Existentialism is a Humanism

“The truth is that of all doctrines, this is the least scandalous and the most austere: it is strictly intended for specialists and philosophers.” 

This statement occurs just after Sartre has enumerated a number of silly misunderstandings of existentialism he has seen in the popular press and expresses the frustration he seems to have felt at being called to account for his philosophy before people who had never read it, much less understood it. No doubt some of Sartre’s leftist critics found his elitism and separation of the philosophical from the general and political a further cause for their disapproval. 

“If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence—a being whose existence comes before its essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept of it.” 

Sartre’s reasoning here is as follows: human beings were not created by a God who endowed them with a certain essence, nor does instinct dictate all our actions; we are essentially free, and the choices we make (about which projects to pursue, which values to uphold, and so on) make us who we are. 

“If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.” 

This statement unpacks what Sartre means by the formula “existence precedes essence.” His existentialism denies any sort of universal human nature, which is why Sartre cannot define man. A human being first exists, and then achieves his essence; he becomes “what he makes of himself,” in virtue of the choices he makes. 

“Man is, before all else, something that projects itself into a future, and is conscious of doing so.” 

Human beings are rational, self-conscious creatures. Our particular way of life involves caring deeply about projects such as (for example) our career, our children, or our artistic and intellectual pursuits. All of these involve goals that we hope to reach in the future and unfold over a period of time. This is part of what Sartre means by projecting ourselves into a future. 

“Man is indeed a project that has a subjective existence, rather unlike that of a patch of moss, a spreading fungus, or a cauliflower. Prior to that projection of the self, nothing exists, not even in divine intelligence, and man shall attain existence only when he is what he projects himself to be—not what he would like to be. What we usually understand by ‘will’ is a conscious decision that most of us take after we have made ourselves what we are. I may want to join a party, write a book, or get married—but all of that is only a manifestation of an earlier and more spontaneous choice than what is known as ‘will.’” 

This passage occurs within Sartre’s defense of existentialism against the accusation that it is subjective. Instead of denying the charge, Sartre attempts to explain the sense in which he thinks existentialism is a subjective philosophy. Here, he explains that human beings have inner lives, complete with self-consciousness and intentions; that is, we are subjects. While a cauliflower is what it is completely independently of its (nonexistent) subjectivity, a human being does not have an essence separate from his subjectivity. Who and what an individual is depends on that individual’s choices, and choice proceeds from subjectivity, as a projection of that subjectivity, into the future.

“When we say that man chooses himself, not only do we mean that each of us must choose himself, but also that in choosing himself, he is choosing for all men.” 

Sartre’s view is that we cannot make a choice without affirming that what we choose has positive value. We cannot choose something that we consider evil. Since good and evil are not only good and evil for one person, but universally, we are implicitly making a choice that reflects our vision of what is good and bad for all people. 

“You know the story: an angel orders Abraham to sacrifice his son.” 

Sartre’s audience would have known the Biblical story of Abraham and Abraham’s son, Isaac. Abraham and Sarah wanted a child very much but did not have one. When Sarah was already very old—well past childbearing age—God granted her and Abraham a son. Sarah was so surprised when she learned she was pregnant that she laughed. She named the child “Isaac,” which means “laughter,” and she and Abraham loved him very much. One day, God decided to test Abraham’s faith. He sent an angel to command Abraham to kill Isaac as a sacrifice to God. Abraham was frightened but began to carry out the command. God was pleased with the strength of Abraham’s faith and told him to release Isaac unharmed. The story is discussed at length in another key work of existentialism, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. 

“[Anguish] is not a screen that separates us from action, but a condition of action itself.” 

Sartre’s critics thought that his notion of anguish resembled what we mean by anguish in ordinary language: severe emotional distress that can mire us in inaction. If so, one should desire to get rid of one’s anguish in order to act. However, Sartre uses “anguish” as a technical term. For him, anguish is an unavoidable condition rather than an acute emotion; there is no way to get rid of one’s anguish, and to act one must already be in anguish, understood as the awareness of one’s responsibility to others in making choices and the uncertainty of one’s ability to make the correct choices. 

“Dostoevsky once wrote: ‘If God does not exist, everything is permissible.’ This is the starting point of existentialism.” 

Sartre attributes this famous statement to Dostoevsky as if Dostoevsky himself had asserted it. In fact, the statement is uttered by one of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Brothers Karamazov. One prominent school of criticism (represented by Bakhtin) warns against taking the views of any of Dostoevsky’s characters to reflect Dostoevsky’s own considered opinions. 

“In reality, however, for existentialists there is no love other than the deeds of love; no potential for love other than that which is manifested in loving. There is no genius other than that which is expressed in work of art [...] the genius of Racine is found in the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the ability to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not do?” 

