Please read the following essay on Existentialism and comment in this blog space using evidence from the essay in your response.
Three Stages of Existentialism
Humans in Anguish: "The man who involves himself and who
realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a law-maker
who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot help
escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility. Of course there are many people who are not
anxious; but we claim they are hiding their anxiety, that they are fleeing from
it....Anguish is evident, even when it conceals itself."
Humans in
Forlornness: "When we speak
of forlornness, we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face
all the consequences of this....The existentialist thinks it very distressing
that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven
of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer an a priori Good, since
there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists,
that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a
plane where there are only men....Neither within him or without does man find
anything to cling to. He can't start
making excuses for himself.
Humans in Despair: "As for despair, the term has a very
simple meaning. It means that we shall
confine ourselves to reckoning only with what depends upon our will, or on the
ensemble of probabilities which make our action possible....No God, no scheme,
can adapt the world and its possibilities to my will."
“Existentialism Is a Humanism”
By Jean-Paul Sartre
Written: Lecture given in 1946
Source: Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre,
ed. Walter Kaufman, Meridian Publishing Company, 1989;
First Published: World Publishing Company in 1956;
Translator: Philip Mairet;
My purpose here is to offer a defense of existentialism
against several reproaches that have been laid against it.
First, it has been reproached as an invitation to people to
dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one
would have to regard any action in this world as entirely ineffective, and one
would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since
contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy.
This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists.
From another quarter we are reproached for having underlined
all that is ignominious in the human situation, for depicting what is mean,
sordid or base to the neglect of certain things that possess charm and beauty
and belong to the brighter side of human nature: for example, according to the
Catholic critic, Mlle. Mercier, we forget how an infant smiles. Both from this
side and from the other we are also reproached for leaving out of account the
solidarity of mankind and considering man in isolation. And this, say the
Communists, is because we base our doctrine upon pure subjectivity – upon the
Cartesian “I think”: which is the moment in which solitary man attains to
himself; a position from which it is impossible to regain solidarity with other
men who exist outside of the self. The ego cannot reach them through the
cogito.
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.
It is to these various reproaches that I shall endeavour to
reply today; that is why I have entitled this brief exposition “Existentialism
is a Humanism.” Many may be surprised at the mention of humanism in this
connection, but we shall try to see in what sense we understand it. In any
case, we can begin by saying that existentialism, in our sense of the word, is
a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which
affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human
subjectivity. The essential charge laid against us is, of course, that of
over-emphasis upon the evil side of human life. I have lately been told of a
lady who, whenever she lets slip a vulgar expression in a moment of
nervousness, excuses herself by exclaiming, “I believe I am becoming an
existentialist.” So it appears that ugliness is being identified with
existentialism. That is why some people say we are “naturalistic,” and if we
are, it is strange to see how much we scandalise and horrify them, for no one seems
to be much frightened or humiliated nowadays by what is properly called
naturalism. Those who can quite well keep down a novel by Zola such as La Terre
are sickened as soon as they read an existentialist novel. Those who appeal to
the wisdom of the people – which is a sad wisdom – find ours sadder still. And
yet, what could be more disillusioned than such sayings as “Charity begins at
home” or “Promote a rogue and he’ll sue you for damage, knock him down and
he’ll do you homage”? We all know how many common sayings can be quoted to this
effect, and they all mean much the same – that you must not oppose the powers
that be; that you must not fight against superior force; must not meddle in
matters that are above your station. Or that any action not in accordance with
some tradition is mere romanticism; or that any undertaking which has not the
support of proven experience is foredoomed to frustration; and that since
experience has shown men to be invariably inclined to evil, there must be firm
rules to restrain them, otherwise we shall have anarchy. It is, however, the
people who are forever mouthing these dismal proverbs and, whenever they are
told of some more or less repulsive action, say “How like human nature!” – it
is these very people, always harping upon realism, who complain that
existentialism is too gloomy a view of things. Indeed their excessive protests
make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but,
much more likely, our optimism. For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine
that I am about to try to explain to you is – is it not? – that it confronts
man with a possibility of choice. To verify this, let us review the whole
question upon the strictly philosophic level. What, then, is this that we call
existentialism?
