Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism

Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism

Jean-Paul Sartre delivered his 1945 lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris, later published in 1946, defending his version of existentialism against critics from across the French intellectual scene. The lecture engaged interlocutors and institutions such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, André Breton, Georges Bataille, and organizations like the French Communist Party and the Vichy regime-era readership, situating Sartre within debates involving Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Background and Context

Sartre composed the lecture amid post-World War II reconstruction, contemporaneous with events like the Nuremberg Trials, the founding of the United Nations, the formation of the Fourth Republic, and intellectual currents from the Surrealist movement, Phenomenology of Mind influences, and controversies involving figures such as Louis Althusser, Raymond Aron, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Arthur Koestler. The milieu included institutions and publications like Les Temps Modernes, the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, Le Monde, Libération, and debates with activists linked to Indochina and Algerian struggles. Philosophical antecedents referenced or implicitly contested included René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Max Weber, and Wilhelm Dilthey.

Summary of the Lecture

Sartre opens by addressing critics from journals and thinkers like Marcel Aymé, Gustave Flaubert-era readers, and commentators associated with Jean Cocteau or Jacques Lacan. He defines existentialism against misrepresentations linked to religious existentialists such as Søren Kierkegaard, and in dialogue with secular intellectuals including Simone Weil, José Ortega y Gasset, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus. Central claims: existence precedes essence, human freedom is radical, and individuals bear responsibility—positions interacting with the ideas of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Nabokov, and critics from France Culture circles. The lecture counters accusations of pessimism and moral subjectivism advanced by personalities like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and institutions such as the Prix Goncourt jury, while invoking analogies drawn from literature by Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert.

Key Themes and Concepts

Sartre articulates terms in conversation with philosophers and writers: freedom and responsibility compared to Immanuel Kant's autonomy and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract; bad faith analyzed alongside critiques from Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl; authenticity linked to literary exemplars like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Ivan Turgenev. He addresses ethics without divine law, dialoguing with Thomas Aquinas, Pope Pius XII, Blaise Pascal, Baron d'Holbach, and secular moralists such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. The lecture frames commitment and praxis in ways that intersect debates about class struggle thinkers including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georges Sorel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and activists like Jean Jaurès, Georges Clemenceau, Gaston Berger, and Paul Nizan. Sartre's existentialism also engages literary and political figures such as Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Éluard, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, André Malraux, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Reception and Criticism

The lecture provoked response across newspapers, journals, and public intellectuals: positive and negative appraisals from Les Temps Modernes contributors, Marxist critics including Georges Politzer and Raymond Aron, Catholic commentators aligned with Charles Maurras or Jacques Maritain, and literary critics writing in Le Figaro and Le Monde. Critics such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, Louis Althusser, Raymond Aron, Jean Wahl, and Emmanuel Levinas contested Sartre's arguments on freedom, responsibility, and politics. Institutions like the French Communist Party, the Académie Française, and publishers including Gallimard mediated the work's dissemination, while international responses involved scholars at Harvard University, University of Oxford, Columbia University, University of Berlin, Princeton University, and journals like The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, and The Atlantic.

Influence and Legacy

Sartre's lecture shaped postwar debates in philosophy, literature, and politics, influencing thinkers and movements including Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Its cultural impact extended into theater and film through practitioners like Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, André Malraux, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. Political echoes appear in debates over decolonization, the Algerian War, the May 1968 protests, and intellectual currents within New Left movements and universities such as École Normale Supérieure and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. The lecture's tensions with Marxism, theology, and analytic philosophy informed later scholarship at centers like King's College London, Princeton Theological Seminary, Yale University, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley.

Category:Jean-Paul Sartre Category:Existentialist works Category:Philosophy books