sartre essays in existentialism

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Essays in existentialism

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism , towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2. That lecture offered an accessible version of his difficult treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943), which had been published two years earlier, and it also responded to contemporary Marxist and Christian critics of Sartre’s “existentialism”. Sartre was much more than just a traditional academic philosopher, however, and this begins to explain his renown. He also wrote highly influential works of literature, inflected by philosophical concerns, like Nausea (1938), The Roads to Freedom trilogy (1945–49), and plays like No Exit (1947), Flies (1947), and Dirty Hands (1948), to name just a few. He founded and co-edited Les Temps Modernes and mobilised various forms of political protest and action. In short, he was a celebrity and public intellectual par excellence, especially in the period after Liberation through to the early 1960s. Responding to some calls to prosecute Sartre for civil disobedience, the then French President Charles de Gaulle replied that you don’t arrest Voltaire.

While Sartre’s public renown remains, his work has had less academic attention in the last thirty or so years ago, and earlier in France, dating roughly from the rise of “post-structuralism” in the 1960s. Although Gilles Deleuze dedicated an article to his “master” in 1964 in the wake of Sartre’s attempt to refuse the Nobel Prize for literature (Deleuze 2004), Michel Foucault influentially declared Sartre’s late work was a “magnificent and pathetic attempt of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century” (Foucault 1966 [1994: 541–2]) [ 1 ] . In this entry, however, we seek to show what remains alive and of ongoing philosophical interest in Sartre, covering many of the most important insights of his most famous philosophical book, Being and Nothingness . In addition, significant parts of his oeuvre remain under-appreciated and thus we seek to introduce them. Little attention has been given to Sartre’s earlier, psychologically motivated philosophical works, such as Imagination (1936) or its sequel, The Imaginary (1940). Likewise, few philosophers have seriously grappled with Sartre’s later works, including his massive two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), or his various works in existential psychoanalysis that examine the works of Genet and Baudelaire, as well as his multi-volume masterpiece on Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–2). These are amongst the works of which Sartre was most proud and we outline some of their core ideas and claims.

1. Life and Works

2. transcendence of the ego: the discovery of intentionality, 3. imagination, phenomenology and literature, 4.1. negation and freedom, 4.2 bad faith and the critique of freudian psychoanalysis, 4.3 the look, shame and intersubjectivity, 5. existential psychoanalysis and the fundamental project, 6. existentialist marxism: critique of dialectical reason, 7. politics and anti-colonialism, a. primary literature, b. secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Sartre’s life has been examined by many biographies, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux (and, subsequently, Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre’s own literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized in both Words and Being and Nothingness , summed up by his claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first to undertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of his own childhood in Words (1964a)—in which Sartre applies to himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, thereby complicating this life/death binary.

Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of major cultural and historical events that his existential philosophy responded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in 1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “age of extremes”, a period that was also well-described in the middle of that century in Albert Camus’ The Rebel , notwithstanding that the reception of Camus’ book in Les Temps Modernes in 1951–2 caused Sartre and Camus to very publicly fall out.

The major events of Sartre’s life seem relatively clear, at least viewed from an external perspective. A child throughout World War 1, he was a young man during the Great Depression but born into relative affluence, brought up by his grandmother. At least as presented in Word s, Sartre’s childhood was filled with books, the dream of posterity and immortality in those books, and in which he grappled with his loss of the use of one eye and encountered the realities of his own appearance revealed through his mother’s look after a haircut—suffice to say, he was not classically beautiful.

Sartre’s education, by contrast, was classical—the École Normale Supérieure. His education at the ENS was oriented around the history of philosophy, and the influential bifurcation of that time between the neo-Kantianism of Brunschvicg and the vitalism of Bergson. While Sartre failed his first attempt at the aggregation, apparently by virtue of being overly ambitious, on repeating the year he topped the class (de Beauvoir was second, at her first attempt and at the age of 21, then the youngest to complete). Sartre then taught philosophy at various schools, notably at Le Havre from 1931–36 and while he was composing his early philosophy and his great philosophical novel, Nausea . He never entered a classical university position.

Although Sartre’s philosophical encounter with phenomenology had already occurred (around 1933), which de Beauvoir described as causing him to turn pale with emotion (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 112]), with the onset of World War 2 Sartre merged those philosophical concerns with more obviously existential themes like freedom, authenticity, responsibility, and anguish, as translated into English from the French angoisse by both Hazel Barnes and Sarah Richmond. He was a Meteorologist in Alsace in the war and was captured by the German Army in 1940 and imprisoned for just under a year (see War Diaries ). During this socio-political turmoil, Sartre remained remarkably prolific. Notable publications include his play, No Exit (1947), Being and Nothingness (1943), and then completing Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Anti-semite and Jew (1946), and founding and coediting Les Temps Modernes , commencing from 1943 (Sartre’s major contributions are collected in his series Situations , especially volume V).

Sartre continued to lead various social and political protests after that period, especially concerning French colonialism (see section 7 below). By the time of the student revolutions in May 1968 he was no longer quite the dominant cultural and intellectual force he had been, but he did not retreat from public life and engagement and died in 1980. Estimates of the numbers of those attending his funeral procession in Paris range from 50–100,000 people. Sartre had been in the midst of a collaboration with Benny Levy regarding ethics, the so-called “Hope Now” interviews, whose status remain somewhat controversial in Sartrean scholarship, given the interviews were produced in the midst of Sartre’s illness and shortly before he died, and the fact that the relevant audio-recordings are not publicly available.

One of the most famous foundational moments of existentialism concerns Sartre’s discovery of phenomenology around the turn of 1932/3, when in a Parisian bar listening to his friend Raymond Aron’s description of an apricot cocktail (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 135]). From this moment, Sartre was fascinated by the originality and novelty of Husserl’s method, which he identified straight away as a means to fulfil his own philosophical expectations: overcoming the opposition between idealism and realism; getting a view on the world that would allow him “to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process”. Sartre became immediately acquainted with Emmanuel Levinas’s early translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and his introductory book on Husserl’s theory of intuition. He spent the following year in Berlin, so as to study more closely Husserl’s method and to familiarise himself with the works of his students, Heidegger and Scheler. With Levinas, and then later with Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Tran Duc Thao, Sartre became one of the first serious interpreters and proponent of Husserl’s phenomenology in France.

While he was studying in Berlin, Sartre tried to convert his study of Husserl into an article that documents his enthusiastic discovery of intentionality. It was published a few years later under the title “Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology”. This article, which had considerable influence over the early French reception of phenomenology, makes explicit the reasons Sartre had to be fascinated by Husserl’s descriptive approach to consciousness, and how he managed to merge it with his previous philosophical concerns. Purposefully leaving aside the idealist aspects of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Sartre proposes a radicalisation of intentionality that stresses its anti-idealistic potential. Against the French contemporary versions of neo-Kantianism (Brochard, Lachelier), and more particularly against the kind of idealism advocated by Léon Brunschvicg, Sartre famously claims that intentionality allows us to discard the metaphysical oppositions between the inner and outer and to renounce to the very notion of the interiority of consciousness. If it is true, as Husserl states, that every consciousness is consciousness of something, and if intentionality accounts for this fundamental direction that orients consciousness towards its object and beyond itself, then, Sartre concludes, the phenomenological description of intentionality does away with the illusion that makes us responsible for the way the world appears to us. According to Sartre’s radicalised reading of Husserl’s thesis, intentionality is intrinsically realistic: it lets the world appear to consciousness as it really is , and not as a mere correlate of an intellectual act. This realistic interpretation, being perfectly in tune with Sartre’s lifelong ambition to provide a philosophical account of the contingency of being—its non-negotiable lack of necessity—convinced him to adopt Husserl’s method of phenomenological description.

While he was still in Berlin, Sartre also began to work on a more personal essay, which a few years later resulted in his first significant philosophical contribution, Transcendence of the Ego . With this influential essay Sartre engages in a much more critical way with the conception of the “transcendental ego” presented in Husserl’s Ideas and defends his realistic interpretation of intentionality against the idealistic tendencies of Husserl’s own phenomenology after the publication of Logical Investigations . Stressing the irreducible transparency of intentional experience—its fundamental orientation beyond itself towards its object, whatever this object may be—Sartre distinguishes between the dimensions of our subjective experiences that are pre-reflectively lived through, and the reflective stance thanks to which one can always make their experience the intentional object towards which consciousness is oriented. One of Sartre’s most fundamental claims in Transcendence of the Ego is that these two forms of consciousness cannot and must not be mistaken with one another: reflexive consciousness is a form of intentional consciousness that takes one’s own lived-experiences as its specific object, whereas pre-reflexive consciousness need not involve the intentional distance to the object that the act of reflection entails. In regard to self-consciousness, Sartre argues there is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, as well as reflective forms of self-consciousness. The latter is unable to give access to oneself as the subject of unreflected consciousness, but only as the intentional object of the act of reflection, i.e., the Ego in Sartre’s terminology. The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world . It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).

This critique of the transcendental Ego is less opposed to Husserl than it may seem, notwithstanding Sartre’s reservations about the transcendental radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The neo-Humean claim that the “I” or Ego is nowhere to be found “within” ourselves remains faithful to the 5th Logical Investigation , in which Husserl had initially followed the very same line of reasoning (see Husserl 1901 [2001: vol. 2, 91–93]), before developing a transcendental methodology that substantially modified his approach to subjectivity (as exposed in particular in Husserl 1913 [1983]). However, for the Husserl of the Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenology (published in 1913), the sense in which a perceptual object, which is necessarily seen from one side but also presented to us as a unified object (involving other unseen sides), requires that there be a unifying structure within consciousness itself: the transcendental ego. Sartre argues that such an account would entail that the perception of an object would always also involve an intermediary perception—such as some kind of perception or consciousness of the transcendental ego—thus threatening to disrupt the “transparency” or “translucidity” of consciousness. All forms of perception and consciousness would involve (at least) these two components, and there would be an opaqueness to consciousness that is not phenomenologically apparent. In addition, it appears that Husserl’s transcendental ego would have to pre-exist all of our particular actions and perceptions, which is something that the existentialist dictum “existence precedes essence”, which we will explicate shortly, seems committed to denying. Without considering here the extent to which Husserl can be defended against these charges, Sartre’s general claim is that the notion of a self or ego is not given in experience. Rather, it is something that is not immanent but transcendent to pre-reflective experience. The Ego is the transcendent object of one’s reflexive experience, and not the subject of the pre-reflective experience that was initially lived (but not known).

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me . The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides , so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “ the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken ”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone ). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences. In a different example of this, Sartre argues that when I perceive Pierre as loathsome, say, I do not perceive my feeling of hatred; rather, Pierre repulses me and I experience him as repulsive (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13]). Repulsiveness constitutes an essential feature of his distinctive mode of appearing, rather than a trait of my feelings towards him. Sartre concludes that reflective statements about one’s Ego cannot be logically derived from non-reflective (“ irréfléchies ”) lived-experiences:

Thus to say “I hate” or “I love” on the occasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is to carry out a veritable passage to the infinite […] Nothing more is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is certain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain forever doubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceeds the power of reflection. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13])

This critique of the powers of reflection forms one important part of Sartre’s argument for the primacy of pre-reflective consciousness over reflective consciousness, which is central to many of the pivotal arguments of Being and Nothingness , as we indicate in the relevant sections below.

For many of his readers, the book on the Imaginary that Sartre published in 1940 constitutes one of the most rigorous and fruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenological investigations. Along with the The Emotions: Outline of a Theory which was published one year before (Sartre 1939b), Sartre presented this study of imagination as an essay in phenomenological psychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in psychological studies and brought to completion the research on imagination he had undertaken since the very beginning of his philosophical career. With this new essay, Sartre continues to explore the relationship between intentional consciousness and reality by focusing upon the specific case of the intentional relations to the unreal and the fictional, so as to produce an in-depth analysis of “the great ‘irrealizing’ function of consciousness”. Engaging in a detailed discussion with recent psychological research that Sartre juxtaposes with (and against) fine-grained phenomenological descriptions of the structures of imagination, his essay proposes his own theory of the imaginary as the corollary of a specific intentional attitude that orients consciousness towards the unreal.

In a similar fashion to his analysis of the world-shaping powers of emotions (Sartre 1939b), Sartre describes and highlights how imagination presents us with a coherent world, although made of objects that do not precede but result from the imaging capacities of consciousness. “The object as imaged, Sartre claims, is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 15]). Contrary to other modes of consciousness such as perception or memory, which connect us to a world that is essentially one and the same, the objects to which imaginative consciousness connects us belong to imaginary worlds, which may not only be extremely diverse, but also follow their own rules, having their own spatiality and temporality. The island of Thrinacia where Odysseus lands on his way back to Ithaca needs not be located anywhere on our maps nor have existed at a specific time: its mode of existence is that of a fictional object, which possesses its own spatiality and temporality within the imaginary world it belongs to.

Sartre stresses that the intentional dimension of imaging consciousness is essentially characterised by its negativity. The negative act, Sartre writes, is “constitutive of the image” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 183]): an image consciousness is a consciousness of something that is not , whether its object is absent, non-existing, or fictional. When we picture Odysseus sailing back to his native island, Odysseus is given to us “as absent to intuition”. In this sense, Sartre concludes,

one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certain nothingness. […] However lively, appealing, strong the image, it gives its object as not being. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 14])

The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediate consciousness of the nothingness of its object. Sartre’s essay investigates how imaging consciousness allows us to operate with its objects as if they were present, even though these very objects are given to us as non-existing or absent. This is for instance what happens when we go to the theatre or read a novel:

To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees. To read is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. In this world there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initially those mentioned in the book and then a host of others that are not named but are in the background and give this world its depth. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 64])

The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator or reader from projecting herself into this world as if it was real . The acts of imagination can consequently be described as “magical acts” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 125]), similar to incantations with respect to the way they operate, since they are designed to make the object of one’s thought or desire appear in such a way that one can take possession of it.

In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophical significance of the relationship between imagination and freedom, which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world. Imagination, Sartre writes, “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imaging consciousness posits its object as “out of reach” in relation to the world understood as the synthetic totality within which consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginary creation is only possible if consciousness is not placed “in-the-midst-of-the-world” as one existent among others.

For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 184])

In that respect, the irrealizing function of imagination allows consciousness to “surpass the real” so as to constitute it as a proper world : “the nihilation of the real is always implied by its constitution as a world”. This capacity of surpassing the real to make it a proper world defines the very notion of “situation” that becomes central in Sartre’s philosophical thought after the publication of the Imaginary . Situations are nothing but “the different immediate modes of apprehension of the real as a world” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]). Consciousness’ situation-in-the-world is precisely that which motivates the constitution of any irreal object and accounts for the creation of imaginary worlds—for instance, and perhaps above all, in art:

Every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in a sense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particular point of view. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185])

With this conclusion, which prioritises the question of the world over that of reality, Sartre begins to move away from the realist perspective he was initially aiming at when he first discovered phenomenology, so as to make the phenomenological investigation of our “being-in-the-world” (influenced by his careful rereading of Heidegger in the late 30s) his new priority.

Although Sartre never stated it explicitly, his interest in the question of the unreal and imaging consciousness appears to be intimately connected with his general conception of literature and his self-understanding of his own literary production. The concluding remarks of the Imaginary extend the scope of Sartre’s phenomenological analyses of the irrealizing powers of imagination, by applying them to the domain of aesthetics so as to answer the question about the ontological status of works of art. For Sartre, any product of artistic creation—a novel, a painting, a piece of music, or a theatre play—is just as irreal an object as the imaginary world it gives rise to. The irreality of the work of art allows us to experience—though only imaginatively—the world it gives flesh to as an “analogon” of reality. Even a cubist painting, which might not depict nor represent anything, still functions as an analogon, which manifests

an irreal ensemble of new things , of objects that I have never seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 191])

Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal objects through verbal analogons.

This original conception of the nature of the work of art dominates Sartre’s critical approach to literature in the many essays he dedicates to the art of the novel. This includes his critical analyses of recent writers’ novels in the 30s—Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Mauriac, etc.—and the publication in the late 40s of his own summative view, What is literature? (Sartre 1948a [1988]). In a series of articles gathered in the first volume of his Situations (1947, Sit. I ), Sartre defends a strong version of literary realism that can, somewhat paradoxically, be read as a consequence of his theory of the irreality of the work of art. If imagination projects the spectator within the imaginary world created by the artist, then the success of the artistic process is proportional to the capacity of the artwork to let the spectator experience it as a reality of its own, giving rise to a full-fledged world. Sartre applies in particular this analysis to novels, which must aim, according to him, at immersing the reader within the fictional world they depict so as to make her experience the events and adventures of the characters as if she was living them in first person. The complete absorption of the reader within the imaginary world created by the novelist must ultimately recreate the particular feel of reality that defines Sartre’s phenomenological kind of literary realism (Renaudie 2017), which became highly influential over the following decades in French literature. The reader must be able to experience the actions of the characters of the novel as if they did not result from the imagination of the novelist, but proceeded from the character’s own freedom—and Sartre goes as far as to claim that this radical “spellbinding” (“envoûtante”, Sartre 1940 [2004: 175])) quality of literary fiction defines the touchstone of the art of the novel (See “François Mauriac and Freedom”, in Sartre Sit. I ).

This original version of literary realism is intrinsically tied to the question of freedom, and opposed to the idea according to which realist literature is expected to provide a mere description of reality as it is . In What is Literature? , Sartre describes the task of the novelist as that of disclosing the world as if it arose from human freedom—rather than from a deterministic chain of causes and consequences. The author’s art consists in obliging her reader “to create what [she] discloses ”, and so to share with the writer the responsibility and freedom involved in the act of literary creation (Sartre 1948a [1988: 61]). In order for the world of the novel to offer its maximum density,

the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be.

The conception of the writer’s engagement that resulted from these analyses constitutes probably the most well-known aspect of Sartre’s relation to literature. The writer only has one topic: freedom.

This analysis of the role of imaginative creations of art can also help us to understand the role of philosophy within his own novels, particularly in Nausea , a novel which Sartre began as he was studying Husserl in Berlin. In this novel Sartre’s pre-phenomenological interest for the irreducibility of contingency intersects with his newly-acquired competences in phenomenological analyses, making Nausea a beautifully illustrated expression of the metaphysical register Sartre gave to Husserl’s conception of intentionality. The feeling of nausea that Roquentin, the main character of Sartre’s novel, famously experienced in a public garden while obsessively watching a chestnut tree, accounts for his sensitivity to the absolute lack of necessity of whatever exists. Sartre understands this radical absence of necessity as the expression of the fundamental contingency of being. Roquentin’s traumatic moment of realisation that there is absolutely no reason for the existence of all that exists illustrates the intuition that motivated Sartre’s philosophical thinking since the very beginning of his intellectual career as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as Simone de Beauvoir recalls (1981 [1986]). It constitutes the metaphysical background of his interpretation of intentionality, which he would come to develop and systematise in the early dense parts of Being and Nothingness . While the experience of nausea when confronting the contingency of the chestnut tree does not give us conceptual knowledge, it involves a form of non-conceptual ontological awareness that is of a fundamentally different order to, and cannot be derived from, our conceptual understanding and knowledge of brute existence.

4. Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943) remains the defining treatise of the existentialist “movement”, along with works from de Beauvoir from this period (e.g., The Ethics of Ambiguity ). We cannot do justice to the entirety of the book here, but we can indicate the broad outlines of the position. In brief, Sartre provides a series of arguments for the necessary freedom of “human reality” (his gloss on Heidegger’s conception of Dasein), based upon an ontological distinction between what he calls being-for-itself ( pour soi ) and being-in-itself ( en soi ), roughly between that which negates and transcends (consciousness) and the "pure plenitude" of objects. That kind of metaphysical position might seem to “beg the question” by assuming what it purports to establish (i.e., radical human freedom). However, Sartre argues that realism and idealism cannot sufficiently account for a wide range of phenomena associated with negation. He also draws on the direct evidence of phenomenological experience (i.e., the experience of anguish). But the argument for his metaphysical picture and human freedom is, on balance, an inference to the best explanation. He contends that his complex metaphysical vision best captures and explains central aspects of human reality.

As the title of the book suggests, nothingness plays a significant role. While Sartre’s concern with nothingness might be a deal-breaker for some, following Rudolph Carnap’s trenchant criticisms of Heidegger’s idea that the “nothing noths/nothings” (depending on translation from the German), Sartre’s account of negation and nothingness (the latter of which is the ostensible ground of the former) is nevertheless philosophically interesting. Sartre does not say much about the genesis of consciousness or the for-itself, other than that it is contingent and arises from “the effort of an in-itself to found itself” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 84]). He describes the appearance of the for-itself as the absolute event, which occurs through being’s attempt “to remove contingency from its being”. Accordingly, the for-itself is radically and inescapably distinct from the in-itself. In particular, it functions primarily through negation, whether in relation to objects, values, meaning, or social facts. According to Sartre this negation is not about any reflective judgement or cognition, but an ontological relation to the world. This ontological interpretation of negation minimises the subjectivist interpretations of his philosophy. The most vivid example he provides to illustrate this pre-reflective negation is the apprehension of Pierre’s absence from a café. Sartre describes Pierre’s absence as pervading the whole café. The café is cast in the metaphorical “shade” of Pierre not being there at the time he had been expected. This experience depends on human expectations, of course. But Sartre argues that if, by contrast, we imagine or reflect that someone else is not present (say the Duke of Wellington, an elephant, etc.), these abstract negative facts are not existentially given in the same manner as our pre-reflective encounter with Pierre’s absence. They are not given as an “objective fact”, as a “component of the real”.

Sartre provides numerous other examples of pre-reflective negation throughout Being and Nothingness . He argues that the apprehension of fragility and destruction are likewise premised on negativity, and any effort to adequately describe these phenomena requires negative concepts, but also that they presuppose more than just negative thoughts and judgements. In regard to destruction, Sartre suggests that there is not less after the storm, just something else (Sartre 1943 [1956: 8]). Generally, we do not need to reflectively judge that a building has been destroyed, but directly see it in terms of that which it is not —the building, say, in its former glory before being wrecked by the storm. Humans introduce the possibility of destruction and fragility into the world, since objectively there is just a change. Sartre’s basic question is: how could we accomplish this unless we are a being by whom nothingness comes into the world, i.e., free? He poses similar arguments in regard to a range of phenomena that present as basic to our modes of inhabiting the world, from bad faith through to anguish. In all of these cases Sartre argues that while we can expressly pose negative judgements, or deliberately ask questions that admit of the possibility of negative reply, or consciously individuate and distinguish objects by reference to the objects which they are not, there is a pre-comprehension of non-being that is the condition of such negative judgements.

Although the for-itself and the in-itself are initially defined very abstractly, the book ultimately comes to say a lot more about the for-itself, even if not much more about the in-itself. The picture of the for-itself and its freedom gradually becomes more “concrete”, reflecting the architectonic of the text, which has more sustained treatments of the body, others, and action, in the second half. Throughout, Sartre gives a series of paradoxical glosses on the nature of the for-itself—i.e., a “being which is what it is not and is not what it is” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction, Sartre’s claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existence of the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stable identity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather, “existence precedes essence”, as he famously remarks in both Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In later chapters he develops the basic ontological position in regard to free action. His point is not, of course, to say we are free to do or achieve anything (freedom as power), or even to claim that we are free to “project” anything at all. The for-itself is always in a factical situation. Nonetheless, he asserts that the combination of the motives and ends we aspire to in relation to that facticity depend on an act of negation in relation to the given. As he puts it: “Action necessarily implies as its condition the recognition of a “desideratum”; that is, of an objective lack or again of a negatité” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 433]). Even suffering in-itself is not a sufficient motive to determine particular acts. Rather, it is the apprehension of the revolution as possible (and as desired) which gives to the worker’s suffering its value as motive (Sartre 1943 [1956: 437]). A factual state, even poverty, does not determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack. No factual state, whatever it may be, can cause consciousness to respond to it in any one way. Rather, we make a choice (usually pre-reflective) about the significance of that factual state for us, and the ends and motives that we adopt in relation to it. We are “condemned” to freedom of this ontological sort, with resulting anguish and responsibility for our individual situation, as well as for more collective situations of racism, oppression, and colonialism. These are the themes for which Sartre became famous, especially after World War 2 and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In Being and Nothingness he provides various examples that are designed to make this quite radical philosophy of freedom plausible, including the hiker who gives in to their fatigue and collapses to the ground. Sartre says that a necessary condition for the hiker to give in to their fatigue—short of fainting—is that their fatigue goes from being experienced as simply part of the background to their activity, with their direct conscious attention focusing on something else (e.g., the scenery, the challenge, competing with a friend, philosophising, etc.), to being the direct focus of their attention and thus becoming a motive for direct recognition of one’s exhaustion and the potential action of collapsing to the ground. Although we are not necessarily reflectively aware of having made such a decision, things could have been otherwise and thus Sartre contends we have made a choice. Despite appearances, however, Sartre insists that his view is not a voluntarist or capricious account of freedom, but one that necessarily involves a situation and a context. His account of situated freedom in the chapter “Freedom and Action” affirms the inability to extricate intentions, ends, motives, and reasons, from the embodied context of the actor. As a synthetic whole, it is not merely freedom of intention or motive (and hence even consciousness) that Sartre affirms. Rather, our freedom is realised only in its projections and actions, and is nothing without such action.

Sartre’s account of bad faith ( mauvaise foi ) is of major interest. It is said to be a phenomenon distinctive of the for-itself, thus warranting ontological treatment. It also feeds into questions to do with self-knowledge (see Moran 2001), as well as serving as the basis for some of his criticisms of racism and colonialism in his later work. His account of bad faith juxtaposes a critique of Freud with its own “depth” interpretive account, “existential psychoanalysis”, which is itself indebted to Freud, as Sartre admits.

We will start with Sartre’s critique of Freud, which is both simple and complex, and features in the early parts of the chapter on bad faith in Being and Nothingness . In short, Freud’s differing meta-psychological pictures (Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious, or Id, Ego, Superego) are charged with splitting the subject in two (or more) in attempting to provide a mechanistic explanation of bad faith: that is, how there can be a “liar” and a “lied to” duality within a single consciousness. But Sartre accuses Freud of reifying this structure, and rather than adequately explaining the problem of bad faith, he argues that Freud simply transfers the problem to another level where it remains unsolved, thus consisting in a pseudo-explanation (which today might be called a “homuncular fallacy”). Rather than the problem being something that pertains to an embodied subject, and how they might both be aware of something and yet also repress it at the same time, Sartre argues that the early Freudian meta-psychological model transfers the seat of this paradox to the censor: that is, to a functional part of the brain/mind that both knows and does not know. It must know enough in order to efficiently repress, but it also must not know too much or nothing is hidden and the problematic truth is manifest directly to consciousness. Freud’s “explanation” is hence accused of recapitulating the problem of bad faith in an ostensible mechanism that is itself “conscious” in some paradoxical sense. Sartre even provocatively suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis is itself in bad faith, since it treats a part of ourselves as “Id”-like and thereby denies responsibility for it. That is not the end of Sartre’s story, however, because he ultimately wants to revive a version of psychoanalysis that does not pivot around the “unconscious” and these compartmentalised models of the mind. We will come back to that, but it is first necessary to introduce Sartre’s own positive account of bad faith.

While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre’s view, it is also important to recognise that the “germ of its destruction” lies within. This is because bad faith always remains at least partly available to us in our own lived-experience, albeit not in a manner that might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge of an external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that my life is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it is given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie and more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly equivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to be in bad faith (cf. Moran 2001). There is a distanciation involved in coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation of a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematised in Being and Nothingness .

Sartre gives many examples of bad faith that remain of interest. His most famous example of bad faith is the café waiter who plays at being a café waiter, and who attempts to institutionalise themselves as this object. While Sartre’s implied criticisms of their manner of inhabiting the world might seem to disparage social roles and affirm an individualism, arguably this is not a fair reading of the details of the text. For Sartre we do have a factical situation, but the claim is that we cannot be wholly reduced to it. As Sartre puts it:

There is no doubt I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter? But if I am one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not . (Sartre 1943 [1956: 60])

In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when we reduce the other to some ostensible identity (e.g., Anti-semite and the Jew ).

It is important to recognise that no project of “sincerity”, if that is understood as strictly being what one is, is possible for Sartre given his view of the for-itself. Likewise, in regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might be achieved through direct self-consciousness, our options are limited. On Sartre’s view we cannot look inwards and discover the truth about our identity or our own bad faith through simple introspection (there is literally no-thing to observe). Moreover, when we have a lived experience, and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g., third-personally), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that is so posited. We transcend it. Or, to be more precise, we both are that Ego (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also not reducible to it. This is due to the structure of consciousness and the arguments from Transcendence of the Ego examined in section 2 . In Being and Nothingness , the temporal aspects of this non-coincidence are also emphasised. We are not just our past and our objective attributes in accord with some sort of principle of identity, because we are also our “projects”, and these are intrinsically future oriented.

Nonetheless, Sartre argues that it would be false to conclude that all modes of inhabiting the world are thereby equivalent in terms of “faith” and “bad faith”. Rather, there are what he calls “patterns of bad faith” and he says these are “objective”. Any conduct can be seen from two perspectives—transcendence and facticity, being-for-itself and being-for-others. But it is the exclusive affirmation of one or the others of these (or a motivated and selective oscillation between them) which constitutes bad faith. There is no direct account of good faith in Being and Nothingness , other than the enigmatic footnote at the end of the book that promises an ethics. There are more sustained treatments of authenticity in his Notebooks for an Ethics and in Anti-semite and Jew (see also the entry on authenticity ).

Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity is often the subject of premature dismissal. The hyperbolic dimension of his writings on the Look of the Other and the pessimism of his chapter on “concrete relations with others”, which is essentially a restatement of the “master-slave” stage of Hegel’s struggle for recognition without the possibility of its overcoming, are sometimes treated as if they were nothing but the product of a certain sort of mind—a kind of adolescent paranoia or hysteria about the Other (see, e.g., Marcuse 1948). What this has meant, however, is that the significance of Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity, both within phenomenological circles and more broadly in regard to philosophy of mind and social cognition, has been downplayed. Building on the insights of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre proposes a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for any theory of the other, which are far from trivial. In Being and Nothingness , Sartre suggests that various philosophical positions—realism and idealism, and beyond—have been shipwrecked, often unawares, on what he calls the “reef of solipsism”. His own solution to the problem of other minds consists, first and foremost, in his descriptions of being subject to the look of another, and the way in which in such an experience we become a “transcendence transcended”. On his famous description, we are asked to imagine that we are peeping through a keyhole, pre-reflectively immersed and absorbed in the scene on the other side of the door. Maybe we would be nervous engaging in such activities given the socio-cultural associations of being a “Peeping Tom”, but after a period of time we would be given over to the scene with self-reflection and self-awareness limited to merely the minimal (tacit or “non-thetic” in Sartre’s language) understanding that we are not what we are perceiving. Suddenly, though, we hear footsteps, and we have an involuntary apprehension of ourselves as an object in the eyes of another; a “pre-moral” experience of shame; a shudder of recognition that we are the object that the other sees, without room for any sort of inferential theorising or cognising (at least that is manifest to our own consciousness). This ontological shift, Sartre says, has another person as its condition, notwithstanding whether or not one is in error on a particular occasion of such an experience (i.e., the floor creaks but there is no-one actually literally present). While many other phenomenological accounts emphasise empathy or direct perception of mental states (for example, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre thereby adds something significant and distinctive to these accounts that focus on our experience of the other person as an object (albeit of a special kind) rather than as a subject. In common with other phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Scheler, Sartre also maintains that it is a mistake to view our relations with the other as one characterised by a radical separation that we can only bridge with inferential reasoning. Any argument by analogy, either to establish the existence of others in general or to particular mental states like anger, is problematic, begging the question and having insufficient warrant.

For Sartre, at least in his early work, our experience of being what he calls a “we subject”—as a co-spectator in a lecture or concert for example, which involves no objectification of the other people we are with—is said to be merely a subjective and psychological phenomenon that does not ground our understanding and knowledge of others ontologically (Sartre 1943 [1956: 413–5]). Originally, human relations are typified by dyadic mode of conflict best captured in the look of the other, and the sort of scenario concerning the key-hole we just considered above. Given that we also do not grasp a plural look, for Sartre, this means that social life is fundamentally an attempt to control the impact of the look upon us, either by anticipating it in advance and attempting to invalidate that perspective (sadism) or by anticipating it and attempting to embrace that solicited perspective when it comes (masochism). In Sartre’s words:

It is useless for human reality to seek to escape this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not the Mitsein (being-with); it is conflict. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 429])

Sartre’s radical criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not his last word on psychoanalysis. In the last chapters of Being and Nothingness , Sartre presents his own conception of an existential psychoanalysis, drawing on some insights from his attempt to account for Emperor Wilhelm II as a “human-reality” in the 14 th notebook from his War Diaries (Sartre 1983b [1984]). This existential version of psychoanalysis is claimed to be compatible with Sartre’s rejection of the unconscious, and is expected to achieve a “psychoanalysis of consciousness” (Moati 2020: 219), allowing us to understand one’s existence in light of their fundamental free choice of themselves.

The very idea of a psychoanalysis oriented towards the study of consciousness rather than the unconscious seems paradoxical—a paradox increased by Sartre’s efforts to highlight the fundamental differences that oppose his own version of psychoanalysis to Freud’s. Sartre contends that Freud’s “empirical” psychoanalysis

is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche, which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject.

By contrast, Sartre’s own existential psychoanalysis aims to remain faithful to one of the earliest claims of Husserl’s phenomenology: that all psychic acts are “coextensive with consciousness” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570]). For Sartre, however, the basic motivation for rejecting Freud’s hypothesis is less an inheritance of Brentano’s descriptive psychology (as was the case for Husserl) than a consequence of Sartre’s fundamental critique of determinism, applied to the naturalist presuppositions of empirical psychoanalysis and the particular kind of determinism that it involves. In agreement with Freud, Sartre holds that psychic life remains inevitably “opaque” and at least somewhat impenetrable to us. He also stresses that the philosophical understanding of human reality requires a method for investigating the meaning of psychic facts. But Sartre denies that the methods and causal laws of the natural sciences are of any help in that respect. The human psyche cannot be fully analysed and explained as a mere result of external constraints acting like physical forces or natural causes. The for-itself, being always what it is not and not what it is, remains free whatever the external and social constraints. Sartre is consequently bound to reject any emphasis on the causal impact of the past upon the present, which he argues is the basic methodological framework of empirical psychoanalysis. That does not mean that past psychic or physical facts have no impact on one’s existence whatsoever. Rather, Sartre contends that the impact of past events is determined in relation to one’s present choice, and understood as the consequence of the power invested in this free choice. As he puts it:

Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of a past. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 503])

Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, in agreement with the free project that orients his or her existence towards the future. Conversely, determinist explanations that construe one’s present as a mere consequence of the past proceed from a kind of self-delusion that operates by concealing one’s free project, and thus contributes to the obliteration of responsibility. Sartre hence seeks to redefine the scope of psychoanalysis: rather than a proper explanation of human behaviour that relies on the identification of the laws of its causation, psychoanalysis consists in understanding the meaning of our conducts in light of one’s project of existence and free choice. One might wonder, then, why we need any such psychoanalysis, if the existential project that constitutes its object is freely chosen by the subject. Sartre addresses this objection in Being and Nothingness , claiming that

if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must by the same token be known by him; quite the contrary. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570])

What Freud calls the unconscious must be redescribed as the paradoxical entanglement of a “total absence of knowledge” combined with a “true understanding” ( réelle comprehension ) of oneself (1972, Sit. IX : 111). The legitimacy of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis of consciousness lies in its ability to unveil the original project according to which one chooses (more or less obscurely) to develop the fundamental orientations of their existence. According to Sartre, analysing a human subject and understanding the meaning that orients their existence as a whole requires that we grasp the specific kind of unity that lies behind their various attitudes and conducts. This unity can only appear once we discover the synthetic principle of unification or “totalization” ( totalisation ) that commands the whole of their behaviours. Sartre understands this totalization as an an-going process that covers the entire course of one’s existence, a process which is constantly reassumed so as to integrate the new developments of this existence. For this reason, this never ending process of totalization cannot be fully self-conscious or the object of reflective self-knowledge. The synthetic principle that makes this totalization possible is identified by Sartre in terms of fundamental choice: existential psychoanalysis describes human subjects as synthetic totalities in which every attitude, conduct, or behaviour finds its meaning in relation to the unity of a primary choice, which all of the subject’s behaviour expresses in its own way.

All human behaviour can thus be described as a secondary particularisation of a fundamental project which expresses the subject’s free choice, and conditions the intelligibility of their actions. On the basis of his diagnosis of Baudelaire’s existential project, for instance, Sartre goes as far as to claim that he is “prepared to wager that he preferred meats cooked in sauces to grills, preserves to fresh vegetables” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 113]). Sartre legitimates such a daring statement by showing its logical connection to Baudelaire’s irresistible hatred for nature, from which his gastronomic preferences must derive, and which Sartre identifies as the expression of the initial free choice of himself that commands the whole of the French poète maudit ’s existence. In Sartre’s words:

He chose to exist for himself as he was for others. He wanted his freedom to appear to himself like a “nature”; and he wanted this “nature” which others discovered in him to appear to them like the very emanation of his freedom. From that point everything becomes clear. […] We should look in vain for a single circumstance for which he was not fully and consciously responsible. Every event was a reflection of that indecomposable totality which he was from the first to the last day of his life (Sartre 1947a [1967: 191–192]).

Baudelaire’s choice of himself both accounts for the subject’s freedom (insofar as it has been freely accepted as the subject’s own project of existence) and exerts a constraint on particular behaviours and attitudes towards the world, so that he is bound to act and behave in a way that must be compatible with that choice. Although absolutely free, such an initial choice takes the shape and the meaning of an inescapable and relentless destiny —a destiny in which one’s sense of freedom and their inability to act in any other way than they actually did come to merge perfectly: “the free choice which a man makes of himself is completely identified with what is called his destiny” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 192]).