Most of those who are making use of this word would be
highly confused if required to explain its meaning. For since it has become
fashionable, people cheerfully declare that this musician or that painter is
“existentialist.” A columnist in Clartes signs himself “The Existentialist,”
and, indeed, the word is now so loosely applied to so many things that it no
longer means anything at all. It would appear that, for the lack of any novel
doctrine such as that of surrealism, all those who are eager to join in the
latest scandal or movement now seize upon this philosophy in which, however,
they can find nothing to their purpose. For in truth this is of all teachings
the least scandalous and the most austere: it is intended strictly for
technicians and philosophers. All the same, it can easily be defined.
The question is only complicated because there are two kinds
of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I
shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the
other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as
the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the
fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will,
that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?
If one considers an article of manufacture as, for example,
a book or a paper-knife – one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had
a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a
paper-knife and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of
that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the
same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other
hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would
produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the
paperknife that its essence – that is to say the sum of the formulae and the
qualities which made its production and its definition possible – precedes its
existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus
determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a
technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.
When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him,
most of the time, as a supernal artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be
considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibnitz
himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the
understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows
precisely what he is creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God
is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes
man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan
manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. Thus each
individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the
divine understanding. In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the
notion of God is suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is
prior to existence; something of that idea we still find everywhere, in
Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possesses a human nature; that
“human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man;
which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception,
the conception of Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man
of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in
the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the
essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in
experience.
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. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes
essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in
the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees
him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be
anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there
is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man
simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is
what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills
to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he
makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is
what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us.
But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a
stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is,
before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware
that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective
life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before
that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of
intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.
Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing
or willing is a conscious decision taken – much more often than not – after we
have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or
to marry – but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a
manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true
that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus,
the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of
himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence
squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for
himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality,
but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be
understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them.
Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and,
on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter
which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses
himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we
also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect,
of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be,
there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man
such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the
same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever
to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be
better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes
essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that
image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our
responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns
mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a
Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I
choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best
becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit
myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action
is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a
more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this
decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am
thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of
monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a
certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion
man.
This may enable us to understand what is meant by such terms
– perhaps a little grandiloquent – as anguish, abandonment and despair. As you
will soon see, it is very simple. First, what do we mean by anguish? – The
existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as
follows: 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. There are many, indeed, who
show no such anxiety. But we affirm that they are merely disguising their
anguish or are in flight from it. Certainly, many people think that in what
they are doing they commit no one but themselves to anything: and if you ask
them, “What would happen if everyone did so?” they shrug their shoulders and
reply, “Everyone does not do so.” But in truth, one ought always to ask oneself
what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that
disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception. The man who lies in
self-excuse, by saying “Everyone will not do it” must be ill at ease in his
conscience, for the act of lying implies the universal value which it denies.
By its very disguise his anguish reveals itself. This is the anguish that
Kierkegaard called “the anguish of Abraham.” You know the story: An angel
commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son; and obedience was obligatory, if it
really was an angel who had appeared and said, “Thou, Abraham, shalt sacrifice
thy son.” But anyone in such a case would wonder, first, whether it was indeed
an angel and secondly, whether I am really Abraham. Where are the proofs? A
certain mad woman who suffered from hallucinations said that people were
telephoning to her, and giving her orders. The doctor asked, “But who is it
that speaks to you?” She replied: “He says it is God.” And what, indeed, could
prove to her that it was God? If an angel appears to me, what is the proof that
it is an angel; or, if I hear voices, who can prove that they proceed from
heaven and not from hell, or from my own subconsciousness or some pathological
condition? Who can prove that they are really addressed to me?
Who, then, can prove that I am the proper person to impose,
by my own choice, my conception of man upon mankind? I shall never find any
proof whatever; there will be no sign to convince me of it. If a voice speaks
to me, it is still I myself who must decide whether the voice is or is not that
of an angel. If I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who
choose to say that it is good and not bad. There is nothing to show that I am
Abraham: nevertheless I also am obliged at every instant to perform actions
which are examples. Everything happens to every man as though the whole human
race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct
accordingly. So every man ought to say, “Am I really a man who has the right to
act in such a manner that humanity regulates itself by what I do.” If a man
does not say that, he is dissembling his anguish. Clearly, the anguish with
which we are concerned here is not one that could lead to quietism or inaction.
