means when he says we are "condemned to be free." We can't escape the constant, moment-to-moment choice of creating who we are. Kevin: But wait, this 'radical freedom' sounds a bit much. Surely our genetics, our upbringing, our environment matter? Sartre can't just be ignoring all of that. I didn't choose to be born in the 21st century, or to have the body I have. Michael: You're right, and he doesn't ignore it. He makes a brilliant distinction here between what he calls Facticity and Transcendence. Facticity is all the brute facts about you that you can't change: your birthplace, your past, your height, the historical moment you live in. They are the 'givens.' Kevin: Okay, so that's the stuff I'm stuck with. Michael: Yes, but Transcendence is your freedom to choose what those facts mean. You can't change the fact that you failed an exam in the past. That's facticity. But you are completely free to define what that failure means: is it proof that you're stupid? Is it a lesson to study harder? Is it an irrelevant event from long ago? The meaning is not in the fact; the meaning is in your choice. Kevin: I see. The facts are the canvas, but I'm the one painting the picture. Michael: A perfect analogy. And this is where the anguish comes in. To illustrate this, Sartre gives the example of a compulsive gambler. Imagine a man who, after a disastrous night, makes a sincere, heartfelt resolution: "I will never gamble again." He feels it in his bones. He has defined himself as a non-gambler. Kevin: I can picture it. He's hit rock bottom and he's ready to change. Michael: But the next day, he walks past the casino. The lights are flashing, he hears the familiar sounds. He approaches the roulette table. And in that moment, Sartre says, the resolution he made yesterday is totally powerless. It's just a fact from the past. It's a ghost. It has no force unless he, in this present moment, freely chooses to remake that resolution from scratch. Kevin: Wow. So his past self can't save him. Michael: His past self can't do anything. He is totally, terrifyingly free to place a bet. And that gap between the man who made the resolution and the man who is free to break it—that's the abyss of freedom. That's existential anguish.

Kevin: Honestly, that sounds exhausting. The constant pressure to choose, to create yourself from nothing every single second... I can see why someone would want to escape that. Michael: And that is the perfect entry point to Sartre's most psychologically brilliant concept: Bad Faith. Mauvaise foi. It's the ingenious mechanism we use to flee from the vertigo of our own freedom. It's the art of lying to yourself. Kevin: How does it work? If I'm the one telling the lie, and I'm also the one being lied to, how can I possibly believe it? Michael: That's the paradox, and Sartre says we do it by pretending we are not free. We pretend we are fixed objects, like that letter-opener. We try to become a thing, a being-in-itself, to escape the burden of being a free consciousness, a being-for-itself. And he gives this incredible, almost cinematic example: the waiter in a Parisian café. Kevin: Okay, I'm intrigued. What about the waiter? Michael: Sartre observes this waiter. His movement is a little too quick, a little too precise. He leans forward a little too eagerly. His voice is a little too solicitous. He's not just being a waiter; he's performing the role of a waiter. He is trying to chain himself to the identity of 'waiter' so he can convince himself that his actions are determined by his role. He's trying to become a waiter-automaton. Kevin: Oh, I know this person. It's like someone whose entire personality on Instagram is 'coffee enthusiast' or 'dog mom.' They're reducing their whole, messy, free existence into this one, neat little box. Michael: Exactly! That is a perfect modern example of bad faith. The waiter is denying his transcendence—his freedom to be anything else—and trying to melt into his facticity, his job. He's building a comfortable prison out of his identity to hide from the terrifying, open field of his freedom. Kevin: So that's one way to lie to yourself—pretend you're just your job or your role. Michael: Yes, you deny your freedom. But there's another way, which is to deny your facticity. Sartre, drawing from a psychoanalyst of his time, gives the example of a woman on a first date. Her date takes her hand. This is an ambiguous moment. To leave her hand there is to consent to a certain level of intimacy. To pull it away is to shut it down. Kevin: A classic awkward moment. Michael: To escape the responsibility of this choice, she engages in bad faith. She leaves her hand there, but she treats it as just a thing, a piece of flesh separate from her. She divorces her consciousness from her body. She starts talking about abstract, intellectual things, denying the facticity of the situation—the warm hand on hers, the burgeoning romance. She denies the facts to pretend she isn't making a choice. Kevin: So in both cases, the waiter and the woman on the date, they're pretending some part of their reality doesn't exist so they don't have to choose. Michael: Precisely. They are lying to themselves to escape the anguish of freedom. And Sartre argues we do this all the time, in a thousand different ways.

