Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism

Sartre’s Existentialism The fundamental point of Sartre’s (1946) lecture entitled “Existentialism is a Humanism” is that according to the French philosopher there is no God and this is what makes existence the precursor to essence. Man is born and lives and defines himself along the way or at the end in looking back at who he was and what he accomplished. Because there is no God, there is no set of rules of guide or goal driving or compelling man in the universe.

Man has to determine his own course of action while simultaneously realizing that he is responsible for his action and also for guiding the fate of humanity. By “fashioning myself,” as Sartre (1946) puts it, “I fashion Man.” Sartre argues in his lecture that Christians opposed his philosophy of existentialism because it was immoral and thus pessimistic, but Sartre contended that it was neither. This paper will determine the extent to which one may view “Existentialism is a Humanism” as a pessimistic work.

Sartre (1946) stated the main problem in the beginning of the lecture that he wished to address: “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.” The argument, Sartre acknowledged, was that by denying the existence of God, man was denying the precepts and laws of God that should determine man’s actions and that determine man’s identity and essence.

If man is made in the image and likeness of God, man’s essence must be at least partly spiritual and related to a spiritual purpose. Sartre (1946) argued that God was not necessary for leading a moral life, because instead of being judged by God one could be judged by others or held accountable by one’s own self.

One has to determine how one will react to the facts of life and therefore base his behavior on the realities of the world, which need not be governed by an all-seeing God. Sartre (1946) contended that in order for man to be moral, he need only accept his responsibility before others and live a life that would be beneficial to himself and to others. This was why he described existentialism as a humanism: he focused on human matters rather than on those related to the divine (Barrett, 1958).

The aim of Sartre was to draw emphasis away from God toward man in terms of where one should apply one’s sense of devotion. In other words, man should be devoted to man, to determining his essence, to shaping himself—not because his aim is to be a villain or unethical but because, simply, the existentialist has no sense of God and no need for God.

The existentialist feels that his existence is what leads to his essence and not the other way around, as a Deist might believe. Sartre (1946) noted, for example, that “When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan.” It was Sartre’s intention that man think of himself as the artisan and cease trying to escape his responsibility to become an artisan of high worth and value.

The fact that so many people were linking negativity with existentialism was Sartre’s chief complaint. This could be because the existentialists were writing novels about man’s search for meaning. People who had already arrived at some goal did not appreciate this quest: they saw it as ignorant and anti-social. They viewed existentialism as pessimistic because it denied the religious truths that men had accepted and embraced for hundreds of years.

Existentialists, Sartre argued on the opposite hand, were nothing more than naturalists: they did not need a God or theology to give them their essence. Their essence was determined by their experience and their own existence. That is why existentialism was a humanism: it was a man-centered approach to understanding one’s place in the world and one’s responsibilities. Sartre did not see this view as pessimistic at all.

He saw it rather as the reality and his goal was to express the reality, in artistic terms, as a journey of self-knowledge. Just as Dante took his reader through Hell to get to Heaven, the existentialist writer would take his characters through hellish experiences to allow them to arrive at a kind of self-knowledge or essential epiphany of thought in which they finally establish a sense of self.

Sartre (1946) stated: “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.” The human reality was the condition that Sartre and the existentialists sought to explore.

Heidegger understood man’s role in the world as being based on the idea that he brings his own meaning to the world (Bracken & Thomas, 2002). In other words, the subjective experience is what matters for every man and the subjective perspective is the only view from which he might define himself in the world.

The problem that people took from existentialism as the fact that it focused so much on anguish—the awareness of an incredible weight of responsibility: with no God to shoulder the burden, man had to shoulder it himself: “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” (Sartre, 1946).

This awareness of the “profound responsibility” is what leads to the anguish that is often linked to the pessimism that people associate with existentialism. The anguish builds with the acknowledgment that the existentialist cannot rightfully or morally impose his own worldview onto others as every person has a right to his or her own, because his or her essence is defined by his or her existence.

This is why Sartre (1946) asked rhetorically, “Who, then, can prove that I am the proper person to impose, by my own choice, my conception of man upon mankind?”  The answer was no one, and thus every existentialist is to some extent alienated from others. This was not pessimism, Sartre contended, but rather the reality for existentialists. Moreover, existentialists tend to express a feeling of being abandoned in the.