Existentialism Is a Humanism

Existentialism Is a Humanism is the text of a lecture Jean-Paul Sartre gave in Paris on 29 October 1945. What we call a book is a talk, and so it moves along in a conversational way, through examples. Its French title is L'existentialisme est un humanisme; it came out the following year from the publisher Nagel.

From what I know, the best-known current English edition is the 2007 Yale University Press edition translated by Carol Macomber: 128 pages, with, alongside the lecture, Sartre's analysis of Camus's The Stranger, an introduction by Annie Cohen-Solal, a preface by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, and the question and answer section from the 1996 French edition.

In Turkish, the book published by Say Yayınları in Asım Bezirci's translation under the title Varoluşçuluk (Existentialism) is listed on a seller's page as 128 pages and dated 2022. According to its description, it contains the lecture under its Turkish title Varoluşçuluk Bir İnsancılıktır, writings on existentialism by Gaëtan Picon and Laffont Bompiani, and P. Naville's conversation with Sartre. I could not get hold of that edition and compare it page by page; I write the title in English.

This review relies on the flow of the lecture text in its published English translation, the publishers' descriptions and published reviews.

Who Sartre was, and what happened that evening

Sartre was born in 1905 and died in 1980. He worked as a lycée teacher, served in a meteorological unit during the war, spent nine months as a German prisoner, then joined the resistance. Being and Nothingness came out in 1943; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes this lecture as a readable version of that thick book. After the war he founded the journal Les Temps modernes, and in 1964 he turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The lecture was organized by Club Maintenant, and its topic was a question: is existentialism a humanism? According to French sources, the hall was the Salle des Centraux in Paris. Boris Vian recounts this night with amusement in his novel L'Écume des jours: pushing and shoving, broken chairs, Sartre forcing his way to the lectern. According to the same source, the text was published without Sartre's approval, and Sartre later distanced himself from it, citing its simplicity. I will talk about this retreat separately below.

Four objections facing the hall

Sartre opens the talk with a defense. He lists four accusations.

The first comes from the communists: existentialism leaves people in despair and pushes them toward passivity, toward a bourgeois contemplation. The second comes from a Catholic critic: existentialists dwell on the ugly and sordid side of human life and do not see beauty. The third again from the communists: someone who starts from the point of "I think" shuts himself up inside himself and cannot reach others. The fourth from the Christians: if there are no commandments from God, nothing is binding, and no one can judge anyone.

And right at the start he draws attention to the word in the title: the word humanism will surprise the reader, he says, and I will explain in what sense I use it. The rest of the talk can be read as an answer to these four objections, and I think that is the easiest way to read it.

The paper knife and the priority of existence

The starting point is the famous formula: existence precedes essence. Sartre opens it up with the example of a paper knife. The craftsman who makes a paper knife knows what it will be used for before making it; that is, the object's essence comes before its existence. Traditional religion thinks of the human being this way too: a being created according to a design in God's mind. Eighteenth-century atheists like Diderot, Voltaire and Kant removed God but kept the idea of human nature.

According to Sartre, the atheist existentialist drops that too. The human being first turns up, encounters himself, and only afterwards defines himself. There is no nature given in advance. A person is what he has made of himself.

Here he also addresses the insult stuck to the word subjectivity. Critics use the word like an accusation, while Sartre says that subjectivity gives the human being back his dignity: a person is not an object, not like a table or a stone.

Anguish, abandonment, despair

The middle of the talk is devoted to three heavy words.

Anguish is realizing that when you choose for yourself, you have in fact chosen for everyone. Marrying or not marrying, joining a union or not joining, each one becomes an example of how a human being ought to be. He gives the example of a commander who sends his soldiers to war: he feels anguish, and this anguish is not an obstacle in front of the action but its condition. The person who flees from anguish takes refuge in bad faith, that is, in deceiving himself. Kierkegaard's Abraham also comes up here: he cannot prove that the command to sacrifice his son really came from God; the interpretation is left to him.

Abandonment means that if there is no God, there is also no sky with values written in it in advance. Sartre takes Dostoevsky's saying that if God does not exist, everything is permitted as his starting point, and rejects the secular moralists who try to cover over this nakedness. Man is "condemned to be free"; he did not create himself, but he is responsible for everything he does.

Despair in Sartre differs from everyday usage: relying only on your own will and on probabilities. He gives small examples, like trusting that the train will come on time. Instead of taking refuge in the hope that others will carry on the cause, he suggests trusting the people you can know and influence, and taking action. History is open; free people can also choose fascism.

The student and the two options

The most memorable scene of the talk is a student coming to Sartre for advice. The young man wants to leave France and join the Free French Forces, but his older brother died in 1940, his father turned out to be a collaborator, and his mother has been left alone. One is a broad but vague good that might go to waste; the other is a concrete bond, small but certain to be of use.

Sartre tries the tools at hand one by one, and each ends in a dead end. Christian doctrine cannot decide between love of one's neighbor and love of one's country. Kant's principle of never treating a person as a means applies to both, so it does not make you choose one: looking after the mother and going to war can both make the other a means. Feeling does not settle it either, because the strength of a feeling only shows itself in action. Seeking advice is also a choice: the moment you choose whom to ask, you have already partly chosen the answer. A Jesuit he met in prison, who interpreted the failures he had lived through one after another as a sign and joined the Jesuit order, is also read through this logic: the one who reads the sign is still the person.

The answer is short: you are free, so choose, that is, invent. No general moral rule does this for you.

Others, universality, and the objection that everything is permitted

Man is the sum of his actions, says Sartre. Unrealized talent does not count; Racine is the sum of the tragedies he wrote, Proust of his novels. This is why he objects to Zola explaining his characters through heredity and environment: the coward is a coward because he acts like a coward. And the coward can stop being a coward, and the hero can stop being a hero.

