In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre introduces the detours of his existentialism by bringing existentialism and humanism together into the same locale.
Existentialism Is a Humanism is considered to be one of Sartre’s most straightforward philosophical works, which was originally delivered as a public lecture at the Salle des Centraux on 29 October 1945.
There is among Sartre scholars a consensus that both the public lecture and the published work do not correctly represent Sartre’s conceptions and arguments due to Sartre’s attempts at oversimplifying his own views so that the audience, attending the lecture, could understand the meaning, significance, and detours of existentialism.
Sartre himself regretted the publication of this public lecture and endeavored to distance himself from some of its oversimplified conclusions, hasty arguments, and problematic claims in his later works and writings.
Yet Existentialism Is a Humanism remains one of Sartre’s most read and discussed philosophical works. Because it is accessible, brief, and straightforward, it has become an introduction rendering more accessible and bringing closer to not only the detours and endeavors of existentialism, but also Sartre’s whole existential thinking-philosophizing.
The main aim of Existentialism Is a Humanism was to defend existentialism, for existentialism was accused of being a pessimistic philosophizing only revolving around anguish and despair and a radically individualistic philosophical attempt ignoring and rendering insignificant important notions such as social justice. Existentialism Is a Humanism was thus Sartre’s attempt at defending existentialism and rendering it more credible.
Existentialism, Godlessness, and Radical Freedom
In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre says that existentialism is not pessimistic, but rather optimistic because its philosophizing-thinking arises from the conviction that there is a radical freedom lying at the heart of our being and our existence in the world. This radical freedom allows us to shape and reshape ourselves, our lives, and our destinies; constantly, inevitably, and repeatedly.
Sartre says that existentialism renders apparent how freedom resides in our being and how we are responsible for this freedom, for it takes Godlessness as its origin and extent. Sartre says that although Godlessness might lead to despair, it delivers us into a sphere in which we, for the first time, become truly and radically free and completely responsible for our freedom, our choices, and our whole being in the world.
There Is No Human Nature
According to Sartre, there is no human nature. Sartre says that the significance of Godlessness for us is that our existence in the world becomes what defines and decides us. This means that it is through our own existing in the world that we become what we are. One is only one’s own existence; one is one’s unique existing in the world. This is what Sartre means by “existence precedes essence”.
“Existence precedes essence” means that we must exist first and then choose or form our own essence. Our essence is neither pre-determined nor fixed; it comes after, and is hence decided according to, our own unique existing in the world.
There is nothing in our being that is pre-determined, stable, decided, fixed, or unchangeable. Our unique existing in the world precedes and hence decides our own essence. This is what distinguishes our being from the being of objects whose essences are fixed, stable, and pre-determined.
Since our own unique existing in the world precedes and decides our own essence, Sartre says that there is no human nature, there is nothing in us that is universal, stable, fixed, determined, governed, and decided. There is no essence residing in us. Yet there is a general human condition linking together all humans with each other. To this general human condition belong, for instance, freedom and mortality.
Anguish and Bad Faith
Sartre says that the radical freedom lying at the heart of our being leads to anguish. Anguish arises from the realization that we are completely free to shape our lives, our destinies, and ourselves. This realization is a burden, the burden of responsibility.
According to Sartre, this radical freedom and the responsibility belonging to it and arising because of it deliver us into self-deception or bad faith. In other words, bad faith is our attempt at escaping what lies at the heart of our being, our freedom, for being radically free means being completely responsible.
Groundlessness, Deciding, and Choosing
One of the themes that Existentialism Is a Humanism discusses is the groundlessness of all decisions and every deciding; that is, the absence of what justifies and renders stable and firm any deciding and all decisions. This is a theme that Sartre repeatedly problematizes and revisits in many of his writings.
In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre gives the example of a student who must decide either to stay home to look after his mother or to leave home to fight for the resistance. The student must decide, but deciding lacks what makes it justified and grounded. Although deciding is inescapable, it is neither firm nor stable.
The student’s decision is groundless, it lacks what renders it justified, it lacks that in which it could ground itself. The already available ethical theories and cultural norms appear to be useless and lacking at this moment, since they become valuable only if the student decides to follow them.
What lies at the heart of the groundlessness of every decision and all deciding, what renders every ground groundless and every grounding lacking in the first place, is the radical freedom residing in our being. This is why freedom is a condemnation in the existential thinking-philosophizing of Sartre; a condemnation that delivers into anguish and bad faith, for only through bad faith could we escape what lies at the heart of our being.
What Sartre endeavors to render clear here is that choosing inevitably and constantly emerges from decisions that are arbitrary, since they lack what renders them justified, firm, and stable. Every decision and all deciding harbor within themselves this arbitrariness, taking place as groundlessness.
Arbitrariness permeates every genuine choosing and every truly free deciding, for every genuine choosing and every truly free deciding refuse to pass through that which is dominant, acceptable, and available in society. Genuine choosing and free deciding must pass through the arbitrary, the groundless, and the unjustified.
Sartre also says that choosing and deciding affect not only the person that carries out the choosing and the deciding, but also everyone else, for every individual decision is a deciding for everyone else, since it is an assertion that everyone else also ought to decide and to choose.
Sartre says that “in choosing, I choose for all people”. This claim links together one’s own freedom with the freedom of everyone else by rendering them equal, by bringing them into the same locale, and by bringing them into each other.
This linking together of one’s own freedom with the freedom of everyone else is Sartre’s attempt at making us constantly and inevitably responsible for the Other. In other words, this joining together of one’s own freedom with the freedom of the Other makes responsibility an essential part of any relation linking together oneself with the Other.
This is Sartre’s attempt at rendering the togetherness of freedom and responsibility the center of existentialism. Sartre says that one should say to oneself: “Am I he who has the right to act such that humanity regulates itself by my acts?”
Sartre also says that our moral choices create an image of both the person that “we wish to be” and what the moral person, in general, should be. According to Sartre, “for in effect, there is not one of our acts that, in creating the man we wish to be, does not at the same time create an image of man such as we judge he ought to be.”
Although these claims seem foreign to Sartre’s own existentialism and even to be contradicting it, and although they seem to be confused readings of Kant’s theory of the Categorical Imperative, what they endeavor to render clear is that there is in existentialism and its focus on the individual that from out of which a genuine and real turning toward the Other could emerge. These claims endeavor to say that notions such as social justice could be brought into existentialism and that existentialism does not reject the collective.
Sartre, Existentialism, and Humanism
Not only Existentialism Is a Humanism, where the existential is directly and straightforwardly connected to, brought into, and rendered equal to the humanist, but Sartre’s whole existentialism endeavors to bring the human being into the center of every philosophizing and all thinking.
This bringing of the human being into the center thinks and philosophizes from out of a locale in which only the human being can genuinely dwell, that is, the world. The world is where the human being encounters itself and thinks from out of this unique encounter. According to Sartre, this bringing of the human being into the center is a bringing of a lost freedom back to the human being, a freedom abandoned by the human being.
Perhaps this freedom was never there in the first place and hence never lost or abandoned. Yet to the existentialism of Sartre belongs a site, a necessary site, an inevitable site, in which our continuous and radical making and remaking of ourselves, our lives, and our destinies reside as genuine possibilities. This site is itself that in which Sartre’s whole existential thinking-philosophizing is grounded. Sartre takes this site as that from out of which any thinking-philosophizing of the human being should emerge. This site announces and confirms Sartre’s existentialism. This site is the origin and extent of Sartre’s existentialism. Sartre calls this site “freedom” and its holding sway our “condemnation”.