How to write an essay (p.1)

Before approaching the essay, realise this: Every question has a claim.

This means that wherever you see a question mark there is a claim that is in question.

It took me MUCH too long to realise this during my university education, so I’m hoping to save you all a lot of time and effort here by explaining how.

What does this mean?

Let’s take the following question:

"To what extent does Sartre's claim that 'existence precedes essence' succeed in grounding human freedom?"

How would you answer this question? What would your first step be?

Take a moment to decide…

So, what was it? Is it to google the claim ‘existence precedes essence’? Better yet, would you just copy and paste the question into a search engine? Would you break down the question into key phrases and analyse the meaning within each?

These are all ways of starting, and were the ways that I would approach essay questions when I was in university. Now?

The first step:

1. Look for (and find) the claim in the question.

When I did - here’s what I found:

“Sartre’s ‘existence precedes essence’ succeeds in grounding human freedom.”

And there we go - that’s the basis of this question. It is a question about this claim, and it is asking you to decide to what extent this claim is strong or weak.

This is what you are looking to analyse, critique, evaluate and decide.

Once you know that - onto step two.

2. Find the basis behind the claim in the question.

   
   

In other words, why has someone claimed this?

To do that, you need to research. You can research using any search engine - the important part is the source you use to find the answer. There will be many answers to this question that you might be able to use, but what you really want is the undeniable proof. To do this, you need to get as close to the original source as possible.

I'm going to take you through one approach to identifying this basis. In it, I'm going to make some assumptions that I won't indicate, because that's what we all do when we write an essay, and in the next article - I'm going to bring some of these up.

But for now, here's what we do next: We need to go to Sartre’s work, and more specifically, we need to go to the sections of his work that reference ‘existence precedes essence’.

Here’s one:

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing.”

Here we have an account of the phrase existence precedes essence, one that is taken from Sartre’s lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism. However, we aren’t looking for a definition of the phrase, we’re looking for how this succeeds in grounding human freedom.

To do this, let’s ask ourselves the question - if existence precedes essence means that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the work - and defines himself afterwards” - how does this succeed in grounding human freedom?

This is where the plot thickens. What is human freedom?

Let’s say free will…the ability to freely make choices about how to be a human.

So does this definition work? The definition suggests that we are responsible for who we are, but it doesn’t tell us why.

And so we go back to the primary sources. Why are we responsible for who we are?

Here’s why:

“He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence.”

And so we see, the basis behind the claim that existence precedes essence successfully grounds human freedom is that there is no God to have a conception of our nature, because God doesn’t exist, and therefore, there is no nature, and it is our responsibility to define our existence for ourselves.

3. Evaluate the evidence

Once you have the basis behind the claim, it is now up to you to evaluate the evidence.

The problem with evaluating the evidence is always how far to go, and what points to consider. It is at this point where I find most students make or break their argument.

Why?

Because there is a huge difference in the potential quality of someone’s evaluation.

Here’s an example of two different levels of evaluation:

”existence precedes essence successfully grounds human freedom.”

1. The claim is correct because I agree that God doesn’t exist and therefore it is up to us to decide how to live. This is because no one has ever seen God in the sky and as a result there is no evidence that God exists. Because this means God doesn’t exist, and therefore that no one can tell us what to do and not to do, the only other person it could be is myself, and therefore I must exist first and then define myself, and if that is the case, then I must be able to make free choices, and therefore have human freedom.

2. The claim is correct on the condition that all arguments in favour of the existence of God are incorrect. This is because atheism is a prerequisite to the idea that we define our existence for ourselves. If atheism as a belief is proven, then human freedom is not the result of an entity separate to ourselves, and is instead the result of our capacity for self-definition. That said, Sartre’s statement does not discuss evolution as a potential basis for human freedom, nor does he define how his definition of “existence precedes essence” might relate to evolution. The reason that evolution is relevant is because there is a wealth of scientific literature on the potential for evolution to account for development in species behaviour. Therefore, if God doesn’t exist, the emphasis is on the defender of the claim to describe how “existence precedes essence” successfully grounds human freedom in relation to evolution. The truthity of the claim is also contingent on the scope of the context that we might take as a basis for evidence. Furthermore, the correctness of the claim is also contingent on the strength of the evidence in representing Sartre’s viewpoint. The evidence is only taken from one piece of work, and it is known that Sartre rejected the validity of the work after it was produced, and favoured different work as the true basis of the claim. Therefore, there are a variety of factors that contribute to the strength and correctness of the claim that ”existence precedes essence successfully grounds human freedom.”

I’m sure the difference between these two forms of evaluation is clear. The second evaluation is much, much better as an evaluation, but ironically, is much, much worse as an answer.

Why?

Because the second evaluation identifies various conditions that need to be satisfied in order for the claim to be correct. This increases the specificity of the truth within the claim, and therefore makes for a more accurate evaluation That said, some of these conditions aren't clarified and tied back to the question. As a result, while there is more going on in the evaluation, we somehow end up with more questions than we started with.

By contrast, the first evaluation leads with an answer and supports the answer with various evaluations, it just happens that the evaluations are not very strong and if someone wanted to, they could identify several problems with the reasoning on display.

So, which is better?

This is where your field of study comes into play. You need to decide what the conditions for good evidence are within your essay. In other words, what will you appeal to in order to decide whether the evidence you identified as the basis for the correctness of the claim is good enough?

Easy right? This is what we’ll tackle next week.