Aristotelianism

• Aristotle first took on this question in his Nicomachean Ethics – arguably the first time anyone in Western intellectual history had focused on the subject as a standalone question.
• Aristotle proposed, in other words, an answer grounded in an investigation of our purpose or ends (telos) as a species.

Ends and essences

• This will allow us to determine what a good or a bad function actually is.
• We must first understand what a knife is in order to determine what would constitute its proper function.
• He thus proposes that our essence – what makes us unique – is that humans are capable of reasoning.
• What a good, flourishing human life involves, therefore, is “some kind of practical life of that part that has reason”.

Existence precedes essence

• During the Enlightenment, the dominant philosophical and religious traditions, which included Aristotle’s work, were reexamined in light of new Western principles of thought.
• There was a corresponding proliferation of secular approaches to understanding the nature of reality and, by extension, the way we ought to live our lives.
• Sartre summed up this principle in the formula “existence precedes essence”.
• Believing we possess a predefined essence is one such external circumstance.
• Sartre believes the waiter’s exaggeration of waiter-hood is an act – that the waiter is deceiving himself into being a waiter.

An authentic life

• This means never acting in such a way that denies we are free.
• When we make a choice, that choice must be fully ours.
• We have no essence; we are nothing but what we make for ourselves.
• “You are free, therefore choose,” he replied to the pupil – “that is to say, invent”.