Today I'd like to discuss Sartre's 1945 lecture existentialism is a Humanism.
Jean- Paul Sartre was the first to really popularize the term existentialism.
It was originally used as a charge against him.
He's like, Hey, yeah, I'll take that.
I'll consider myself an existentialist.
And this lecture that he gave in 1945 was a way of addressing some of the common
misconceptions that he found people associated with existentialism as well
as to really encapsulate the main ideas that he saw as existentialist ones.
Right.
And, offer a key formulation of the philosophy.
Because of that, and because this lecture was a public lecture given in 1945,
as I mentioned, it has a tendency to oversimplify a bit and Sartre later in
his life was actually somewhat worried about certain oversimplifications
that emerge in this text.
So just to provide that as a caveat here.
I do think it's a really good introduction to his thought, though,
because it is easier to read than some of his longer and denser works.
So, he's trying to defend existentialism against a few major charges.
The first major charge is that existentialism is bourgeois or quietest.
That is that it encourages us, because it's all about the idea that you have
choices, no matter how limited your situation feels, um, and that there
is no one action that's inherently better than another, that it tends to
simply reproduce the status quo or to license a kind of political inaction.
The way that Sartre defends existentialism against this
charge is to say that, actually, existentialism is all about action.
Because he thinks that every choice that we make constitutes an action, and also
because he thinks that humans are always in the process of inventing our own
essence through our actions in the world, Sartre actually finds existentialism to
be among the least quietest philosophies.
It encourages resistance, it encourages actively assessing your
situation and transforming it.
The second charge that he wants to defend against is the charge of pessimism.
Existentialism can seem pretty gloomy.
A lot of it is about anxiety, despair, really a sense of meaninglessness in life.
And Sartre says actually, no.
Existentialism is optimistic because it gives us our own destiny rather than being
fatalistic about the human condition.
Rather than thinking that we are predetermined or even predisposed
towards certain actions over others, existentialism says, Hey, at least
the version of existentialism we find in Sartre says, Hey, we are
always choosing ourselves, not just for ourselves, but ourselves.
We are crafting ourselves through every action that we take.
And this means that we have a lot of power, a lot more than we realize.
And he thinks that this is optimistic, right?
The third charge that he wants to defend against is that of
subjectivism or individualism.
He says, sure.
Existentialism starts from the cogito or Descartes' "I think."
But,
inter subjectivity is really crucial.
He thinks that we are selves by virtue of our relations to others and by
virtue of our actions in the world.
And so we're not limited to a subjective perspective, but that subjective
perspective is always a starting point that is in interactive engagement with
its environment, including other things.
In choosing for ourselves Sartre thinks we choose for all people because we
are actively involved in the collective process of creating the human condition.
And when it comes to morality, he's not saying that we can just
do anything we want and there's absolutely no way of distinguishing
between better and worse actions.
He said, Yes, it's true that existentialism offers no moral code.
Existentialist ethics is actually about the rejection of moral codes
or fundamental axioms or principles, but we can judge truth and error.
We can judge authenticity and bad faith.
If you want to check out my video on bad faith, I have one on this
channel, and that means that we can judge whether we are living up
to the human condition, living it out honestly, or whether we are
trying to deny our human condition.
Our actions can live up to the human condition or they can amount to ways
of being dishonest and denying it.
The fourth charge against which he defends existentialism is that of
nihilism or the idea that nothing matters.
And Sartre says that a lot of people think that existentialism is nihilist
because it tends to be atheistic.
Now this is not true of all existentialism.
There are religious forms of existentialism and he talks about
Christian existentialists in particular, but his version of existentialism
is atheistic existentialism.
And he says that actually, if you deny that God exists, human life is all the
more important than if there were a God.
So rather than saying that nothing matters because there is no God who has
a plan for us, we can instead say we are the beings for whom things matter.
And that means that we have the power to decide what matters to us.
We have the freedom to invent our own ways of mattering.
Now, a funny thing about this text is that Sartre actually defends existentialism
against these charges before he then goes on to define existentialism.
And so in this text, he defines existentialism after canvasing these
four objections that I've mentioned.
And he says that existentialism is a doctrine that makes human life
possible and declares that every truth or action has a human setting
and human subjectivity.
The formula that he gives for this, which is extremely iconic,
is that existence precedes essence.
Now, when you think about most things in the world, their
essence proceeds their existence.
If I decide that I want to make a cup, I am going to.
