On Saturday April 19, 1980, fifty thousand people packed the streets of Paris to mourn the death of a philosopher. The crowd accompanying the hearse of Jean-Paul Sartre to Montparnasse cemetery would have been as various as Sartre’s own career: some paying their respects to a novelist or playwright; others to a Marxist and revolutionary; still others to an iconic existentialist, atheist, and humanist. All would have agreed they were witness to the passing of one of the great philosophers of their time.

In university philosophy departments, Sartre’s reputation – judging by how infrequently his works appear on undergraduate reading lists – did not long outlive him. The public polemics and cultural pursuits that made the Frenchman famous led him to be dismissed as unserious by his fellow academics. Sartre’s uncompromising assessment of the human condition, and the struggle to find meaning in a meaningless age, however, still resonates. His influence stretches from feminism, where his partner Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex remains a benchmark, to Black studies and post-colonial thought, where his disciple Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Masks, is currently enjoying a revival. He may be absent from undergraduate reading lists, but his books line the shelves of high street bookshops – more than can be said for most contemporary academic philosophers.

Sartre’s somewhat marginal status in the academy comes down to his refusal to produce work that conformed to the established customs of that world. He could have done so easily: he was a highly regarded philosophy student at the elite École Normale Supérieure, and in 1929 he came first in France’s prestigious, competitive agrégation (national examinations for the qualification to be a schoolteacher or university lecturer). Sartre had always taken issue with the conventions of academia: he saw them as restrictions on his freedom. The first time he took the agrégation, in 1928, he was expected to top the national lists. Instead, he failed as he decided to write – freely – about his own philosophical ideas instead of simply following the examination rubric.

Sartre was a nonconformist. He believed that pre-existing norms and rules imposed on individual agents are unjustified constraints on human freedom. For him, insofar as we are human, whether we like it or not, accept it or not, we are fundamentally free beings. As he liked to put it, human beings are “condemned to be free.” Accordingly, if to be human is to be free, then the act of uncritically conforming to pre-established rules and norms is fundamentally unhuman: an expression of what Sartre calls “bad faith.” To act or exist in bad faith is to deny one’s own freedom: to pretend that one is not free. Sartre illustrates this idea in Being and Nothingness with an anecdotal analysis of a waiter in a Parisian café, much like those where Sartre did much of his writing. The waiter acts in bad faith because he is too eager in “playing at being a waiter in a café.” He tries so hard to conform to the social norms of Parisian café culture, “playing” and performing the predefined role of “waiter,” that he effectively disavows his freedom as a human being. Existing in bad faith, the waiter becomes more like a robot programmed to follow social cues and less like a human being, free to choose his own actions. In this way, the waiter behaves more as a what than a who: he allows the social role of “waiter” to define who – even what – he is. He is a waiter more than a free human being.

Tjitske Kamphuis, Flights, Procreate (digital drawing), 2022. Used by permission.

While this waiter might be his most well-known illustration of bad faith, for Sartre the phenomenon of bad faith is exemplified above all in the human belief in God. Such faith is problematic or indeed “bad” because it commonly entails the belief that God created all things with a particular purpose or meaning, that each and every creature is called into being “according to God’s purpose” (Rom 8:28). Sartre compares such an act of “purposeful” creation to the way in which a craftsman creates a paperknife. The craftsman, Sartre notes, works in accordance with pre-established definitions of what makes something a paperknife, with preconceived ideas of the purposes and functions of a paperknife (namely, to cut paper). In a similar way, to believe that human beings are creatures created by some purposeful creator is to believe that each human being not only has a pre-determined destiny, but also a pre-established and fixed nature in accordance with God’s design and purposes.

In short, for Sartre, to believe that there is a God who is the creator of all – and specifically of human beings – is to believe that each human being has a fixed, predefined nature. And this “bad faith” entails that human beings are not in fact free but can instead be defined by particular pre-existing expectations and conceptions of what – not who – they should be. For example, such bad faith is evident in the assumption that existing as a woman means conforming to certain social preconceptions of what a woman should be and how she should behave, as famously articulated by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Likewise, in light of the atrocities he witnessed during the Second World War, Sartre argued in his Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) that bad faith extends to the assumption that Jewish people must conform to the characteristics – even the “essence” – of “Jewishness,” itself defined in the prejudiced terms set by a non-Jewish culture. Jews could not be “who,” only “what”: a process of dehumanization that culminated, in Sartre’s view, in the Holocaust.

Freedom to act autonomously – and a concomitant rejection of any concept of innate, still less fixed, human nature – was for Sartre anything but an academic question. In 1945, just two years after publishing his classic Being and Nothingness, Sartre resigned from his teaching job at the Lycée Condorcet – one of France’s most elite schools – and bid farewell to academia and all its restrictive conventions, never to return. He even went so far as to decline the Nobel Prize in Literature nearly twenty years later in 1964, forgoing not only the title but also roughly one million US dollars’ worth of prize money. The rejection of the benefits of institutional support was, to Sartre, a price well worth paying to be free.