In the years following the publication of Being and Nothingness , Sartre refines this original conception of existential psychoanalysis. He applies it methodically to the biographical analysis of a series of major French writers (Baudelaire first, then Mallarmé, Jean Genêt, Flaubert, and himself in Words ), warning against the dangers of all kinds of determinist interpretations, from the constitution of psychological types to materialist explanations inherited from Marxian historical analyses. Sartre’s analyses become more subtle over time, as he substitutes fine-grained descriptions of the concrete constraints that frame and shape the limits of human lives to the strongly metaphysical theses on freedom that he was first tempted to apply indistinctly to each of these writers. Accordingly, existential psychoanalysis plays a central role in the development of Sartre’s thought from the early 40s up to his last published work on Flaubert. It allows him to unify and articulate two fundamental threads of his philosophical thinking: his ontological analysis of the absolute freedom of the for-itself in Being and Nothingness ; and his later attempt to take into consideration the social, historical and political factors that are inevitably involved in the determination of one’s free choice of their own existence. Already in his War Diaries from 1940, the method of analysis of “human reality” arises from Sartre’s attempt to understand rather than explain (according to Dilthey’s famous distinction) Emperor Wilhelm II’s historical situation and its relation to the aspects of his personal life that express his specific way of being-in-the-world (Sartre 1983b [1984: 308–309]). The application of his method to the specific cases of these French writers allowed him to refine the ahistorical descriptions of his earlier work, by bringing the analysis of the subject’s freedom back to the material/historical conditions (both internal and external) of constitution of their particular modes of existing.

Sartre’s inquiries into existential psychoanalysis also anticipate and intersect with his philosophical investigations on historical anthropology. The progressive-regressive method presented in Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1960a [1976]) was first sketched and experimented through Sartre’s essays in existential psychoanalysis. Sartre’s detailed analyses of Flaubert’s biography in The Family Idiot can be read as synthesising the hermeneutical methodology theorised in Search for A Method and the conception of the freedom involved in one’s initial choice of themselves that arose from Being and Nothingness . Moving discretely away from an all-too metaphysical doctrine of absolute freedom, Sartre goes back to the most concrete details of Flaubert’s material conditions of existence in order to account for the specific way in which Flaubert made himself able, through the writing of his novels, to overcome his painful situation as a “frustrated and jealous younger brother” and “unloved child” thanks to a totalizing project that made him “the author of Madame Bovary ” (Sartre 1971–72 [1987, vol. 2: 7]). If Flaubert’s novel and masterpiece is consequently understood and described as the final objectivation of Gustave’s fundamental project, Sartre is now careful to point out the economic, historic and social conditions within which this project only finds its full intelligibility. Sartre’s psychoanalytic method is then expected to reveal, beyond what society has made of Flaubert, what he himself could make of what society has made of him. In order to fly away from the painful reality of his unbearable familial situation, the young Gustave chooses irreality over reality, and chooses it freely, though achingly. From that moment on, his dedication to literature commits him to a fictional world that he couldn’t but choose to elect as the realm of his genius.

While Search for a Method (1957) had been published earlier, it is not until 1960 that Sartre completed the first volume—“Theory of Practical Ensembles”—of what is his final systematic work of philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason . The second volume, “The Intelligibility of History”, was published posthumously in French in 1985. It would be 1991 before both volumes were to be available in English, which goes some of the way towards explaining their subsequent neglect. It is also a book that rivals Being and Nothingness for difficulty, even if some of its goals and ambitions can be expressed straightforwardly enough. Never a member of the French Communist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cards on the table:

we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 21])

Critique offers a systematic attempt to justify these two perspectives and render them compatible. In broad terms, some of the main steps needed to effect such a synthesis are clear, most notably to deny or limit strong structuralist and determinist versions of Marxism. Borrowing some themes from Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror , Sartre maintained that any genuinely dialectical method refuses to reduce; it refuses scientific and economic determinism that treats humans as things, contrary to reductive versions of Marxism. He pithily puts his objection to such explanations in terms of what we might today call the genetic fallacy. Sartre says,

Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 56])

Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor that determines and orients history and the field of possibilities. There is human choice and commitment in class formation that is equally fundamental. The way in which this plays out in Critique is through an emphasis on praxis rather than consciousness, which we have seen is also characteristic of his existential psychoanalytic work of the prior decade.

Without being able to adequately summarise the vast Critique here (see Flynn 1984), one of the book’s core conceptual innovations is the idea of the practico-inert. Sartre defines this as “the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 556]). The concept is intended to capture the forms of social and historical sedimentation that had only minimally featured in Being and Nothingness . It is the reign of necessity,

the domain … in which inorganic materiality envelops human multiplicity and transforms the producer into its product. (Sartre 1960a [1976: 339])

For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Any reaffirmation of humanity, in which genuine freedom resides, must take the form of the negation of this negation (negation is productive here, as it also was in Being and Nothingness ). For Sartre, then, there are two fundamental kinds of social reality: a positive one in which an active group constitutes the common field; and a negative one in which individuals are effectively separated from each other (even though they appear united) in a practico-inert field. In the practico-inert field, relations are typified by what Sartre calls seriality, like a number, or a worker in a factory who is allocated to a place within a given system that is indifferent to the individual. Sartre’s prime example of this is of waiting for a bus, or street-car, on the way to work. If the people involved do not know each other reasonably well there is likely to be a kind of anonymity to such experiences in which individuals are substitutable for each other in relation to this imminent bus, and their relations are organised around functional need. If the bus is late, or if there are too many people on it, however, those who are waiting go from being indifferent and anonymous (something akin to what Heidegger calls das Man in Being and Time ) to becoming competitors and rivals. In a related spirit Sartre also discusses the serial unity of the TV watching public, of the popular music charts, bourgeois property, and petty racism and stereotyping as well. These collective objects keep serial individuals apart from one another under the pretext of unifying them. Sartre thus appears to accept a version of the Marxian theses concerning commodity fetishism. This competitive or antagonistic dimension of the practico-inert is amplified in situations of material scarcity. This kind of seriality is argued to be the basic type of sociality, thus transforming the focus on dyadic consciousnesses of Being and Nothingness . In the Critique , otherness becomes produced not simply through the look that Sartre had previously described as the original meaning of being-for-others, but through the sedimentation of social processes and through practico-inert mediation. Society produces in us serial behaviour, serial feelings, serial thoughts, and “passive activity” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 266]), where events and history are conceived as external occurrences that befall us, and we feel compelled by the force of circumstance, or “monstrous forces” as Sartre puts it. It is the practico-inert, modified by material and economic scarcity, which turns us into conflictual competitors and alienates us from each other and ourselves. Only an end to both material scarcity and the alienating mediation of the practico-inert will allow for the actualisation of socialism.

While Sartre is pessimistic about the prospects for any sort of permanent revolution of society, he maintains that we get a fleeting glimpse of this unalienated condition in the experience of the “group in fusion”. This occurs when the members of a group relate to each other through praxis and in a particular way. The group in fusion is not a collective à la the practico-inert, but a social whole that spontaneously forms as a plurality of serial individuals respond to some danger, pressing situation, or to the likelihood of a collective reaction to their stance (Flynn 1984: 114). We could consider what happens when an individual acts so as to make manifest this serial otherness, like Rosa Parkes when she refused to give up her seat and thus drew attention to the specific nature of the colonialist seriality at the heart of many states in the USA. This sometimes creates a rupture and others might follow. Sartre’s own prime example is of a crowd of workers who were fleeing during the French Revolution in 1789. At some point the workers stopped fleeing, turned around and reversed direction, suddenly energised alongside each other by their practical awareness that they were doing something together. For this kind of “fusion” to happen it must fulfil the following four key conditions for genuine reciprocity that Flynn summarises as follows:

That the other be a means to the exact degree that I am a means myself, i.e., that he be the means towards a transcendent goal and not my means;
That I recognize the other as praxis at the same time as I integrate him into my totalizing project;
That I recognize his movement towards his own ends in the very movement by which I project myself towards mine;
That I discover myself as an object and instrument of his own ends by the same act that makes him an object and instrument of mine. (Flynn 1984: 115, also see previous version of this entry [Flynn 2004 [2013]] and cf. Sartre 1960a [1976: 112–3]).

Sartre calls the resurrection of this freedom an “apocalypse”, indicating that it is an unforeseen and (potentially) revolutionary event that happens when serial abuse and exploitation can no longer be tolerated. The group in fusion has a maximum of praxis and a minimum of inertia, but serial sociality has the reverse.

Unfortunately, Sartre insists that this group in fusion is destined to meet with what he calls an “ontological check” in the form of the institution, which cannot be escaped as some versions of anarchism and Marxism might hope. The group relapses into seriality when groups are formalised into hierarchical institutional structures. Serial otherness comes to implicate itself in interpersonal relations in at least three ways in the institution: sovereignty; authority; and bureaucracy (see Book 2, Chapter 6, “The Institution”). From the co-sovereignty of the group in fusion, someone inevitably becomes sovereign in any new social order. Similarly, a command-obedience relation comes about in institutions, to greater and lesser extents, and there will be exhortations to company loyalty, to do one’s duty, etc. (Flynn 1984: 120). Bureaucratic rules and regulation also inevitably follow, partly as a reaction to fear of sovereignty, and this installs what Sartre calls vertical otherness—top-down hierarchies, as opposed to the horizontal and immanent organisation of the group in fusion (Sartre 1960a [1976: 655–663]). As such, the revolutionary force of the group in fusion is necessarily subject to mediation by the practico-inert, as well as the problems associated with institutionality just described. Although is it still structured through a series of oppositions, the Critique delivers a sophisticated social ontology that both addresses some weaknesses in Sartre’s earlier work and unifies the social and political reflections of much of his later work.

Although it is not possible to address all of Sartre’s rich and varied contributions to ethics and politics here, we will introduce some of the key ideas about race and anti-colonialism that were important themes in his post Being and Nothingness work and are currently significant issues in our times. Sartre was generally stridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating a multiculturalism avant la lettre , as Michael Walzer has argued in his Preface to Anti-semite and Jew (Walzer 1995: xiv). His books and more journalistic writings typically call out what he saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens.

The issue of race was part of Sartre’s French intellectual scene, and Sartre himself played a major role in facilitating that in the pages of Les Temps Modernes , L’Express , and elsewhere. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race, and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. These concerned not only the French Algerian and African “colonies” but also Vietnam via Tran Duc Thao, who had challenged Sartre’s efforts to bring phenomenological existentialism together with Marxism. Initially at least, Sartre’s arguments here typically drew on and extended some of the categories deployed in Being and Nothingness . There is an obvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues from Sartrean existentialism. Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre, since it typically (perhaps necessarily) involves believing in essences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. His Notebooks suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. In racism, in particular, there is an “infernal circle of irresponsible responsibility, of culpable ignorance and ignorance which is knowledge” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 49]), as well as what Sartre calls passive complicity. Many of us (or Sartre’s own French society) may not obviously be bigots, but we sustain a system that is objectively unjust through our choices and sometimes wilful ignorance. In relation to colonialism, Sartre likewise contends that we have all profited from colonialist exploitation and sustained its systems, even if we are not ourselves a “settler”.

This is also the key argument of Anti-semite and the Jew , composed very quickly in 1944 and without much detailed knowledge of Judaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passive anti-semitism of many French citizens. The text was written following the Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust were widely known. Sartre was aiming to understand (and critique) the situation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of the French Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all. The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit or implicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excluding others, notably the Jew. Now, of course, few of his contemporaries would admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to being racist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks are clear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma of authenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choose between their concrete practical identities (religious and cultural) and more universal ascriptions (liberty, etc.) in a way that cannot be readily navigated within the terms of the debate. Sartre consistently ascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectives are ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him, it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Nazi regime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviously egregious activities were sustained by their society and the individuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of bad faith.

Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface to Black Orpheus (1948), an anthology of negritude poetry. He called for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on the side of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged such interventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category of race itself as an example of bad faith. Here the reception from Frantz Fanon and others was mixed. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon argues this effectively undermined his own lived-experience and its power (see entries on negritude and Fanon ; cf. also Gordon 1995). Sartre continued to address colonialism and racism in subsequent work, effecting a rapprochement of sorts with Fanon that culminated in his “Introduction” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where also Sartre appears to endorse a counter-violence.

Although we have not given much attention to Sartre’s literary and artistic productions since section 3 above, he continued to produce artistic work of political significance throughout his career. Continuous with insights from his What is Literature? , Sartre argues that in a society that remains unjust and dominated by oppression, the prose-writer (if not the poet) must combat this violence by jolting the reader and audience from their complacency, rather than simply be concerned with art for its own sake. His literary works hence are typically both philosophical and political. Although the number of these works diminished over time, there is still a powerful literary exploration of the philosophical and political themes of the Critique in the play, The Condemned of Altona (1960).

We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like Sartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, with the benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre’s interventions are prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century ( à la Foucault). They certainly presage issues that are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. That doesn’t mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whatever that might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-political life. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the major socio-political issues of one’s time, as Sartre did, it is inevitable that history will not look kindly on them all. Sartre’s life and writings hence present a complex and difficult interpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thought and action today.

This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre and secondary literature that are relevant for this article. For a complete annotated bibliography of Sartre’s works see

Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1974, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre , two volumes, Richard C. McCleary (trans.), (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
1975, Magazine littéraire , 103–4: 9–49,

and by Michel Sicard in

1979, special issue on Sartre, Obliques , 18–19(May): 331–347.

Michel Rybalka and Michel Contat have complied an additional bibliography of primary and secondary sources published since Sartre’s death in

Rybalka, Michel and Michel Contat, 1993, Sartre: Bibliographie 1980–1992 , (CNRS Philosophie), Paris: CNRS and Bowling Green, OH:: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University.

A.1 Works by Sartre

A.1.1 individual works published by sartre.

1957, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness , Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.), New York: Noonday Press.
2004, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description , Andrew Brown (trans.), London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203694367
1936b [2012], L’imagination , Paris: F. Alcan. Translated as The Imagination , Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (trans.), London: Routledge, 2012. doi:10.4324/9780203723692
1938 [1965], La Nausée: Roman , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Nausea , Robert Baldick (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
1939a [1970], “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalit”, La Nouvelle Revue française , 304: 129–132. Reprinted in Situations 1. Translated as “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, Joseph P. Fell (trans.), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 1(2): 4–5, 1970. doi:10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118
1939b [1948], Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions , Paris: Hermann. Translated as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
1940 [2004], L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de l’imagination , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination , Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (ed.), Jonathan Webber (trans.), London: Routledge, 2004.
1956, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library.
2018, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology , Sarah Richmond (trans.), London: Routledge.
1945–49, Les Chemins de la liberté (The roads to freedom), Paris: Gallimard. Series of novels L’âge de raison (The age of reason, 1945), Le sursis (The reprieve, 1945), and La mort dans l’âme (Troubled sleep, 1949).
1946a [2007], L’existentialisme est un humanisme , (Collection Pensées), Paris: Nagel. Translated as Existentialism is a Humanism , John Kulka (ed.), Carol Macomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
1946b [1948/1995], Réflexions sur la question juive , Paris: P. Morihien. Translated as Anti-semite and Jew , George J. Becker (trans.), New York: Schocken Books, 1948 (reprinted with preface by Michael Walzer, 1995).
1946c [1955], “Matérialisme et Révolution I”, Les Temps Modernes , 9: 37–63 and 10: 1–32. Reprinted in Situations III , Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Translated as , “Materialism and Revolution”, in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), New York: Criterion Books, 1955.
1947a [1967], Baudelaire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Baudelaire , Martin Turnell (trans.), London: H. Hamilton, 1949. Reprinted, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1967
1947b [1949], Huis-Clos , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1944. Translated as No Exit , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
1947c [1949], Les Mouches , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1943. Translated as The Flies , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
1948a [1988], “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”, Les Temps modernes . Collected in Situations II . Translated in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
1948b [1967], “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie , n° 3, avril-juin 1948. Translated as “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self”, in Readings in Existential Phenomenology , Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (eds), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967.
1948c [1949], Les mains sales: pièce en sept tableaux , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1948. Translated as Dirty Hands , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
1952a [1963], Saint-Genêt, Comédien et martyr , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1963.
1952b [1968]. “Les communistes et la paix”, published in Situations VI . Translated as “The Communists and Peace”, in The Communists and Peace, with A Reply to Claude Lefort , Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1968.
1957 [1963/1968], Questions de méthode , Paris: Gallimard. Later to be a foreword for Sartre 1960. Translated as Search for a Method , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Knopf, 1963. Reprinted New York: Random House, 1968.
1960a [1976], Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome 1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques , Paris, Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles , Alan Sheridan-Smith (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1976. Reprinted in 2004 with a forward by Fredric Jameson, London: Verso. The second unfinished volume was published posthumously in 1985.
1960b, Les Séquestrés d’Altona (The condemned of Altona), Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1959.
1964a [1964], Les mots , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Words , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Braziller, 1964.
1969, “Itinerary of a Thought”, interview with Perry Anderson, Ronald Fraser and Quintin Hoare, New Left Review , I/58: 43–66. Partially published in Situations IX .
1971–72 [1981–93], L’Idiot de la famille. Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857 , 3 volumes, Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857 , 5 volumes, Carol Cosman (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981/1987/1989/1991/1993.
1980 [1996], “L’espoir, maintenant”, interview with Benny Lévy, Le Nouvel observateur , n° 800, 801, 802. Reprinted as L’espoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980 , Lagrasse: Verdier, 1991. Translated as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

A.1.2 Collections of works by Sartre

References to Situations will be abbreviated as Sit. followed by the volume, e.g., Sit. V .

1947, Situations I: Critiques littéraires , Paris: Gallimard. Partially translated in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), London: Rider, 1955. Reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1962.
1948, Situations II , Paris: Gallimard.
1949, Situations III: Lendemains de guerre , Paris: Gallimard.
1964b, Situations IV: Portraits , Paris: Gallimard.
1964c, Situations V: Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Colonialism and Neocolonialism , Azzdedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (trans), London: Routledge, 2001. doi:10.4324/9780203991848
1964d, Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1 , Paris: Gallimard.
1965, Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme 2 , Paris:, Gallimard.
1971, Situations VIII: Autour de 68 , Paris: Gallimard.
1972, Situations IX: Mélanges , Paris: Gallimard. Material from Situations VIII et IX translated as Between Existentialism and Marxism , John Mathews (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1974.
1976, Situations X: Politique et autobiographie , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken , Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (trans), New York: Pantheon, 1977.
1981, Œuvres romanesques , Michel Contat, Michel Rybalka, G. Idt and G. H. Bauer (eds), Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
1988, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays , [including Black Orpheus ] tr. Bernard Frechtman et al., intro. Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
2005, Théâtre complet , Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

A.1.3 Posthumous works by Sartre

1983a, Cahiers pour une morale , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Notebook for an Ethics , David Pellauer (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
1983b [1984], Carnets de la drôle de guerre, septembre 1939 - mars 1940 , Paris: Gallimard. Reprinted in 1995 with an addendum. Translated as The War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War , Quinton Hoare (trans.), New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Tome 1: 1926–1939
Tome 2: 1940–1963
1984, Le Scenario Freud , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Freud Scenario , Quinton Hoare (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
1985, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome 2, L’intelligibilité de l’histoire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2: The Intelligibility of History , Quintin Hoare (trans.), London: Verso, 1991. Reprinted 2006, foreword by Frederic Jameson, London: Verso. [unfinished].
1989, Vérité et existence , Paris: Gallimard [written in 1948]. Translated as Truth and Existence , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Ronald Aronson (intro.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
1990, Écrits de jeunesse , Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds), Paris: Gallimard.

