You create yourself through your choices

We like the idea that a finished self is waiting somewhere inside us. A talent to be discovered, a calling to be found, a real personality that circumstances have been hiding. Under that assumption, life becomes a search: if we look carefully enough, we will finally learn who we are.

Jean-Paul Sartre argued the opposite. A paper knife exists because someone first had the concept of a paper knife and then produced it. Its purpose came before its existence. For a human being there is no such prior blueprint, so existence precedes essence. We exist first, and only afterwards, through what we do, does anything like a self appear.

That reverses the usual order of explanation. I am not generous and therefore help people; I become generous by helping people. There is no hidden essence quietly guaranteeing that I am brave, honest or serious. There is only a record of decisions.

"Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is."

This is why Sartre called freedom a burden rather than a gift. If nothing was written in advance, nothing can be blamed in advance either. We are, in his phrase, condemned to be free: forced to choose, without any authority to sign off on the choice. Even refusing to decide is a decision, and it produces the same kind of person that any other decision would.

He gave the strategies we use to escape this a name: bad faith. It is the move of treating ourselves as objects with fixed properties. I am simply not that sort of person. I had no choice. That is just how I am. Each of these sentences quietly converts a decision into a fact of nature, which is exactly what makes it comfortable.

None of this means circumstances are irrelevant. We do not choose our bodies, families, class, historical moment or the consequences that follow from them. Sartre's point is narrower and harder to dismiss: within a situation we did not select, our response is still ours, and that response is the only material we have to work with.

The practical consequence is unglamorous. If there is no essence to discover, self-knowledge stops being an act of introspection and becomes an act of observation. Not what do I feel I am, but what have I actually been doing. Ambitions we never act on describe nothing. Values we abandon whenever they cost something describe nothing either.

It also means the question is never settled. A record of choices can be continued in a different direction tomorrow, which is the optimistic half of the argument and the reason Sartre insisted his philosophy was not a doctrine of despair.

There is no true self hiding behind the choices. The choices are the self, and they are still being made.

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— Jean-Paul Sartre