There is no fixed human essence handed to you in advance: you exist first and define yourself through your choices. Freedom is total, and so is the responsibility that comes with it.
Where it stands on the axes
- The nature of reality
- Takes no fixed position. Brackets cosmology to focus on lived existence; Sartre distinguishes conscious being (for-itself) from mere thinghood (in-itself), but this isn't a claim about what the world is made of.
- How we knowcontested
- Intuition-led. Privileges first-person, lived truth over detached system — Kierkegaard: 'truth is subjectivity'; the phenomenological method starts from experience.
- What makes an action right
- Takes no fixed position. No fixed moral code; authenticity and radical responsibility are the nearest thing to a standard (Beauvoir's 'ethics of ambiguity' pushes furthest toward an ethics).
- Where meaning comes from
- Created. The signature claim: 'existence precedes essence' — meaning is authored, not found or given.
- What people are like underneath
- Malleable. There is no fixed human nature; we make ourselves through what we choose.
- Free will
- Libertarian (free will). 'Man is condemned to be free' — freedom is not partial but total, and inescapable.
- The individual and the groupcontested
- Individualist. Centres the authentic individual against the anonymous crowd; the later Sartre and Beauvoir turned toward committed, even Marxist, politics.
- How power should be arranged
- Egalitarian. Deferring to inherited roles or external authority is 'bad faith'; each person is radically, equally responsible.
- How change should happencontested
- Rupture. Authenticity means breaking from the given roles of 'the They' (das Man); Sartre carried this into revolutionary politics.
Marked readings are ones serious scholars dispute; the note says how. Traditions are living arguments, not fixed doctrines.
A challenge to it
The critic of radical freedom: Genes, upbringing, class, and circumstance shape choices far more than 'total freedom' allows; declaring everyone the sole author of their life can turn into blaming people for constraints they never chose.
Inner Axis never pins a school on you. A reading describes where your answers resemble a tradition and where they part from it — a family resemblance, not a label you carry.