Jean-Paul Sartre · Philosophy
Accused of gloom, of nihilism, of dwelling on the sordid, Sartre rose to defend his philosophy as a <em>humanism</em>: the most optimistic of doctrines because it places human destiny in human hands. This lesson follows his great public reply - and the ethics of freedom he tried to build from the rubble of God’s absence.
By 1945 ‘existentialism’ was a scandal and a fashion at once, and Sartre was its lightning rod. From the right, Catholics charged that his philosophy was a counsel of despair that dwelt on the dark, the sordid, the shameful - that by denying God it left human life squalid and meaningless. From the left, Communists charged that it was a bourgeois indulgence, a self-absorbed contemplation that ignored solidarity and the real struggles of history, trapping each person in private subjectivity. Both accused him of pessimism: of offering a bleak, dispiriting picture of human existence. Sartre’s lecture Existentialism is a Humanism - the most accessible thing he ever wrote, delivered to a crowd so large it caused a near-riot - was his reply to these charges. Its provocative thesis is that existentialism, far from being a gloomy nihilism, is the most optimistic doctrine there is, and a humanism in the deepest sense - because it alone makes the human being the author of their own existence and places human destiny entirely in human hands.
Sartre is careful, because there is a kind of ‘humanism’ he rejects. The first, false humanism takes humanity as a finished object of worship - it celebrates ‘Man’ as a species, congratulating humankind on its achievements (great art, science, civilization) as if humanity were a fixed and admirable thing we could survey and praise. Sartre thinks this is absurd: it treats man as a completed value, and it can flip into a self-satisfied cult of Humanity that is really just collective vanity. His own humanism is quite different. It rests on two ideas. First, transcendence: the human being is always beyond itself, always surpassing itself toward goals and possibilities - never a finished thing to be admired, but a perpetual self-overcoming. Second, subjectivity: man is always ‘within’ this surpassing, the centre and origin of his projects, not a passive object. Sartre’s humanism, then, is the recognition that the human being is the law-giver and the maker, the being who creates values and meaning by projecting itself beyond itself - and that there is no universe, no value, no meaning except the one disclosed by this free human surpassing. Man is the maker of his world, and that is his dignity.
The stakes of Sartre’s lecture are enormous: he is attempting nothing less than to show that a fully secular, atheist philosophy - one that takes the death of God with total seriousness - can nonetheless sustain a demanding ethic, human dignity, engaged action, and even hope. This is why the lecture mattered so much in 1945 and matters still. A great many people in the modern world have lost or set aside religious faith, and with it the sense that values are guaranteed by a divine order. The terrifying question is whether anything remains: whether, without God, we are condemned to nihilism, to the conclusion that ‘everything is permitted’ and nothing truly matters. Sartre’s answer is a resounding no. He insists that the loss of God need not be the loss of meaning, morality, or hope - that human beings can take up the burden of value-creation themselves, build an ethic on the foundation of freedom, commit themselves to engaged action in history, and live with dignity and purpose precisely because nothing is given. Whether or not he fully succeeds, the attempt is one of the most important in modern thought: the effort to show that the human being, abandoned and free, can be the source of its own values without falling into despair - that a humanism is possible after the death of God.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Sartre defended existentialism as a humanism : optimistic because it makes humans the authors of their own destiny, and able to ground a real ethic on freedom. Explain why he rejects the charges of pessimism and nihilism, and how he tries to derive a morality of freedom.
Leads to Immanuel Kant.
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