What follows is merely my interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s pivotal 1946 lecture, “Existentialism is a Humanism.” While this lecture was not Sartre’s first presentation of the themes that characterized and, dare I say, united the corpus of his writings, and while this lecture most certainly did not crystallize his thought on the significance and action of the subject, I want to spend some time with the text itself to courageously insert myself, so to speak, into its environment…notwithstanding, of course, the limitation that is my own environment in the here and of this time. This is not an endorsement but an attempt to understand.
Post-war France is the setting, that is, if one can suitably describe as “post-war” the vantage point of a passage of one year after the conclusion of Europe’s national and spiritual apocalypse. The blood war for Europe’s landscape and borderlands most certainly has ended, but the battle for the soul of Europe—and France especially—wages on. This, perhaps or perhaps not, is what is most pressing on the Parisian theoretician who, at mid-life, was suddenly roused out of the reverie of an abstract project of “phenomenological ontology” having witnessed the flight of the spirit of Catholicism in France, the diminishing of national identity, the erosion of the great chain of being, the fracture of positivism…and who knows what else. What then is left for him in 1946 Paris when nationalism, religion, metaphysics and economics no longer have form but within the academy? Perhaps the self. But what self?
Certainly not the self of the metaphysicians—the person is an individual substance of a rational nature. Certainly not the “individual” of the British and Scottish empiricists, whose concept of self-identity amounted to no more than a castle in the air. Certainly not the individual of the bourgeois culture, whose effacing relations amount to a mere I give you what you want, you give me what I want. The self is faceless now without an eternal form, without an image or likeness, without subsisting being. The self has to be created, not from without but from within. So stands our Parisian pioneer.
There is no God, he says, and so there is no human nature, no eternal essence to be but one of many ideas in His eternal mind. Existence, he claims, precedes essence. But that’s incoherent! Essence, the masters of the University used to say, limits existence, it sets the bounds of participation in ipsum esse subsistens. There cannot be an existent in existence whose essence isn’t already prior determined. Not even the existence of God, they said, preceded His essence for His essence is existence. But recall our Parisian has already done away with God. The abolishment took place in his youth, and if adolescent doubt was not sufficient, then surely the Germans and Allies were. If there is no God (and our Parisian is stalwart in his denial), then those clever definitions of the schoolmen are gibberish. Existence is not participation or degree of perfection; it is no exitus or reditus. Existence is possibility. Why? Well, there is no doubt that I exist—ego cogito, ergo ego sum, one of those residual Cartesian effects that enchanted even the master himself, Husserl.
I exist, that is for certain, and this subjectivity or self is where I must begin, he tells me, for the towers of the old thinkers lie in ruins. But must it be so? Did not the great thinkers of the Enlightenment conceive of a stock human nature that even I possess irrespective of the existence of God? Yes, but they indiscriminately kept the structure of a concept without its foundation. Without God to ground human nature—a human essence—what is left is, for lack of a better phrase, human reality in its sheer existence. Without essence, man is nothing—undefined and lacking form—and yet man is confronted with a possibility to be that which he chooses, and that inaugurates the drama between his being and his nothingness. This is to push the absence of God to its limits in abandonment.
Our Parisian tells us that man cannot move beyond subjectivity (how could he?), and so his entire existence is one of freedom to choose what he wills to be. Yet, this is not some sentimental pop-psychology you-can-do-it manner of thinking. Rather, it is a grave responsibility—the gravest of responsibilities, in fact. Man is left to himself; he is in full possession of himself. Hence, abandonment. The imago Dei fashioned by God is really the imago hominis created by the self for all men. There is no pre-conceived plan, there is no limit concept (except subjectivity, of course), no a priori values, there is no binding essence restricting this existence in the free and the possible. I am, I exist—Descartes was right—but I am not a res cogitans within the greater scheme of an ontological hierarchy of substances and modes. I am a self, but for how long? For as long as I continually invent myself in each passing moment, for if I cease to choose I slip further and further back into nothingness. In other words, the very self of which I am sure that I am is at stake, and only my freedom—my very own continual choice—can make my essence. Existentialism, our dear Parisian claims, is about responsibility and optimism, not about pessimism and resignation. Reality—my reality—results in my own action within my environment among my others. I choose, perhaps out of the ressentiment of a Dostoevsky character or out of the so-called creative fidelity of Marcel. Whatever be the case, I invent my essence through my freedom, and should I choose not to invent, I remain as nothing, yet a nothing that nevertheless exists! My absolute commitment constitutes humanity, for I shape humanity by my choice. I choose for me and for all that is possible for the lot of us. Descartes says that my will is boundless, unbridled, infinite; so it is! But if I do not choose, I am not thereby assured that I am still a something, as Descartes would have it. Possibility to be something is the result of choice…action…commitment. The drama of becoming a self.
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