Um, first think about its essence, right?
Why am I making a cup?
I am making a cup so that I can have something to hold liquid in.
So the essence of a cup is to be a container that holds liquid in it.
And I can then think about the features that I want my cup to have.
Okay.
I want it to have a place to put my finger.
I want it to be made out of ceramic.
I want it to have like a fun design, whatever.
In any case, the essence of the cup precedes its existence.
And he says, this would be the way that humans are.
If there were a God, right.
If there were a God, then God would say, Hey, this is my idea of human essence.
Now I'm going to go ahead and make a human.
But if you follow Sartre's atheistic existentialism and believe that there is
no God, then he says, there must be at least one being whose existence precedes
its essence.
And that is humans.
Unlike the cup, humans are first indefinable.
We are first nothing.
We are the kinds of beings that find ourselves questioning, that find ourselves
imagining alternative possibilities, that find ourselves showing up in
the world and negating the conditions around us by transcending them.
And he actually thinks that the idea that humans are first indefinable or nothing,
you don't have to necessarily agree with atheism in order to go along with it.
He thinks that both Christian existentialists and atheistic
existentialists, uh, take the idea that for humans, existence precedes essence.
But the way that he's set it up, as I've mentioned, is through
atheistic existentialism.
And the conclusion that he draws is that we are nothing,
but what we make of ourselves.
Now, this doesn't mean that humans can just go around, uh, imagining that
we could be whoever we want to be.
Right.
We do have limits.
And so he says there's a universal human condition, but there's just
not a universal human nature.
And that universal human condition is established historically over
time through human actions, which manifest then in human institutions,
laws, rules, regulations, visions for the future of humanity, et cetera.
Now Sartre of course is drawing some pretty bold conclusions about
the nature of human freedom here.
He says that I am responsible for myself and for everyone else.
I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing.
In choosing myself, I choose man.
And he says that understanding this helps us then understand some of
the concepts that are traditionally associated with existentialism.
The first is anguish or anxiety, which is the felt sense of
our profound responsibility.
You can watch a video that I've done on Heidegger's concept of anxiety if
you're interested in the same channel.
Sartre draws a lot of his ideas of anguish from Heidegger.
And Sartre says that any time we are choosing, we're choosing out
of this profound responsibility and giving value to what we are choosing.
And it makes a lot of sense that that would give us a sense of anxiety.
Right?
This profound responsibility is pretty overwhelming.
In addition to that, there's also an existentialism, this theme of abandonment
or what Sartre also calls forlornness.
If there is no God, then there is no universal moral scheme that we can follow.
And therefore we must choose our ethics.
We are abandoned alone in the world having to figure things out for ourselves
as a collective and as individuals.
And that felt sense of abandonment, you know, doesn't always feel good.
Although, as we said, Sartre ultimately thinks it can, uh, manifest optimism.
In describing how, by making choices, we are creating values in the
world and that those choices don't depend on universal moral codes,
Sartre uses the example of a boy
who's trying to decide whether to stay home and help his ailing mother or to go
off and fight in the French resistance.
And he says that the boy is caught in a genuine moral dilemma and
no universalizing code of ethics can make the decision for him.
A Christian code would on the one hand suggest that it's good for him to stay
with his mother, but also that it's good for him to go and fight in the resistance,
and basically same with all other moral codes.
He says all concepts of ethics fail, and he's not optimistic that other moral
codes are going to be much help either.
He says at the end of the day, we must choose.
Even if I try and outsource my decision, let's say I go to the local
priests and I ask what he would do,
that's still my choice to go to him and have him make the decision for me.
So.
We cannot not choose, Sartre concludes.
Even if the boy decides to do nothing, to not make a decision,
he's still making a decision.
He's deciding to stay where he currently is.
For Sartre, there are no a priori moral values.
However, this doesn't mean that we can't pass judgment on the actions of
others, because we can judge whether these actions were based on honesty or
dishonesty about our human condition as both facticity and transcendence.
I get into this a little bit in the bad faith video.
We can also judge, and this is something that Simone de Beauvoir develops in detail
in her book, the ethics of ambiguity, which I also have a video about.
Um, we can also judge whether the actions that we are undertaking are
preserving the truth of human freedom, the freedom of others, especially, or
whether they are in denial of that.
Lots to unpack here.
I hope this has helped to introduce some of the key concepts of Existentialism is
a Humanism and given you a sense of some of the ideas that are really important.