Continental Philosophy

Sartre and Existentialism

Primary Source:

• Sartre, “Existentialism” [the actual title should be “Existentialism is a Humanism”, silly translator], in Existentialism and Human Emotions, pp. 9-51

Background:
From the Routledge Online Encyclopedia:

Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s [when this essay was written], Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable. [This should be familiar from Hegel.]

Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options.

From Bob Zunjic’s Online Outline of “Existentialism is a Humanism”:

This essay was originally published in 1946 as a transcribed version of a public lecture delivered by Sartre a year before (October 29, 1945). With it Sartre intended to provide a more readable exposition of his phenomenological ontology, but the condensed and sometimes ambiguous formulations have caused some new misinterpretations so that he eventually regretted the publication of the text.

The unstated objective of the essay is to expound Sartre's own philosophy as existentialism and to explain existentialism in terms of Sartre's own philosophy. With this idea in mind Sartre is taking over an already existing and widely (ab)used term he now wants to redefine so that it can serve a serious philosophical purpose. The justification for this conceptual operation is that the term “existentialism” was at the time so stretched in different applications (“so broad a meaning”) that its signification has become very elusive and sometimes even frivolous (covering sheer vulgarities). In opposition to this indiscriminate propagation Sartre is committed to take it in a very technical sense, which would restrict its usage to a particular (his) philosophical doctrine.

Questions:

• What are the two main kinds of existentialists? What kind is Sartre? What do all existentialists believe in common?
• What does Sartre mean by “existence precedes essence”?
• How does Sartre contend there is no human nature or human “essence”?
• What is the “deeper meaning” of existentialism?
• How is man “condemned” to be free?
• What does Sartre mean by “anguish”, “forlornness”, and “despair”?
• Who is a “self-deceiver” (i.e., someone of “bad faith”)?
• What does Sartre mean when he says that “we invent values”?
• What kind of humanism does Sartre reject? Why?
• What other “sense of the word [humanism]” does Sartre accept? Why?

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