A.2 Works by others

Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat (directors), 1978, Sartre by Himself: A Film Directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat with the Participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, Andre Gorz, Jean Pouillon , transcription of film, Richard Seaver (trans.), New York: Urizen Books.
Beauvoir, Simone de, 1947 [1976], Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Translation reprinted New York: Citadel Press, 1976.
–––, 1960 [1962], La force de l’âge , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Prime of Life , Peter Green (trans.), Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1962.
–––, 1963 [1965], La force des choses , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Force of Circumstance , Richard Howard (trans.), New York: Putnam, 1965.
–––, 1981 [1986], La cérémonie des adieux: suivi de, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, août-septembre 1974 , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre , Patrick O’Brian (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Translation reprinted London and New York: Penguin, 1988.
Carnap, Rudolf, 1931, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”, Erkenntnis , 2(1): 219–241. Translated as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, Arthur Pap (trans.), in Logical Positivism , A. J. Ayer (ed.), New York: The Free Press, 1959, 60–81. doi:10.1007/BF02028153 (de)
Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1970, Les écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, bibliographie commentée , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 1: A Bibliographical Life , Richard C. McCleary (trans.), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
Deleuze, Gilles, 2004, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 , David Lapoujade (trans.), Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Derrida, Jacques, 1992 [1995], Points de Suspension: Entretiens , Elisabeth Weber (ed.), (Collection la philosophie en effet), Paris: Editions Galilée. Translated as Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 , Peggy Kamuf (trans.), (Meridian), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Fanon, Francis, 1952, Peau noire, masques blancs , Paris, Seuil. Translated as Black Skin, White Masks , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2008.
–––, 1961, Les damnés de la terre , Paris: Maspero. Translated as The Wretched of the Earth , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2005.
Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1994], “L’homme est-il mort?” (interview with C. Bonnefoy), Arts et Loisirs , no. 38 (15–21 juin): 8–9. Reprinted in Dits et Écrits , Daniel Defert, François Ewald, & Jacques Lagrange (eds.), 540–544, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 2001, Dits et Écrits , volume 1, Paris: Gallimard.
Heidegger, Martin, 1957 [1962], Sein und Zeit , Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Translated as Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans), London: SCM Press.
Husserl, Edmund, 1913 [1983], Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie , Halle: Niemeyer. Translated as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , volume 1, F. Kersten (tr.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
–––, 1950 [1960], Cartesianische Meditationen eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie , The Hague: Nijhoff. Translated as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , Dorion Cairns (trans.), The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960.
–––, 1900/1901, 1913/1921 [1970, 2001], Logische Untersuchungen , two volumes, Halle: M. Niemeyer. Second edition 1913/1921. Translated as Logical Investigations , 2 volumes, J. N. Findlay (trans.), London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1970. Revised English edition, 2 volumes, London: Routledge, 2001.
Levinas, Emmanuel, 1930 [1963], La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl , Doctoral dissertation, Université de Strasbourg. Published Paris: Vrin, 1963.
Marcuse, Herbert, 1948, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et Le Neant”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 8(3): 309–336. doi:10.2307/2103207
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1947 [1969], Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste , (Les Essais [2 sér.] 27), Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem , John O’Neill (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press.
Moran, Richard, 2001, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Anderson, Thomas C., 1993, Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Aronson, Ronald, 1987, Sartre’s Second Critique , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baring, Edward, 2011, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511842085
Barnes, Hazel Estella, 1981, Sartre & Flaubert , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bell, Linda A., 1989, Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity , Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Busch, Thomas W., 1990, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Cabestan, Philippe, 2004, L’être et la conscience: recherches sur la psychologie et l’ontophénoménologie sartriennes (Ousia 51), Bruxelles: Editions Ousia.
Catalano, Joseph S., 1974, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (Harper Torchbooks 1807), New York: Harper & Row. New edition Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
–––, 1986, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Churchill, Steven and Jack Reynolds (eds.), 2014, Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315729695
Cohen-Solal, Annie, 1985 [1987], Sartre , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Sartre: A Life , Norman MacAfee (ed.). Anna Cancogni (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
Coorebyter, Vincent de, 2000, Sartre face à la phénoménologie: Autour de “L’Intentionnalité” et de “La Transcendance de l’Ego” (Ousia 40), Bruxelles: Ousia.
–––, 2005, Sartre, avant la phénoménologie: autour de “La nausée” et de la “Légende de la vérité” (Ousia 53), Bruxelles: Ousia.
Cox, Gary, 2019, Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre , London: Bloomsbury.
Detmer, David, 1988, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Dobson, Andrew, 1993, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History. , New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fell, Joseph P., 1979, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place , New York: Columbia University Press.
Flynn, Thomas R., 1984, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
–––, 1997, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: volume 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
–––, 2004 [2013], “Jean-Paul Sartre”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/ >
–––, 2014, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, Sebastian, 2009, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum Reader’s Guides), London: Continuum.
Gordon, Lewis R., 1995, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Henri-Levy, Bernard, 2003, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century , Cambridge: Polity Press.
Howells, Christina (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Sartre , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521381142
Jeanson, Francis, 1947 [1980], Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Collection “Pensée et civilisation”), Paris: Éditions du myrte. Translated as Sartre and the Problem of Morality , Robert V. Stone (trans.), (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Judaken, Jonathan (ed.), 2008, Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Philosophy and Race), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
McBride, William Leon, 1991, Sartre’s Political Theory , (Studies in Continental Thought), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness
Sartre’s French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Debeauvoir & Enduring Influences
Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde
Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics
Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger
Existentialist Ethics: Issues in Existentialist Ethics
Existentialist Politics and Political Theory
The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-Century Existentialism
Moati, Raoul, 2019, Sartre et le mystère en pleine lumière (Passages), Paris: Les éditions du Cerf.
Morris, Katherine J., 2008, Sartre , (Blackwell Great Minds 5), Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Mouillie, Jean-Marc and Jean-Philippe Narboux (eds.), 2015, Sartre: L’être et le néant: nouvelles lectures , Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Murphy, Julien S. (ed.), 1999, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Renaudie, Pierre-Jean, 2017, “L’ambiguïté de la troisième personne”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain , 115(2): 269–287. doi:10.2143/RPL.115.2.3245502
Reynolds, J. and P. Stokes, 2017, “Existentialist Methodology and Perspective: Writing the First Person”, in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology , Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 317–336. doi:10.1017/9781316344118.017
Santoni, Ronald E., 1995, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
–––, 2003, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), 1981, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre , (Library of Living Philosophers 16), La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Schroeder, William Ralph, 1984, Sartre and His Predecessors: The Self and the Other , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. doi:10.4324/9780429024511
Stone, Robert V. and Elizabeth A. Bowman, 1986, “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes”, Social Text , 13/14: 195–215.
–––, 1991, “Sartre’s ‘Morality and History’: A First Look at the Notes for the unpublished 1965 Cornell Lectures”, in Sartre Alive , Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (eds), Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 53–82.
Taylor, Charles, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Van den Hoven, Adrian and Andrew N. Leak (eds.), 2005, Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration , New York: Berghahn Books.
Webber, Jonathan (ed.), 2011, Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism , London ; New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203844144
Walzer, Michael, 1995, “Preface” to the 1995 English translation reprint of Sartre’s Anti-semite and Jew , New York: Schocken Books.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism , by Christian J. Onof at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
U.K. Sartre Society
North American Sartre Society
Groupe d'Études Sartriennes
Flynn, Thomas, “Jean-Paul Sartre”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/sartre/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

Acknowledgments

Jack would like to acknowledge Marion Tapper, who taught him Sartre as an undergraduate student. In addition, he would like to thank Steven Churchill, with whom he has worked on Sartre elsewhere and the work here remains indebted to those conversations and collaborations. Thanks also to Erol Copelj for feedback on this essay.

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Essays In Existentialism Paperback – June 1, 2000

Print length 448 pages
Language English
Publisher Citadel
Publication date June 1, 2000
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Citadel; Reissue edition (June 1, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0806501626
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0806501628
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.08 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.37 x 1.16 x 8.25 inches
#10 in French Literary Criticism (Books)
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Jean-paul sartre.

Novelist, playwright, and biographer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. His major works include "No Exit," "Nausea," "The Wall," "The Age of Reason," "Critique of Dialectical Reason," "Being and Nothingness," and "Roads to Freedom," an allegory of man's search for commitment, and not, as the man at the off-licence says, an everyday story of French country folk.

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A student’s guide to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism

Nigel warburton gives a brief introduction to this classic text..

Existentialism and Humanism is probably the most widely read of all Sartre’s philosophical writings, and it is certainly one of his more accessible pieces; yet surprisingly little has been written about it. One explanation for this may be that Sartre himself came to regret the publication of the book and later repudiated parts of it. Nevertheless Existentialism and Humanism provides a good introduction to a number of key themes in his major work of the same period, Being and Nothingness , and to some of the fundamental questions about human existence which are the starting point for most people’s interest in philosophy at all.

It is common practice for teachers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition to be scathing about Sartre’s philosophy, dismissing it as woolly, jargon-laden, derivative, wrong-headed and so on – in Bryan Magee’s recent TV series ‘The Great Philosophers’, for instance, Sartre’s philosophy was declared to be only of passing interest. But even where Sartre’s philosophy is obviously flawed, as it certainly is in Existentialism and Humanism , it can fire the imagination and offer genuine insight into the human condition.

My aim in this article is to give a straightforward introduction to the main themes of Existentialism and Humanism , pointing to its most obvious strengths and shortcomings.

Paris, 1945

Existentialism and Humanism was first presented as a public lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris in October 1945. This was a time of great intellectual ferment and guarded optimism: Paris had been liberated from the Nazi Occupation and reprisals against collaborators were being meted out. There was a sense of the need for a reexamination of the previously unquestioned foundations of society and morality. People who would otherwise have led relatively uneventful lives had been forced to think about issues of integrity and betrayal in relation to the Occupation, the Resistance and the Vichy Government. The truth about the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau was emerging; the atom bomb had been dropped for the first time – evidence of the human capacity for evil and destruction was everywhere. Philosophical, and in particular moral, questions were no longer of merely academic interest.

Inexplicably, the declarative original French title of Sartre’s published lecture, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), was changed in translation to the milder conjunction Existentialism and Humanism , a title which hides the polemic nature of the lecture and obliterates the deliberate suggestion of incongruity in the French title: reviewers had attacked Sartre’s bleak novel Nausea for its allegedly anti-humanistic qualities, so to declare existentialism to be a humanism would have been thought deliberately provocative. In fact, to complicate matters further, Simone de Beauvoir refers to Sartre’s lecture as originally being entitled Is Existentialism a Humanism ? – but any apparent uncertainty in this title was dropped when the lecture was published as L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme .

Existentialism

This lecture firmly linked Sartre’s name with the philosophical movement known as existentialism. Only months before he had refused to accept the label: “My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even known what Existentialism is”, he protested. As Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong companion records in her diary, Force of Circumstance , neither she nor Sartre relished the term (which was probably first coined by Gabriel Marcel in 1943 when he used it speaking of Sartre), but decided to go along with it: “In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes”. But what precisely is existentialism?

Sartre explicitly addressed this question in his lecture, describing existentialism as “the least scandalous and the most austere” (p.26) of teachings, and one only really intended for technicians and philosophers. He stated that the common denominator of the so called existentialists was their belief that for human beings “existence comes before essence” (p.26). What he meant by this was that, in contrast to a designed object such as a penknife – the blueprint and purpose of which pre-exist the actual physical thing – human beings have no pre-established purpose or nature, nor anything that we have to or ought to be. Sartre was an ardent atheist and so believed that there could be no Divine Artisan in whose mind our essential properties had been conceived. Nor did he believe there to be any other external source of values: unlike for example, Aristotle, Sartre did not believe in a common human nature which could be the source of morality. The basic given of the human predicament is that we are forced to choose what we will become, to define ourselves by our choice of action: all that is given is that we are, not what we are. Whilst a penknife’s essence is pre-defined (it isn’t really a penknife if it hasn’t got a blade and won’t cut); human beings have no essence to begin with:

… man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself (p.28).

So for the penknife essence comes before existence; whereas for human beings the reverse is true – Sartre has nothing to say about the status of non-human animals in this scheme of things.

This emphasis on our freedom to choose what we are is characteristic of all existentialist thinkers. Although Sartre was himself an atheist, some existentialists, including Gabriel Marcel, have been Christians: following on from the work of the nineteenth century Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, they emphasise the need for doctrine to be derived from human experience and reject any appeal to eternal essence; they, like the atheist existentialists, believe that human beings are forced to create themselves.

It is important to get clear what Sartre meant by humanism. Humanism is a very general term usually used to refer to any theory which puts human beings at the centre of things: so for instance, the humanism of the Renaissance was characterised by a movement away from metaphysical speculation about the nature of God to a concern with the works of humanity, especially in art and literature. Humanism has the positive connotation of being humane and is generally associated with an optimistic outlook. One version of humanism that Sartre rejects as absurd is the self-congratulatory revelling in the achievements of the human race (pp.54-5). The humanism that he endorses emphasises the dignity of human beings; it also stresses the centrality of human choice to the creation of all values. Sartre’s existentialism also captures the optimism usually associated with humanism: despite the absence of preestablished objective values we are entirely responsible for what we become, and this puts the future of humanity in our own hands: Sartre quotes Francis Ponge approvingly “Man is the future of man” (p.34).

Answering His Critics

Sartre’s expressed aim was to defend existentialism against a number of charges which had been made against it. Its critics saw existentialism as a philosophy which could only lead to a ‘quietism of despair’, in other words they thought it to be a philosophy of inaction, merely contemplative, one which would discourage people from committing themselves to any course of action. Others chided the existentialists for being overly pessimistic and for concentrating on all that is ignominious in the human condition – Sartre quotes a Catholic critic, Mlle Mercier, who accused him of forgetting how an infant smiles (p.23). This criticism gains some substance from the fact that in Being and Nothingness Sartre had declared that man was a useless passion and that all forms of sexual love were doomed to be either forms of masochism or sadism.

From another quarter came the criticism that because existentialism concentrates so much on the choices of the individual it ignores the solidarity of humankind, a criticism made by Marxists and Christians alike. Yet another line of criticism came from those who saw existentialism as licensing the most heinous crimes in the name of free existential choice. Since existentialists rejected the notion of God-given moral laws, it seemed to follow that “Everyone can do what he likes, and will be incapable, from such a point of view, of condemning either the point of view or the action of anyone else” (p.24).

Sartre’s response to these criticisms centres on his analysis of the concepts of abandonment, anguish and despair. These words have specific meanings for him – he uses them as technical terms and their connotations are significantly different from those they have in ordinary usage. All three terms in everyday usage typically connote helplessness and suffering of various kinds; for Sartre, although they preserve some of these negative associations, they also have a positive and optimistic aspect, one which a superficial reading of the text might not reveal.

Abandonment

For Sartre ‘abandonment’ means specifically abandonment by God. This doesn’t imply that God as a metaphysical entity actually existed at some point, and went away: Sartre is echoing Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement: ‘God is dead’. Nietzsche did not mean that God had once been alive, but rather that the belief in God was no longer a tenable position in the late nineteenth century. By using the word ‘abandonment’ in a metaphorical way Sartre emphasises the sense of loss caused by the realisation that there is no God to warrant our moral choices, no divinity to give us guidelines as to how to achieve salvation. The choice of word stresses the solitary position of human beings alone in the universe with no external source of objective value.

The main consequence of abandonment is, as we have seen, the absence of any objective source of moral law: Sartre objected to the approach of some atheistic moralists who, recognising that God didn’t exist, simply clung to a secular version of Christian morality without its Guarantor. In order to meet the criticism that without God there can be no morality, Sartre develops his theory about the implications of freedom and the associated state of anguish.

Sartre believes wholeheartedly in the freedom of the will: he is strongly anti-deterministic about human choice, seeing the claim that one is determined in one’s choices as a form of self-deception to which he gives the label ‘bad faith’, a notion that plays an important role in Being and Nothingness . Although he rejects the idea that human beings have any essence, he takes the essence of human beings to be that they are free when he declares: “man is free, man is freedom” (p. 34). The word ‘freedom’ would have had a particularly powerful appeal for people recently freed from the Nazi Occupation. ‘Freedom’ is a word with extremely positive associations – hence its frequent appropriation by politicians who redefine it to suit their own purposes. Yet Sartre states that we are “condemned to be free” (p. 34), a deliberate oxymoron bringing out what he believes to be the great weight of responsibility accompanying human freedom.

Recognition of the choices available to each of us entails recognition of our responsibility for what we do and are: “We are left alone without excuse” (p. 34). Sartre believes that we are responsible for everything that we really are. Obviously we cannot choose who our parents were, where we were born, whether we will die, and so on; but Sartre does go so far as to say that we are responsible for how we feel, that we choose our emotions, and that to deny this is bad faith.

In fact Sartre goes beyond even this. Not only am I responsible for everything that I am, but also when choosing any particular action I not only commit myself to it but am choosing as “a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind” (p. 30). So, to take an example Sartre uses, if I choose to marry and to have children I thereby commit not only myself but the whole of humankind to the practice of this form of monogamy. This is in many ways reminiscent of Immanuel Kant's concept of universalisability: the view that if something is morally right for one person to do, it must also be morally right for anyone in relevantly similar circumstances . Sartre labels the experience of this extended responsibility (which he takes to be an unavoidable aspect of the human condition) ‘anguish’, likening it to the feeling of responsibility experienced by a military leader whose decisions have possibly grave consequences for the soldiers under his command. Like Abraham whom God instructed to sacrifice his son, we are in a state of anguish performing actions, the outcome of which we cannot ascertain, with a great weight of responsibility: “Everything happens to every man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct accordingly” (p. 32).

Despair, like abandonment and anguish, is an emotive term. Sartre means by it simply the existentialist’s attitude to the recalcitrance or obstinacy of the aspects of the world that are beyond our control (and in particular other people: in his play No Exit one of the characters declares “Hell is other people”). Whatever I desire to do, other people or external events may thwart. The attitude of despair is one of stoic indifference to the way things turn out: “When Descartes said ‘Conquer yourself rather than the world’, what he meant was, at bottom, the same – that we should act without hope” (p.39). We cannot rely on anything which is outside our control, but this does not mean we should abandon ourselves to inaction: on the contrary, Sartre argues that it should lead us to commit ourselves to a course of action since there is no reality except in action. As Sartre puts it: “The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust” (pp.41-2) – everyone is wholly defined by what they actually do rather than by what they might have done had circumstances been different. For Sartre there are no ‘mute inglorious Miltons’.

