On the Weight of Choosing

We tend to talk about freedom as a prize — something governments owe citizens, something adolescents win from parents, something to be defended, expanded, celebrated. Sartre agreed it was all of that, and then insisted on a much less comfortable addition: freedom is also a sentence. His exact phrase, from a 1946 lecture, was that we are “condemned to be free”^[1] — condemned, not blessed, because the condemned don’t get to opt out of their verdict, and neither, on his account, do we get to opt out of choosing.

No author but you

The engine behind this is a claim that sounds almost like a slogan: existence precedes essence. For a manufactured object — a letter-opener, his own example — essence comes first: someone had a concept of letter-opener in mind, a purpose, before any actual letter-opener existed. The object’s nature was decided before it showed up.

SidenoteSartre was explicitly arguing against any view — religious or naturalistic — that treats human nature as fixed in advance, whether by God’s design or by biology playing the same role under a different name.Human beings, Sartre argued, are the one kind of thing that runs this backwards. You show up first — thrown into a body, a family, a century, none of it chosen — and only afterward, through what you actually do, do you become anything in particular. There’s no factory concept of “you” that your choices are measured against. The choices are the concept, accumulating in real time, with nothing behind them but more choosing.

Why this is a weight and not a gift

This is where “condemned” earns its keep. If some fixed human nature dictated what you should do, moral effort would be a matter of discovering the right answer, the way you discover a fact. But if there’s no such nature — if, in Sartre’s phrase, you are nothing else but what you make of yourself — then every choice is not just selecting an action but casting a vote for what a human being is allowed to be, since you’re implicitly saying: this is a viable way to live, one I’d endorse for anyone in my position.^[2] That’s an enormous amount of freight to hang on ordering breakfast, and Sartre knew it sounded excessive even as he insisted it was true of the small choices as much as the large ones — just harder to notice at small scale, the way you don’t feel the earth’s rotation.

Most people, most of the time, don’t operate this way, and Sartre had a name for the alternative too: bad faith, mauvaise foi — the vast, ordinary human effort spent pretending the choice wasn’t really a choice at all. I was just following orders. That’s just how I was raised. I had no other option. Some of these excuses are situationally true in a narrow sense. But bad faith is what happens when we use the language of no-option to escape a situation that was, underneath the language, still chosen — even choosing to comply is a choice, dressed up as its absence because the dressing is more comfortable than the nakedness of the alternative.

What to do with the weight

None of this is an argument for paralysis, though it’s often mistaken for one. Camus, working the same territory from a different angle, thought the right response to an absence of built-in meaning wasn’t despair but something closer to defiance — Sisyphus, pushing the boulder back up knowing it will roll down again, and somehow, in Camus’s famous last line, we must imagine him happy.

The weight of choosing, in other words, isn’t a bug to be engineered away with the right rulebook or the right excuse. It’s closer to a description of what it actually is to be a person rather than an object — and the discomfort of it, Sartre would say, is simply what freedom feels like from the inside, before you’ve decided to stop pretending otherwise.

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1. From Existentialism Is a Humanism, the 1946 lecture in which Sartre tried to defend existentialism against the charge that it left people with no grounds for values at all. ↩︎

2. This is Sartre’s version of universalizability — close in spirit to Kant’s categorical imperative, though Sartre arrives at it from freedom and responsibility rather than from reason legislating a universal law. ↩︎