Existentialism Is a Humanism Summary & Analysis

From the start, Sartre confronts his public image head-on, focusing on the misunderstandings that lead his critics to dismiss existentialism outright. His framing of the objections also foreshadows some of the central arguments he later makes for existentialism: that it is the only intellectually honest framework for human action because it forces people to take responsibility for their moral actions and judgments, that it is therefore an optimistic rather than pessimistic philosophy, and that it recognizes the intersubjectivity of the human world—the fact that each person’s understanding of their existence depends on the existence and contributions of other people. .

Sartre believes that his critics willfully misunderstand his theory in order to avoid confronting the existentialist conclusion that they are morally responsible for their actions and beliefs. He later defines this kind of avoidance as bad faith: blaming external factors for one’s moral errors in order to pretend that one did not freely choose to make them.

Sartre is suggesting that the source of his notoriety might be the inadequate explanation of his specialist theories to the public, rather than the content of that philosophy itself. “Existence precedes essence” is the foundational proposition of Sartre’s philosophy, but it was also important for earlier existentialists like Kierkegaard and Heidegger, although they did not express it in the same words. He introduces the paper knife to draw a distinction between things that have a definite purpose – and therefore are not free – and humans, who are free because they define their own purposes in living.

Sartre’s concept of subjectivity builds directly from his notion that existence precedes essence and it allows him to carefully differentiate his views from other forms of atheism. He introduces the traditional Christian idea of God to contrast existentialism, which sees humans as lacking an inherent purpose and therefore free to determine their own purpose. In his view, the Christian notion that humans are designed for a particular destiny is restrictive. For Sartre, Christianity and atheistic notions of fixed “human nature” deprive people of their characteristic freedom.

The basic outline of Sartre’s argument is now complete: existence precedes essence, so human life should be viewed as a project of creating purpose. Furthermore, every person is just a sum of their actions, and therefore those actions determine that person’s moral character. Each human project is a response to the shared human condition and so every action expresses a set of values common to all people. Although he does not say so explicitly (in part to avoid biasing or confusing the nonspecialists in his audience), Sartre’s explanation is already deeply indebted to earlier philosophers. For example, Heidegger famously championed the notion that people “project” into their futures by imagining their future selves.

Now that Sartre has explained the basic tenets of existentialism to his audience, he turns to an in-depth explanation of some of his most misunderstood conclusions. Anguish, abandonment and despair, for Sartre, are simply facts about the universe, and existentialism’s purpose is to help people confront these facts rather than conceal them through bad faith. The public’s notion that existentialism causes anguish, despair and moral abandonment reveals their own bad faith; for Sartre, people must recognize the fundamental facts of anguish, abandonment and despair, rather than running from them, in order to actually live freely and morally. Sartre also continues to engage his philosophical predecessors. Here, for instance, he borrows Kant’s notion that each person acts as a “legislator” when they act because their actions express underlying principles about good and bad.

Sartre’s argument that anguish has nothing to do with inaction is meant to respond to the Communist objection that existentialism prevents people from taking moral action because existentialists believe there are no definite values in the world. In fact, Sartre argues, believing in predetermined values is lying to oneself about the true source of values: our actions. The version of the Abraham story Sartre is referencing comes from Kierkegaard, who in his book Fear and Trembling imagined how Abraham could take the “leap of faith” required to sacrifice Isaac. Sartre reveals his suspicion of such faith when he argues that he could not have known whether it was truly the “voice of an angel” and not a hallucination.

The notion that God has “abandoned” people—that in the modern world it is no longer viable for people to believe in an all-powerful, benevolent God—is deeply indebted to the Enlightenment, during which philosophers tried to reground morality in humans rather than in received doctrine. However, Sartre is also critical of the Enlightenment’s search for a “human nature” to replace the fixed values provided by religion; this criticism is closely indebted to the work of Nietzsche.

Attributing mistakes to “passion” is, for Sartre, one prominent way people display bad faith: they say there is some uncontrollable force within them that caused them to act, rather than taking responsibility for their actions and the consequences thereof. The example of the student demonstrates that, although moral codes often seem like consistent guides to action, they fail to provide guidance in many real-world situations where people have no choice but to violate a moral rule. In a sense, the student is “abandoned” by morality. In making a difficult choice, he first tries to find a doctrine that will tell him which to choose, then tries to measure his passions in order to determine which he loves more, but he ultimately realizes that there is no preexisting formula for his moral choice; rather, he must “invent” a moral code through his own choice. This fact of free choice allows people to build their individual moral compasses but it also makes them wholly responsible for the outcomes of their actions.

