Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre A Philosophy of Freedom
What's it about?
Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) is one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s most accessible explanations of his philosophy. Rooted in a matter-of-fact atheism, it contends with humanity’s search for meaning in an absurd and indifferent universe. Rejecting everything-goes nihilism, it argues that we must take responsibility for creating our own meaning.
Existentialism is a modern philosophy. Its often harrowing insights are situated against the backdrop of what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God,’ as well as the all-too-human horrors of the Holocaust. But what existentialism says philosophy is for is similar to the ancient Greeks, who saw it as a way of life. For Sartre as much as Socrates, the focus is on how to live well.
Based on a lecture given in Paris in 1945, Existentialism is a Humanism is perhaps the most concise explanation Sartre ever gave of his philosophy. As we’ll see, it grasps truths not in scientific, but moral terms. What’s the difference? Well, consider a truth such as two plus two equals four. As Descartes once pointed out, sinners and saints alike have access to this truth. But to grasp a moral truth you have to be a certain kind of person.
The ancient Greeks emphasised self-control, meditation, and exercise as preconditions for accessing these truths. Sartre, as we’ll see, lays the focus on authenticity, honesty, and a refusal to follow the crowd. These ways of being, he suggests, open us to the ultimate truth of our existence: that we are responsible for creating our own meaning in a coldly contingent universe.
Sartre recalls the day he lost his faith. He was twelve and the classmates who accompanied him to school were late. Impatient, he decided to think about God. “Well,” he said to himself, “he doesn’t exist.” It was, in his words, an authentic revelation. After that, it was all over; the question had been settled once and for all. Sartre thought pride might have inclined his precocious twelve-year-old self toward atheism: there was no place for God in the self-image of a boy who saw himself as the “source of his own origins.” But history played its part too.
By the time of Sartre’s birth in 1905, two generations of intellectuals had grappled with God’s apparent retreat from the world. Marx attributed the decline of religion to the rise of capitalism. The relentless pursuit of profit, he wrote, had drowned “the heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour” in the “icy water of egotistical calculation.” Nietzsche pinned the blame on progress: humanity’s scientific and technological advances had made God superfluous. By the late-nineteenth century, everything from the origin of species to the causes of infant mortality could be rationally explained without appeal to an all-knowing deity. God, in Nietzsche’s words, was dead and it was a self-sufficient humanity that killed him.
For Sartre, this wasn’t a value-judgment – it was a “historical fact.” Atheism, an idea once associated with a small number of enlightened dissenters, had conquered the European mind. Religion, once the foundation of its thought, no longer provided assurance or guidance. Now, for many nineteenth-century Europeans, God’s death was a shock akin to being plunged into icy water. Without religion’s truths and laws, the pessimists among them argued, people would become nihilists – criminal partisans of the idea that life is meaningless and anything goes. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it, “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permissible.”
Sartre sympathised with these pessimists. There are, he says, people who lose someone important whose life from that point on is no more than the “gloomy aftermath of that death.” Writing in the 1940s, he was surrounded by the “survivors” of God’s death. To lose the belief upon which your values are based is, as Nietzsche foresaw, to go beyond good and evil – and to find yourself in a disorienting and apparently meaningless world. But the loss of that belief is also an opportunity for creative endeavour. If God can’t help us, we must help ourselves.
When Sartre gave his lecture in 1945, the French public associated existentialism with unseemly novels about cowards, crooks, and castoffs. According to the popular cliché, the people who wrote them hung out in smoky cafés listening to jazz records and plotting new ways to scandalise the respectable middle-classes. It was this hostile caricature that Sartre wanted to correct in his remarks on existentialism and humanism.
Contrary to what many think, he begins, existentialism is a technical doctrine for specialists. Its central claim is a fairly dry argument about the nature of being, a branch of philosophical inquiry known as ontology. It holds that “existence precedes essence.”