Sartre’s Pupil

Sartre gives a specific example to help explain the practical consequences of such theoretical concepts as abandonment. He tells the story of a pupil of his who was faced with a genuine moral dilemma: whether to stay in France to look after his mother who doted on him; or to set off to join the Free French in England to fight for the liberation of his country. He knew that his mother lived only for him and that every action he performed on her behalf would be sure of helping her to live; in contrast, his attempt to join the Free French would not necessarily be successful and his action might “vanish like water into sand” (p.35). He was forced to choose between filial loyalty and the preservation of his country.

Sartre first of all shows the poverty of traditional Christian and Kantian moral doctrines in dealing with such a dilemma. Christian doctrine would tell the youth to act with charity, love his neighbour and be prepared to sacrifice himself for the sake of others. However this gives little help since he still would have to decide whether he owed more love to his mother or to his country. The Kantian ethic advises never to treat others as means to an end. But this gives no satisfactory solution:

“… if I remain with my mother, I shall be regarding her as the end and not as a means: but by the same token I am in danger of treating as means those who are fighting on my behalf; and the converse is also true, that if I go to the aid of the combatants I shall be treating them as the end at the risk of treating my mother as a means.” (p.36)

To recognise the lack of outside help is to appreciate the meaning of ‘abandonment’: like all of us, Sartre’s pupil is alone, forced to decide for himself. Sartre maintains that even if he were to ask for advice, the choice of advisor would itself be highly significant since he would know in advance the sort of advice different people would be likely to give. The pupil’s experience of responsibility for his own choice (and thus for his choice of an image of humankind) is existential ‘anguish’. To act without hope, relying only on what he had control over and accepting that his plans might not come to fruition, is to be in a state of existential ‘despair’.

Sartre’s advice to his pupil was in a way no more useful than the traditional moral doctrines:

“You are free, therefore choose - that is to say invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world.” (p.38)

Yet, assuming the pupil accepted the advice, it would have made him realise that he was fully responsible for what he made of his life with no hard and fast guidelines to tell him what the right thing to do might be; abstract ethical theories are ultimately of little use when it comes to solving actual moral problems in one’s life.

Existentialism Is a Humanism

My purpose here is to offer a defence of existentialism against several reproaches that have been laid against it.

First, it has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as entirely ineffective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists.

From another quarter we are reproached for having underlined all that is ignominious in the human situation, for depicting what is mean, sordid or base to the neglect of certain things that possess charm and beauty and belong to the brighter side of human nature: for example, according to the Catholic critic, Mlle. Mercier, we forget how an infant smiles. Both from this side and from the other we are also reproached for leaving out of account the solidarity of mankind and considering man in isolation. And this, say the Communists, is because we base our doctrine upon pure subjectivity – upon the Cartesian “I think”: which is the moment in which solitary man attains to himself; a position from which it is impossible to regain solidarity with other men who exist outside of the self. The ego cannot reach them through the cogito .

From the Christian side, we are reproached as people who deny the reality and seriousness of human affairs. For since we ignore the commandments of God and all values prescribed as eternal, nothing remains but what is strictly voluntary. Everyone can do what he likes, and will be incapable, from such a point of view, of condemning either the point of view or the action of anyone else.

It is to these various reproaches that I shall endeavour to reply today; that is why I have entitled this brief exposition “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Many may be surprised at the mention of humanism in this connection, but we shall try to see in what sense we understand it. In any case, we can begin by saying that existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity. The essential charge laid against us is, of course, that of over-emphasis upon the evil side of human life. I have lately been told of a lady who, whenever she lets slip a vulgar expression in a moment of nervousness, excuses herself by exclaiming, “I believe I am becoming an existentialist.” So it appears that ugliness is being identified with existentialism. That is why some people say we are “naturalistic,” and if we are, it is strange to see how much we scandalise and horrify them, for no one seems to be much frightened or humiliated nowadays by what is properly called naturalism. Those who can quite well keep down a novel by Zola such as La Terre are sickened as soon as they read an existentialist novel. Those who appeal to the wisdom of the people – which is a sad wisdom – find ours sadder still. And yet, what could be more disillusioned than such sayings as “Charity begins at home” or “Promote a rogue and he’ll sue you for damage, knock him down and he’ll do you homage”? We all know how many common sayings can be quoted to this effect, and they all mean much the same – that you must not oppose the powers that be; that you must not fight against superior force; must not meddle in matters that are above your station. Or that any action not in accordance with some tradition is mere romanticism; or that any undertaking which has not the support of proven experience is foredoomed to frustration; and that since experience has shown men to be invariably inclined to evil, there must be firm rules to restrain them, otherwise we shall have anarchy. It is, however, the people who are forever mouthing these dismal proverbs and, whenever they are told of some more or less repulsive action, say “How like human nature!” – it is these very people, always harping upon realism, who complain that existentialism is too gloomy a view of things. Indeed their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but, much more likely, our optimism. For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is – is it not? – that it confronts man with a possibility of choice. To verify this, let us review the whole question upon the strictly philosophic level. What, then, is this that we call existentialism?

Most of those who are making use of this word would be highly confused if required to explain its meaning. For since it has become fashionable, people cheerfully declare that this musician or that painter is “existentialist.” A columnist in Clartes signs himself “The Existentialist,” and, indeed, the word is now so loosely applied to so many things that it no longer means anything at all. It would appear that, for the lack of any novel doctrine such as that of surrealism, all those who are eager to join in the latest scandal or movement now seize upon this philosophy in which, however, they can find nothing to their purpose. For in truth this is of all teachings the least scandalous and the most austere: it is intended strictly for technicians and philosophers. All the same, it can easily be defined.

The question is only complicated because there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?

If one considers an article of manufacture as, for example, a book or a paper-knife – one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a paper-knife and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paperknife that its essence – that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible – precedes its existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.

When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibnitz himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. Thus each individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding. In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is prior to existence; something of that idea we still find everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possesses a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken – much more often than not – after we have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry – but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

This may enable us to understand what is meant by such terms – perhaps a little grandiloquent – as anguish, abandonment and despair. As you will soon see, it is very simple. First, what do we mean by anguish? – The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows: When a man commits himself to anything, fully realising that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind – in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility. There are many, indeed, who show no such anxiety. But we affirm that they are merely disguising their anguish or are in flight from it. Certainly, many people think that in what they are doing they commit no one but themselves to anything: and if you ask them, “What would happen if everyone did so?” they shrug their shoulders and reply, “Everyone does not do so.” But in truth, one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception. The man who lies in self-excuse, by saying “Everyone will not do it” must be ill at ease in his conscience, for the act of lying implies the universal value which it denies. By its very disguise his anguish reveals itself. This is the anguish that Kierkegaard called “the anguish of Abraham.” You know the story: An angel commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son; and obedience was obligatory, if it really was an angel who had appeared and said, “Thou, Abraham, shalt sacrifice thy son.” But anyone in such a case would wonder, first, whether it was indeed an angel and secondly, whether I am really Abraham. Where are the proofs? A certain mad woman who suffered from hallucinations said that people were telephoning to her, and giving her orders. The doctor asked, “But who is it that speaks to you?” She replied: “He says it is God.” And what, indeed, could prove to her that it was God? If an angel appears to me, what is the proof that it is an angel; or, if I hear voices, who can prove that they proceed from heaven and not from hell, or from my own subconsciousness or some pathological condition? Who can prove that they are really addressed to me?

Who, then, can prove that I am the proper person to impose, by my own choice, my conception of man upon mankind? I shall never find any proof whatever; there will be no sign to convince me of it. If a voice speaks to me, it is still I myself who must decide whether the voice is or is not that of an angel. If I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who choose to say that it is good and not bad. There is nothing to show that I am Abraham: nevertheless I also am obliged at every instant to perform actions which are examples. Everything happens to every man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct accordingly. So every man ought to say, “Am I really a man who has the right to act in such a manner that humanity regulates itself by what I do.” If a man does not say that, he is dissembling his anguish. Clearly, the anguish with which we are concerned here is not one that could lead to quietism or inaction. It is anguish pure and simple, of the kind well known to all those who have borne responsibilities. When, for instance, a military leader takes upon himself the responsibility for an attack and sends a number of men to their death, he chooses to do it and at bottom he alone chooses. No doubt under a higher command, but its orders, which are more general, require interpretation by him and upon that interpretation depends the life of ten, fourteen or twenty men. In making the decision, he cannot but feel a certain anguish. All leaders know that anguish. It does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the very condition of their action, for the action presupposes that there is a plurality of possibilities, and in choosing one of these, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen. Now it is anguish of that kind which existentialism describes, and moreover, as we shall see, makes explicit through direct responsibility towards other men who are concerned. Far from being a screen which could separate us from action, it is a condition of action itself.

And when we speak of “abandonment” – a favorite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense. Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself. The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori , since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which, therefore, is an excuse for them. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion. Neither will an existentialist think that a man can find help through some sign being vouchsafed upon earth for his orientation: for he thinks that the man himself interprets the sign as he chooses. He thinks that every man, without any support or help whatever, is condemned at every instant to invent man. As Ponge has written in a very fine article, “Man is the future of man.” That is exactly true. Only, if one took this to mean that the future is laid up in Heaven, that God knows what it is, it would be false, for then it would no longer even be a future. If, however, it means that, whatever man may now appear to be, there is a future to be fashioned, a virgin future that awaits him – then it is a true saying. But in the present one is forsaken.

As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He fully realised that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his death – would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. For instance, to set out for England he would have to wait indefinitely in a Spanish camp on the way through Spain; or, on arriving in England or in Algiers he might be put into an office to fill up forms. Consequently, he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous – and it might be frustrated on the way. At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debatable validity. He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour, deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular person to live? Who can give an answer to that a priori ? No one. Nor is it given in any ethical scripture. The Kantian ethic says, Never regard another as a means, but always as an end. Very well; if I remain with my mother, I shall be regarding her as the end and not as a means: but by the same token I am in danger of treating as means those who are fighting on my behalf; and the converse is also true, that if I go to the aid of the combatants I shall be treating them as the end at the risk of treating my mother as a means. If values are uncertain, if they are still too abstract to determine the particular, concrete case under consideration, nothing remains but to trust in our instincts. That is what this young man tried to do; and when I saw him he said, “In the end, it is feeling that counts; the direction in which it is really pushing me is the one I ought to choose. If I feel that I love my mother enough to sacrifice everything else for her – my will to be avenged, all my longings for action and adventure then I stay with her. If, on the contrary, I feel that my love for her is not enough, I go.” But how does one estimate the strength of a feeling? The value of his feeling for his mother was determined precisely by the fact that he was standing by her. I may say that I love a certain friend enough to sacrifice such or such a sum of money for him, but I cannot prove that unless I have done it. I may say, “I love my mother enough to remain with her,” if actually I have remained with her. I can only estimate the strength of this affection if I have performed an action by which it is defined and ratified. But if I then appeal to this affection to justify my action, I find myself drawn into a vicious circle.

Moreover, as Gide has very well said, a sentiment which is play-acting and one which is vital are two things that are hardly distinguishable one from another. To decide that I love my mother by staying beside her, and to play a comedy the upshot of which is that I do so – these are nearly the same thing. In other words, feeling is formed by the deeds that one does; therefore I cannot consult it as a guide to action. And that is to say that I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act. You may say that the youth did, at least, go to a professor to ask for advice. But if you seek counsel – from a priest, for example you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise. In other words, to choose an adviser is nevertheless to commit oneself by that choice. If you are a Christian, you will say, consult a priest; but there are collaborationists, priests who are resisters and priests who wait for the tide to turn: which will you choose? Had this young man chosen a priest of the resistance, or one of the collaboration, he would have decided beforehand the kind of advice he was to receive. Similarly, in coming to me, he knew what advice I should give him, and I had but one reply to make. You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world. The Catholics will reply, “Oh, but they are!” Very well; still, it is I myself, in every case, who have to interpret the signs. While I was imprisoned, I made the acquaintance of a somewhat remarkable man, a Jesuit, who had become a member of that order in the following manner. In his life he had suffered a succession of rather severe setbacks. His father had died when he was a child, leaving him in poverty, and he had been awarded a free scholarship in a religious institution, where he had been made continually to feel that he was accepted for charity’s sake, and, in consequence, he had been denied several of those distinctions and honours which gratify children. Later, about the age of eighteen, he came to grief in a sentimental affair; and finally, at twenty-two – this was a trifle in itself, but it was the last drop that overflowed his cup – he failed in his military examination. This young man, then, could regard himself as a total failure: it was a sign – but a sign of what? He might have taken refuge in bitterness or despair. But he took it – very cleverly for him – as a sign that he was not intended for secular success, and that only the attainments of religion, those of sanctity and of faith, were accessible to him. He interpreted his record as a message from God, and became a member of the Order. Who can doubt but that this decision as to the meaning of the sign was his, and his alone? One could have drawn quite different conclusions from such a series of reverses – as, for example, that he had better become a carpenter or a revolutionary. For the decipherment of the sign, however, he bears the entire responsibility. That is what “abandonment” implies, that we ourselves decide our being. And with this abandonment goes anguish.

As for “despair,” the meaning of this expression is extremely simple. It merely means that we limit ourselves to a reliance upon that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the probabilities which render our action feasible. Whenever one wills anything, there are always these elements of probability. If I am counting upon a visit from a friend, who may be coming by train or by tram, I presuppose that the train will arrive at the appointed time, or that the tram will not be derailed. I remain in the realm of possibilities; but one does not rely upon any possibilities beyond those that are strictly concerned in one’s action. Beyond the point at which the possibilities under consideration cease to affect my action, I ought to disinterest myself. For there is no God and no prevenient design, which can adapt the world and all its possibilities to my will. When Descartes said, “Conquer yourself rather than the world,” what he meant was, at bottom, the same – that we should act without hope.

Marxists, to whom I have said this, have answered: “Your action is limited, obviously, by your death; but you can rely upon the help of others. That is, you can count both upon what the others are doing to help you elsewhere, as in China and in Russia, and upon what they will do later, after your death, to take up your action and carry it forward to its final accomplishment which will be the revolution. Moreover you must rely upon this; not to do so is immoral.” To this I rejoin, first, that I shall always count upon my comrades-in-arms in the struggle, in so far as they are committed, as I am, to a definite, common cause; and in the unity of a party or a group which I can more or less control – that is, in which I am enrolled as a militant and whose movements at every moment are known to me. In that respect, to rely upon the unity and the will of the party is exactly like my reckoning that the train will run to time or that the tram will not be derailed. But I cannot count upon men whom I do not know, I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon man’s interest in the good of society, seeing that man is free and that there is no human nature which I can take as foundational. I do not know where the Russian revolution will lead. I can admire it and take it as an example in so far as it is evident, today, that the proletariat plays a part in Russia which it has attained in no other nation. But I cannot affirm that this will necessarily lead to the triumph of the proletariat: I must confine myself to what I can see. Nor can I be sure that comrades-in-arms will take up my work after my death and carry it to the maximum perfection, seeing that those men are free agents and will freely decide, tomorrow, what man is then to be. Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be. Does that mean that I should abandon myself to quietism? No. First I ought to commit myself and then act my commitment, according to the time-honoured formula that “one need not hope in order to undertake one’s work.” Nor does this mean that I should not belong to a party, but only that I should be without illusion and that I should do what I can. For instance, if I ask myself “Will the social ideal as such, ever become a reality?” I cannot tell, I only know that whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing.

Quietism is the attitude of people who say, “let others do what I cannot do.” The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.

In the light of all this, what people reproach us with is not, after all, our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism. If people condemn our works of fiction, in which we describe characters that are base, weak, cowardly and sometimes even frankly evil, it is not only because those characters are base, weak, cowardly or evil. For suppose that, like Zola, we showed that the behaviour of these characters was caused by their heredity, or by the action of their environment upon them, or by determining factors, psychic or organic. People would be reassured, they would say, “You see, that is what we are like, no one can do anything about it.” But the existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament. There are nervous temperaments; there is what is called impoverished blood, and there are also rich temperaments. But the man whose blood is poor is not a coward for all that, for what produces cowardice is the act of giving up or giving way; and a temperament is not an action. A coward is defined by the deed that he has done. What people feel obscurely, and with horror, is that the coward as we present him is guilty of being a coward. What people would prefer would be to be born either a coward or a hero. One of the charges most often laid against the Chemins de la Liberté is something like this: “But, after all, these people being so base, how can you make them into heroes?” That objection is really rather comic, for it implies that people are born heroes: and that is, at bottom, what such people would like to think. If you are born cowards, you can be quite content, you can do nothing about it and you will be cowards all your lives whatever you do; and if you are born heroes you can again be quite content; you will be heroes all your lives eating and drinking heroically. Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether.

We have now, I think, dealt with a certain number of the reproaches against existentialism. You have seen that it cannot be regarded as a philosophy of quietism since it defines man by his action; nor as a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic, the destiny of man is placed within himself. Nor is it an attempt to discourage man from action since it tells him that there is no hope except in his action, and that the one thing which permits him to have life is the deed. Upon this level therefore, what we are considering is an ethic of action and self-commitment. However, we are still reproached, upon these few data, for confining man within his individual subjectivity. There again people badly misunderstand us.

Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual, and that for strictly philosophic reasons. It is not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching upon the truth, and not upon a collection of fine theories, full of hope but lacking real foundations. And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think, therefore I am , which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory which begins with man, outside of this moment of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby suppresses the truth, for outside of the Cartesian cogito , all objects are no more than probable, and any doctrine of probabilities which is not attached to a truth will crumble into nothing. In order to define the probable one must possess the true. Before there can be any truth whatever, then, there must be an absolute truth, and there is such a truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of one’s self.

In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object. All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object – that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone. Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world. 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.

Furthermore, although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence that can be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition . It is not by chance that the thinkers of today are so much more ready to speak of the condition than of the nature of man. By his condition they understand, with more or less clarity, all the limitations which a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe. His historical situations are variable: man may be born a slave in a pagan society or may be a feudal baron, or a proletarian. But what never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there. These limitations are neither subjective nor objective, or rather there is both a subjective and an objective aspect of them. Objective, because we meet with them everywhere and they are everywhere recognisable: and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if man does not live them – if, that is to say, he does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to them. And, diverse though man’s purpose may be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me, since every human purpose presents itself as an attempt either to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else to deny or to accommodate oneself to them. Consequently every purpose, however individual it may be, is of universal value. Every purpose, even that of a Chinese, an Indian or a Negro, can be understood by a European. To say it can be understood, means that the European of 1945 may be striving out of a certain situation towards the same limitations in the same way, and that he may reconceive in himself the purpose of the Chinese, of the Indian or the African. In every purpose there is universality, in this sense that every purpose is comprehensible to every man. Not that this or that purpose defines man for ever, but that it may be entertained again and again. There is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information. In this sense we may say that there is a human universality, but it is not something given; it is being perpetually made. I make this universality in choosing myself; I also make it by understanding the purpose of any other man, of whatever epoch. This absoluteness of the act of choice does not alter the relativity of each epoch.