This example is designed to refute the (generally Christian) notion that the world contains messages about people’s destinies, aptitudes, and nature. Sartre shows that the selection and interpretation of such “signs” are still subject to people’s free choice, and his accusation of bad faith toward his critics is always in the background. Here, he is suggesting that it is their fault for misinterpreting him. In saying that the Jesuit could have chosen carpentry or revolution, Sartre slyly criticizes his Christian and Communist critics’ deep faith in Jesus and proletarian revolution, respectively.

Again, Sartre argues that one of the attitudes the public associates with existentialism—despair at the world’s inherent meaninglessness—is not a result of his philosophy, but rather a condition it seeks to address. He argues here for a close attention to circumstances and a practical attitude toward action, rather than an idealistic faith that things will work out if one has the right goal in mind. Sartre is also seeking to demonstrate the connection between his philosophy and his early political activities, including his participation in resistance groups during the German occupation and his decision to found a journal of “engaged letters” the same month he gave this lecture.

For Sartre, existentialism is a deeply optimistic doctrine: it argues that people are capable of moral improvement because they freely choose their actions and are responsible for their choices. This contrasts with opposing doctrines that lay the blame for wrong actions on forces outside peoples control, thereby suggesting that people are powerless to overcome their weaknesses and moral failings.

Sartre argues that his interpretation of “I think, therefore I am” actually disagrees with how Descartes and Kant understand the foundational truth of subjectivity. For them, one can only discover oneself in this way, but for Sartre, discovering oneself is also discovering others. His notion of intersubjectivity is deeply indebted to earlier thinkers, most of all Hegel and Heidegger, who argue in various ways that the individual human is a fundamental product of interpersonal life because people require the recognition of others to realize that they themselves are moral actors. The fact that an individual is always already intertwined with collective life is part of the reason that every individual action expresses a moral code for humanity as a whole and it also gives Sartre’s later work its political urgency.

Sartre’s differentiation between human nature (a fixed human essence by which people are defined, whether they like it or not) and the human condition (a common set of circumstances in which people find themselves, but to which they respond in various ways) is designed to demonstrate that, for existentialists, there is still something universal about human life—and therefore that people can still be held morally accountable to others. This also clarifies the difference between Sartre’s atheist existentialism and earlier atheists, who believed that some things are inherently right and wrong even if God does not exist.

Although Sartre has already made all the necessary arguments to refute his critics’ worries about his philosophy, he explicitly returns to their remaining objections one-by-one. He compares human life to art in order to emphasize that both are governed by complete freedom—they have no predetermined meaning, but they nevertheless both create meaning.

Because Sartre denies the existence of predetermined moral good and evil, he cannot say that bad faith is an evil—rather, it is the logical error of freely choosing to believe that one is not free. Therefore, to some extent, Sartre agrees with the objection; existentialists have no right to judge people who have thoughtfully and conscientiously pursued their own personal moralities. For Sartre, judging others should not be about whether they fulfill specific moral principles, but rather whether their mode of action respects the absolute freedom of morality in the first place.

Even though Eliot and Stendahl’s characters appear to have opposite moral feelings about sex and relationships, for Sartre they are morally equivalent because they both act for the sake of freedom. While they choose the same ends as the characters Sartre invents, Sartre’s modified examples do not choose freedom—rather, they choose their paths because they feel powerless. This demonstrates that the central concern of Sartre’s existentialism is whether one acts authentically, with respect for one’s freedom, rather than what exactly one chooses.

Ultimately, Sartre closes his responses to his objectors by emphasizing that, if there is no God, subjective value is the realest value there is: life is full of the meanings people create through their choices. In fact, this means that people’s active investment in their relationships, accomplishments, and goals is precisely what makes their lives meaningful.

Sartre is careful to distance himself from the dominant humanism of his day, that espoused by sociologist Auguste Comte. Again, the difference is between human nature and the human condition—Comte’s sort of humanism worships human nature but denies people the freedom to live outside a narrow picture of human accomplishment.

Sartre answers the title question of his lecture: existentialism is a humanism grounded in the shared human condition—humanist not because it worships humans, but because it is designed for humans and recognizes that everyone is constantly trying to become the people they imagine they should be.

Sartre distinguishes his atheism—in which God’s existence is irrelevant—from forms of atheism that focus on disproving particular religious beliefs. By the end, Sartre has inverted the conventional religious critique of atheism: for him, atheism is not the denial of religious truths about morality (that God demands this or that, for instance); rather, religion is the denial of atheist truths about morality (that we are in control of and responsible for our own moral decisions).