Consider a penknife. The craftsman who makes knives has a concept in his head of what such a thing is and a plan to produce it. The purpose of the knife is predetermined: it is made for cutting fruit, trimming string, whittling wood, and so on. The nature of the knife, its essence, is known before the craftsman applies hammer to steel – that is, before it exists.
For theologians, God is a kind of “superlative artisan.” The concept of humanity in his mind is like the concept of a knife in the craftsman’s: both know what they are making. Just as each penknife embodies the concept of a penknife, each human embodies God’s concept of humanity. Thought of this way, the pattern of human nature – our essence – precedes our individual existence.
God’s death, though, is also the death of the creator who fashions us in his own image. The notion that our lives unfurl according to a pre-existing plan no longer makes sense. Sartre argues that we are made – and make ourselves – over time. Our existence comes before our essence. We first materialise and encounter ourselves in the world and only later define ourselves. To begin with, we are nothing.
The core ideas of existentialism flow from this claim. Without a God to tell us who we are or what we ought to do, we are free. This too for Sartre is a statement of fact, not a value-judgement. In Sartre’s striking phrase, we’re “condemned to be free.” What he means is that, although we don’t choose to be born – and in that sense are condemned – we alone are responsible for what we make of the life we’re arbitrarily given. Without an immutable human nature or a God to justify our deeds or dictate our values, we have no excuses: we are what we choose to become.
In Nausea, Sartre’s first novel, we watch as a man called Antoine Roquentin suddenly grasps the implications of the supposedly “technical” doctrine of existentialism.
Sitting on a bench, he observes people strolling around a public garden while studying the shapes of chestnut tree roots. The more he looks, the less real it all becomes. He begins to feel sick. There’s no reason, he thinks, for anything to be here rather than there – or anywhere at all. Overcome by the “vertigo of possibility,” he contemplates killing himself on the spot, but the idea of his corpse on the gravel is as superfluous as that of his living body on the bench.
What Sartre says in his lecture is that we feel this ontological nausea when we discover the “non-necessity” of being. Chestnut trees, Chopin’s nocturnes, murder, love, revolution, the couple holding hands in the street, you and I – none of it is necessary; it simply is. The universe is contingent: nothing in it has to happen and nothing that does has to make sense.
The protagonist Antoine asks a question famously posed by another existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus. According to Camus, there’s only one “truly serious” philosophical problem: suicide. But Antoine, like Camus, realises that death has no more intrinsic meaning than life. Another solution would be to ignore the problem – to take on so many conventional commitments that there’s no time left to sit around on park benches having existential breakdowns. That, Sartre thinks, is what most of us do: we hide our anguish, suppress our nausea, and pretend that how we live isn’t really up to us.
Yet the indifference of the universe points us in the right direction. Meaning, Sartre reminds us, is neither a product of divine intention nor a molecular property of things. The streets and trams I see as I walk to work make up a city that I can love or loathe, live in or leave. The goodness, beauty, sadness, or ugliness I find in it emerges in relation to my life and my actions. These things are, as existentialists put it, “at hand” – I experience them through their utility and functionality; they mean what I do with them.
So there’s the lesson – and the cure. Abstractly contemplating the significance of tree roots is like repeating the same word a hundred times: it becomes nonsensical. But things do make sense in the context of our personal projects – just think of how a botanist or a painter might look at those chestnuts. This human-centric and thus humanist view challenges us to create. That’s ultimately how Antoine settles his stomach at the end of Sartre’s novel: he decides to become a writer and articulate his experiences – that is, to make something of his own.
.
So Sartre locates values in actions, not in facts waiting to be discovered “out there” in the world. Nothing necessarily follows from empirical claims. Scientists can tell us how many micrograms of pesticide a liter of water contains, but is that good or bad? The question has little meaning until we bring it into relationship with our projects as morally interested beings who care about things like conservation, economic growth, or food sovereignty. As Sartre puts it, a boulder is an inert fact; it becomes an “obstacle” when it enters the perception of the climber who finds it blocking her path on this particular mountain.
