Get Your Smart On
Part Two of our treatment of Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism Is A Humanism where Sartre gets to defining what Humanistic Existentialism is, after defending it against what it is not.
FOLLOW TO PREVIOUS PART ONE:
In this second part, Sartre defends Existentialism against common critiques that it is politically ineffective, pessimistic, and too individualistic or solipsistic. Finally, he defines his tendency of Existential Humanism *and underscores the extasis of the transcendent subject that lies at the core of its authenticity. *
*Please note that the subject here is always referred to in the masculine, and I have elected to preserve this gendering of the subject. You can choose to read women’s (indeed, all gendered) experiences as included in this account, or set that aside as a future project, the ex-stasis of women’s temporality and transcendence. For more on this you can turn to Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, etc. There is a plethora of work on this in feminist philosophy. *
*To begin then…. here is part two of the original podcast from 2018: *
…
Sartre doesn't believe that progress, political or otherwise, is guaranteed. There isn't an underlying sense that progress is inevitable for humankind. Here's what he writes, and I, I love this quote actually, it really resonates for me. He writes,
“Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be so cowardly and so slack as to let them do so. If so, fascism will then be the truth of man. And so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be. Does that mean that I should abandon myself to quietism? No. First, I ought to commit myself and then act my commitment according to the time honored formula that, ‘one need not hope in order to undertake one's work’. Nor does this mean that I should not belong to a party, but only that I should be without illusion. And that I should do what I can, for instance, if I ask myself, will a social ideal as such ever become a reality, I cannot tell. I only know that whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do. Beyond that, I can count upon nothing.”
So part of what he's saying here is that you have to act given the realities today. And you cannot act today, in order to secure a good that is somehow in the future, always in the future. That is really the trick of Christian theology and of many religions that you suffer now on earth because you will get a deferred reward later that is, you know, a place in heaven or whatnot. He says, if there is no heaven, if there is no God, then our actions are limited by what we know in the here and the now and we cannot do things in order to bring about something that we cannot predict. That I think is a very deep political insight that many on the left have forgotten, or perhaps never learned.
So let's go back to the three charges. The first charge was that of quietism, right? That existentialism is politically ineffective. Well, I think that Sartre believes that he has shown us that in fact, existentialism is the condition, the philosophy that describes and makes clear the conditions for authentic action in the world, politically effective action in the world.
What about the charge of pessimism? Well, here he elaborates a little bit more because he says that when people accuse existentialism of pessimism, often what they say is that the characters in his fictional works are awful. Like, why does he celebrate cowards and anti heroes? Why does he portray such negative pessimistic human pieces of you know what, and his response is that: Look, when I portray a coward I show the coward as being responsible for that cowardice Existentially responsible. I do not paint a picture of the coward as being cowardice because of this or that Cause that is beyond them and therefore as somehow just born into his cowardice, as not responsible, as somehow driven by some determined, predetermined condition to be a coward that they are. In fact, it's very optimistic because what it says is that as long as you're acting in a cowardly way, you deserve to be understood as a coward, but that at any moment you can change and take responsibility, and stop acting like a coward. You have the power to define that for yourself. Not that it's easy, but that that is your responsibility and your privilege as a human whose existence precedes essence.
Now, the third charge is a little bit more difficult and also more philosophical, more philosophically significant, as I have already noted. So we're going to get to that in the last part of this podcast session by taking a look at what he says about intersubjectivity and about self-surpassing. But first, let me give you the summary that Sartre gives us, and here I am reading from the text.
“We have now, I think, dealt with a certain number of reproaches against existentialism. You have seen that it cannot be regarded as a philosophy of quietism since it defines man by his action, nor as a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic. The destiny of man is placed within himself. Nor is it an attempt to discourage man from actions, since it tells him that there is no hope except in his actions, and that the one thing which permits him to have a life is the deed. Upon this level, therefore, what we are considering is an ethic of action and self-commitment. However, we are still reproached upon these few data for confining man within his individual subjectivity. There again, people badly misunderstand us.”
And here comes the last section of this essay. To answer this charge, I first want to give you kind of the overall generalized answer. Then I want to read you a kind of long quote, which is about intersubjectivity. And then I want to come back and try to fill out that answer a little bit more after having heard the quote. So generally speaking, Sartre's answer to the charge that the existential subject is confined in his own subjectivity and is somehow unable to reach the world. That is a charge that comes from an understanding of subjectivity that is that is based in Descartes Cogito, that is the I think therefore I am. We haven't covered Descartes, so we'll have to do that at some point. But the thing that I want to say here is that phenomenology emerges with Husserl, through Heidegger, and into the French reading of Heidegger, which includes Sartre, as a reaction and as an attempt to solve that very problem that emerges in Descartes.
That is the Cartesian subject who can know with certainty that only that he exists because he thinks. And this frames the philosophical enterprise as one that is primarily epistemological, that is that our existence in the world is primarily about knowing things. For the phenomenologist, this epistemological framing, this prioritizing of knowledge over ethics, say, or morality, is not one that is given or pre given, right? So the Cartesian subject has this problem that he can only know his interior life. He can only know himself as a thinking being. And therefore he can never be certain that the external world exists, as it is, independent from his thinking about it.
This is where you get a number of problems about brains and vats, right? How do we know that we're not simply a brain and a vat who is imagining that there's this world, this external reality? Because for the Cartesian subject, reality is a wholly internal perception. This is the problem of the subject object dichotomy that emerges very strongly at the birth of modern philosophy with Descartes.
