“Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.”[1]
Sartre is one of the best known, and certainly one of the most charismatic, philosophers of the Twentieth Century. In his classic Existentialism and Humanism he argued that existence precedes essence. What he meant by this was simple: the kind of person we become is down to us. It is us that create the meaning of our lives. The optimism of this approach is that if we are not happy with the person we have become, we are free to choose otherwise. In this sense he anticipated many of the advances in psychological therapies that were to be developed in the late Twentieth Century.
Does this approach contradict an evolutionary approach to human psychology? Personally I don’t think so. The existence we are born to is intimately shaped by our evolutionary history. We are free to transcend its limitations if we so choose … and this was Sartre’s great insight.
Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the
UK. He offers:
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