Michael: So we've seen how we try to escape our own freedom. But the biggest threat to our freedom, the thing that can turn our world upside down in an instant, often comes from the outside. It comes from the simple glance of another person. Kevin: The look? What do you mean? Like someone giving you a dirty look? Michael: It's much deeper than that. Sartre calls it "The Look," and it's his solution to the problem of other minds. He tells this incredibly vivid story. Imagine a man, driven by jealousy or curiosity, peeping through a keyhole. Kevin: Okay, a bit creepy, but I'm with you. Michael: While he's peeping, he is the center of his own universe. The world is organized around him. The keyhole, the hallway, the sounds from the room—they are all objects for his consciousness. He is a pure subject, a king in his own world. He is totally free. Kevin: He's in control. Michael: Completely. But then... he hears a floorboard creak behind him. He realizes someone is there. Someone is watching him. In that single, horrifying instant, his entire world collapses and reorients. Kevin: Oh man, I can feel that. The sudden rush of shame. Michael: Exactly. He is no longer the subject. He has become an object in someone else's world. He is no longer just a consciousness; he is a thing—a "peeping Tom," something vulgar, shameful, frozen by the other person's gaze. The Other, just by looking at him, has stolen his world and defined him. He now exists as a character in their story. Kevin: That's a chilling thought. The idea that someone just looking at me can steal my world... it feels so violating. I mean, it's that feeling when you're singing alone in your car, totally lost in the music, and you look over and the person in the next car is just staring at you. Instant shame. You're not a free spirit anymore; you're just 'that weird guy singing badly.' Michael: That is the perfect description of the experience. And this is what leads Sartre to his most famous, and most bleak, conclusion in his play No Exit: "Hell is other people." Hell isn't fire and brimstone. Hell is being trapped for eternity under the objectifying gaze of others, constantly fighting a battle for your own identity that you can never win. You need their recognition to feel real, but their recognition always turns you into an object, a thing. It's an unwinnable conflict.

Kevin: So, if we're condemned to be free, constantly lying to ourselves in bad faith, and our relationships are a battlefield of gazes... this sounds incredibly bleak. Is there any way out? Is there any hope in Sartre's world? Michael: That's the ultimate question Sartre leaves us with, and it's where his philosophy becomes a profound challenge. He does hint at a path, a concept he calls 'authenticity.' But it's not what you'd think. Authenticity isn't about 'finding your true self'—for Sartre, that's just another form of bad faith, another attempt to become a fixed thing. Kevin: So what is it then? Michael: It's about embracing the contradiction. It's accepting your total freedom and your unchangeable facticity, all at once. It's living with the anguish of knowing you are the sole author of your values in a world that has none. It's not a comfortable, happy state. It's a state of constant tension. But in that tension, Sartre believes, lies our human dignity. Kevin: So the takeaway isn't a happy one, but a powerful one. It's not a solution, but a challenge. It forces you to ask: What roles am I playing? What lies am I telling myself to feel safe? Michael: Exactly. And the most profound question he leaves us with is this: What would you do, how would you live, if you truly believed you were 100% responsible for the person you are becoming, starting right now? Kevin: That's a question that could change your life. For anyone listening who feels that pull, we encourage you to share your thoughts. What roles do you find yourself playing? Let us know and join the conversation. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.