Sartre is going to say that is not a problem for existentialism because the subject that we're adopting, the model of subjectivity is that of intersubjectivity. And it's a good thing that we did the Hegel. master slave dialectic because I think it'll be easier to see what Sartre's rebuke is to that charge against existentialism.
He basically says the subject that we're talking about always already, to use that kind of lingo of continental philosophy, always already includes the Other. That is an acknowledgement of recognition within itself of a world that it's taking into account as a part of that subjectivity. So let me now read you what Sartre says about this and hopefully this will make sense. This is probably the most difficult, well, the two parts that we're going to do now are the most difficult part of this text, the most dense, and I think they require the most understanding of the history of philosophy . Let's see how we do. Sartre writes,
“But the subjectivity which we thus postulate as the standard of truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism, for, as we have demonstrated, it is not only one's own self that one discovers in the cogito…”
In cognition, that is, he's using here Descartes word in order to signal that he is arguing against Descartes, okay.
“It is not only one's own self that one discovers in the cogito, but those of others too. Contrary to the philosophy of Descartes, contrary to that of Kant, who follows Descartes in this, when we say, I think, we are attaining to ourselves in the presence of the Other. So, the Other is always already included in the, I think, in the I am, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus, the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others and discovers them as a condition of his own existence.”
So what does that mean? Well, what that means according to the Hegelian dialectic is that you have the bifurcation of a generalized consciousness of human spirit into self consciousness. The way that you arrive at self consciousness is through the master slave dialectic, which requires that two self consciousnesses recognize each other in each other. So at the very moment that I am seeing the other, I am seeing the other seeing me. And so my notion of who I am not only incorporates my knowledge of the other and his world, but also, the other is a precondition for my being able to know myself as a thinking self.
Let me read a little bit further.
“Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as a condition of his own existence. He recognizes that he cannot be anything in the sense in which one says that one is spiritual, or that one is wicked, or jealous, unless others recognize him as such….”
Recognition here is an important word because as you will recall, one's self identity, one's subjectivity, one's ability to know anything at all depends on being recognized as a subject by the other. So recognition is the operation by which we as subjects gain reality or emerge as subjects.
“I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence and equally so to any knowledge that I can have about myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me.”
So our will to power, our decision, our choices, are always made with the understanding that they are made with and against others. So others are always part of the equation of the choices that we make. We do not make choices in a vacuum in which the world and others are irrelevant to our choices. Continuing: “Thus at once we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of intersubjectivity. It is a world that man has to decide what he is and what others are.”
So the existential subject is not the Cartesian subject. This is what Sartre is saying. The Cartesian subject is a subject that is divorced from the world. and that has difficulty reaching the world and verifying that the world exists outside of his own subjectivity. For all the Cartesian subject knows, the world is a mirage, an appearance, or the production of an evil genie, to use Descartes own analogy. And there's no real way to verify that the cognition of that subject is not an illusion.
The subject that emerges through intersubjectivity, on the other hand, is a subject that already includes within its own cognition, its own ability to know the recognition of an exterior world through the recognition of another and their being in the world. So Sartre here is basically dismissing this charge by saying that it's a misunderstanding, right? That there, there's an imposition of a Cartesian subject, which he does not hold and which is not a part of his philosophy.
(As an aside, I have done a whole series on intersubjectivity the start of which I link here, but also you can find all the posts in this series by scrolling down on the front page of the Philosophy Publics substack, where you will find that it is its own section.)
Okay, we've finally arrived at self-surpassing. Let me read you this quote and then we'll talk about it. Sartre writes,
“But there is another sense of the word, humanism, of which the fundamental meaning is this. Man is, all the time, outside of himself. It is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that man makes man to exist. And on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing and can grasp objects only in relation to his self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and the center of his transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man, not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing, with subjectivity, in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself forever present in a human universe. It is this that we call existential humanism.”
So let me just read that again without all the additions: There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man with subjectivity, it is this that we call existential humanism.
This is humanism because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself, that he himself thus abandoned must decide for himself. Also, because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking beyond himself an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realization that man can realize himself as truly human.
What Sartre is describing here is Heidegger's ek-stasis. Ek means beyond in the sense of out, and stasis comes from the word for a place. So leaving or surpassing the place that one is at. And ex-stasies for Heidegger is the structure of being in the world in the end. It's futurity. So Sartre here is restating something that Heidegger spends a lot of time developing.
The details of this structure of subjectivity, this ex-stasies, is that man is that type of being, that kind of being, that is, always anticipating what comes next, always attempting to go beyond, who is poised on the edge of the present and tipping into the future, and who is able to surprise even himself with what comes next.
There's a sense in which we don't know what we want until we arrive there. And then as soon as we arrive there, it is no longer enough. So we're always striving for what we want. We are always exercising our will upon the world and upon ourselves and upon others, in order to bring about a reality that we desire.
That reality is always futural because we never finally finish the project of our lives, right? We can never wake up one morning and say, okay, I'm done with, you know, being, you know, I've now fulfilled me-ness and I can move on to some other project. No, because the life project is being who you are.
And so as soon as you arrive at one milestone, that becomes or morphs into the next milestone. You know, that feeling of never being satisfied with what you do have, and that always striving for the next thing for more, anticipating what's going to come next, being wrong about that, having to refashion your desires and your strategy, that structure of anticipation and that futurity that is embedded in, in being in the world, that is what Sartre is describing. And he says that this is what humanism means in the deepest, best sense, and that is what he wants to mean by humanism when he says that existentialism is a humanism.
I hope you've enjoyed this explanation of Sartre's fabulous essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism.”
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber, Yale University Press, 2007.
You can read Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre for free on the Marxists Internet Archive: Marxists Internet Archive.