Existentialism Is a Humanism summary

When Sartre gave his lecture in 1945, the French public associated existentialism with unseemly novels about cowards, crooks, and castoffs. According to the popular cliché, the people who wrote them hung out in smoky cafés listening to jazz records and plotting new ways to scandalise the respectable middle-classes. It was this hostile caricature that Sartre wanted to correct in his remarks on existentialism and humanism.

Contrary to what many think, he begins, existentialism is a technical doctrine for specialists. Its central claim is a fairly dry argument about the nature of being, a branch of philosophical inquiry known as ontology. It holds that “existence precedes essence.”

In Nausea, Sartre’s first novel, we watch as a man called Antoine Roquentin suddenly grasps the implications of the supposedly “technical” doctrine of existentialism. 

Sitting on a bench, he observes people strolling around a public garden while studying the shapes of chestnut tree roots. The more he looks, the less real it all becomes. He begins to feel sick. There’s no reason, he thinks, for anything to be here rather than there – or anywhere at all. Overcome by the “vertigo of possibility,” he contemplates killing himself on the spot, but the idea of his corpse on the gravel is as superfluous as that of his living body on the bench.  

So Sartre locates values in actions, not in facts waiting to be discovered “out there” in the world. Nothing necessarily follows from empirical claims. Scientists can tell us how many micrograms of pesticide a liter of water contains, but is that good or bad? The question has little meaning until we bring it into relationship with our projects as morally interested beings who care about things like conservation, economic growth, or food sovereignty. As Sartre puts it, a boulder is an inert fact; it becomes an “obstacle” when it enters the perception of the climber who finds it blocking her path on this particular mountain. 

We appeal to facts, Sartre thinks, not because we’re philosophically muddleheaded, but because we want an alibi. When we seek ethical guidance from facts outside ourselves, we’re trying to avoid taking responsibility for our values. These dodges can take any number of forms. Biological determinists appeal to evolution, Marxists to the means of production, Freudians to the unconscious. As Sartre sees it, these intellectual schools are all engaged in more or less elaborate attempts to evade responsibility. 

In his lecture, Sartre tells us about the dilemma of a student in occupied France. This young man wanted to go to Britain, join the Free French Forces based there, and fight the Germans who had killed his brother. His mother, however, hadn’t only lost a child – she’d also been abandoned by her husband, who, to make matters worse, was a collaborator. Realizing his mother lived only for him, the student was as reluctant to leave her as he was keen on doing his patriotic duty and avenging his brother. What, then, was the right course of action? 

Sartre looks at the problem from two conventional perspectives. Christian doctrine tells us a lot about the nobility of love and sacrifice, but it doesn’t answer the student’s question: does family or country have a greater claim on us? Kantian morality meanwhile instructs us to always treat others as ends, never as means. But whose ends trumps whose – his mother’s, or those of the soldiers indirectly fighting on the student’s behalf?