French Waiter and a French Woman

L'existence précède l'essence. Existence precedes essence. Thus speak existentialists. The human being chooses and creates his own values and moulds the meaning of his life. This is because the human being has no inherent essence, identity, value or meaning. He needs to pick up one of his own.
According to Sartre, if someone tries to reduce his existence to any essence, shows bad faith. The French philosopher gives an example of a waiter, who shows exaggerated waiteresque movements, as if to cheat himself that his nothing but a waiter. Perhaps a salesman or a call-centre employee would provide a better example today, but let’s stay with the original waiter and read Sartre in translation
“Let us consider the waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with recklessness or a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand.”
“All his behaviour seems to us a game (…) He is playing at being a waiter in a café.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, transl. by Hazel E. Barnes (Methuen and Co, Ltd., UP Paperback, 1969), 59.
But despite what existentialists say or preach many people seem to base the reason for their existence not even a many-featured essence, but even on a single feature. This may seem odd and even disquieting. But they do not seem to cheat themselves; they are genuine in their suffering, when this feature is gone. They do not play a waiter.
I was struck by a quote from the BBC’s Bookclub of 3 April 2011 (to be easily found on the BBC podcast page). It describes the feelings of woman who became barren after an accident.
“My friend in France said to me over and over again (she said it in French of course which I am not going to do): “I am not a woman any longer” And I said don’t be so silly. What are you talking about? And she said that it was because of that thing: everything was gone. There was no reason, as far as she was concerned, for her existence”.