We appeal to facts, Sartre thinks, not because we’re philosophically muddleheaded, but because we want an alibi. When we seek ethical guidance from facts outside ourselves, we’re trying to avoid taking responsibility for our values. These dodges can take any number of forms. Biological determinists appeal to evolution, Marxists to the means of production, Freudians to the unconscious. As Sartre sees it, these intellectual schools are all engaged in more or less elaborate attempts to evade responsibility.
Of course, the facts these schools describe do act upon us. As existentialists put it, we are “thrown” into the world: we find ourselves in bodies we didn’t choose, subject to genetic, economic, social, and historical forces beyond our control. I may be able to walk or require a wheelchair; my parents might be loving or narcissistic – or both; class snobbery may impede or benefit me; I can be born in Sudan or France. These concrete details may limit freedom, but they don’t negate it: we’re always free to choose what we make of what we’ve been made into.
This freedom exists even when all the facts are against us. For existentialists, a peasant bound by feudal oppression is still free in this sense: he can choose to work well or badly, to be serene or resentful. Albert Camus called this freedom an “invincible summer” in the midst of winter. He found it in Sisyphus, the Greek king punished by the gods to eternally roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each time he reached the top.
Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy even as he watches his fateful rock hurtling back down the slope. Sisyphus’ task is inherently futile, so a sense of achievement can’t possibly bring him joy. Instead, it’s the choice to defy his absurd situation that makes him happy. He refuses to despair; he embraces his labor with humour and persistence; he delights in the skill of the work, not its outcome.
We’re all rolling our own little boulders up hills knowing we’ll ultimately fail, if only because we must die. Existentialists argue that we can transcend this absurdity by finding Sisyphean happiness in the pushing.
In his lecture, Sartre tells us about the dilemma of a student in occupied France. This young man wanted to go to Britain, join the Free French Forces based there, and fight the Germans who had killed his brother. His mother, however, hadn’t only lost a child – she’d also been abandoned by her husband, who, to make matters worse, was a collaborator. Realizing his mother lived only for him, the student was as reluctant to leave her as he was keen on doing his patriotic duty and avenging his brother. What, then, was the right course of action?
Sartre looks at the problem from two conventional perspectives. Christian doctrine tells us a lot about the nobility of love and sacrifice, but it doesn’t answer the student’s question: does family or country have a greater claim on us? Kantian morality meanwhile instructs us to always treat others as ends, never as means. But whose ends trumps whose – his mother’s, or those of the soldiers indirectly fighting on the student’s behalf?
Of course, the student could seek out the advice of a living moral authority such as a priest. But which one? This is wartime Paris, after all, and there are priests connected to the Resistance as well as collaborating priests. If he goes to the first, the student will hear one answer; if he consults the latter, he’ll be given another.
That, though, makes the point Sartre is driving at. The fact that we can usually guess what people are going to tell us suggests that we’re more interested in validation than advice. It’s like flipping a coin when you can’t decide between two options: you realize you knew what you wanted all along the moment the coin lands “wrong” side up. Asking a Resistance-supporting priest is choosing to be told to leave your mother. Asking his collaborator counterpart is choosing to be told not to.
You have, in short, already decided what you’re going to do.
This student didn’t seek out a priest in the end – he asked an existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre what he should do. That, too, meant deciding what he was going to hear. You are free, the philosopher told the student, so choose. No general code of ethics will tell you what to do.
In other words, invent.
In this lesson to Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre, you’ve learned that Sartre’s philosophy situates humanity in a world without God and without inherent meaning. But the absurdity of existence isn’t a mandate for nihilism – it simply means we must decide how to live for ourselves and take full responsibility for the decisions we make. There are, Sartre shows us, no excuses. We can’t blame our lot in life on our parents, the economy, or the unconscious – we are what we make of ourselves.
Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) is one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s most accessible explanations of his philosophy. Rooted in a matter-of-fact atheism, it contends with humanity’s search for meaning in an absurd and indifferent universe. Rejecting everything-goes nihilism, it argues that we must take responsibility for creating our own meaning.
Existentialism is a modern philosophy. Its often harrowing insights are situated against the backdrop of what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God,’ as well as the all-too-human horrors of the Holocaust. But what existentialism says philosophy is for is similar to the ancient Greeks, who saw it as a way of life. For Sartre as much as Socrates, the focus is on how to live well.
Based on a lecture given in Paris in 1945, Existentialism is a Humanism is perhaps the most concise explanation Sartre ever gave of his philosophy. As we’ll see, it grasps truths not in scientific, but moral terms. What’s the difference? Well, consider a truth such as two plus two equals four. As Descartes once pointed out, sinners and saints alike have access to this truth. But to grasp a moral truth you have to be a certain kind of person.
The ancient Greeks emphasised self-control, meditation, and exercise as preconditions for accessing these truths. Sartre, as we’ll see, lays the focus on authenticity, honesty, and a refusal to follow the crowd. These ways of being, he suggests, open us to the ultimate truth of our existence: that we are responsible for creating our own meaning in a coldly contingent universe.
Sartre recalls the day he lost his faith. He was twelve and the classmates who accompanied him to school were late. Impatient, he decided to think about God. “Well,” he said to himself, “he doesn’t exist.” It was, in his words, an authentic revelation. After that, it was all over; the question had been settled once and for all. Sartre thought pride might have inclined his precocious twelve-year-old self toward atheism: there was no place for God in the self-image of a boy who saw himself as the “source of his own origins.” But history played its part too.
By the time of Sartre’s birth in 1905, two generations of intellectuals had grappled with God’s apparent retreat from the world. Marx attributed the decline of religion to the rise of capitalism. The relentless pursuit of profit, he wrote, had drowned “the heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour” in the “icy water of egotistical calculation.” Nietzsche pinned the blame on progress: humanity’s scientific and technological advances had made God superfluous. By the late-nineteenth century, everything from the origin of species to the causes of infant mortality could be rationally explained without appeal to an all-knowing deity. God, in Nietzsche’s words, was dead and it was a self-sufficient humanity that killed him.
For Sartre, this wasn’t a value-judgment – it was a “historical fact.” Atheism, an idea once associated with a small number of enlightened dissenters, had conquered the European mind. Religion, once the foundation of its thought, no longer provided assurance or guidance. Now, for many nineteenth-century Europeans, God’s death was a shock akin to being plunged into icy water. Without religion’s truths and laws, the pessimists among them argued, people would become nihilists – criminal partisans of the idea that life is meaningless and anything goes. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it, “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permissible.”
Sartre sympathised with these pessimists. There are, he says, people who lose someone important whose life from that point on is no more than the “gloomy aftermath of that death.” Writing in the 1940s, he was surrounded by the “survivors” of God’s death. To lose the belief upon which your values are based is, as Nietzsche foresaw, to go beyond good and evil – and to find yourself in a disorienting and apparently meaningless world. But the loss of that belief is also an opportunity for creative endeavour. If God can’t help us, we must help ourselves.
When Sartre gave his lecture in 1945, the French public associated existentialism with unseemly novels about cowards, crooks, and castoffs. According to the popular cliché, the people who wrote them hung out in smoky cafés listening to jazz records and plotting new ways to scandalise the respectable middle-classes. It was this hostile caricature that Sartre wanted to correct in his remarks on existentialism and humanism.
Contrary to what many think, he begins, existentialism is a technical doctrine for specialists. Its central claim is a fairly dry argument about the nature of being, a branch of philosophical inquiry known as ontology. It holds that “existence precedes essence.”
