SARTE IT OUT. I was a bit disappointed that I did not get far enough into the Sunday School lesson to talk about Existentialism, as I know you were. So, here is a quote from Brian C. Anderson's book review of The Absolute Intellectual, a book about Jean-Paul Sarte: Man’s freedom of will — another central theme of the early Sartre — is what makes such creative acts possible. Drawing on German and French philosophical sources — Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, among others — Sartre explained that human beings, unlike, say, oak trees and snakes, choose their own future, even when, trapped in “bad faith,” they pretend they do not. Man has no nature that predetermines what he will eventually become; his existence precedes his essence, as the Sartrean formulation puts it.