Existentialism is a Humanism

Sartre responds to questions from two people, an unidentified audience member and Pierre Naville, a leftist surrealist writer.

The unidentified audience member expresses dissatisfaction with the discussions of despair and abandonment that Sartre offers in an article published in Action. Sartre responds by reformulating what he means by “anguish”: “the total absence of justification accompanied, at the same time, by responsibility toward all” (55). He also concedes that the Action article did dilute his arguments. Sartre partially blames unqualified interviewers at the magazine, whose questions forced him to simplify his ideas. He adds that “these days, philosophy is shot down in the public square” (56) and engagement with the public, and therefore the occasional oversimplification, is a necessary aspect of the contemporary philosopher’s life. He cites Marx’s Communist Manifesto as an example of such simplification, and the unidentified interlocutor insists that the text is “a combat weapon” (56) rather than a popularization of Marx’s views.

Pierre Naville says that existentialist ideas and the various viewpoints compatible with Sartre’s view converge on a single point: that of “some kind of revival of liberalism” (56).

According to Naville, the “old liberalism” has become impossible, and contemporary life demands a “tormented and anguished form of liberalism,” which Sartre’s thought, in its attempt to rehabilitate “the essential tenets of radical socialism and humanist liberalism,” provides (58). Naville explains that he has in mind Sartre’s expressions of respect for the dignity of mankind and the individual. Naville’s major objection to Sartre’s work is that, in order to justify these notions of dignity, Sartre supposedly distinguishes between two meanings of “humanity”: “the human condition”, and “humanism” while actually “cling[ing] to the original one[s]” (58).

According to Naville, Sartre’s concept of existence is actually just the notion of human nature “as it was defined in the eighteenth century” (59). That is, Naville thinks that what Sartre means by “the human condition” is reducible to the eighteenth-century notion of a “uniform and schematic” (60) human nature characterized by individual freedom, whereas a contemporary (and presumably correct) conception of the human condition is defined in terms of historically contingent categories like class and race that determine the horizons of an individual’s possibilities. However, unlike the “self-congratulatory” eighteenth-century conception of human nature, Sartre’s notion of the human condition is “a fearful, uncertain, and forlorn condition” (60). This is because, according to Naville, Sartre’s human condition is “not yet truly committed to what existentialism calls ‘projects’, and which is therefore a precondition” (60).

Naville argues that it would be better to speak of “naturalism” than of “humanism,” since “the primary reality is natural reality, of which human reality is just a function” (61). However, to do this, one would have to take history more seriously than Sartre does; individuals are born not into an abstract existence, but into an historical one. Naville says:

individuals [...] appear in a world they have always been a part of, which conditions them, and which they in turn condition, just as the mother conditions her child, and her child also conditions her, from the moment she becomes pregnant. Only from this perspective are we entitled to speak of the human condition as a primary reality (61). 

According to Naville:

if it is true that there is no such thing as an abstract human nature—an essence separate from, or preceding, his existence—it is also certain that there is no such thing as a human condition in general, even if, by ‘condition’, you mean a number of real-life circumstances or situations because, in your opinion, they have not been articulated (62).

Naville recommends a Marxist analysis of “nature in man and man in nature” (62) that, by analyzing man from a collective rather than an individual standpoint, avoids having to posit an abstract human nature.