It is anguish pure and simple, of the kind well known to all those who have
borne responsibilities. When, for instance, a military leader takes upon
himself the responsibility for an attack and sends a number of men to their
death, he chooses to do it and at bottom he alone chooses. No doubt under a
higher command, but its orders, which are more general, require interpretation
by him and upon that interpretation depends the life of ten, fourteen or twenty
men. In making the decision, he cannot but feel a certain anguish. All leaders
know that anguish. It does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the
very condition of their action, for the action presupposes that there is a
plurality of possibilities, and in choosing one of these, they realize that it
has value only because it is chosen. Now it is anguish of that kind which
existentialism describes, and moreover, as we shall see, makes explicit through
direct responsibility towards other men who are concerned. Far from being a
screen which could separate us from action, it is a condition of action itself.
And when we speak of “abandonment” – a favorite word of Heidegger
– we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw
the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is
strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks to suppress
God at the least possible expense. Towards 1880, when the French professors
endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God
is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we
are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that
certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence
ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not
to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are
going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that
these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although,
of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the
purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if
God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and
humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which
will die away quietly of itself. The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it
extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him
all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no
longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect
consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that
one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there
are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be
permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is
indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for
he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He
discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence
precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference
to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism –
man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are
we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour.
Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values,
any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That
is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because
he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment
that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. The
existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a
grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain
actions as by fate, and which, therefore, is an excuse for them. He thinks that
man is responsible for his passion. Neither will an existentialist think that a
man can find help through some sign being vouchsafed upon earth for his
orientation: for he thinks that the man himself interprets the sign as he
chooses. He thinks that every man, without any support or help whatever, is
condemned at every instant to invent man. As Ponge has written in a very fine
article, “Man is the future of man.” That is exactly true. Only, if one took
this to mean that the future is laid up in Heaven, that God knows what it is,
it would be false, for then it would no longer even be a future. If, however,
it means that, whatever man may now appear to be, there is a future to be
fashioned, a virgin future that awaits him – then it is a true saying. But in
the present one is forsaken.
As an example by which you may the better understand this
state of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought
me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his
mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had been
killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment
somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living
alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the
death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he,
at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French
Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He fully realised
that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his
death – would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in
fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect
in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and
fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and
serve no purpose. For instance, to set out for England he would have to wait
indefinitely in a Spanish camp on the way through Spain; or, on arriving in
England or in Algiers he might be put into an office to fill up forms.
Consequently, he found himself confronted by two very different modes of
action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual;
and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national
collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous – and it might be frustrated
on the way. At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality;
on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the
other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debatable validity. He had to
choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian
doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour,
deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But
which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the
patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting
in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular
person to live? Who can give an answer to that a priori? No one. Nor is it
given in any ethical scripture. The Kantian ethic says, Never regard another as
a means, but always as an end. Very well; if I remain with my mother, I shall
be regarding her as the end and not as a means: but by the same token I am in
danger of treating as means those who are fighting on my behalf; and the
converse is also true, that if I go to the aid of the combatants I shall be
treating them as the end at the risk of treating my mother as a means. If
values are uncertain, if they are still too abstract to determine the
particular, concrete case under consideration, nothing remains but to trust in
our instincts. That is what this young man tried to do; and when I saw him he
said, “In the end, it is feeling that counts; the direction in which it is
really pushing me is the one I ought to choose. If I feel that I love my mother
enough to sacrifice everything else for her – my will to be avenged, all my
longings for action and adventure then I stay with her. If, on the contrary, I
feel that my love for her is not enough, I go.” But how does one estimate the
strength of a feeling? The value of his feeling for his mother was determined
precisely by the fact that he was standing by her. I may say that I love a
certain friend enough to sacrifice such or such a sum of money for him, but I
cannot prove that unless I have done it. I may say, “I love my mother enough to
remain with her,” if actually I have remained with her. I can only estimate the
strength of this affection if I have performed an action by which it is defined
and ratified. But if I then appeal to this affection to justify my action, I
find myself drawn into a vicious circle.