In this passage, Sartre argues that existentialism is not a quietism. Quietism gives the individual permission to do nothing in the belief that others can do what one cannot. Existentialism, on the other hand, holds that “reality exists only in action” (37) and a person is no more or less than what he does. From Sartre’s perspective, rather than encouraging quietism, existentialism has the power to motivate people to act. 

“In light of all this, what people reproach us for is not essentially our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism.” 

Sartre was the twentieth century’s first superstar philosopher, and the popular conception of who he was and what his philosophy meant diverged sharply from his own conception of existentialism and its significance. (The popular image of a philosopher as an unhappy chain-smoker in a black turtleneck is a sort of cartoon version of the public’s idea of Sartre.) According to the popular view, existentialists were gloomy, pessimistic, and nihilistic. 

“For strictly philosophical reasons, our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual—not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our doctrine on truth, not on comforting theories full of hope but without any real foundation.” 

Marxist critics took Sartre’s emphasis on the individual, rather than on impersonal economic and historical forces, to be a sign of his reactionary tendency. Here, Sartre states that he begins with the individual rather than with the social because he follows Descartes in regarding the cogito as a foundational piece of certain knowledge. 

“Furthermore, although it is impossible to find in every man a universal essence that could be said to comprise human nature, there is nonetheless a universal human condition. [...] By ‘condition’ they refer, more or less clearly, to all limitations that a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe.” 

Here, Sartre attempts to distinguish between the Enlightenment notion of a universal human nature and his own, non-essentialist concept of a condition. The human condition, according to Sartre, is defined by one’s necessity to live among others, work, and die in the world. In the Post-Lecture Discussion, Pierre Naville takes Sartre to task for this concept of a human condition. According to Naville, what Sartre calls the “human condition” is just the old concept of human nature in new clothing. 

“The fundamental aim of existentialism is to reveal the link between the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realizes himself in realizing a type of humanity—a commitment that is always understandable, by anyone in any era—and the relativity of the cultural ensemble that may result from such a choice. We must also note the relativity of Cartesianism and the absolute nature of the Cartesian commitment. In this sense, we can say, if you prefer, that every one of us creates the absolute by the act of breathing, eating, sleeping, or by behaving in any fashion at all. There is no difference between free being—being as a project, being as existence choosing its essence—and absolute being. Nor is there any difference between being as an absolute temporarily localized—that is, localized in history—and universally intelligible being.” 

In this passage, Sartre refers to the “commitment that is always understandable, by anyone, in any era,” a theme he elaborates by saying that “every project, however individual, has a universal value. Every project—even one belonging to a Chinese, an Indian, or an African—can be understood by a European” (42). Every project has universal value insofar as every person chooses not just for himself but for all people. Every project is understandable because, despite the specific social-historical details of each person’s situation, all people must contend with the same basic limitations (that is, finitude, mortality, abandonment, despair, anguish, the desire for eternity and unity). 

“Progress implies improvement, but man is always the same, confronting a situation that is forever changing, while choice always remains a choice in any situation.”

Sartre’s remarks here shed light on his rationale for thinking that all human projects can be understood by any person, and that human beings create the absolute within an overall context of contingency. By “man is always the same”, Sartre presumably means not that there is an unchanging human nature, but rather that man is always in the position of having to live, work, and die. The world is constantly changing, hence the relativity of any particular project; however, because all projects are a response to the unchanging human condition, any person is capable of understanding any project. Choice, and our complete freedom in choosing, provide our link to the Absolute. Choice is absolute in the sense that it is present in every situation, and choosing, insofar as it constitutes a choice for all people, and not only for oneself, stakes a claim for the absolute by implicitly declaring what is good and what is evil.

“The primary reality is natural reality, of which human reality is but a function. But in order [to discuss this primary reality], we must first accept the truth of history, and existentialism does not generally accept the truth of history any more than it does human history or natural history as a rule. Yet it is history that shapes individuals; it is their own history, from the moment of conception, that accounts for the fact that individuals are not born into, and do not appear in, a world that provides them with an abstract condition, but they appear in a world they have always been a part of, which conditions them, and which they in turn condition, just as the mother conditions her child, and her child also conditions her, from the moment she becomes pregnant. Only from this perspective are we entitled to speak of the human condition as a primary reality.” 

Naville’s objection is essentially that Sartre treats human beings as if they exist independently of their social context. It is a classic Marxist objection in its emphasis on the impersonal forces of history that shape a person’s life. 

“Among the literary productions of its time, the novel itself was a stranger. It came to us from the other side of horizon, the other side of the sea; in that bitter spring without coal, it spoke to us of the sun, not as some exotic wonder but in a tone of weary familiarity used by people who have indulged in it too much. It did not set out to rebury the old regime on its own say-so, or to fill us with feelings of our own unworthiness. While reading this book, we recalled that there had once been works that did not attempt to prove anything, content just to stand on their own merits.” 