What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realises himself in realising a type of humanity – a commitment always understandable, to no matter whom in no matter what epoch – and its bearing upon the relativity of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment. One must observe equally the relativity of Cartesianism and the absolute character of the Cartesian commitment. In this sense you may say, if you like, that every one of us makes the absolute by breathing, by eating, by sleeping or by behaving in any fashion whatsoever. There is no difference between free being – being as self-committal, as existence choosing its essence – and absolute being. And there is no difference whatever between being as an absolute, temporarily localised that is, localised in history – and universally intelligible being.

This does not completely refute the charge of subjectivism. Indeed that objection appears in several other forms, of which the first is as follows. People say to us, “Then it does not matter what you do,” and they say this in various ways.

First they tax us with anarchy; then they say, “You cannot judge others, for there is no reason for preferring one purpose to another”; finally, they may say, “Everything being merely voluntary in this choice of yours, you give away with one hand what you pretend to gain with the other.” These three are not very serious objections. As to the first, to say that it does not matter what you choose is not correct. In one sense choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice. This, although it may appear merely formal, is of great importance as a limit to fantasy and caprice. For, when I confront a real situation – for example, that I am a sexual being, able to have relations with a being of the other sex and able to have children – I am obliged to choose my attitude to it, and in every respect I bear the responsibility of the choice which, in committing myself, also commits the whole of humanity. Even if my choice is determined by no a priori value whatever, it can have nothing to do with caprice: and if anyone thinks that this is only Gide’s theory of the acte gratuit over again, he has failed to see the enormous difference between this theory and that of Gide. Gide does not know what a situation is, his “act” is one of pure caprice. In our view, on the contrary, man finds himself in an organised situation in which he is himself involved: his choice involves mankind in its entirety, and he cannot avoid choosing. Either he must remain single, or he must marry without having children, or he must marry and have children. In any case, and whichever he may choose, it is impossible for him, in respect of this situation, not to take complete responsibility. Doubtless he chooses without reference to any pre-established value, but it is unjust to tax him with caprice. Rather let us say that the moral choice is comparable to the construction of a work of art.

But here I must at once digress to make it quite clear that we are not propounding an aesthetic morality, for our adversaries are disingenuous enough to reproach us even with that. I mention the work of art only by way of comparison. That being understood, does anyone reproach an artist, when he paints a picture, for not following rules established a priori . Does one ever ask what is the picture that he ought to paint? As everyone knows, there is no pre-defined picture for him to make; the artist applies himself to the composition of a picture, and the picture that ought to be made is precisely that which he will have made. As everyone knows, there are no aesthetic values a priori , but there are values which will appear in due course in the coherence of the picture, in the relation between the will to create and the finished work. No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a painting until it is done. What has that to do with morality? We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of art as irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand very well that the composition became what it is at the time when he was painting it, and that his works are part and parcel of his entire life.

It is the same upon the plane of morality. There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done. I think it was made sufficiently clear to you in the case of that student who came to see me, that to whatever ethical system he might appeal, the Kantian or any other, he could find no sort of guidance whatever; he was obliged to invent the law for himself. Certainly we cannot say that this man, in choosing to remain with his mother – that is, in taking sentiment, personal devotion and concrete charity as his moral foundations – would be making an irresponsible choice, nor could we do so if he preferred the sacrifice of going away to England. Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of circumstances upon him. We define man only in relation to his commitments; it is therefore absurd to reproach us for irresponsibility in our choice.

In the second place, people say to us, “You are unable to judge others.” This is true in one sense and false in another. It is true in this sense, that whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P. [ Mouvement Republicain Poputaire ] and the Communists.

We can judge, nevertheless, for, as I have said, one chooses in view of others, and in view of others one chooses himself. One can judge, first – and perhaps this is not a judgment of value, but it is a logical judgment – that in certain cases choice is founded upon an error, and in others upon the truth. One can judge a man by saying that he deceives himself. Since we have defined the situation of man as one of free choice, without excuse and without help, any man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-deceiver. One may object: “But why should he not choose to deceive himself?” I reply that it is not for me to judge him morally, but I define his self-deception as an error. Here one cannot avoid pronouncing a judgment of truth. The self-deception is evidently a falsehood, because it is a dissimulation of man’s complete liberty of commitment. Upon this same level, I say that it is also a self-deception if I choose to declare that certain values are incumbent upon me; I am in contradiction with myself if I will these values and at the same time say that they impose themselves upon me. If anyone says to me, “And what if I wish to deceive myself?” I answer, “There is no reason why you should not, but I declare that you are doing so, and that the attitude of strict consistency alone is that of good faith.” Furthermore, I can pronounce a moral judgment. For I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values. That does not mean that he wills it in the abstract: it simply means that the actions of men of good faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself as such. A man who belongs to some communist or revolutionary society wills certain concrete ends, which imply the will to freedom, but that freedom is willed in community. We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim. Consequently, when I recognise, as entirely authentic, that man is a being whose existence precedes his essence, and that he is a free being who cannot, in any circumstances, but will his freedom, at the same time I realize that I cannot not will the freedom of others. Thus, in the name of that will to freedom which is implied in freedom itself, I can form judgments upon those who seek to hide from themselves the wholly voluntary nature of their existence and its complete freedom. Those who hide from this total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards. Others, who try to show that their existence is necessary, when it is merely an accident of the appearance of the human race on earth – I shall call scum. But neither cowards nor scum can be identified except upon the plane of strict authenticity. Thus, although the content of morality is variable, a certain form of this morality is universal. Kant declared that freedom is a will both to itself and to the freedom of others. Agreed: but he thinks that the formal and the universal suffice for the constitution of a morality. We think, on the contrary, that principles that are too abstract break down when we come to defining action. To take once again the case of that student; by what authority, in the name of what golden rule of morality, do you think he could have decided, in perfect peace of mind, either to abandon his mother or to remain with her? There are no means of judging. The content is always concrete, and therefore unpredictable; it has always to be invented. The one thing that counts, is to know whether the invention is made in the name of freedom.

Let us, for example, examine the two following cases, and you will see how far they are similar in spite of their difference. Let us take The Mill on the Floss . We find here a certain young woman, Maggie Tulliver, who is an incarnation of the value of passion and is aware of it. She is in love with a young man, Stephen, who is engaged to another, an insignificant young woman. This Maggie Tulliver, instead of heedlessly seeking her own happiness, chooses in the name of human solidarity to sacrifice herself and to give up the man she loves. On the other hand, La Sanseverina in Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme , believing that it is passion which endows man with his real value, would have declared that a grand passion justifies its sacrifices, and must be preferred to the banality of such conjugal love as would unite Stephen to the little goose he was engaged to marry. It is the latter that she would have chosen to sacrifice in realising her own happiness, and, as Stendhal shows, she would also sacrifice herself upon the plane of passion if life made that demand upon her. Here we are facing two clearly opposed moralities; but I claim that they are equivalent, seeing that in both cases the overruling aim is freedom. You can imagine two attitudes exactly similar in effect, in that one girl might prefer, in resignation, to give up her lover while the other preferred, in fulfilment of sexual desire, to ignore the prior engagement of the man she loved; and, externally, these two cases might appear the same as the two we have just cited, while being in fact entirely different. The attitude of La Sanseverina is much nearer to that of Maggie Tulliver than to one of careless greed. Thus, you see, the second objection is at once true and false. One can choose anything, but only if it is upon the plane of free commitment.

The third objection, stated by saying, “You take with one hand what you give with the other,” means, at bottom, “your values are not serious, since you choose them yourselves.” To that I can only say that I am very sorry that it should be so; but if I have excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are. And moreover, to say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this; that there is no sense in life a priori . Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose. Therefore, you can see that there is a possibility of creating a human community. I have been reproached for suggesting that existentialism is a form of humanism: people have said to me, “But you have written in your Nausée that the humanists are wrong, you have even ridiculed a certain type of humanism, why do you now go back upon that?” In reality, the word humanism has two very different meanings. One may understand by humanism a theory which upholds man as the end-in-itself and as the supreme value. Humanism in this sense appears, for instance, in Cocteau’s story Round the World in 80 Hours , in which one of the characters declares, because he is flying over mountains in an airplane, “Man is magnificent!” This signifies that although I personally have not built aeroplanes, I have the benefit of those particular inventions and that I personally, being a man, can consider myself responsible for, and honoured by, achievements that are peculiar to some men. It is to assume that we can ascribe value to man according to the most distinguished deeds of certain men. That kind of humanism is absurd, for only the dog or the horse would be in a position to pronounce a general judgment upon man and declare that he is magnificent, which they have never been such fools as to do – at least, not as far as I know. But neither is it admissible that a man should pronounce judgment upon Man. Existentialism dispenses with any judgment of this sort: an existentialist will never take man as the end, since man is still to be determined. And we have no right to believe that humanity is something to which we could set up a cult, after the manner of Auguste Comte. The cult of humanity ends in Comtian humanism, shut-in upon itself, and – this must be said – in Fascism. We do not want a humanism like that.

But there is another sense of the word, 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, that man can realize himself as truly human.

You can see from these few reflections that nothing could be more unjust than the objections people raise against us. Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.

Further Reading: Simone De Beauvoir Archive | Marxism & Ethics | Ethics of Ambiguity , de Beauvoir 1947 | Marxist Humanism | Marxists Internet Archive

Jean-Paul Sartre Archive | Value_of_Knowledge

Existentialism Is a Humanism

Jean-paul sartre, everything you need for every book you read..

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Literature Notes
Sartrean Existentialism: Specific Principles
About No Exit
Character List
Summary and Analysis
Jean-Paul Sartre Biography
Critical Essays
Existentialism before Sartre
Sartrean Existentialism: An Overview
Sartre's Political Ideas
Sartre's Dramatic Formula
Essay Questions
Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Sartrean Existentialism: Specific Principles

In order to simplify things even further, one should study a point-by-point list of existentialist principles. This is a summary useful for understanding several of Sartre's works, and it is representative of his major ideas.

The Problem

Existence is absurd. Life has no meaning. Death is the ultimate absurdity: It undoes everything that life has been building up to. One is born by chance; one dies by chance. There is no God.

The Solution

One must make use of freedom; only freedom of choice can allow one to escape "nausea."

(1) Existence Precedes Essence Our acts create our essence. Humanity alone exists; objects simply are (for example, they do not exist per se). Animals and vegetables occupy an intermediary position. Plants grow, form fruits, live, and then die. Animals are born, chew their food, make sounds, follow their instincts, and die. Neither plants nor animals make deliberate choices or carry through with responsibility.

EXISTENCE + FREEDOM OF CHOICE + RESPONSIBILITY = ESSENCE

Historically, philosophy before Sartre was "essentialist." That is, it was concerned with defining the essence of each species, with providing details about generic traits. Existentialism, on the other hand, places existence before essence. Man exists (is born) before he can be anything, before he can become anything; therefore, his existence precedes his essence. His state of existence precedes his state of becoming. An individual is responsible for making himself into an essence, of lifting himself beyond the level of mere existence. This is where choice and action come in. Sartre offers the argument about the artisan and his craft: "When you consider a manufactured object, such as a book or a paper cutter, this object was manufactured by an artisan who started from a concept; he referred to this concept of a paper cutter and also to the technique of producing it as a part of the concept — which is basically a recipe. Thus, the paper cutter is simultaneously an object which is produced in a certain manner and which has a definite purpose; one cannot suppose a man making a paper cutter without knowing what the object will be used for. That's why we say that, for the paper cutter, essence . . . precedes existence. . . . It's a technical vision of the world in which one can say that production precedes the existence of an object. When we conceive of a God-creator, this God is usually thought of as a superior artisan. . . . In the eighteenth century, with the atheism of the philosophers, the notion of God was done away with, but not so with the idea that essence precedes existence. . . . Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It declares that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before being defined by any concept, and this being is man — or, in the words of Heidegger, human reality. What does this mean, that existence precedes essence? It means that man exists first, finds himself, ventures into the world, and then defines himself. . . . Thus, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive it. Man is simply, not only in the way by which he conceives himself, but as he wishes himself to be, and since he conceives himself after existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself."

Thus, Sartre takes the traditional assumption of "essence precedes existence" and changes it into "existence precedes essence." This is a direct result of his atheism whereby God does not exist. Man is born at random, and objects such as paper cutters simply are (they do not exist ). Sartre distinguishes between "to be" and "to exist." One must exist before one can have essence, but objects and animals simply are.

(2) Freedom Man's situation is an unhappy one: what is good? and what is evil? Since there is no way of separating them, man is condemned to a life of freedom in which he must choose. If one rejects the notion of God, who is to say what is good and what is evil? No one, since there are no absolutes: There is good in evil and evil in good. One cannot act and remain pure since too many fears and obstacles would present themselves; of necessity, one must make choices and assume the consequences.

Sartre delineates three categories within his definition of freedom:

the man whom he compares to a stone: this man makes no choices and is happy in his no-choice life. He refuses to commit himself ( engagement ), to accept responsibility for his life. He continues in his passive habits. Sartre scorns him. In The Flies, this person is represented by the Tutor.
the man whom he compares to plants: This man is not happy. But he lacks the courage to take responsibility for his actions. He obeys other people. He is the one who suffers from "nausea." Sartre scorns this man the most of all three groups.
the man not compared to stones or plants: This man suffers from freedom. He has the nobility to use freedom for the betterment of his life. He is the one whom Sartre admires.

(3) Responsibility Man must be committed, engaged. He has a responsibility before other citizens for his actions. By acting, he creates a certain essence for society ("by choosing for oneself, man chooses for all men"); any action which one takes affects the rest of humanity. From the moment when man makes a choice, he is committed. One must not renege on one's responsibility (as does Electra in The Flies ), nor must one place the responsibility for one's actions onto the shoulders of someone else. Man should not regret what he has done. An act is an act.

(4) "The others" Other people are a torture for two reasons:

they are capable of denying one's existence and one's freedom by treating one as an object; for example, if you do a cowardly act, and another person calls you a coward, this cuts off the possibility of your doing something heroic or courageous; it stereotypes you as a coward, and this causes anguish.
others judge you, observe you without taking into consideration your intentions (either your intentions about a future act or an act which you've already committed). The image they have of you may not correspond to the one you have of yourself. But you can't do without them because only they can tell you who you are. Man does not always understand the motives behind his actions; therefore, he needs others to help in this process. But there is relief; man can say to himself: "I am torture for them, just as they are torture for me."

Sartre offers four ways of defending oneself from the torture of "the others":

evasion or avoidance: One can isolate oneself from them, go to sleep, commit suicide, remain silent, or live in obscurity;
disguise: One can try to fool others, lie to them, give a false image, resort to hypocrisy;
emotions: One can inspire emotions such as love and friendship in others, make oneself liked/loved by them: "My lover accepts me as I accept myself." Therefore, an "other" judges you as you judge yourself;
violence: A dictator can put people in prison to prevent them from saying what he doesn't want to hear.

Sartre concludes that if any of the above four conditions prevail(s), one finds oneself in circumstances that are hell.

(5) Commitment Man must not be indifferent to his surroundings. He must take a stand, make choices, commit himself to his beliefs, and create meaning through action. Sartre is in favor of an engaged literature, of art that has a goal, a purpose. As with a man shooting a gun in the air or directly at a target, it's better to have a target, a message. The readers should feel their responsibilities; the author should incite the readers to action, infuse an energy into them. Sartre is interested in a "historical public" (that is, a public of a certain precise moment in history): He addresses himself to the public of his times. Ideally, an author should write for a universal audience, but this is possible only in a classless society.

But the compromise is to address all readers who have the freedom to change things (for example, political freedom). People hostile to Sartre's writings criticized him of assassinating literature. But he replied that he would never ignore stylistics, regardless of the ideas he was developing. He claimed that a reader should not be aware of a writer's style, that this would get in the way of understanding the piece of literature. Commitment to one's writing, he argued, was as vital as commitment to all other actions in one's life.

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The Existential Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a leading twentieth-century French philosopher and novelist. In this article, we look at his most important contributions to philosophy.

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Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905, in Paris. He was to become one of the most famous writers and philosophers of the twentieth century, eventually declining the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His philosophy and writings on existentialism provoked strong themes of human freedom and the corresponding angst that comes with the responsibility of being free. Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy attracted many adherents in philosophy and the arts and he notably had a relationship with second-wave feminist, Simone de Beauvoir . In this article, we look at some of his most significant contributions to existential philosophy found throughout his various writings.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself

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For Sartre, there are philosophically significant differences between the states of being between things in the world and people. Things that are not conscious, such as rocks, chairs, or can-openers, are what he referred to as being-in-itself. A can-opener is defined by what it does (opens cans) which defines what it is . No matter how you use a can-opener, its defining quality (i.e., essence) is that it is an object that opens cans. A rock, similarly, is a rock no matter what you do to it. These types of objects are locked into their essence and cannot change it.

A being-for-itself, on the other hand, can define its essence above and beyond what it simply is. In this way, a person is both being-in-itself and being-for-itself. A person is a being-in-itself so far as it is a biological organism and it is a being-for-itself in the sense that we can freely choose what our essence is; what we are for, what we are about and so on. A being-for-itself has this freedom to choose its essence whereas a being-in-itself does not. Furthermore, a being-for-itself can distinguish itself from other beings and objects and in doing so discover itself. Sartre referred to this process of discerning this-from-that as negation , which he believed was a fundamental trait of consciousness.

Jean-Paul Sartre on Nothingness

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Sartre suggests that people are not like things (such as rocks or can-openers), which is why he uses the term “no-thing-ness” to refer to the kind of being that people are. Unlike things, we do not have an intrinsic essence. A can-opener, for example, has an essence that was ascribed to it before it even existed. A designer created that object for the sake of opening cans. In this way, we can say that its essence preceded its existence. According to Sartre, we are not designed by a God , therefore we are unlike things; i.e., no-thing-ness. With this in mind, we can now begin to understand Sartre’s greatest contribution to existential philosophy .

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Please check your inbox to activate your subscription, existentialism: existence precedes essence.

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards […] He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. […] Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.” Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

If there is no designer (i.e., God), there is no intrinsic essence of human life, therefore there can be no human nature (what humans are supposed to be). Instead, we must invent our purpose, our own “essence”. So whereas a can-opener’s essence precedes its existence, the opposite is true for the being-for-itself. We exist first and then we must create our essence later. It is for this reason that Sartre proclaimed that we are “ condemned to be free ”.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Bad Faith

One of Sartre’s most controversial contributions to philosophy is his claim that we are “radically free”; radically free to define our essence but also free to choose, act, and even change our emotions. Of course, radical freedom is not exactly a pleasant experience. Realizing we are free to choose means that we are entirely responsible for our lives, which creates angst — a feeling of anxiety or even despair. Nevertheless, to deny our radical freedom is what Sartre referred to as “bad faith”. Accordingly, we act in bad faith any time we refuse to take responsibility for our actions, beliefs, or emotions. He likened it to a kind of self-delusion. In this way, he controversially claimed in Being and Nothingness : A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology , that even slaves are free since they could choose to run away or end their own lives. To believe otherwise is to deny one’s radical freedom — to act in bad faith.

