Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre

Author:Jean-Paul Sartre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

POST-LECTURE DISCUSSION

This discussion took place during the question-and-answer exchange following Sartre’s lecture on existentialism. The first series of questions came from an unidentified member of the audience. Pierre Naville was a French surrealist author and leftist.

QUESTION: I don’t know if this current effort to explain existentialism will make you better or less well understood, but I think that the clarification in Action makes your position somewhat harder to understand.4 “Despair” and “abandonment” have an even greater resonance in an existentialist text than they usually do. And it seems to me that your understanding of “despair” or “anguish” is something more fundamental than a simple choice made by a man who realizes that he is alone and so must make his own choices. It is an awareness of the human condition that does not occur all the time. That we must choose ourselves at all times is evident, but anguish and despair are hardly common emotions.

SARTRE: Obviously, I do not mean that when I choose between a cream pastry and a chocolate éclair, I am choosing in anguish. The anguish is constant in the sense that my initial choice is a constant thing. Indeed, in my opinion, anguish is the total absence of justification accompanied, at the same time, by responsibility toward all.

QUESTION: I was speaking about the clarification offered in Action, and it seems to me that your viewpoint, as it was expressed there, was slightly weakened.

SARTRE: In all sincerity, it is possible that the article in Action did somewhat dilute my arguments. Many of the people who interview me are not qualified to do so. This leaves me with two alternatives: refuse to answer their questions, or agree to allow discussion to take place on a simplified level. I chose the second because, when all is said and done, whenever we present our theories in the classroom, we agree to dilute our thinking in order to make it understood, and that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. If we have a theory of commitment, we must be committed to the very end. If existentialist philosophy is, first and foremost, a philosophy that says “existence precedes essence,” it must be experienced if it is to be sincere. To live as an existentialist means to accept the consequences of this doctrine and not merely to impose it on others in books. If you truly want this philosophy to be a commitment, you have an obligation to make it comprehensible to those who are discussing it on a political or moral plane.

I am reproached for using the word “humanism.” That is because the problem poses itself as follows: either we must convey the doctrine on a strictly philosophical plane and then leave it to luck as to whether or not it will have any impact, or—since people are asking something else from it, and since it is intended to be a commitment—we must agree to popularize it on the condition that we don’t deform it.

QUESTION: Those who want to understand will do so, and those who don’t want to understand won’t.

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