Jean-Paul Sartre · Philosophy
With no God and no fixed values, where do we get our morality? Sartre’s answer is unflinching: we invent it, and we know we are inventing it. He explores the three moods this produces - <em>anguish</em>, <em>abandonment</em>, and <em>despair</em> - through the case of a young man torn between his mother and the Resistance, for whom no rule or feeling can make the choice.
Sartre’s denial of a fixed human nature and of God leaves him facing the hardest question in ethics: if there is no divine lawgiver and no human essence to read our duties from, where do moral values come from, and what makes anything right or wrong? Many thinkers who gave up God tried to keep an objective morality anyway - grounding it in reason, nature, or human flourishing. Sartre thought this was wishful thinking, a failure of nerve. He took the loss of God with full seriousness and drew the vertiginous conclusion: there are no objective values written into the universe, no moral facts waiting to be discovered, no ‘ought’ inscribed in the nature of things. Values do not come to us from anywhere; they come from us. We create them by our choices and commitments - and, what is harder to bear, there is no external standard by which our creation of values can itself be judged correct or incorrect. We are the source of value in a universe that contains none on its own.
Sartre names three emotional realities that follow from taking our condition seriously - not as neurotic symptoms, but as the lucid mood of a freedom that has stopped deceiving itself. Anguish (angoisse) is the feeling that comes with total responsibility: when I grasp that in choosing I commit not only myself but, by my example, an image of all humanity, I feel the vertigo of a legislator who answers for everyone. The military officer who orders an attack, knowing lives hang on his decision and that he alone must decide without certainty, feels this anguish - and Sartre says we all bear it, whether we admit it or not. Abandonment (délaissement) is the recognition that God does not exist and that we must draw every consequence: there is no heaven of values to consult, no signs to read, no one to forgive us or guide us; we are abandoned, left utterly to ourselves. Despair (désespoir) is not depression but a kind of clear-eyed resolve: it means confining ourselves to what is within our will and acting without relying on hope - without counting on luck, on God’s help, or on other people doing their part, since none of these is guaranteed. We act, committing ourselves fully, but without the false comfort of a happy ending we cannot ensure.
The case of the young man is the emotional core of Sartre’s ethics because it makes vivid what abandonment really means: not that morality is easy or that anything goes, but that in the deepest decisions we are utterly alone with our freedom, and no external authority can lift the weight from us. We long for there to be a rule, a sign, an expert, a God, a feeling that will tell us what to do and so absolve us of the terror of deciding. Sartre’s message is that there is none - and that pretending otherwise (consulting an adviser whom we have already, by our choice of adviser, half-instructed how to answer; or reading the world for ‘signs’) is a form of bad faith, a flight from a responsibility that is inescapably ours. To live authentically is to choose without a net: to commit fully, knowing we create the value by committing, and to own the choice as ours without alibi. This is anguish, abandonment, and despair lived through honestly. It is also, for Sartre, the only path to genuine dignity and genuine action - for it is precisely because nothing is decided in advance that our choices truly matter, truly make us who we are, and truly bring something new into a world that, without us, would contain no values at all.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Sartre’s three existentialist moods - anguish (the weight of total responsibility), abandonment (no God, no given values, no excuses), and despair (acting without false hope). Explain the case of the young man torn between his mother and the Resistance, and why Sartre says no rule could decide it for him.
Leads to Fyodor Dostoevsky.
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