Existentialism is a Humanism: An Introduction
Put yourself in the shoes of a budding academic during the Second World War, kept safe from the draft that would throw you into untold military fronts. Though you’re not battling on the front lines, you’re fully aware of the atrocities of the war - the violent encroachment of the Nazis across Europe, the millions sentenced to die in concentration camps, the swaths of kamikaze pilots leading suicide missions for the Japanese Empire - and it seems as if the egregious disregard for life ultimately renders it meaningless.
Such was the philosophical zeitgeist for the better part of the 20th century plagued with war; there was an unspoken sense of meaninglessness that contrasted with the dated doctrine of essentialism, which advocated that all things are imbued with meaning before being created or conceived. It was an idea as old as the days of Plato and Aristotle that was quickly eroding - and for good reason.
This is where Jean-Paul Sartre comes into play. A polymath that served as a meteorologist for the French army turned professor, philosopher, critic, playwright, and many other things in his storied life, Sartre was one of the most vocal individuals in the movement that would soon turn essentialism on its head. He published notable works like Nausea, Being and Nothingness, and Existentialism is a Humanism, among many others, but we’ll be focusing on his latter lecture and its importance to the existentialist movement.
Before we delve into the text, let’s break down what the title actually means. We can define existentialism through what Sartre posits, that “man first exists, encounters himself and emerges in the world, to be defined afterwards,” which could be boiled down to the widely known mantra, “existence precedes essence”. Consequently, this means we all have to carve out meaning for ourselves. The second part of the title, humanism, is just a general term that puts the human condition at the forefront of the lecture. To put it all together, Sartre is trying to scrutinize existentialism with a special focus on humans.
He was aware of the issue that religious thinkers would take with this argument, as religion was still widely practiced at the time, so he made clear that there were two types of existentialists: atheists (like himself), and theists (like his predecessor, Søren Kierkegaard). The beauty of existentialism in particular lies in the fact that its doctrines and religious beliefs are not mutually exclusive; to be an existentialist does not mean to be an atheist. The only precondition, however, is to deny what’s referred to as the teleological argument: that God made the universe and the world without a specific purpose in mind. That way, one can still believe that everything was created by a higher power; had God made the world with a purpose, existentialism would simply cease to exist, as all of us would adhere to a predetermined “human nature.”
To be unchained from the wishes of authority figures or the government meant that one must carve out meaning for oneself. In Sartre’s eyes, these individuals were just as lost as us, trying to search for meaning in a world that increasingly seems meaningless. This led to the problem of the incredible freedom we have and its consequences, which I have outlined in a separate article here.
Later in the lecture, Sartre presented his audience with a curious dilemma. One of his students came to him for advice, asking whether he should stay home to care for his ill mother, who had no one else to rely on, or fight for the Free French, a government of French insurgents driven out of their homeland following a battery of Axis invasions. He weighed the dilemma with more ubiquitous philosophies at the time. Using Christian doctrines, Sartre expressed that while these beliefs may suggest to act in a way that is charitable and lends oneself to self-sacrifice, the Bible never weighs the importance of what is perceived as a “greater good” (fighting for the Free French, even if it may be a futile effort) compared to helping an individual greatly (consoling and looking after his mother).
The fact of the matter was that his dilemma wasn’t able to be answered definitively under any philosophical lens, even existentialism. The student had to conceive some kind of moral rule for himself, and whatever the consequences were had he taken another route - perhaps the demise of the Free French or death of his mother - ultimately wasn’t his onus to bear.
There’s no doubt that Existentialism was a cornerstone of the philosophical movement at the time, but it was widely criticized by influential philosophers as it garnered more attention. Sartre even walked back on some of the contentions he laid out in the lecture - I’ve compiled and broken down some of these critiques in this article to make them more digestible.