Consider a penknife. The craftsman who makes knives has a concept in his head of what such a thing is and a plan to produce it. The purpose of the knife is predetermined: it is made for cutting fruit, trimming string, whittling wood, and so on. The nature of the knife, its essence, is known before the craftsman applies hammer to steel – that is, before it exists.
For theologians, God is a kind of “superlative artisan.” The concept of humanity in his mind is like the concept of a knife in the craftsman’s: both know what they are making. Just as each penknife embodies the concept of a penknife, each human embodies God’s concept of humanity. Thought of this way, the pattern of human nature – our essence – precedes our individual existence.
God’s death, though, is also the death of the creator who fashions us in his own image. The notion that our lives unfurl according to a pre-existing plan no longer makes sense. Sartre argues that we are made – and make ourselves – over time. Our existence comes before our essence. We first materialise and encounter ourselves in the world and only later define ourselves. To begin with, we are nothing.
The core ideas of existentialism flow from this claim. Without a God to tell us who we are or what we ought to do, we are free. This too for Sartre is a statement of fact, not a value-judgement. In Sartre’s striking phrase, we’re “condemned to be free.” What he means is that, although we don’t choose to be born – and in that sense are condemned – we alone are responsible for what we make of the life we’re arbitrarily given. Without an immutable human nature or a God to justify our deeds or dictate our values, we have no excuses: we are what we choose to become.
In Nausea, Sartre’s first novel, we watch as a man called Antoine Roquentin suddenly grasps the implications of the supposedly “technical” doctrine of existentialism.
Sitting on a bench, he observes people strolling around a public garden while studying the shapes of chestnut tree roots. The more he looks, the less real it all becomes. He begins to feel sick. There’s no reason, he thinks, for anything to be here rather than there – or anywhere at all. Overcome by the “vertigo of possibility,” he contemplates killing himself on the spot, but the idea of his corpse on the gravel is as superfluous as that of his living body on the bench.
What Sartre says in his lecture is that we feel this ontological nausea when we discover the “non-necessity” of being. Chestnut trees, Chopin’s nocturnes, murder, love, revolution, the couple holding hands in the street, you and I – none of it is necessary; it simply is. The universe is contingent: nothing in it has to happen and nothing that does has to make sense.
The protagonist Antoine asks a question famously posed by another existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus. According to Camus, there’s only one “truly serious” philosophical problem: suicide. But Antoine, like Camus, realises that death has no more intrinsic meaning than life. Another solution would be to ignore the problem – to take on so many conventional commitments that there’s no time left to sit around on park benches having existential breakdowns. That, Sartre thinks, is what most of us do: we hide our anguish, suppress our nausea, and pretend that how we live isn’t really up to us.
Yet the indifference of the universe points us in the right direction. Meaning, Sartre reminds us, is neither a product of divine intention nor a molecular property of things. The streets and trams I see as I walk to work make up a city that I can love or loathe, live in or leave. The goodness, beauty, sadness, or ugliness I find in it emerges in relation to my life and my actions. These things are, as existentialists put it, “at hand” – I experience them through their utility and functionality; they mean what I do with them.
So there’s the lesson – and the cure. Abstractly contemplating the significance of tree roots is like repeating the same word a hundred times: it becomes nonsensical. But things do make sense in the context of our personal projects – just think of how a botanist or a painter might look at those chestnuts. This human-centric and thus humanist view challenges us to create. That’s ultimately how Antoine settles his stomach at the end of Sartre’s novel: he decides to become a writer and articulate his experiences – that is, to make something of his own.
.
So Sartre locates values in actions, not in facts waiting to be discovered “out there” in the world. Nothing necessarily follows from empirical claims. Scientists can tell us how many micrograms of pesticide a liter of water contains, but is that good or bad? The question has little meaning until we bring it into relationship with our projects as morally interested beings who care about things like conservation, economic growth, or food sovereignty. As Sartre puts it, a boulder is an inert fact; it becomes an “obstacle” when it enters the perception of the climber who finds it blocking her path on this particular mountain.