The kind of freedom affirmed and promoted by Sartre is sometimes called “negative freedom,” where one is free from something – in Sartre’s case, the restrictive professional and cultural expectations of the French academy. In contemporary philosophy, this sense of freedom is often juxtaposed with so-called “positive freedom,” where one is said to be free to do something, especially freedom to pursue goodness and flourishing. Although the distinction between these two ways of thinking about freedom is often associated with Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” it can be traced back to Augustine’s early treatise On the Free Choice of the Will.

In this early work completed in the late fourth century, shortly before he wrote the Confessions, Augustine draws a contrast between the imperfect, finite freedom of fallen human beings in their transitory and restless earthly life and the kind of freedom one attains when one finds rest in God. This freedom, Augustine thought, was perfect, permanent, and found only in union with God. He speaks of these two kinds of freedom respectively as the “first” and “final” freedom: “The first freedom is the freedom to be able to not sin, but the final freedom will be much greater: it is the freedom not to be able to sin.” These two kinds of freedom are both ways of being free from sin, but where it is possible for one to not sin in the state of the first freedom, Augustine argues it becomes simply not possible for one to sin in the perfected human state of the final freedom. With our “first” imperfect freedom, we are “able not to abandon the good”; but in “final” freedom, we will not be able to. Our purposes will be completely aligned with God’s. And God is, for Augustine, none other than perfect goodness, the Good to which all human beings are called and in which all human beings can find rest.

In the Confessions Augustine describes how he was drawn to convert to Christianity while listening to the sermons of Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, the city where Augustine worked as a professor of rhetoric. Rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech, was highly esteemed by Augustine’s contemporaries; his professorship in Milan was probably the most prestigious and coveted academic position in the entire Latin world. But in 387, after being baptized by Ambrose, Augustine – like Sartre would in 1945 – quit his job and left academia behind for good. He wanted, above all else, to be free.

But the freedom Augustine had in mind was very different. The vision of freedom that drew him away from the benefits and prestige of conformity was the freedom to seek the good, and the highest possible good at that. Sartre left academia because he felt its conventions too closely resembled what he saw as the dehumanizing, oppressive dogmas of religious faith. Augustine left academia precisely for God. He left Milan and his career as an academic, returned home to North Africa, converted his family house into a monastic community, and was ordained a few years later and made Bishop of Hippo, a position he held until his death in 430. Augustine did not leave his academic job so that he could do whatever he pleased – in fact he did not want to become a bishop and only agreed to by the request of the church. Augustine did so to serve God, to more freely align his pursuits with God, to commit his life to the God whom he saw as the Good itself and the source of all goodness in the world.

Like Sartre, Augustine believed that one’s identity ought not be limited to one’s worldly occupations. But, unlike Sartre the fierce atheist, Augustine believed that one’s ultimate identity is defined by how one relates to God. In his book On Christian Teaching, which he wrote the same year as the Confessions, Augustine argues one must not “enjoy” one’s worldly possessions and occupations, but merely “use” them. According to this influential distinction between “use” and “enjoyment”, we enjoy something when we love it for its own sake, while we use something to assist us in our pursuit of that which we love. For Augustine, only God – the Good itself – is worthy of being loved for God’s own sake: It is God alone whom human beings are called to “enjoy,” whereas all other things are to be “used” in our pursuit to love and enjoy God. This include our jobs as well as our social roles: while we can make “use” of our jobs and occupations and understand them as relative “useful” goods, they are not the ultimate Good that we are called to “enjoy” and in which alone we can find “final freedom.” While our “useful” worldly occupations can afford us a sense of “first freedom” whereby we are “able not to abandon the good,” “final” freedom can only be attained in our “enjoyment” of God. For Augustine, to misdirect our love and enjoyment towards relative worldly goods and mistake them for the ultimate Good is to misuse or even abuse such worldly goods: it is to turn them into idols, it is a misplacing of faith – or even, one might say, a kind of bad faith. Far from bringing freedom, they might come to enslave us.

This year, almost eighty years after Sartre left academia, and more than sixteen centuries after Augustine resigned from his professorship in Milan, I was appointed to a permanent academic job at a UK university. Before I was offered the role – roughly equivalent to a tenured position in the United States, and roughly as hard to attain – I had been on the verge of walking away from academia myself, after years of moving around to different universities across the country, holding one fixed-term contract after another. Walking away would have meant giving up on a longtime dream of mine. In this I have been, in comparison to many of my peers, very fortunate. Acquiring a permanent academic position has always been difficult – and a decade of cuts to humanities programs and the spreading financial crisis in UK universities have made it even harder. It has been reported (in the first quarter of 2024 alone) that cuts and redundancies are being planned by many British higher education institutions – thirty-nine and counting, including some prestigious, “high-power” research universities. This May, it was reported that forty percent of English universities are expected to face budget deficits by the end of the year.

