Existentialism as a Humanism

“Existentialism is a Humanism” is a defence speech. Sartre states the charges against his position at the start and answers them in order, which means the essay has an argumentative shape that is easy to lose if you read it as a summary of his views.

Knowing the charges is worth more than it looks, because a paper prompt often quotes one of his answers, and an answer read without its question looks like an unmotivated assertion.

1. The four charges

1. Quietism. That existentialism invites people to remain in a kind of desperate quietism, because if no solutions are possible we should have to consider action in this world impossible, ending in a philosophy of contemplation and therefore a bourgeois philosophy. Sartre names the communists as making this charge.
2. Pessimism. That it dwells on human degradation, pointing up everywhere the sordid, shady, and slimy, and neglecting the gracious and beautiful, the bright side of human nature. He attributes to Mlle. Mercier, a Catholic critic, the charge of forgetting the smile of the child.
3. Isolation. That by taking pure subjectivity, the Cartesian I think, as the starting point, we are unable to return to solidarity with the men who are not ourselves, a state which we can never reach in the cogito. Sartre says both sides bring this one.
4. Caprice. From the Christian standpoint, that denying God’s commandments and the eternal verities leaves nothing but pure caprice, with everyone permitted to do as he pleases and incapable of condemning the points of view and acts of others.

Sartre’s suspicion about the source of the complaints is itself worth quoting: he wonders whether people are complaining not about its pessimism, but much rather about its optimism, and asks whether what really scares them is that it leaves to man a possibility of choice.

2. The answer to quietism and pessimism

These two are answered together, and briefly, because the first-principle work has already been done.

Against quietism: it cannot be taken for a philosophy of quietism, since it defines man in terms of action. Sartre’s compressed version: there is no reality except in action. And the fuller statement of what a man is: man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.

He contrasts this directly with the quietist attitude, which is the attitude of people who say, let others do what I can’t do.

Against pessimism: there is no doctrine more optimistic, since man’s destiny is within himself. And it is not an attempt to discourage man from acting, since it tells him that the only hope is in his acting, and that action is the only thing that enables a man to live.

Sartre’s own name for the position is optimistic toughness. His argument for it is the coward case. When the existentialist writes about a coward, he says this coward is responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that because he has a cowardly heart or lung or brain, but because he has made himself a coward by his acts.

The point of that example is not moral severity. It is that determinism is the reassuring doctrine, not the harsh one. If we were born that way, everything would be explained, and people would say, that’s what we’re like, no one can do anything about it. What people would like is that a coward or a hero be born that way. The existentialist says the coward makes himself cowardly and the hero makes himself heroic, and there is always a possibility for the coward not to be cowardly any more and for the hero to stop being heroic.

3. The answer to isolation: intersubjectivity

The third charge is the substantial one, and Sartre’s answer introduces a term he needs.

He keeps the Cartesian starting point and denies that it isolates. His reason: contrary to the philosophies of Descartes and Kant, through the I think we reach our own self in the presence of others, and the others are just as real to us as our own self.

The mechanism: the man who becomes aware of himself through the cogito also perceives all others, and he perceives them as the condition of his own existence. He realizes that he cannot be anything, in the sense in which we say that someone is witty or nasty or jealous, unless others recognize it as such. In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself.

Sartre’s name for the resulting field: intersubjectivity, the world in which man decides what he is and what others are.

This is the essay’s compressed version of the account worked out at length in the Look, and the connection is worth making in a paper. The claim that I need another consciousness to be witty or nasty is the same claim as nobody can be vulgar all by himself.

Universality of condition does the rest of the work, and it is treated on the first page of this material. There is no universal essence which would be human nature, but there does exist a universal human condition: the a priori limits which outline man’s fundamental situation. The necessity of existing in the world, of being at work there, of being in the midst of other people, and of being mortal there. Every configuration has universal value because every configuration can be understood by every man.

4. The answer to caprice: freedom wills freedom

The fourth charge is the hardest, and Sartre splits it into three objections and answers each.

Objection one: you are able to do anything, no matter what. Sartre’s answer is that this is not to the point. In one sense choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing. This may seem purely formal, but it is highly important for keeping fantasy and caprice within bounds: in facing a situation, I am obliged to choose an attitude, and in any way assume responsibility for a choice which involves all mankind.