However, not everyone agrees with Sartre’s view on radical freedom. Are we free to choose when our choices are limited or coerced? If we are so radically free as Sartre suggests, what does it mean for someone to be a victim? Are they, in some sense, responsible for what happens to them? These unsavory aspects of Sartre’s philosophy contributed to the apprehension that many felt about existentialism at the time.

untitled gotthard graubner satre painting

Sartre considered some of these concerns in his formulation of the being-for-itself. He believed that there are certain facts about ourselves which we cannot change no matter how radically free we are, which make up our “facticity”. These conditions include where a person was born, their social class, and their bodily condition. These form the background against which we make choices, the unchosen situation of the for-itself.

Temporality

For Sartre, temporality refers to our connection with the past, present, and future. Temporality is a process. The past is what the being-for-itself has been, the present is the being-for-itself being formed and the future is projection, what the for-itself is not yet. Our temporality is a unique feature of the being-for-itself.

Transcendence

abstractionists emilio pettoruti drawing

Sartre proposed that even though we cannot change our facticity (including aspects of our temporality), we can choose to not let those things define us. For example, if a person was bullied in school they can choose to transcend those past experiences in a way such that instead of shying away from the world they choose to become stronger and more courageous. Of course, there are some things that we cannot change, such as our skin color or body type. However, we can — according to Sartre — choose not to be defined by the stereotypes ascribed to us; instead, we define ourselves.

Responsibility

Defining ourselves — our essence — is a unique feature of Sartre’s philosophy, which can be empowering. However, it also comes with responsibility.

For Sartre, there is no human nature for there is “ no God to have a conception of it” . Human nature implies that there is an essence of being human, which Sartre refuted. Therefore, human nature is something we must individually decide upon. We define what human nature is, and therein lies our responsibility. If we choose to allow suffering and inequality in the world we are responsible. If you know about inequality in your neighborhood and do nothing about it, you are defining human nature and are responsible for it. In this way, Sartre suggests that we each carry the burden of being free for with it comes responsibility. To shy away from that responsibility would be bad faith.

Synthetic Unity

Lastly, synthetic unity is a term that Sartre used to describe the relationship between the for-itself and the in-itself. According to Sartre, meaning emerges from our conscious interrelations with things in the world. Take an illustration of a car, for example.

Here the illustration is a being-in-itself, it is simply there. To take a reductionist point of view, the object is made up of matter. Whatever meaning we ascribe to the object (e.g., that it is an “illustration” of a “car”) comes from our conscious relationship with that object. The interesting point that Sartre raised, however, was that the illustration of the car did not exist just in the mind of the being-for-itself. Rather, the illustration (e.g., of a “car”) exists within the synthesis between the being-for-itself and the being-in-itself, whereby it could not exist without both. For this reason, Sartre proposed that there are objective facts about the world that exist only within the relationship between the for-itself and the in-itself.

Jean-Paul Sartre: In Summary

As we have seen here, Sartre helped to define some of the defining differences between conscious beings and things; therefore contributing to our understanding of ourselves. He proposed ideas that not only relate to consciousness but also to how certain facts emerge between the conscious and the non-conscious. Furthermore, his most significant contributions were about what it means to be a self, which he concluded to be one of no-thing-ness. From nothing, we henceforth create ourselves in an image of our own making. In doing so we find our freedom, which is radical and full of responsibilities.

The Sublime: An Aesthetic Concept in Change

By Casey Scott MA Philosophy, GDipEd English and Humanities, BA(Hons) Professional & Creative Writing Casey teaches philosophy and culture studies at a leading Australian university. His postgraduate research examined the metaphysics of biological concepts. He is a qualified English teacher with a degree in professional and creative writing and is about to begin his third degree in zoology and animal sciences.

two philosophy drawings jean arp and ernst barlach

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Jean-Paul Sartre was one of my favorites when I was an undergraduate. I enjoyed his novels and plays, and his great essay “Existentialism as Humanism. “ And I once even read a good bit of Being and Nothingness, his 700 page magnum opus.

So what did Sartre mean by saying that we are radically free, and that we are condemned to be free? And what is existentialism?

This morning I made the decision to come to work on Philosophy Talk, rather than turn over and go back to sleep. Now I couldn't’ decide to change the past --- say go back and change the Philosophy Talk schedule, so that I had another day before I had to prepare. That’s was given, fixed. And a lot of other things are given so I couldn’t do anything about. This is what Sartre calls the facticity of the in-itself , by the way.

Nothing given, however, dictated what I would decide. I couldn’t count on the laws of nature or God to get me out of bed. I had to make the decision. I am a for-itself , a consciousness, not an in-itself, like a rock. I am condemned to be radically free.

But, I might say, I promised to work on philosophy talk this morning. I live up to my promises, that’s part of my nature, part of who and what I am. So I couldn’t , really , do anything but get out of bed and get to work. That's how it seemed .

Wrong, Sartre would say. I couldn’t both roll over and go back to sleep and fulfill my promise. But I could roll over and go back to sleep, and thereby break my promise. My promise in the past, so this morning it was part of the facticity of the in-itself. But my decision to get ready for Philosophy Talk was not. I had to decide, and there was nothing in the world, as it had developed up to the moment of decision, that forced me to decide to get out of bed. That decision hadn’t been made; I had to make it.

But still, that wouldn't it have been contrary to my nature, to what I am, to just roll over and ignore my obligations?

Sartre would say that I am trying to escape from freedom. There is no essential nature that fixes who I are and what I do. My decisions and actions define my nature, not the other way around. As Sartre says, “existence precedes essence”.

Existentialism is sort of a generalization of all of this. Not only each individual, but humankind in general, creates its own nature. God didn’t determine the essence of humanity --- Sartre was an atheist. And biology doesn’t fix the nature of humanity in many important ways. It fixes the way we digest things and gives us the ability to perceive and move our bodies in various ways. But it doesn’t settle what is right and what is wrong; that’s done by human decisions.

But still, even atheists believe can believe in an objective realm of values. Our freedom extends only so far. Human decisions don’t determine that 2 + 2 = 4, or the pi is an irrational number, and that remains the case even if there is no God. And human decisions they don’t determine that genocide is wrong and keeping one’s promises is right. Those things are given, aren’t they?

But according to Sartre, there is no objective realm of values that fixes the nature of right and wrong. This is the way that his existentialism differs from other versions of secular humanism. It’s all up to us. For humankind as well as for each individual, existence precedes essence. Objective values are just one more way of trying to escape from freedom.

It’s not so easy to put the various sides of Sartre together. He is famous for being part of the French Resistance, fighting Nazi-ism in every way he could. Could he really have really dared all risk all to fight this evil, if he didn’t really think it was objectively evil? Could he really think that it was his decision to fight Naziism, that made it evil? Was slavery OK, until humans decided it was not OK?

It’s all a bit hard to swallow. Still, I think he may be right. I guess I’m condemned to decide whether I am an existentialist or not.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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Existentialism

Simone de Beauvoir

Camus and the absurd, kierkegaard, blog archive, comments (7).

Thursday, January 14, 2016 -- 4:00 PM

Well, I had not really began to get an understanding of existentialism until reading your post on Sartre. The notion of existence preceding essence seems somehow clear though, whether we are talking about a rock (which presumably does not; cannot CARE about existence) or a human being who DOES care and really has no say-so in the matter of caring...inasmuch as a human essence is measurably more complex and profound than that of a rock. Therefore, Professor Perry, I submit to you that none of us are condemned to decide whether we are existentialists. The matter is, as stated in various subjects of litigation, well-settled. The fact of our humanity itself compels our essential existentialism. We need not worry ourselves over the question. You probably have not lost sleep over this and neither will I. Happy to have been of help. Jean-Paul was an iconic figure. And just so. HGN.

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Friday, January 15, 2016 -- 4:00 PM

I think Sartre's role in the Paris Underground was more in spirit than in substance, though it certainly colored his thinking. His is a sort of secular Calvinism. Instead of a solitary soul standing in judgment before a relentlessly ?just? and ?righteous? god, his is a solitary consciousness before the void. The moral void, that is, that sanity was left with after defeat of the Nazis. Unlike so many other thinkers, he did not reach out for some intellectual crutch to elude the terrible specter of complete responsibility. But, pace Perry, it is his philosophical writings that are most of interest, and too much should not be made of his fiction. His two earliest works are ingenious, on the creation of mental images (Imagination and The Psychology of the Imaginary) demonstrate that Husserl's phenomenology is an act of consciousness, not passive perception. Heidegger states in the preface to Being and Time that the essence of Dasein is to exist. He repudiates this later, denying he ever said it, but there it is for any to read. Sartre would have noted this when he received that work during his internment as a POW of the Germans. Hence, ?existence precedes essence?. It amounts to saying that existence is a priori to transcendence. The beginning of the count of time is the act of person naming it. His thinking did not evolve as it might have, so stubborn was he in preserving his ?pessimism?. And yet, he saw in the complete responsibility of being the only act in a universe of passive reaction, an affirmation of moral duty. What he never allows himself to see is the response that completes that act by finding its own worth in it. Each of us is an anomaly to the mindless pulse of time. Each alone is negligible in this. But where time responds in any sense recognized its worth as that act each of us is of it moral duty is what freedom is. Because it is merely the recognition of the worth of that response time is of the act each is. And what neglects that, what views time as unworthy of us (because we belong to some divine plan) or as a mindless obedience to a priori principles, really is despair. It was a kind of honesty that kept Sartre from seeing this, as hard as it surely was for him. Where he really falls flat is in his rather stupid adherence to Stalinism, long after Stalin's inhumanity became known. Just to give an idea of how much of an impact he had in his day, the collection of articles and papers written about him runs to eight finely printed volumes.

Sunday, January 17, 2016 -- 4:00 PM

Jean-Paul Sartre is a great writer, his novels and plays are very popular. You have written a detail article about him, I am happy to read it because I am a great fan of his work.

Thursday, January 21, 2016 -- 4:00 PM

I also believe Sartre's position in the Paris subversive was additional in strength than in matter, though it positively tinted his thoughts.

Saturday, January 23, 2016 -- 4:00 PM

Professor Perry, it is interested that I came to this site and saw this post, as I am halfway through your 1978 book: A dialogue on personal identity and immortality. It seems your mind is just as sharp as when you wrote this fabulous book. As far as philosophical works goes, yours is one of my favorites so far. It is very impressive to me that you are able to keep your mind sharp as many philosophers as there years go by, attribute a decline in creativity to a certain "fogginess" that perhaps has engulfed them. Or is it their mind rather and not "them"? Haha.

Monday, January 25, 2016 -- 4:00 PM

This very broad definition will be clarified by discussing seven key themes that existentialist thinkers address. Those philosophers considered existentialists are mostly from the continent of Europe, and date from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016 -- 4:00 PM

Here's a useful resource: Sartre, by Neil Levy, from One World Books. It's short and workmanlike, right to the point, and clearer than the other material supplied here.

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Jean-Paul Sartre: A Legacy of Existential Thought

Jean-Paul Sartre, the seminal existentialist philosopher, embarked on a profound journey through life and thought that left an indelible mark on the 20th century’s intellectual landscape. Born in Paris in 1905, Sartre’s exploration of existentialism’s depths reshaped our understanding of freedom, responsibility, and the essence of human existence. His works, ranging from dense philosophical treatises like “Being and Nothingness” to compelling literature such as “Nausea” and the play “No Exit,” illustrate his belief in existentialism’s core principle: existence precedes essence.

Sartre’s philosophy championed the idea that individuals are not defined by any pre-determined essence but must instead forge their identities and meanings through their actions and choices. A fervent advocate for political activism, Sartre’s engagement with the socio-political issues of his time, including his stance on Marxism, anti-colonialism, and his refusal of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, underscored his commitment to the existential belief in personal responsibility and freedom. Sartre’s journey through life and thought remains a towering beacon of existentialist philosophy, inviting endless exploration and debate on the human condition, freedom, and the search for authenticity in an often indifferent universe.

Early Life and Education

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, came into this world on June 21, 1905, in the vibrant city of Paris, France. Born to Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a distinguished naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, whose roots traced back to the culturally rich region of Alsace, young Sartre’s life held the promise of brilliance from the very beginning. However, fate dealt a tragic blow when his father passed away when he was just a tender one-year-old, leaving him to be raised by his devoted mother and his maternal grandfather, Karl Schweitzer.

It was within the loving embrace of this familial cocoon that Sartre’s intellectual curiosity and passion for literature and philosophy began to take root. His grandfather, Karl Schweitzer, emerged as a pivotal figure in his formative years, guiding him through the realms of literature and philosophy. This early mentorship and nurturing of his young mind would sow the seeds for the profound philosophical thoughts that would later define his legacy.

As Sartre’s early years unfolded, he found himself enrolled at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Here, amidst the hallowed halls of education, he showcased exceptional academic prowess, signaling his potential for greatness. This academic excellence paved the way for him to pursue higher education, and in 1924, he earned admission to the École Normale Supérieure, a venerable institution renowned for its commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual exploration.

It was within the walls of the École Normale Supérieure that Sartre’s intellectual journey truly blossomed. Here, he immersed himself in the study of philosophy, embarking on a profound exploration of human existence, ethics, and the nature of reality. It was during this transformative period that he crossed paths with another brilliant mind, Simone de Beauvoir, who would become not only his lifelong companion but also a formidable intellectual collaborator.

The meeting of Sartre and de Beauvoir would prove to be a turning point in the world of existentialism and philosophical thought. Their shared passion for philosophy and literature would spark a creative synergy that gave birth to some of the most influential works in existentialist philosophy. Together, they would delve into profound questions about human freedom, the absurdity of existence, and the intricate interplay between individual choice and societal constraints.

Existentialism and Key Philosophical Contributions

Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, deeply rooted in the notion that “existence precedes essence,” revolutionized the understanding of freedom, consciousness, and the human condition. His pivotal work, “Being and Nothingness,” not only cements his place as a leading figure in existential thought but also meticulously unpacks the complexities of human reality. Sartre posits that humans first exist without any predetermined purpose and must then navigate the world to define their essence through actions and decisions. This framework places immense emphasis on individual freedom and the inherent responsibility it entails, challenging us to embrace our autonomy and create meaning in an indifferent universe.

Central to Sartre’s exploration of existentialism is the concept of “bad faith,” where individuals deceive themselves into denying their freedom to escape the anxiety of choice and responsibility. This act of self-deception, according to Sartre, is a betrayal of our true nature as beings capable of self-determination and authenticity. By identifying and critiquing the mechanisms of bad faith, Sartre invites a deeper introspection into how societal pressures and internalized norms can lead us away from genuine self-realization and towards a life unfaithfully lived.

Sartre’s philosophical inquiries further extend to the realm of “the Other,” a concept pivotal in understanding the relational dynamics that shape our existence. He explores how our awareness of being observed and judged by others can profoundly affect our freedom, leading to a state where our actions and self-perception are influenced by the external gaze. “No Exit” masterfully illustrates this struggle, encapsulating the tension between the desire for individual authenticity and the inescapable influence of societal judgment.

Through these key contributions, Jean-Paul Sartre not only advanced existential philosophy but also offered a compelling framework for examining the depth of human freedom, the weight of responsibility, and the quest for authenticity in a world fraught with ambiguity and constraints. His enduring legacy lies in his ability to articulate the nuances of human existence, urging us to confront the challenges of living authentically in a complex social landscape.

Literary Achievements

Jean-Paul Sartre’s intellectual prowess wasn’t confined solely to the realm of philosophy; he made significant and enduring contributions to literature, utilizing his literary talents to explore and express existential themes in novel and play formats.

One of his most celebrated literary works is the novel “Nausea” (1938), a masterpiece that delves deep into the human experience of existential anguish and alienation. The novel’s protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, serves as a vehicle for Sartre’s exploration of the absurdity of existence. Roquentin grapples with a profound sense of nausea and meaninglessness in the world around him, a visceral representation of the existential angst that plagued many in the tumultuous 20th century. Through Roquentin’s journey, Sartre presents readers with a vivid and haunting portrayal of the human condition.

Sartre’s literary talents also found expression in his plays, which are renowned for their intense psychological examination of characters and their engagement with existential themes. His play “No Exit” (1944) is a prime example of this. Set in a claustrophobic room in the afterlife, it explores the complexities of human relationships, personal responsibility, and the inescapable judgment of others. The famous line, “Hell is other people,” encapsulates the profound philosophical exploration that takes place within the confines of the play.

Another remarkable play, “The Flies” (1943), reinterprets the Greek myth of Orestes. This work delves into themes of guilt, freedom, and individual responsibility, reimagining a classic tale in the context of existential philosophy. Through Orestes’ journey, Sartre weaves a thought-provoking narrative that forces us to grapple with the ethical and existential dilemmas faced by its characters.

In addition to his novels and plays, Sartre was a prolific essayist and political activist. His essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946) stands as a concise and accessible introduction to existentialist philosophy. In this essay, he passionately defends the principles of existentialism while clarifying common misconceptions. It serves as a valuable resource for those seeking to understand the core tenets of existential thought, making complex philosophical concepts more approachable for a wider audience.

Adversity and Controversy

Jean-Paul Sartre’s journey through life was not without its share of adversity and controversy, elements that seemed to both challenge and complement the radical and provocative essence of his existential philosophy. His experiences during World War II, particularly his capture and imprisonment by German forces in 1940, marked a period of profound personal trial. Despite the harsh conditions of his captivity, Sartre’s resolve remained unbroken, and he continued to engage with philosophical and literary work, embodying the existential commitment to freedom and the creation of meaning even in the face of absurdity. His play “Bariona,” performed for fellow prisoners, though seen by some as controversial, served as a testament to the indomitable spirit of resistance and the complexity of moral choices under occupation.

Sartre’s post-war period was equally marked by his deep engagement with political activism, drawing both acclaim and criticism. His vocal support for Marxist principles and his involvement with various left-wing movements, including his stance on the Algerian War for independence, positioned him as a polarizing figure. His criticisms of French colonial policies and advocacy for Algerian independence not only drew ire from the French government but also led to a broader debate on the role of intellectuals in political discourse. Sartre’s fearless critique of societal norms, political oppression, and his advocacy for marginalized voices underscored his commitment to existential freedom, not just as a philosophical concept but as a lived practice.

The controversies that trailed Sartre’s activism and his unapologetic critique of bourgeois society reflected the broader tensions within post-war France and the intellectual world. His rejection of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 further exemplified his disdain for conventional accolades and his desire to remain an outsider to institutional recognition, consistent with his existential belief in the primacy of individual freedom over societal validation.

Through all the adversities and controversies, Sartre’s life and work remain a beacon of intellectual bravery and moral integrity. His existential philosophy, deeply intertwined with his political engagement, continues to inspire debates on the nature of freedom, responsibility, and the role of the individual in shaping a just society. Sartre’s legacy, marked by his relentless pursuit of truth and justice amidst adversity, offers enduring insights into the challenges and responsibilities of intellectual and moral leadership.

Existentialism and Literature

Jean-Paul Sartre’s profound impact on literature extends well beyond the boundaries of his novels and plays; it encompasses his philosophical essays and literary criticism as well. Sartre believed that literature possessed a unique ability to illuminate philosophical concepts and engage readers in profound existential questions about life, freedom, and the search for meaning.

