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Existentialism is a Humanism
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Symbols & Motifs
Man as an Isolated or a Social Being
Much of the disagreement between Sartre and the Marxists, to which “Existentialism is a Humanism” is a response, stems from Sartre’s focus on the individual. Sartre takes Descartes’s cogito—the individual’s awareness of himself or herself as a thinking being–as a piece of foundational knowledge. He also emphasizes the radical freedom of human beings; for him, each person is wholly free. A person can make any choice he likes, and in doing so he determines who and what he really is. Of course, according to Sartre, choosing for oneself implies choosing for others, as well, so Sartre disagreed with the Marxists’ criticism that his philosophy was too individualistic and bourgeois.
Marxists objected to this picture of human beings because they conceived of the individual not as a radically-free unit but rather as a socially- and historically-conditioned member of a collective. A person cannot make any choice he likes; he can only make the choices that are available to a person of his class, at his time in history, in his location. Moreover, even if a person were free to make any choice whatsoever, it is not individual choices that construct history and lead to meaningful social change.
The Absurd
Camus discusses the absurd, “both a factual state and the lucid awareness some people require from that state [...] Nothing less than man’s relationship to the world” (74), in relation to Camus’s The Stranger. For Sartre, human existence is absurd. Man is a rational being, with a desire for unity and the eternal, who approaches his projects with “concern” (75), yet the world we live in is one hopelessly separate from mind, our existence is hopelessly finite, and our efforts are all in vain.
Silence
In “A Commentary on The Stranger,” Sartre remarks that Camus has an “obsession with silence” (87). Drawing on Heidegger, Jules Renard, and Jean-Jacques Bernard, Sartre states that silence is “the authentic mode of speech” (87) and suggests that in The Stranger, Camus has attempted the impossible task of remaining silent in words. He notes that Camus’s protagonist, Mersault, is either silent or laconic. The prose of The Stranger, in contrast to Camus’s other works, is also “silent,” in the sense of presenting events and conversations in a way that is devoid of meaning or causality, in “clipped sentences that imitate the discontinuity of time” (93).
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By Jean-Paul Sartre