He adds the comparison with art here, and it is useful because it shows what kind of thing an ethics is without a priori values. Nobody has ever accused an artist who paints a picture of not having drawn his inspiration from rules set up a priori. It is clearly understood that there is no definite painting to be made, that the artist is engaged in the making of his painting, and that the painting to be made is precisely the painting he will have made. There are no a priori aesthetic values, but there are values which appear subsequently in the coherence of the painting, in the correspondence between what the artist intended and the result. Painting can be judged only after it has once been made.

The same holds on the ethical plane. What art and ethics have in common is that we have creation and invention in both cases. We cannot decide a priori what there is to be done. Sartre’s guard: he says at once that we are not dealing with an aesthetic ethics, and that the example is a comparison only.

Objection two: you are unable to pass judgment on others. Sartre says this is true in one way and false in another.

It is true in this sense: whenever a man sanely and sincerely involves himself and chooses his configuration, it is impossible for him to prefer another configuration. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress; progress is betterment, and man is always the same, with only the situation confronting him varying.

It is false in this sense: one can still pass judgment, because one makes a choice in relationship to others. Sartre gives two grounds.

• A logical judgment, not yet a value judgment. Certain choices are based on error and others on truth. If we have defined man’s situation as a free choice with no excuses and no recourse, then every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, every man who sets up a determinism, is a dishonest man. Sartre defines the dishonesty as an error: dishonesty is obviously a falsehood because it belies the complete freedom of involvement. On the same grounds, it is dishonesty if I choose to state that certain values exist prior to me, since it is self-contradictory to want them and at the same time state that they are imposed on me.
• A moral judgment, on the ground of freedom itself. This is the essay’s most demanding argument, and it needs to be reproduced carefully.

The argument. When I declare that freedom in every concrete circumstance can have no other aim than to want itself, then if man has once become aware that in his forlornness he imposes values, he can no longer want but one thing, and that is freedom, as the basis of all values.

That does not mean he wants it in the abstract. The ultimate meaning of the acts of honest men is the quest for freedom as such. A man who belongs to a communist or revolutionary union wants concrete goals; these goals imply an abstract desire for freedom; but this freedom is wanted in something concrete.

Then the step that closes it: in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours. Freedom as the definition of man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is involvement, I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. I can take freedom as my goal only if I take that of others as a goal as well.

So: having recognized that man is a being in whom existence precedes essence, and that he is a free being who in various circumstances can want only his freedom, I have at the same time recognized that I can want only the freedom of others.

Who gets judged. In the name of this will for freedom, Sartre says he may pass judgment on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence. Those who hide their complete freedom from themselves out of a spirit of seriousness or by means of deterministic excuses, he calls cowards. Those who try to show that their existence was necessary, when it is the very contingency of man’s appearance on earth, he calls stinkers. He adds that cowards or stinkers can be judged only from a strictly unbiased point of view.

What is universal and what is not. Sartre’s own formulation of where he differs from Kant: though the content of ethics is variable, a certain form of it is universal. Kant says that freedom desires both itself and the freedom of others, granted, but he believes that the formal and the universal are enough to constitute an ethics. Sartre thinks that principles which are too abstract run aground in trying to decide action. Back to the student: in the name of what great moral maxim could he have decided to abandon his mother or to stay with her? The content is always concrete and thereby unforeseeable; there is always the element of invention. The one thing that counts is knowing whether the inventing that has been done has been done in the name of freedom.

Objection three: you take something from one pocket and put it into the other, so values are not serious since you choose them. Sartre’s answer is short and he does not soften it. He is quite vexed that that is the way it is; but if he has discarded God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values. To say that we invent values means nothing else but this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose. In that way, there is a possibility of creating a human community.

5. The two senses of humanism

The title has to be earned, and Sartre earns it by rejecting one meaning of the word before claiming another.

The humanism he rejects. A theory which takes man as an end and as a higher value. His example is a character in a Cocteau tale who, flying over mountains, declares “Man is simply amazing.” That means that I, who did not build the airplanes, shall personally benefit from these particular inventions, and that I, as man, shall personally consider myself responsible for and honored by acts of a few particular men.

