paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer.… In the eighteenth century, the atheism of the philosophes discarded the idea of God, but not … the notion that essence precedes existence. To a certain extent, this idea is found everywhere … [that] man has a human nature.… Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that