EXISTENTIALISM
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)
Existentialism is a Humanism (1945/6)
I) Charges
Against Existentialism
1. Communists: Existentialism is a bourgeois philosophy of desperate
quietism and luxurious contemplation that considers effective action in this
world to be impossible (p. 31).
2. Communists and Catholics: Existentialism dwells on a one-sided,
pessimistic, despairing, dark view of human nature that ignores human
solidarity and advocates an atomistic, isolated form of individualism
centered on pure subjectivity (pp. 31-2).
3. Christianity: Existentialism denies or trivializes human undertakings
since it rejects transcendent standards without which man has no basis for
willing, acting, and judging. As such, existentialism is a type of
irrational voluntarism (pure caprice) and relativistic moral anarchy (p.
32).
4. Replies to Critics: (pp. 54-62)
II) Existentialism is a Humanism: Defining and Defending Existentialism
A. Types of Humanism
- Christian, religious: a
theory that interprets man as an end and a higher value (p. 60)
- Modern, secular: a
theory that interprets man as an end and a higher value (p. 60)
- Existential (Sartre,
Marcel, etc.): man as a responsible, free, self-transcending, temporal
existence (ekstasis) not reducible to, or predetermined by, an
essence [essentialism] (p. 61)
B. Sartre’s Atheistic Version of Existential
Humanism
1. Definition of Existentialism
In any case, what can be said from the very beginning is that by
existentialism we mean a doctrine that makes human life possible and, in
addition, declares that every truth and every action implies a human setting
and a human subjectivity. (p. 32)
Actually, it [existentialism] is the least scandalous, the most austere of
doctrines. It is intended strictly for specialists and philosophers. Yet, it
can be defined easily. What complicates matters is that there are two kinds
of existentialism; first, those who are Christian, among whom I would
include Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both Catholic; and on the other hand the
atheistic existentialists among whom I class Heidegger, and then the French
existentialists [presumably Camus, Merleau-Ponty, etc.] and myself. What
they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or,
if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point. (p. 34)
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first
principle of existentialism…. [italics added] Thus, existentialism’s
first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full
responsibility of his existence rest on him.” (p. 36)
The word subjectivism has two meanings, and our opponents play on the two.
Subjectivism means, on the one hand, that an individual chooses and makes
himself; and, on the other, that it is impossible for man to transcend human
subjectivity. The second of these is the essential meaning of
existentialism [Italics added]. (p. 37)
Dostoyevsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.” That
is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is
permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because
neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to
[transcendent, absolute grounds]. (p. 41)
2. Essence and existence as ontological categories referring
to specific modes of being.
a) Essence: “… essence—that is, the ensemble of both the
production routines and the properties which enable it to be both produced
and defined—precedes existence. Thus, the presence of the paper-cutter or
book in front of me is determined. Therefore, we have here a technical view
of the world whereby it be said that production precedes existence…. (p. 34)
Essence: fixed, pregiven, pre-established, predetermined, essential,
necessary or involuntary nature
b) Essence Precedes Existence:
- Manufactured object
(paper-cutter): artisan, concept, production technique (pp. 34-5)
- Technical view of the
world: production precedes existence (p. 34)
- Proportional analogy: an
artisan is to a paper-cutter just as God is to man; the individual
man as the realization of a certain concept in the divine mind (p. 35)
- 18th-century
atheistic philosophes (Diderot, Voltaire): essence still precedes
existence
- Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804): each man as an instantiation (existence) of the
universal concept (essence)
- Essence as
being-in-itself (l’être-en-soi): coincidence with itself, existence
predetermined by involuntary, fixed, pregiven, pre-established essence
(essential nature),
3. Existence precedes essence: subjectivity
as philosophical starting point (anti-essentialist subjectivism)
a) Atheistic Existentialism: If God does not exists,
then there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence
[hypothetical proposition] (p. 35).
b) Sartrean existence (being-for-itself = l’être-pour-soi) or
Heideggerian Dasein (being-there, being-in-the-world) as preceding
essence (pp. 35 ff.): non-coincidence with itself; self-surpassing or
self-transcending (ekstasis) mode of being temporally oriented toward
future projects (thrown project); one’s self as task and responsibility;
freedom and consciousness, etc.
“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.” (p. 47)
What we mean is that a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings,
that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships
which make up these undertakings. (pp. 48-9)
- Facticity: man
exists, turns up, appears on the scene (being-there or being-in-situation
before being defined by a concept, thrown into the world, the involuntary)
(p. 35)
- Freedom: man as
initially nothing (not predefined, open to possibilities, only become
“something” through a temporal process of free choices); self-definition
as self-transcending, self-conscious, temporal project and process (p. 36)
- Responsibility:
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first
principle of existentialism…. Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make
every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his
existence rest on him.” (p. 36)
- Subjectivism: 1)
an individual chooses and makes himself; 2) the impossibility of man
transcending human subjectivity—The second of these is the essential
meaning of existentialism. [Italics added] (p. 37)
- Existential traits of
subjectivity: anguish before the deep responsibility of
choosing oneself; denial, self-deception, hiding and fleeing from freedom,
“bad faith” (pp. 38-40); forlornness in the face of the death of
God and its consequences: loss of transcendent moral ground or a priori
values; man is “condemned to be free,” student moral dilemma (pp.
40-5); and despair: self-confinement to reckoning only with what
depends upon our will, or on the ensemble of probabilities which make our
action possible (pp. 45 ff.)
- Subjectivity as
philosophical point of departure: 1) Absolute truth of consciousness
becoming aware of itself—I think; therefore, I exist. (Descartes’
famous formula) 2) Subjectivity as philosophical starting point
(existentialism) is the only theory that a) does not a priori
(i.e., essentialistically, in a predetermined manner) reduce man to an
object (objectification into “an ensemble of determined reactions in no
way distinguished from the ensemble of qualities and phenomena which
constitute a table or a chair or a stone.”); and the only theory that b)
accords man dignity as “an ensemble of values distinct from the
material realm,” as a free, responsible, historical configuration or
existence (pp. 50-1)
- Intersubjectivity:
“…the world in which man decides what he is and what others are.” (p.
52)
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