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Gardner, Sebastian
2017.
The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy.
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636.
Article contents
Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
Sartre presented ‘Existentialism and Humanism’ to a popular audience in Paris late in 1945. As he implies in the discussion which is appended to the text of the lecture (pp. 57–58), he was here simplifying his views so as to make them intelligible to a wide audience. In this he succeeded only too well; the lecture has become exceedingly well known and has been regarded as a definitive presentation not only of Sartre's philosophy at the time, but also of ‘existentialism’. One thing I hope to show in this essay is that this is not a sensible view to take; Sartre's text requires a good deal of interpretation and qualification in the light of his other writings of the period, and what emerges is a position which is uniquely his own. One way in which this can be seen is by considering Heidegger's ‘Letter on Humanism’ of 1947 which is a response to Sartre's lecture and is, indeed, Heidegger's only direct response to Sartre's work. In the lecture Sartre had associated Heidegger with himself as an ‘existential atheist’ (p. 26), but in his letter Heidegger emphatically dissociates himself both from atheism and from existentialism as characterized by Sartre, and goes on to criticize the position advanced by Sartre in the lecture. Yet despite the popular exaggeration of the significance of Sartre's lecture, it is certainly worth studying; for not only is it short and accessible, though in some respects misleading, it is also one of Sartre's few indications of the positive ethical theory which so many of his writings require but do not supply.
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- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 20: Philosophers Ancient and Modern , March 1986 , pp. 287 - 307
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1986
References
1 Sartre's title is ‘L'Existentialisme est un humanisme’, whose meaning is distorted in Mairet's translation of it. Despite this error, Mairet's translation is largely reliable, although his introduction is not. My references are to the 1948 edition (Methuen: London).
2 The occasion is described by de Beauvoir, S. in The Force of Circumstances (Penguin: London, 1968), 46.Google Scholar
3 According to Sartre's friend Francois Jeanson, Sartre even came to regret the publication of the lecture. Cf. Jeanson, F., La problème Morale et la pensée de Sartre (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 36.Google Scholar
4 In Heidegger, M., Basic Writings, Krell, D. M. (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1978).Google Scholar
5 First published in 1938; my references are to the translation by Baldick, R. (Penguin: London, 1965).Google Scholar
6 First published in 1960; my references to it as CDR are to the translation edited by Ree, J. (London: New Left Books, 1976).Google Scholar
7 First published in 1943. My references will be to the 1958 edition of the translation by H. Barnes (Methuen: London), which is now the standard edition of this translation. There are other editions, however, with different page numbers.
8 Cf. A. MacIntyre, both in his early article ‘Existentialism’ (which occurs in Sartre, Warnock, M. (ed.) (New York: Anchor, 1971), esp. pp. 54–55Google Scholar and in After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981)Google Scholar, esp. Ch. 3; Warnock, M., Existentialism (London: Oxford University Press 1970), 123Google Scholar; Danto, A., Sartre (London: Fontana, 1975), 141Google Scholar; Olafson, F., Principles and Persons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1967), 65–66.Google Scholar
9 First published in 1927. My references to it as B&T are to the translation by Macquarrie and Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).
10 In so far as Sartre argues for it, the arguments occur at B&N pp. 23–24, 433–438, and in other earlier writings.
11 First published in 1957. My references are to the translation by Barnes, H. (New York: Vintage, 1968).Google Scholar Cf. also Sartre's comments in ‘Itinerary of a Thought’ in New Left Review 58, (11–12 1969), 44–45.Google Scholar
12 Cf. ‘Cartesian Freedom’ in Sartre, 's Literary and Philosophical Essays (London: Hutchinson, 1955).Google Scholar
13 Op. cit., note 12, p. 184.
14 By ‘ideality’ here Sartre of course means, not that values are ideals (as, say, justice or mercy might be) but that they are ‘ideal’ in the sense which contrasts with ‘real’.
15 The description of Sartre's views in terms of a contrast between negative and positive freedoms also occurs in Jeanson, 's book op. cit., note 3, pp. 27, 249ff.Google Scholar
16 In Existentialisme ou Marxisme (Paris: Nagel, 1948), esp. pp. 128ff.Google Scholar I consider Lukacs' to be still the most helpful critical study of Sartre's early ethical theory.
17 Cf. A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972).Google Scholar
18 Cf. Sartre, 's essay Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Noonday, 1957), 64–65.Google Scholar
19 A point rightly stressed by Habermas, J. in the appendix to Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon, 1971).Google Scholar
20 Likewise Sartre's What is Literature? (originally published in 1948; my references will be to the English translation published by Methuen in 1967).
21 I would recommend anyone interested to start by reading the second notebook (pp. 429ff.) which includes (pp. 484–487) something like a prospective table of contents for the projected book.
22 ‘Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self’, pp. 136–137Google Scholar in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, N. Lawrence and D. J. O'Connor (eds).
23 For a clear expression of this tendency cf. the Air Vice-Marshall's speech in Ch. 12 of Warner, Rex's novel The Aerodrome.Google Scholar The similarities with some Sartrean theses is almost uncanny, but the moral implications are developed in a direction Sartre would not have liked.
24 Baudelaire (London: H. Hamilton, 1949), 70.Google Scholar
25 Despite his stress on ‘being-with’ the perspective of the individual is still primary in Heidegger's Being and Time; cf. the significance of death (p. 284) and the ‘sober anxiety’ described on p. 358.Google Scholar
26 Cf. What is Literature?, pp. 44, 203–204, 216–217Google Scholar, Cahiers, pp. 487, 516.Google Scholar
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