Moreover, as Gide has very well said, a sentiment which is
play-acting and one which is vital are two things that are hardly
distinguishable one from another. To decide that I love my mother by staying
beside her, and to play a comedy the upshot of which is that I do so – these
are nearly the same thing. In other words, feeling is formed by the deeds that
one does; therefore I cannot consult it as a guide to action. And that is to
say that I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action,
nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act. You may
say that the youth did, at least, go to a professor to ask for advice. But if
you seek counsel – from a priest, for example you have selected that priest;
and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise. In other
words, to choose an adviser is nevertheless to commit oneself by that choice.
If you are a Christian, you will say, consult a priest; but there are
collaborationists, priests who are resisters and priests who wait for the tide
to turn: which will you choose? Had this young man chosen a priest of the
resistance, or one of the collaboration, he would have decided beforehand the
kind of advice he was to receive. Similarly, in coming to me, he knew what
advice I should give him, and I had but one reply to make. You are free,
therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show
you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world. The Catholics
will reply, “Oh, but they are!” Very well; still, it is I myself, in every
case, who have to interpret the signs. While I was imprisoned, I made the
acquaintance of a somewhat remarkable man, a Jesuit, who had become a member of
that order in the following manner. In his life he had suffered a succession of
rather severe setbacks. His father had died when he was a child, leaving him in
poverty, and he had been awarded a free scholarship in a religious institution,
where he had been made continually to feel that he was accepted for charity’s
sake, and, in consequence, he had been denied several of those distinctions and
honours which gratify children. Later, about the age of eighteen, he came to
grief in a sentimental affair; and finally, at twenty-two – this was a trifle
in itself, but it was the last drop that overflowed his cup – he failed in his
military examination. This young man, then, could regard himself as a total
failure: it was a sign – but a sign of what? He might have taken refuge in
bitterness or despair. But he took it – very cleverly for him – as a sign that
he was not intended for secular success, and that only the attainments of
religion, those of sanctity and of faith, were accessible to him. He
interpreted his record as a message from God, and became a member of the Order.
Who can doubt but that this decision as to the meaning of the sign was his, and
his alone? One could have drawn quite different conclusions from such a series
of reverses – as, for example, that he had better become a carpenter or a
revolutionary. For the decipherment of the sign, however, he bears the entire
responsibility. That is what “abandonment” implies, that we ourselves decide
our being. And with this abandonment goes anguish.
As for “despair,” the meaning of this expression is
extremely simple. It merely means that we limit ourselves to a reliance upon
that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the probabilities which
render our action feasible. Whenever one wills anything, there are always these
elements of probability. If I am counting upon a visit from a friend, who may
be coming by train or by tram, I presuppose that the train will arrive at the
appointed time, or that the tram will not be derailed. I remain in the realm of
possibilities; but one does not rely upon any possibilities beyond those that
are strictly concerned in one’s action. Beyond the point at which the
possibilities under consideration cease to affect my action, I ought to
disinterest myself. For there is no God and no prevenient design, which can
adapt the world and all its possibilities to my will. When Descartes said,
“Conquer yourself rather than the world,” what he meant was, at bottom, the
same – that we should act without hope.
Marxists, to whom I have said this, have answered: “Your
action is limited, obviously, by your death; but you can rely upon the help of
others. That is, you can count both upon what the others are doing to help you
elsewhere, as in China and in Russia, and upon what they will do later, after
your death, to take up your action and carry it forward to its final
accomplishment which will be the revolution. Moreover you must rely upon this;
not to do so is immoral.” To this I rejoin, first, that I shall always count
upon my comrades-in-arms in the struggle, in so far as they are committed, as I
am, to a definite, common cause; and in the unity of a party or a group which I
can more or less control – that is, in which I am enrolled as a militant and
whose movements at every moment are known to me. In that respect, to rely upon
the unity and the will of the party is exactly like my reckoning that the train
will run to time or that the tram will not be derailed. But I cannot count upon
men whom I do not know, I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon
man’s interest in the good of society, seeing that man is free and that there
is no human nature which I can take as foundational. I do not know where the
Russian revolution will lead. I can admire it and take it as an example in so
far as it is evident, today, that the proletariat plays a part in Russia which
it has attained in no other nation. But I cannot affirm that this will
necessarily lead to the triumph of the proletariat: I must confine myself to
what I can see. Nor can I be sure that comrades-in-arms will take up my work
after my death and carry it to the maximum perfection, seeing that those men
are free agents and will freely decide, tomorrow, what man is then to be.
Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the
others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will
then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will
be such as men have decided they shall be. Does that mean that I should abandon
myself to quietism? No. First I ought to commit myself and then act my
commitment, according to the time-honoured formula that “one need not hope in
order to undertake one’s work.” Nor does this mean that I should not belong to
a party, but only that I should be without illusion and that I should do what I
can. For instance, if I ask myself “Will the social ideal as such, ever become
a reality?” I cannot tell, I only know that whatever may be in my power to make
it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing.
Quietism is the attitude of people who say, “let others do
what I cannot do.” The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the
opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action.
It goes further, indeed, and adds, “Man is nothing else but what he purposes,
he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else
but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” Hence we can
well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have
but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think,
“Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better
than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship;
but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I
have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do
so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I
did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide
range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly
viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the
mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there
is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than
that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is
expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of
Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which
there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet
another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man
commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.
No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of
his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that
reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define
a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that
is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one
says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an
artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things
contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a
man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the
organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.
In the light of all this, what people reproach us with is
not, after all, our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism. If people
condemn our works of fiction, in which we describe characters that are base,
weak, cowardly and sometimes even frankly evil, it is not only because those
characters are base, weak, cowardly or evil. For suppose that, like Zola, we
showed that the behaviour of these characters was caused by their heredity, or
by the action of their environment upon them, or by determining factors,
psychic or organic. People would be reassured, they would say, “You see, that
is what we are like, no one can do anything about it.” But the existentialist,
when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is
not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not
become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he
has made himself into a coward by actions. There is no such thing as a cowardly
temperament. There are nervous temperaments; there is what is called
impoverished blood, and there are also rich temperaments. But the man whose
blood is poor is not a coward for all that, for what produces cowardice is the
act of giving up or giving way; and a temperament is not an action. A coward is
defined by the deed that he has done. What people feel obscurely, and with
horror, is that the coward as we present him is guilty of being a coward. What
people would prefer would be to be born either a coward or a hero. One of the
charges most often laid against the Chemins de la Liberté is something like
this: “But, after all, these people being so base, how can you make them into
heroes?” That objection is really rather comic, for it implies that people are
born heroes: and that is, at bottom, what such people would like to think. If
you are born cowards, you can be quite content, you can do nothing about it and
you will be cowards all your lives whatever you do; and if you are born heroes
you can again be quite content; you will be heroes all your lives eating and
drinking heroically. Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes
himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a
possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being
a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case
or particular action that you are committed altogether.
We have now, I think, dealt with a certain number of the
reproaches against existentialism. You have seen that it cannot be regarded as
a philosophy of quietism since it defines man by his action; nor as a
pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic, the destiny
of man is placed within himself. Nor is it an attempt to discourage man from
action since it tells him that there is no hope except in his action, and that
the one thing which permits him to have life is the deed. Upon this level
therefore, what we are considering is an ethic of action and self-commitment.
However, we are still reproached, upon these few data, for confining man within
his individual subjectivity. There again people badly misunderstand us.
Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the
individual, and that for strictly philosophic reasons. It is not because we are
bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching upon the truth, and not
upon a collection of fine theories, full of hope but lacking real foundations.
And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I
think, therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it
attains to itself. Every theory which begins with man, outside of this moment
of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby suppresses the truth, for outside
of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable, and any
doctrine of probabilities which is not attached to a truth will crumble into
nothing. In order to define the probable one must possess the true. Before
there can be any truth whatever, then, there must be an absolute truth, and
there is such a truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of
everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of one’s self.
In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with
the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object.
All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an
object – that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different
from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a
chair or a stone. Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a
pattern of values in distinction from the material world. But the subjectivity
which we thus postulate as the standard of truth is no narrowly individual
subjectivism, for as we have demonstrated, it is not only one’s own self that
one discovers in the cogito, but those of others too. Contrary to the
philosophy of Descartes, contrary to that of Kant, when we say “I think” we are
attaining to ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain
of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus the man who discovers himself
directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the
condition of his own existence. He recognises that he cannot be anything (in
the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous)
unless others recognise him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about
myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to
my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these
conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation
of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will
without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in
a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world
that man has to decide what he is and what others are.