This oft-quoted passage from Sartre’s essay suggests that Sartre viewed the apparent a politicality of The Stranger with sympathy; after all, Sartre’s own work had been criticized as insufficiently political for its time. For Sartre, The Stranger is a breath of fresh air, a completely gratuitous work of art. 

“‘[Mersault]’s a nut, a poor fool,’ some people said, while others, more insightful, said ‘he’s an innocent.’” 

The language Sartre uses—“nut”, “fool”, and “innocent”—is strongly reminiscent of the characterizations of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Since Sartre refers to Dostoevsky in this essay, as well as in “Existentialism is a Humanism,” one wonders whether Sartre himself was thinking of Dostoevsky and Myshkin when he chose to comment on these characterizations of Mersault. One thing is certain: if the indifferent, detached Mersault is an innocent, he is, at least on the surface, a different sort of innocent than the Christ-like Myshkin. 

“The absurd is not at all primarily the object of a simple notion; it is revealed to us in a bleak light. ‘Get up, take subway, work four hours at the office or plant, eat, take subway, work four hours, eat, sleep—Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday – Saturday—always the same routine […] and then, suddenly, ‘the stage set collapses,’ and we are immersed in hopeless lucidity. So if we manage to reject the misleading promises of religion or existential philosophies, we come into possession of certain basic truths: the world is chaos, a ‘divine equivalence born of anarchy’; and tomorrow does not exist, since we all die.” 

Sartre does not draw the connection explicitly, but he does discuss Pascal in the preceding paragraph, and this passage strongly recalls some of Pascal’s remarks in the Pensées. Compare, for example, Pensées 170, in which Pascal discusses the importance of diversion in distracting us from the “hopeless lucidity” that makes people miserable when they have the leisure to contemplate their condition. 

“Camus does not demand of the reader that attentive solicitude that writers do who ‘have sacrificed their lives to art.’ The Stranger is just a sheet torn from his life. And since the most absurd life must be that which is most sterile, his novel aims at being magnificently sterile [...] a work detached from a life, unjustified and unjustifiable, sterile, fleeting, already forsaken by its author, abandoned for other presents.”

Sartre appears to draw these conclusions simply from the fact that Camus presented his ideas in the form of a novel that neither explains nor proves anything. In this passage, he assimilates Camus to the “absurd man” who is The Stranger’s protagonist. One wonders whether Camus would have agreed, and what Sartre made of Camus’ political commitments (his involvement in the French Resistance, the Communist Party, and the cause of Algerian liberation, for example), which the latter surely did not view detached from life, unjustified or unjustifiable. 

“Camus writes: ‘A man is more of a man because of what he does not say than what he does say.’ Mersault personifies this virile silence, this refusal to overindulge in words.” 

In “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre argues that what one is is wholly determined by what one does (and not, for instance, by what one could have done). Given that fact, this passage could seem initially puzzling: how can a person be more masculine because of something he doesn’t do. It seems that Sartre most likely thinks of silence not in terms of the failure to say something, but rather in terms of success in keeping one’s silence. After all, silence is “the authentic mode of speech” (87).

“Mersault does not seem to be indignant about his death sentence. He was happy, he did as he liked, and his happiness does not seem to have been affected by any inner gnawing so frequently mentioned by Camus in his essay, which stems from the blinding presence of death. [...] In a word, he is alive, but his fictional destiny is the only thing that can make him acceptable to us.” 

This passage indicates that although Sartre seems to think there is something correct about Mersault’s comportment to the world, he also thinks that no actually-existing person can accept that comportment (it would seem to follow that nobody should be expected to imitate Mersault’s behavior and feelings, either). Sartre does not explain in this essay how one who has grasped life’s absurdity ought properly to behave. 

“‘I woke up with starts in my face. Country sounds reached my ears. Aromas of night, earth, and salt soothed my temples. The wonderful peace of that sleepy summer invaded me like a tide.’ The man who wrote these lines is as far removed as possible from the anxieties of a Kafka. He is very much at peace within disorder. The obstinate blindness of nature may irritate, but also comforts, him. Its irrationality is merely a negative thing. The absurd man is a humanist; he knows only the good things of this world.” 

“‘I woke up with starts in my face. Country sounds reached my ears. Aromas of night, earth, and salt soothed my temples. The wonderful peace of that sleepy summer invaded me like a tide.’ The man who wrote these lines is as far removed as possible from the anxieties of a Kafka. He is very much at peace within disorder. The obstinate blindness of nature may irritate, but also comforts, him. Its irrationality is merely a negative thing. The absurd man is a humanist; he knows only the good things of this world.”