Permanent or tenured academic roles are prized not only because of the economic stability and social prestige they carry with them: at least in theory, they afford you the freedom to teach and research as you see fit. In recent years, there have been some controversies around the purpose of tenure in relation to academic freedom and freedom of speech – whether political correctness and identity politics have constrained academic freedom and free speech, or whether tenured professors have the freedom or right to say whatever they want in their research or in the classroom. Participants in these debates often defend “academic freedom” in terms of negative freedom: academic freedom should be regarded as a kind of freedom from the political correctness, cultural norms, or ideological sensibilities academics might offend or contravene in their teaching or research.

At the heart of these debates on academic freedom is the question of what universities and academic jobs are for. And this is a question that has been on my mind since I accepted my new role. It is true that being an academic does come with a raft of rules and expectations, explicit and implicit, restricting what I can do and how I should act. I am expected to teach a certain number of classes each year, show up to class on time, mark and grade papers on time, publish a certain amount of research each year, sit on a certain number of committees, undertake a certain number of administrative roles, and so on. These norms and expectations do limit my freedom to define my own life. If I let these define who I am as a person, to overwrite my understanding of my own freedom and my own pursuit of a meaningful life, I agree with Sartre that this would be an act of “bad faith.” Yet while our roles can end up defining us in dehumanizing ways, I don’t think they have to. Ultimately, I made a free choice to take on this job and conform myself to the concomitant norms and expectations. To pretend that these are simply imposed on me and not something I have willingly – and freely – taken upon myself would be to deny my own freedom. It would be an act of “bad faith.”

Even as it limits you, the security of a permanent position opens up the possibility of a different kind of freedom – the freedom to seek the good. A late mentor of mine once remarked to a junior colleague that attaining a permanent or tenured academic job means no longer needing to dabble or ruthlessly publish in the latest academic trends and debates to build a CV and secure a permanent position; one is instead finally free to do the “serious” academic research in line with one’s own intellectual agenda and trajectory. Such academic freedom is not just a negative freedom – a freedom from economic insecurity; it is also a positive freedom – freedom to pursue that which is good, truthful, and worthy. It is an understanding of human freedom and flourishing in intellectual pursuit that, persuaded by the right motivations and the right aims, more closely resembles Augustine’s pursuit of a “final” freedom in God, in whom alone all human creatures can find rest.

After the many years I spent going from contract to contract, and the kind of insecurity, both internal and circumstantial, that created in my life, finally attaining the permanent job does feel like achieving some kind of freedom. And in many material ways it is: greater financial freedom, the freedom to plan a future rooted in a particular place. Yet even as I relax into these newfound freedoms, I wonder sometimes if I had idealized or even idolized the permanent academic job. If Augustine saw the spiritual life as a restless journey to find rest in God, had I imagined my years on the job market as a restless journey to find rest in the coveted permanent position as a form of academic “eternal life”? Would Sartre criticize me for “giving up” my freedom to an academic institution? Would Augustine tell me I’d made an idol of a job?

But it would do a disservice to both authors to read them as counterposing true freedom to the conventions of academia. Sartre’s critique of the waiter reminds us that it would be “bad faith” to believe that a permanent academic job – or indeed any job – could make me free or give one’s life meaning. However, at the same time, I would also be in “bad faith” if I pretended that being in a contemporary academic institutional setting would deprive me of my freedom – as some self-professed defenders of freedom of speech might allege. In good faith, I can say that I have done my best to get this job, that I think I might be able to exercise my freedom well in it. Leaving academia may have been an expression of Sartre’s freedom, but staying in it can be an expression of mine – I must own my decision and my effort, and not present myself as less free than I am.

For Sartre, as for Augustine, freedom is not about the kinds of options we have and make in life or even our very ability to choose what options to take. We do not become free because of the sheer number of alternatives we are given or because of the choices we make in life. Rather, freedom pertains to how one pursues meaning in life: it is not about what we are or what choices we make but how we make them and how we live our lives. Sartre took issue with the “bad faith” of the waiter not because of what the waiter is, but that the waiter allows this “what,” his occupation as a waiter, to define – and confine – the meaning of his life. Similarly, for Augustine, it is not what one does for a job but how one does and values one’s job that truly matters. In his terminology, our jobs are to be “used” to direct our pursuits to some higher good – indeed, to the highest Good, whom Augustine understands to be none other than God. Because, for him, the freedom that we can truly enjoy is found only in God. An academic job can be a vehicle for this freedom just as much as another kind of work might be – if I use it well.