Furthermore, although it is impossible to find in each and
every man a universal essence that can be called human nature, there is
nevertheless a human universality of condition. It is not by chance that the
thinkers of today are so much more ready to speak of the condition than of the
nature of man. By his condition they understand, with more or less clarity, all
the limitations which a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the
universe. His historical situations are variable: man may be born a slave in a
pagan society or may be a feudal baron, or a proletarian. But what never vary
are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.
These limitations are neither subjective nor objective, or rather there is both
a subjective and an objective aspect of them. Objective, because we meet with
them everywhere and they are everywhere recognisable: and subjective because
they are lived and are nothing if man does not live them – if, that is to say,
he does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to them.
And, diverse though man’s purpose may be, at least none of them is wholly
foreign to me, since every human purpose presents itself as an attempt either
to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else to deny or to
accommodate oneself to them. Consequently every purpose, however individual it
may be, is of universal value. Every purpose, even that of a Chinese, an Indian
or a Negro, can be understood by a European. To say it can be understood, means
that the European of 1945 may be striving out of a certain situation towards
the same limitations in the same way, and that he may reconceive in himself the
purpose of the Chinese, of the Indian or the African. In every purpose there is
universality, in this sense that every purpose is comprehensible to every man.
Not that this or that purpose defines man for ever, but that it may be
entertained again and again. There is always some way of understanding an
idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient
information. In this sense we may say that there is a human universality, but
it is not something given; it is being perpetually made. I make this
universality in choosing myself; I also make it by understanding the purpose of
any other man, of whatever epoch. This absoluteness of the act of choice does
not alter the relativity of each epoch.
What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is
the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realises
himself in realising a type of humanity – a commitment always understandable,
to no matter whom in no matter what epoch – and its bearing upon the relativity
of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment. One
must observe equally the relativity of Cartesianism and the absolute character
of the Cartesian commitment. In this sense you may say, if you like, that every
one of us makes the absolute by breathing, by eating, by sleeping or by
behaving in any fashion whatsoever. There is no difference between free being –
being as self-committal, as existence choosing its essence – and absolute
being. And there is no difference whatever between being as an absolute,
temporarily localised that is, localised in history – and universally
intelligible being.
This does not completely refute the charge of subjectivism.
Indeed that objection appears in several other forms, of which the first is as
follows. People say to us, “Then it does not matter what you do,” and they say
this in various ways.
First they tax us with anarchy; then they say, “You cannot
judge others, for there is no reason for preferring one purpose to another”;
finally, they may say, “Everything being merely voluntary in this choice of
yours, you give away with one hand what you pretend to gain with the other.”
These three are not very serious objections. As to the first, to say that it
does not matter what you choose is not correct. In one sense choice is
possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I
must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice. This, although it
may appear merely formal, is of great importance as a limit to fantasy and
caprice. For, when I confront a real situation – for example, that I am a
sexual being, able to have relations with a being of the other sex and able to
have children – I am obliged to choose my attitude to it, and in every respect
I bear the responsibility of the choice which, in committing myself, also
commits the whole of humanity. Even if my choice is determined by no a priori
value whatever, it can have nothing to do with caprice: and if anyone thinks
that this is only Gide’s theory of the acte gratuit over again, he has failed
to see the enormous difference between this theory and that of Gide. Gide does
not know what a situation is, his “act” is one of pure caprice. In our view, on
the contrary, man finds himself in an organised situation in which he is
himself involved: his choice involves mankind in its entirety, and he cannot
avoid choosing. Either he must remain single, or he must marry without having children,
or he must marry and have children. In any case, and whichever he may choose,
it is impossible for him, in respect of this situation, not to take complete
responsibility. Doubtless he chooses without reference to any pre-established
value, but it is unjust to tax him with caprice. Rather let us say that the
moral choice is comparable to the construction of a work of art.
