ABSTRACT
The claim that existence precedes essence with illustrative example The foundational principle of Sartre’s existentialism is that ‘existence precedes essence’, meaning that, in the beginning, man is ‘nothing’ but a being thrown into the world by accident: ‘He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself’ (28). There is no divine plan behind the existence of man on Earth and, in the absence of God, the very concept of human nature is redundant as it has lost all meaning. Instead, man ‘is what he wills’ and Sartre describes this total freedom of the individual, which he calls ‘subjectivity’, ‘the first principle of existentialism’ (28).
