Sartre’s “Existentialism Is A Humanism": Abandonment, Anguish, Despair, and Our Self-Surpasing
Sartre’s essay "Existentialism Is A Humanism" is based on a lecture that he delivered in Paris in October of 1945, right on the heals of the end of World War II. Much to his chagrin, it has become the most widely read of his works, as it provides readers with a great introduction to Existentialism. In it, Sartre defends existentialism against its critics and explains the most basic tenet of existentialism - that existence precedes essence. He also explains the three key moods that permeate existence - anguish (or existential angst), abandonment, and despair - and redefines the very meaning of the term "humanism."
Theist vs. Atheist Existentialism
Sartre begins by making a distinction between theist and atheist existentialists, saying that some of the confusion about Existentialism stems from mixing these two up. Sartre’s Existentialism takes it’s point of departure from the non-existence of any authority superior to mankind, i.e. God. His atheist Existentialism originates from the French reading of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology in Being and Time. But all existentialists agree on the basic tenet of existentialism: that existence precedes essence. In order to understand the meaning of this, Sartre schools us on the "artisanal" model of production below:
A chair is made according to an idea of that chair in the mind of it’s maker out of a material, like wood, for some purpose or end. Those of you who have studied Aristotle will recognize this as a recitation of Aristotle’s four categories for understanding being: the formal cause (the idea of the chair), the efficient cause (the maker of the chair), the material cause (wood), and the final cause or end of the chair, namely an object on which we can rest in a sitting position comfortably without falling over. Theists (especially Christian theists whose theology is greatly influenced by Aristotelian metaphysics) imagine God like an artisan who fashions man according to divine conception:
“Thus [for theist existentialists] each individual man is the realization of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding.”
Following Heidegger’s most basic critique of Aristotle, Existentialism rejects trying to understand being as if it were a thing - a technological view of the world that puts thing in terms of production. Sartre will assert that unlike things produced in the world, there is no pre-given essence or end of man. And because there is no God, man is forlorn, abandoned to himself and his own freedom with no higher authority to justify his actions and choices. This sense of abandonment also leads to anguish (or existential angst) and despair. Below is a gloss of these three “moods” that permeate our human existence according to Sartre.
Abandonment: Without God or a common, given “human nature” to help us to make “good” or “right” decisions, man is nonetheless compelled to make choices and to act. There is no pre-given essence or end for man’s existence means that the meaning of men’s lives is defined through the choices men make (or fail to make), and the actions men take (or fails to take).
Anguish (or existential angst): When man makes a choice or commits to a course of action, he thereby affirms this choice not only for himself, but for all of humanity. Bearing the responsibility not only for himself for for all of mankind leads to anguish, an anguish that is a precondition for (authentic) action.
Despair: Man acts in the here and now and, given the limited scale of individual men’s lives, they act and bear responsibility for choices that may turn out, after the fact, to lead to unintended or even disastrous consequences. Men act without a hope (or the illusion) that what they are affirming will be what turns out, in fact, to be good.
Three Critiques of Existentialism Addressed
The critics of existentialism think that it's too gloomy and pessimistic (especially to be a humanism), but for Sartre and other existentialists it is a rather optimistic philosophy. How is that? Because it gives man the power to create meaning for himself, and the permission to create, with others, man’s “nature” as a history of man’s best ideas and achievements.
Another critique is that existentialism leads to political quietism - that there is nothing that can be done about our situation(s). But Sartre rejects this view because no other philosophy takes humans' choices and actions more seriously. To act on the basis of one’s convictions is its only imperative. It is action that defines man’s life, a direct contradiction of the quietist, apathetic person who lets others do what he sees himself as powerless to achieve.
Intersubjectivity, and Sartre's Rejection of the Cartesian Cogito
The last charge against Existentialism is the most serious, and it proceeds from an unnamed kind of critic - that is, from other philosophers. That charge is that Existentialism takes man in isolation, that it is a “subjectivism.” Sartre answers this charge by pointing out that the subject taken up by existentialism is not the solipsistic, Cartesian subject, but the Hegelian subject that embodies within it’s own perspective a recognition of the Other, and the world that comes along with this recognition. Near the end of the essay, he writes:
But the subjectivity which we thus postulate as the standard of truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism, for as we have demonstrated, it is not only one’s own self that one discovers in the cogito, but those of others too. Contrary to the philosophy of Descartes, contrary to that of Kant, when we say “I think” we are attaining to ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He recognises that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are.
Man’s subjectivity is one that includes within it the recognition of the Other, and through the other of an external world. Moreover, for the existentialist subject the problematic that frames his human existence is not Descartes’ question of “what can I know with certainty" (or, epistemology), but that of how action in the world defines my existence, and by extension, that of human kind.
Our Self-Surpassing
At this point, you may ask yourself: Has Sartre answered the question implied in the title of his essay: How is Exitentialism (or how could it be considered) a humanism. And this is where, I believe, things get a little scandalous. We find Sartre redefining the very meaning of humanism out from under the humanists themselves:
But there is another sense of the word [humanism], of which the fundamental meaning is this: Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing, and can grasp objects only in relation to his self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and center of his transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing) with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a human universe) – it is this that we call existential humanism. This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realisation (sic), that man can realize himself as truly human.
According to traditional humanism, underneath all of our differences there lies a shared human “nature” that allows us to uphold common values and ideals. You don’t need God to tell you not to kill other men if you can put yourself in another’s shoes and realize that you yourself value your life and would not wish to be killed. Human rights are based on just such an understanding of humanism.
But the other sense of humanism to which Sartre points here is arguably a much more radical view, and that is the idea of a shared human condition or situation. This situation is what Heidegger describes as being thrown in the world, what he describes as the ex-tasis and temporality of Being. But in order to understand this, we must turn to Being and Time.
Here is my podcast episode on the same subject on dSound: Sartre's “Existentialism Is A Humanism"