But here I must at once digress to make it quite clear that
we are not propounding an aesthetic morality, for our adversaries are
disingenuous enough to reproach us even with that. I mention the work of art
only by way of comparison. That being understood, does anyone reproach an
artist, when he paints a picture, for not following rules established a priori.
Does one ever ask what is the picture that he ought to paint? As everyone
knows, there is no pre-defined picture for him to make; the artist applies
himself to the composition of a picture, and the picture that ought to be made
is precisely that which he will have made. As everyone knows, there are no
aesthetic values a priori, but there are values which will appear in due course
in the coherence of the picture, in the relation between the will to create and
the finished work. No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like;
one cannot judge a painting until it is done. What has that to do with
morality? We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of
art as irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand
very well that the composition became what it is at the time when he was
painting it, and that his works are part and parcel of his entire life.
It is the same upon the plane of morality. There is this in
common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and
invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done. I think it
was made sufficiently clear to you in the case of that student who came to see
me, that to whatever ethical system he might appeal, the Kantian or any other,
he could find no sort of guidance whatever; he was obliged to invent the law
for himself. Certainly we cannot say that this man, in choosing to remain with
his mother – that is, in taking sentiment, personal devotion and concrete
charity as his moral foundations – would be making an irresponsible choice, nor
could we do so if he preferred the sacrifice of going away to England. Man
makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of
his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of
circumstances upon him. We define man only in relation to his commitments; it
is therefore absurd to reproach us for irresponsibility in our choice.
In the second place, people say to us, “You are unable to
judge others.” This is true in one sense and false in another. It is true in
this sense, that whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all
clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible
for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in
progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a
situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the
situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice
between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for
example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P.
[Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists.
We can judge, nevertheless, for, as I have said, one chooses
in view of others, and in view of others one chooses himself. One can judge,
first – and perhaps this is not a judgment of value, but it is a logical
judgment – that in certain cases choice is founded upon an error, and in others
upon the truth. One can judge a man by saying that he deceives himself. Since
we have defined the situation of man as one of free choice, without excuse and
without help, any man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by
inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-deceiver. One may object: “But
why should he not choose to deceive himself?” I reply that it is not for me to
judge him morally, but I define his self-deception as an error. Here one cannot
avoid pronouncing a judgment of truth. The self-deception is evidently a
falsehood, because it is a dissimulation of man’s complete liberty of
commitment. Upon this same level, I say that it is also a self-deception if I
choose to declare that certain values are incumbent upon me; I am in
contradiction with myself if I will these values and at the same time say that
they impose themselves upon me. If anyone says to me, “And what if I wish to
deceive myself?” I answer, “There is no reason why you should not, but I
declare that you are doing so, and that the attitude of strict consistency
alone is that of good faith.” Furthermore, I can pronounce a moral judgment.
For I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no
other end and aim but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend
upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and
that is freedom as the foundation of all values. That does not mean that he
wills it in the abstract: it simply means that the actions of men of good faith
have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself as such. A
man who belongs to some communist or revolutionary society wills certain
concrete ends, which imply the will to freedom, but that freedom is willed in
community. We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular
circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends
entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon
our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others,
but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of
others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make
that of others equally my aim. Consequently, when I recognise, as entirely
authentic, that man is a being whose existence precedes his essence, and that
he is a free being who cannot, in any circumstances, but will his freedom, at
the same time I realize that I cannot not will the freedom of others. Thus, in
the name of that will to freedom which is implied in freedom itself, I can form
judgments upon those who seek to hide from themselves the wholly voluntary
nature of their existence and its complete freedom. Those who hide from this
total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with deterministic excuses, I shall
call cowards. Others, who try to show that their existence is necessary, when
it is merely an accident of the appearance of the human race on earth – I shall
call scum. But neither cowards nor scum can be identified except upon the plane
of strict authenticity. Thus, although the content of morality is variable, a
certain form of this morality is universal. Kant declared that freedom is a
will both to itself and to the freedom of others. Agreed: but he thinks that
the formal and the universal suffice for the constitution of a morality. We
think, on the contrary, that principles that are too abstract break down when
we come to defining action. To take once again the case of that student; by
what authority, in the name of what golden rule of morality, do you think he
could have decided, in perfect peace of mind, either to abandon his mother or
to remain with her? There are no means of judging. The content is always
concrete, and therefore unpredictable; it has always to be invented. The one
thing that counts, is to know whether the invention is made in the name of
freedom.
