Existence precedes essence

Bakewell frames Sartre's central claim as a direct reversal of older philosophical and religious assumptions that humans are born with a fixed nature or purpose, the way a manufactured tool is designed with a function before it's built. Sartre argues instead that a person simply exists first, undefined, and only through living, choosing, and acting does any kind of identity or "essence" accumulate afterward.

This reversal is unsettling because it removes any external authority — God, nature, tradition — that could hand a person a ready-made purpose. You are not fulfilling a design; you are inventing yourself continuously, and there is no blueprint to check your choices against, only the choices themselves.

Bakewell shows how this idea, while liberating in theory, produced real anxiety in Sartre's circle, since it means no choice can be excused by appeal to "human nature" or destiny. Takeaway: if nothing about your nature is fixed in advance, you are entirely responsible for who you become — there is no one else, and nothing else, to blame.