Sartre’s big question

Sartre’s big question in the mid-1940s was: given that we are free, how can we use our freedom well in such challenging times? In his essay “The end of the war”, written just after Hiroshima and published in October 1945 — the same month as the lecture — he exhorted his readers to decide what kind of world they wanted, and make it happen. From now on, he wrote, we must always take into account our knowledge that we can destroy ourselves at will, with all our history and perhaps life on earth itself. Nothing stops us but our own free choosing. If we want to survive, we have to decide to live. Thus, he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.

Sarah Bakewell