Let us, for example, examine the two following cases, and
you will see how far they are similar in spite of their difference. Let us take
The Mill on the Floss. We find here a certain young woman, Maggie Tulliver, who
is an incarnation of the value of passion and is aware of it. She is in love
with a young man, Stephen, who is engaged to another, an insignificant young
woman. This Maggie Tulliver, instead of heedlessly seeking her own happiness,
chooses in the name of human solidarity to sacrifice herself and to give up the
man she loves. On the other hand, La Sanseverina in Stendhal’s Chartreuse de
Parme, believing that it is passion which endows man with his real value, would
have declared that a grand passion justifies its sacrifices, and must be
preferred to the banality of such conjugal love as would unite Stephen to the
little goose he was engaged to marry. It is the latter that she would have
chosen to sacrifice in realising her own happiness, and, as Stendhal shows, she
would also sacrifice herself upon the plane of passion if life made that demand
upon her. Here we are facing two clearly opposed moralities; but I claim that
they are equivalent, seeing that in both cases the overruling aim is freedom.
You can imagine two attitudes exactly similar in effect, in that one girl might
prefer, in resignation, to give up her lover while the other preferred, in
fulfilment of sexual desire, to ignore the prior engagement of the man she loved;
and, externally, these two cases might appear the same as the two we have just
cited, while being in fact entirely different. The attitude of La Sanseverina
is much nearer to that of Maggie Tulliver than to one of careless greed. Thus,
you see, the second objection is at once true and false. One can choose
anything, but only if it is upon the plane of free commitment.
The third objection, stated by saying, “You take with one
hand what you give with the other,” means, at bottom, “your values are not serious,
since you choose them yourselves.” To that I can only say that I am very sorry
that it should be so; but if I have excluded God the Father, there must be
somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are. And moreover, to
say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this; that there is
no sense in life a priori. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours
to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you
choose. Therefore, you can see that there is a possibility of creating a human
community. I have been reproached for suggesting that existentialism is a form
of humanism: people have said to me, “But you have written in your Nausée that
the humanists are wrong, you have even ridiculed a certain type of humanism,
why do you now go back upon that?” In reality, the word humanism has two very
different meanings. One may understand by humanism a theory which upholds man
as the end-in-itself and as the supreme value. Humanism in this sense appears,
for instance, in Cocteau’s story Round the World in 80 Hours, in which one of
the characters declares, because he is flying over mountains in an airplane,
“Man is magnificent!” This signifies that although I personally have not built
aeroplanes, I have the benefit of those particular inventions and that I
personally, being a man, can consider myself responsible for, and honoured by,
achievements that are peculiar to some men. It is to assume that we can ascribe
value to man according to the most distinguished deeds of certain men. That
kind of humanism is absurd, for only the dog or the horse would be in a
position to pronounce a general judgment upon man and declare that he is
magnificent, which they have never been such fools as to do – at least, not as
far as I know. But neither is it admissible that a man should pronounce
judgment upon Man. Existentialism dispenses with any judgment of this sort: an
existentialist will never take man as the end, since man is still to be
determined. And we have no right to believe that humanity is something to which
we could set up a cult, after the manner of Auguste Comte. The cult of humanity
ends in Comtian humanism, shut-in upon itself, and – this must be said – in
Fascism. We do not want a humanism like that.
But there is another sense of the word, of which the
fundamental meaning is this: Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in
projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and,
on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able
to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing, and can grasp objects only in
relation to his self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and center of his
transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe
of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man
(not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of
self-surpassing) with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in
himself but forever present in a human universe) – it is this that we call
existential humanism. This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no
legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for
himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but
always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some
particular realisation, that man can realize himself as truly human.
You can see from these few reflections that nothing could be
more unjust than the objections people raise against us. Existentialism is
nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently
atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into
despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of
unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different.
Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in
demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if
God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we
believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His
existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that
nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of
God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action,
and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that
Christians can describe us as without hope.
For further exploration:
“The Myth of Sisyphus”
by Albert Camus
