The human race is constituted by free individual choices, not vice versa

Evidence

Without the human race, mankind, there is no truth; that is certain. There would remain only an irrational and contingent swarming of individual choices to which no law could be assigned. If some sort of truth exists capable of unifying the individual choices, it is the human race which can furnish this truth for us. But if the race is the truth of the individual, it can not be a given in the individual without profound contradiction. As the laws of speech are sustained by and incarnated in the concrete free project of the sentence, so the human race (as an ensemble of peculiar techniques to define the activity of men) far from pre-existing an individual who would manifest it in the way that this particular fall exemplifies the law of falling bodies, is the ensemble of abstract relations sustained by the free individual choice. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1222

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s The Second Sex which inherits Sartre’s ontology of the for-itself and facticity; also resonates with the individual-community dialectic in earlier chapters on the we-subject and intersubjectivity. — connects to: Only free choice can resolve an indeterminate chain of mutual objectification; A fundamental choice is only real as a choice in the world — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1147; Humans lack any predefined nature and create themselves through choices — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 26 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Humans lack any predefined nature and create themselves through choices #corroborates (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 26
• Freedom precedes essence and is indistinguishable from being human #corroborates (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 226
• Human universality is perpetually made by choice, not given in advance. #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 23
• Human beings are processes of their own actions, not fixed essences #corroborates (0.82) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1256
• Freedom, not happiness, is the measure of human possibility #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64
• Humans are constituted by their social relations rather than an intrinsic essence #contradicts (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2517
• Persons are understood as free unifications of responsibility rather than as substances #expands (0.78)
• Humans are obligately interdependent, not naturally solitary #contradicts (0.72)