We appeal to facts, Sartre thinks, not because we’re philosophically muddleheaded, but because we want an alibi. When we seek ethical guidance from facts outside ourselves, we’re trying to avoid taking responsibility for our values. These dodges can take any number of forms. Biological determinists appeal to evolution, Marxists to the means of production, Freudians to the unconscious. As Sartre sees it, these intellectual schools are all engaged in more or less elaborate attempts to evade responsibility.
Of course, the facts these schools describe do act upon us. As existentialists put it, we are “thrown” into the world: we find ourselves in bodies we didn’t choose, subject to genetic, economic, social, and historical forces beyond our control. I may be able to walk or require a wheelchair; my parents might be loving or narcissistic – or both; class snobbery may impede or benefit me; I can be born in Sudan or France. These concrete details may limit freedom, but they don’t negate it: we’re always free to choose what we make of what we’ve been made into.
This freedom exists even when all the facts are against us. For existentialists, a peasant bound by feudal oppression is still free in this sense: he can choose to work well or badly, to be serene or resentful. Albert Camus called this freedom an “invincible summer” in the midst of winter. He found it in Sisyphus, the Greek king punished by the gods to eternally roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each time he reached the top.
Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy even as he watches his fateful rock hurtling back down the slope. Sisyphus’ task is inherently futile, so a sense of achievement can’t possibly bring him joy. Instead, it’s the choice to defy his absurd situation that makes him happy. He refuses to despair; he embraces his labor with humour and persistence; he delights in the skill of the work, not its outcome.
We’re all rolling our own little boulders up hills knowing we’ll ultimately fail, if only because we must die. Existentialists argue that we can transcend this absurdity by finding Sisyphean happiness in the pushing.
In his lecture, Sartre tells us about the dilemma of a student in occupied France. This young man wanted to go to Britain, join the Free French Forces based there, and fight the Germans who had killed his brother. His mother, however, hadn’t only lost a child – she’d also been abandoned by her husband, who, to make matters worse, was a collaborator. Realizing his mother lived only for him, the student was as reluctant to leave her as he was keen on doing his patriotic duty and avenging his brother. What, then, was the right course of action?
Sartre looks at the problem from two conventional perspectives. Christian doctrine tells us a lot about the nobility of love and sacrifice, but it doesn’t answer the student’s question: does family or country have a greater claim on us? Kantian morality meanwhile instructs us to always treat others as ends, never as means. But whose ends trumps whose – his mother’s, or those of the soldiers indirectly fighting on the student’s behalf?
Of course, the student could seek out the advice of a living moral authority such as a priest. But which one? This is wartime Paris, after all, and there are priests connected to the Resistance as well as collaborating priests. If he goes to the first, the student will hear one answer; if he consults the latter, he’ll be given another.
That, though, makes the point Sartre is driving at. The fact that we can usually guess what people are going to tell us suggests that we’re more interested in validation than advice. It’s like flipping a coin when you can’t decide between two options: you realize you knew what you wanted all along the moment the coin lands “wrong” side up. Asking a Resistance-supporting priest is choosing to be told to leave your mother. Asking his collaborator counterpart is choosing to be told not to.
You have, in short, already decided what you’re going to do.
This student didn’t seek out a priest in the end – he asked an existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre what he should do. That, too, meant deciding what he was going to hear. You are free, the philosopher told the student, so choose. No general code of ethics will tell you what to do.
In other words, invent.
In this lesson to Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre, you’ve learned that Sartre’s philosophy situates humanity in a world without God and without inherent meaning. But the absurdity of existence isn’t a mandate for nihilism – it simply means we must decide how to live for ourselves and take full responsibility for the decisions we make. There are, Sartre shows us, no excuses. We can’t blame our lot in life on our parents, the economy, or the unconscious – we are what we make of ourselves.
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