In his renowned essay, “What Is Literature?” published in 1947, Sartre delved into the intricate relationship between literature and existentialism. He argued that literature serves as a powerful medium through which authors can confront the fundamental ambiguity of human existence. According to Sartre, writers craft characters who grapple with the complexities of freedom and choice, mirroring the very existential dilemmas faced by individuals in the real world.

Through his literary works and his critical examinations of literature, Sartre aimed to convey the depth of human experience and the intricacies of human relationships. His novels, particularly the “The Roads to Freedom” trilogy consisting of “The Age of Reason,” “The Reprieve,” and “Troubled Sleep,” serve as captivating explorations of individuals ensnared in the tumultuous events of the 20th century. Within these narratives, Sartre masterfully dissects the human condition, shedding light on the challenges, moral dilemmas, and existential crises that his characters grapple with.

Sartre’s approach to literature not only made his works compelling and thought-provoking but also underscored the significance of literature as a means to engage with the profound questions of existence. His writings, both in fiction and essays, continue to inspire readers and scholars to delve deeper into the complexities of the human experience and the existential quandaries that shape our lives. As a result, Sartre’s legacy in literature stands as a testament to the enduring power of storytelling to explore the deepest recesses of the human soul.

Personal Relationships

Jean-Paul Sartre’s personal relationships, particularly his lifelong partnership with Simone de Beauvoir, stand as a testament to the intricate interplay between his personal life and his philosophical ideas. Their relationship was not only unconventional but also deeply influential, challenging traditional norms and providing valuable insights into the complexities of human connections.

Sartre and de Beauvoir shared a profound intellectual and emotional bond that transcended conventional notions of monogamy. They famously embraced an open relationship, a choice that was deeply rooted in their existentialist philosophy. This unconventional arrangement allowed them to explore their individual desires and choices while still maintaining a profound emotional connection and intellectual collaboration that spanned their entire lives.

Their partnership was built on the belief in existential freedom and authenticity, concepts that were central to Sartre’s philosophical work. In their view, individuals had the freedom to make choices and create their own meanings in life, including in matters of love and relationships. By embracing an open relationship, they asserted their agency and autonomy, choosing a path that resonated with their personal beliefs.

Simone de Beauvoir, in particular, made substantial contributions to existentialist philosophy, feminism, and literature. Her magnum opus, “The Second Sex,” remains a seminal work in feminist literature and continues to influence gender studies and feminist thought. Her experiences within her relationship with Sartre, as well as her own reflections on the position of women in society, informed her groundbreaking writings and further enriched the philosophical discourse surrounding existentialism.

The complex interplay between Sartre and de Beauvoir’s lives and philosophical dialogues illustrates the intricate relationship between personal experiences and philosophical thought. Their unconventional partnership not only challenged societal norms but also exemplified the ways in which personal relationships can deeply influence and shape the philosophical ideas of individuals. Sartre and de Beauvoir’s legacy extends beyond their intellectual contributions, serving as a fascinating case study in the exploration of love, freedom, and authenticity in human relationships.

Legacy and Critiques

Indeed, Jean-Paul Sartre’s legacy is not without its fair share of critiques and controversies. While he undeniably made significant contributions to philosophy, literature, and political activism, his ideas and actions have sparked debates and disagreements among scholars, intellectuals, and the wider public.

One major point of contention surrounding Sartre’s philosophy is its perceived overemphasis on individualism at the expense of societal and environmental influences. Critics argue that Sartre’s existentialism tends to neglect the impact of social structures, cultural context, and external factors on human behavior. This critique suggests that his philosophy may be overly simplistic and fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of human existence, which is undeniably shaped by both individual choices and external circumstances.

Sartre’s association with Marxism and his support for socialist principles have also drawn criticism. Some argue that his vision of a classless society and his advocacy for revolutionary tactics were idealistic and detached from the practical complexities of political and economic systems. The feasibility and consequences of such revolutionary ideas have been subjects of debate, with critics questioning their effectiveness and potential for creating lasting change.

Furthermore, Sartre’s personal life has come under scrutiny. His open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, while considered groundbreaking in terms of defying societal norms, has raised questions about the intersection of his personal choices and his philosophical ideals. Allegations of mistreatment of women have added complexity to his legacy and sparked discussions about whether his behavior aligned with the values of authenticity and responsibility that he espoused in his writings.

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Le Corbusier’s triumphant return to Moscow

The exhibition of French prominent architect Le Corbusier, held in The Pushkin Museum, brings together the different facets of his talent. Source: ITAR-TASS / Stanislav Krasilnikov

The largest Le Corbusier exhibition in a quarter of a century celebrates the modernist architect’s life and his connection with the city.

Given his affinity with Moscow, it is perhaps surprising that the city had never hosted a major examination of Le Corbusier’s work until now. However, the Pushkin Museum and the Le Corbusier Fund have redressed that discrepancy with the comprehensive exhibition “Secrets of Creation: Between Art and Architecture,” which runs until November 18.

Presenting over 400 exhibits, the exhibition charts Le Corbusier’s development from the young man eagerly sketching buildings on a trip around Europe, to his later years as a prolific and influential architect.

The exhibition brings together the different facets of his talent, showing his publications, artwork and furniture design alongside photographs, models and blueprints of his buildings.

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Irina Antonova, director of the Pushkin Museum, said, “It was important for us to also exhibit his art. People know Le Corbusier the architect, but what is less well know is that he was also an artist. Seeing his art and architecture together gives us an insight into his mind and his thought-processes.”

What becomes obvious to visitors of the exhibition is that Le Corbusier was a man driven by a single-minded vision of how form and lines should interact, a vision he was able to express across multiple genres.

The upper wings of the Pushkin Museum are separated by the central stairs and two long balconies. The organizers have exploited this space, allowing comparison of Le Corbusier’s different art forms. On one side there are large paintings in the Purist style he adapted from Cubism, while on the other wall there are panoramic photographs of his famous buildings.

Le Corbusier was a theorist, producing many pamphlets and manifestos which outlined his view that rigorous urban planning could make society more productive and raise the average standard of living.

It was his affinity with constructivism, and its accompanying vision of the way architecture could shape society, which drew him to visit the Soviet Union, where, as he saw it, there existed a “nation that is being organized in accordance with its new spirit.”

The exhibition’s curator Jean-Louis Cohen explains that Le Corbusier saw Moscow as “somewhere he could experiment.” Indeed, when the architect was commissioned to construct the famous Tsentrosoyuz Building, he responded by producing a plan for the entire city, based on his concept of geometric symmetry.

Falling foul of the political climate

He had misread the Soviet appetite for experimentation, and as Cohen relates in his book Le Corbusier, 1887-1965, drew stinging attacks from the likes of El Lissitsky, who called his design “a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve would contradict the style).”

Not to be deterred, Le Corbusier returned to Moscow in 1932 and entered the famous Palace of the Soviets competition, a skyscraper that was planned to be the tallest building in the world.

This time he fell foul of the changing political climate, as Stalin’s growing suspicion of the avant-garde led to the endorsement of neo-classical designs for the construction, which was ultimately never built due to the Second World War.

Situated opposite the proposed site for the Palace of the Soviets, the exhibition offers a tantalizing vision of what might have been, presenting scale models alongside Le Corbusier’s plans, and generating the feeling of an un-built masterpiece.

Despite Le Corbusier’s fluctuating fortunes in Soviet society, there was one architect who never wavered in his support . Constructivist luminary Alexander Vesnin declared that the Tsentrosoyuz building was the "the best building to arise in Moscow for over a century.”

The exhibition sheds light on their professional and personal relationship, showing sketches and letters they exchanged. In a radical break from the abstract nature of most of Le Corbusier’s art, this corner of the exhibition highlights the sometimes volatile architect’s softer side, as shown through nude sketches and classical still-life paintings he sent to Vesnin.

“He was a complex person” says Cohen. “It’s important to show his difficult elements; his connections with the USSR, with Mussolini. Now that relations between Russia and the West have improved, we can examine this. At the moment there is a new season in Le Corbusier interpretation.” To this end, the exhibition includes articles that have never previously been published in Russia, as well as Le Corbusier’s own literature.

Completing Le Corbusier’s triumphant return to Russia is a preview of a forthcoming statue, to be erected outside the Tsentrosoyuz building. Even if she couldn’t quite accept his vision of a planned city, Moscow is certainly welcoming him back.

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Moscow's Urban Movement: Is There Hope for a Better Future?

Written by Mari Chichagova
Published on December 09, 2015

In 2010, following the election of a new mayor, the Moscow city government began to work towards a comfortable urban environment in which citizens would feel like residents rather than mere users of the city. The emphasis was on creating public spaces in which Muscovites could fulfill their potential and feel that the city was their home.

Gorky Park was at the forefront of the changes. During the 1990s, the "Central Park of Culture and Leisure" accumulated a collection of fairground rides and became a sort of amusement park popular principally among visitors from other cities; Muscovites hardly went there. Three years ago, the city government made it their mission to overturn the park's image and bring Moscow's residents back. A full-scale reconstruction and restoration began in spring 2011.

Today, Gorky Park is a new level of urban space – one centered around people and boasting a scrupulously conceived infrastructure. All of the changes were aimed at creating a comfortable environment for life - for strolling and sport, work and study, culture and leisure. Moreover, in a short time the park has developed an effective economic model whereby it receives one half of its budget from the city and generates the other half itself.

The regeneration of Gorky Park was followed by a flurry of changes. The city began to invest intensively in the development of other Moscow parks (by 2015, 240 new parks had been opened, 160 of which were in residential areas), in cycling mobility and infrastructure (by 2015, 241.7 kilometers of cycle track and around 10,000 bike parking spaces had been installed), and in street design and refurbishment (to date, 50 streets and squares have been repaired and 72 pedestrian zones created). Pedestrians are now the priority user group in the urban environment.

The work undertaken in 2015 has been more than impressive in its scale: sidewalks have been widened; 30,000 trees have been planted; 10,000 unauthorized advertising structures have been demolished; the facades of 943 buildings have been repaired, 178 hectares of lawn have been replanted, and 1.1 million square meters of flowerbed have been arranged and planted.

The redevelopment of Krymskaya embankment , completed in 2013, is one of the most successful projects to be implemented in recent years. In accordance with the design by Wowhaus Architecture Bureau , the embankment was completely pedestrianized. Cycle paths were demarcated and later became part of a single 8 kilometer cycle track along the Moskva River linking the Pushkinskaya, Andreevskaya, and Vorobyovskaya embankments. The historical identity of the area was also taken into account: artists have sold their work on the Krymskaya embankment since Soviet times; in light of the tradition, a covered wooden arcade was built to accommodate them. Nearby, a summer cinema and a lecture theater have sprung up. Meanwhile, plentiful benches were installed, along with an open fountain which has become a favorite spot for both locals and tourists.

Triumfalnaya square, which opened in its new guise in September 2015, is another successful urban project. As part of the reconstruction, vehicular access to the square was blocked, the street-level parking was removed, and the section of road from the Garden ring onto Tverskaya Street was closed off. The concept, by the architecture studio Buromoscow , was selected as part of a competition which attracted over forty entries. The design also included new trees, swings, and benches, as well as pavilions where residents and tourists might buy tea, coffee and a newspaper, or find out information about the city.

Despite the obvious positive dynamic - Moscow's gradual transition from a city of disconnected “islands” with a closed, unfriendly urban environment to a European style city where pedestrians are the priority user group - there remain a plethora of issues.

Yes, Moscow is continually holding round tables, forums, and discussions of its future urban development. Yes, it can now be said that the government has long-term planning objectives and a concept for how the city ought to look in three, five or ten years’ time.

And yet - despite the involvement of world class experts such as Jan Gehl , Renzo Piano , and Diller Sconfidio + Renfro , despite the numerous architectural competitions involving a jury, the expert community, and the citizens themselves - the quality and implementation of this city-scale project leaves much to be desired.

A good illustration of this is the Moscow government's ongoing program "My Street," which is intended to improve Moscow's public spaces. The project sets aside 100 billion roubles for the redevelopment of 4,000 streets by 2018. Nevertheless, the quality of the work carried out over the summer of 2015 (scheduled for completion in time for the Moscow City Day celebrations in early September) was far from ideal. After the hurried redevelopment works, it was hard not to notice the high, unwieldy curbs, the drains appearing unexpectedly in the middle of cycle-tracks, the tarmac laid on top of paving slabs, or the paving slabs laid on top of tarmac.

Often, an important date (such as the 2018 FIFA World Cup or City Day) is the best motivation for civil servants to get things done. But should it be that way?

There is a flip-side to chasing after statistics. Firstly, quality of execution suffers. Secondly, the choice of contractor and the professionalism of the people hired to supervise and implement the work leaves much to be desired.

The absence of professionals with the skills, experience and enthusiasm to finish a project to a high standard is becoming increasingly apparent. The contractors' main concern is currently to finish the work as fast as possible (usually to a low standard) and pick up their pay check. Companies rarely invest in skilled personnel, preferring to hire cheap labor.

The winners of architectural contests should be permitted, at a legislative level, to supervise the realization of their spatial development concepts. If this is not done, then contracting organizations will continue to profiteer and to alter concepts at the master-planning stage, condemning the original designs to remain mere ideas, a collection of pretty architectural renders in the official documentation. If third parties continue to oversee work, as opposed to the authors of the concepts, then the question must be answered: how will the quality of future projects be guaranteed?

There is no doubt about the mayor's desire to invest in the visual face of Moscow and to improve the city's quality of life. Yet the need remains for a more careful approach to project implementation and to hiring and contracting decisions. There also needs to be more active work with citizens - they are the main users of urban space, and they, ultimately, are the clients.

Mari Chichagova graduated with honours degree from the Faculty of Philology of Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2009. In 2010 she started working at "Interior + Design," a magazine dedicated to architecture, design, culture and about people who were defining and driving those processes, from Norman Foster to Le Corbusier and Zaha Hadid. Afterwards she worked as a PR specialist at the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design , a Russian institution that is working in the field of urban studies, using a multi-disciplinary approach.

Since 2013 she has worked as a Deputy PR Director and then as an Acting PR Director at Gorky Park , Moscow ’s Central park. In addition to PR duties, she initiated contacts with other significant parks and organizations around the globe such as International Federation of Parks and Recreation Administration, the San Francisco Golden Gate Park, San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, Central Park of New York among others.

All images of Gorky Park (excluding image of Garage Museum) via Shutterstock.com

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Essays in Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre
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Essays in existentialism : Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905-1980
Essays in existentialism by Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905-1980. Publication date 1965 Topics Existentialism Publisher Secaucus, N. J. : Citadel Press ... viii, 437 p. ; 21 cm First ed. published in 1965 under title: Philosophy of existentialism Includes index Bibliography: p. 423-431 Notes. pen markings and highlights. Access-restricted-item true ...
Sartrean Existentialism: An Overview
Within the confines of nothingness, Sartre realized that a person indeed possesses freedom to choose: Consciousness, being non-matter, escapes determinism, and thus permits one to make choices about the beliefs and actions of life. This freedom of choice is at the center of Sartrean existentialism, and although it is a hopeful message, it is ...
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre. First published Sat Mar 26, 2022. Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism , towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2.
Sartre, Jean Paul: Existentialism
The philosophical career of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) focuses, in its first phase, upon the construction of a philosophy of existence known as existentialism. Sartre's early works are characterized by a development of classic phenomenology, but his reflection diverges from Husserl' s on methodology, the conception of the self, and an ...
Essays in Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre
In Essays in Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the leading French exponent of existential philosophy, wrote a book that open many doors to the mind. Sartre challenged his readers to think beyond the meaning of their everyday thoughts and beliefs. His essays on nothingness, on the emotions, and on the image—including "The Problem ...
Essays in Existentialism
In Essays in Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the leading French exponent of existential philosophy, wrote a book that opened many doors to the mind. Sartre challenged his readers to think beyond the meaning of their everyday thoughts and beliefs. His essays on nothingness, on the emotions, and on the image - including " The problem of nothingness," "The role of the image in ...
Amazon.com: Essays In Existentialism: 9780806501628: Sartre, Jean-Paul
Sartre psychoanalyses Tintoretto, and really seems to go over the top in analyzing his mind and historical situation. The essay seems to go on forever, is repetitious, and drifts aimlessly. Jean Wahl's Introduction to Existentialism appears at the beginning of this volume.
A student's guide to Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism
Ethics A student's guide to Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism Nigel Warburton gives a brief introduction to this classic text.. Existentialism and Humanism is probably the most widely read of all Sartre's philosophical writings, and it is certainly one of his more accessible pieces; yet surprisingly little has been written about it. One explanation for this may be that ...
Essays in Existentialism
Essays in Existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre Snippet view - 1965. View all » ...
Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre 1946
In any case, we can begin by saying that existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity. The essential charge laid against us is, of course, that of over-emphasis upon the evil side ...
Existentialism Is a Humanism Summary & Analysis
Sartre opens his lecture by declaring his goal: "to defend existentialism against some charges that have been brought against it." He names four charges: two from Communists and two from Christians.The Communist accusations are that, first, existentialism is an action-averse, merely contemplative philosophy, and secondly, that it remains caught in the "pure subjectivity " of Descartes ...
Sartrean Existentialism: Specific Principles
Existence is absurd. Life has no meaning. Death is the ultimate absurdity: It undoes everything that life has been building up to. One is born by chance; one dies by chance. There is no God. The Solution. One must make use of freedom; only freedom of choice can allow one to escape "nausea." The System.
The Existential Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
Defining ourselves — our essence — is a unique feature of Sartre's philosophy, which can be empowering. However, it also comes with responsibility. For Sartre, there is no human nature for there is "no God to have a conception of it". Human nature implies that there is an essence of being human, which Sartre refuted.
Sartre's Existentialism
As Sartre says, "existence precedes essence". Existentialism is sort of a generalization of all of this. Not only each individual, but humankind in general, creates its own nature. God didn't determine the essence of humanity --- Sartre was an atheist. And biology doesn't fix the nature of humanity in many important ways.
Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism
Sartre presented 'Existentialism and Humanism' to a popular audience in Paris late in 1945. As he implies in the discussion which is appended to the text of the lecture (pp. 57-58), he was here simplifying his views so as to make them intelligible to a wide audience. In this he succeeded only too well; the lecture has become exceedingly ...
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In his essay, Sartre asserts that the key defining concept of existentialism is that the existence of a person is prior to his or her essence. The term 'existence precedes essence
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Existentialism Is a Humanism (French: L'existentialisme est un humanisme) is a 1946 work by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture by the same name he gave at Club Maintenant in Paris, on 29 October 1945.In early translations, Existentialism and Humanism was the title used in the United Kingdom; the work was originally published in the United States as Existentialism, and a later ...
Jean-Paul Sartre: A Legacy of Existential Thought
In addition to his novels and plays, Sartre was a prolific essayist and political activist. His essay "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1946) stands as a concise and accessible introduction to existentialist philosophy. In this essay, he passionately defends the principles of existentialism while clarifying common misconceptions.
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The exhibition's curator Jean-Louis Cohen explains that Le Corbusier saw Moscow as "somewhere he could experiment.". Indeed, when the architect was commissioned to construct the famous ...
The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial
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A student’s guide to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism

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