His objection: this would imply that we ascribe a value to man on the basis of the highest deeds of certain men, and this humanism is absurd, because only the dog or the horse would be able to make such an over-all judgment about man, which they are careful not to do. Man cannot be granted the power of making a judgment about man, because the existentialist will never consider man as an end, since he is always in the making. And we should not believe that there is a mankind to which we might set up a cult in the manner of Auguste Comte. Sartre says plainly that the cult of mankind ends in the self-enclosed humanism of Comte, and, let it be said, of fascism. That kind of humanism we can do without.

The humanism he claims. Man is constantly outside of himself; in projecting himself, in losing himself outside of himself, he makes for man’s existing; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent goals that he is able to exist. Man, being this state of passing-beyond, and seizing upon things only as they bear upon this passing-beyond, is at the heart, at the center of this passing-beyond.

There is no universe other than a human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

The definition, and it is the sentence to be able to reproduce: this connection between transcendency, as a constituent element of man, not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of passing beyond, and subjectivity, in the sense that man is not closed in on himself but is always present in a human universe, is what we call existentialist humanism.

Humanism, because we remind man that there is no law-maker other than himself, and that in his forlornness he will decide by himself; because we point out that man will fulfill himself as man, not in turning toward himself, but in seeking outside of himself a goal which is just this liberation, just this particular fulfillment.

The closing position on God, which is often misread as the essay’s thesis rather than its final clarification: existentialism is not so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God does not exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue.

The reason that follows from everything before it: the problem is not whether the values are underwritten somewhere. The problem is that they have to be chosen and enacted by a being who is not made for anything, and a guarantor would not remove that necessity, since accepting the guarantor would itself be a choice.

Worked example: two women, and why judgment is possible

Sartre’s own case, and useful because it shows the freedom criterion doing discriminating work rather than approving everything.

The two cases. Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss is in love with a young man, Stephen, who is engaged to an insignificant young girl. Instead of heedlessly preferring her own happiness, she chooses, in the name of human solidarity, to sacrifice herself and give up the man she loves. La Sanseverina in The Charterhouse of Parma, believing that passion is man’s true value, would say that a great love deserves sacrifices, that it is to be preferred to the banality of the conjugal love that would tie Stephen to the young ninny he had to marry. She would choose to sacrifice the girl and fulfill her happiness, and she is even ready to sacrifice herself for the sake of passion if this life demands it.

The first pass: here we are in the presence of two strictly opposed moralities. Sartre claims they are much the same thing, because in both cases what has been set up as the goal is freedom.

The discrimination. Then he adds the pair that shows the criterion has teeth. You can imagine two highly similar attitudes: one girl prefers to renounce her love out of resignation; another prefers to disregard the prior attachment of the man she loves out of sexual desire. On the surface these two actions resemble those just described. However, they are completely different. Sartre’s verdict: La Sanseverina’s attitude is much nearer that of Maggie Tulliver, one of heedless rapacity.

So the sorting is not by outcome and not by which option was taken. Maggie gives the man up and Sanseverina takes him, and they land together. What separates them from the second pair is whether the choice was made in the name of freedom or out of resignation and appetite.

The conclusion Sartre draws: the second charge is true and, at the same time, false. One may choose anything if it is on the grounds of free involvement.

That last clause is the whole answer to caprice, and it is what a paper on this material has to be able to state exactly.

Vocabulary to deploy

• “There is no reality except in action” — the answer to quietism, in one line.
• “Man is nothing else than the ensemble of his acts” — the positive definition, against defining a man by unused potential.
• Optimistic toughness — Sartre’s own name for his position against the pessimism charge.
• Intersubjectivity — “the world in which man decides what he is and what others are.” Reached through the cogito, not despite it.
• Universal condition, not universal nature — “the a priori limits which outline man’s fundamental situation”: to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be in the midst of other people, to be mortal there.
• “I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing” — the answer to the do-anything objection.
• Freedom wills freedom — “in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours.”
• Dishonesty as error — the man who takes refuge behind his passions “belies the complete freedom of involvement,” so the judgment is logical before it is moral.
• Cowards and stinkers — those who hide their freedom behind determinism; those who claim their existence was necessary.
• The two humanisms — man as an end and a higher value, rejected as absurd and named as ending in fascism; man as passing-beyond, claimed.
• “Even if God did exist, that would change nothing” — the closing position, not an argument for atheism.