He reaches others like this: in the place where you discover yourself, you discover others with the same certainty. Sartre rejects a universal human nature, but he accepts a universal human condition: being mortal, working, being in the world among other people.

To those who then say everything is permitted, he gives three answers. Not choosing is also a choice. Morality cannot be written in advance like a prescription, any more than a painting can, but it can be judged once it has been made. And bad faith that denies its own freedom can be judged; for those who do this he uses the words cowards and scum. As an example he compares George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver with Stendhal's Sanseverina: the two act differently, but both aim at freedom.

Two humanisms

Sartre separates humanism into two senses. In one, the human being is the highest value, as in Cocteau's airplane scene or in Comte's religion of humanity; Sartre sees this as the road that leads to fascism and rejects it. In his own sense, the human being is always beyond himself, in pursuit of a project; there is no universe other than the human one, and a person realizes himself only by going beyond himself and becoming free.

There are two moves in the closing. Existentialism does not bother trying to prove that God does not exist; it says that even if God existed, the human being would have to find himself, and that no one can save him from himself. And he finds the doctrine optimistic: the Christians who brand it as despair may be hiding their own despair.

Its greatest strengths

Brevity and clarity. This text does something you would hardly expect from a heavy philosopher: it can explain his own system, in a single talk, to someone who knows nothing about it.

The second is that it takes down the shields of excuses. Hiding behind character, heredity, passion is not valid, according to Sartre. This is harsh, but the tone of the talk is more awakening than punishing.

The third is the student example. It takes moral philosophy out of a puzzle solved in a classroom and carries it into a room, to a particular young man. The idea that a moral decision is made not by rule but inside the situation is built up throughout the text, and in this scene it falls exactly into place.

Its weak points and the objections

First, Sartre himself. According to French sources, he later rejected the text because of its simplicity. Stanford's entry on existentialism also describes a similar retreat: after the Marxist critiques of the 1940s and 1950s, Sartre found the radical conception of freedom in Being and Nothingness too abstract and turned to the idea of freedom within a situation. So this talk is a snapshot that even its author does not fully stand behind.

Heidegger's reply is a separate criticism. In Letter on Humanism, which he wrote to Jean Beaufret at the end of 1946, he says that the sentence existence precedes essence merely reverses a metaphysical proposition and so remains inside metaphysics, and he distances himself from Sartre's existentialism. Georg Lukács also wrote a reply from the Marxist front in 1948, titled Existentialisme ou marxisme? I am not going into the content of either here; I am only noting that these objections exist.

My own objections are simpler. One: the idea that when you choose for yourself you choose for everyone is lovely, but the talk announces it more than it shows it; I think this is the loosest link. Two: in the student example, saying you are free, choose, leaves the student where he started. This is a deliberate move, but for a listener waiting for an answer it is a disappointment. Three: the examples are centered on men and war; for the human being, a word is used that, in both the French and the English translation, also means man. The only women who appear as characters are two heroines from the novels of Eliot and Stendhal. Four: the views being opposed are somewhat caricatured throughout the talk; the communist or Christian critic facing Sartre usually cannot answer back in the text.

What a reader with ADHD finds in this text

Let me say it clearly from the start: the text does not say a single word about ADHD and makes no empirical claim. This is a philosophical argument; asking about its level of evidence would be out of place. The connection to ADHD is one I make.

I make it because there is a question that keeps coming back on this site: how much of it is me, and how much is my brain? In the piece on taking responsibility for your own life I wrote that ADHD explains but does not absolve; Sartre's line that character is no excuse is close to that sentence, but it makes no room at all for biological obstacles. This difference matters. Sartre saying that the coward can stop being a coward is a moral claim; what I say about a neurodevelopmental condition is something else. Putting one in place of the other is a shortcut to blaming yourself in the language of freedom.

Still, it is useful in one place: sentences like I am someone who never finishes anything are judgments of character, and Sartre would read them as an escape. All-or-nothing thinking works with exactly this pattern. The gap between knowing and acting, on the other hand, is a very old problem, as I wrote in the piece on akrasia; Sartre does not answer it, but the student scene resembles the moral version of the same gap.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

For the reader who wants to take a first step into philosophy, who has read Camus and is curious about what comes next, who notices they confuse responsibility with guilt. Because it is short, it can be finished in one sitting.

I would not recommend it to someone who has just been diagnosed, whose shame and grief are still fresh. If the tone of the text is received as good news about freedom and turns into the sentence it was all my choice, I think it will do more harm than good. The reader looking for the detail of Being and Nothingness will not find it here either; this is more of a sign hung on the door.

Its place on the shelf

It is a neighbor of two philosophy books on the site. The Myth of Sisyphus is about accepting meaninglessness and carrying on anyway, while Sartre draws up the bill for responsibility in that void; reading the two back to back puts Camus's calm persistence next to Sartre's harsh question. Man's Search for Meaning asks the question of meaning and responsibility from a far heavier experience.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics moves in exactly the opposite direction from Sartre: a good life comes from a human being's function and habit, that is, there is a nature. Putting the two side by side tests how far I accept Sartre's claim that there is no nature. In Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the ordinary official taking refuge in orders also sits close to the escape Sartre calls bad faith; Arendt does not make this connection, I do.

I wrote about Sartre's sentence condemned to be free as the price of freedom in the Eleutheria diary.

Closing

I think the most honest side of this text is that it does not present itself as a system. Even if Sartre later backed away, what he backed away from was the simplicity, and the place where the text still works is that simplicity. You do not have to agree. But before saying I did not choose, stopping once to look at whether you really did not choose is the most solid question this short talk leaves behind.