Existentialism Is a Humanism

Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945)

Author: Jean-Paul Sartre · 1945 L’Existentialisme est un humanisme

The Argument in One Paragraph

If God does not exist, Sartre argues, then there is no prior blueprint for what a human being should be. We exist first, as a blank, and define ourselves afterwards through action. From this one premise — “existence precedes essence” — everything follows: we are absolutely free, there are no objective values to consult, and every choice we make implicitly legislates for all humanity. That freedom feels terrible (Sartre calls the feelings anguish, abandonment, and despair), but it is also the only foundation on which a serious ethics can be built. Existentialism is therefore not the quietist, nihilist, pessimistic philosophy its critics accuse it of being. It is “an ethic of action and self-commitment” — a humanism that refuses all excuses and places the future of humanity in the hands of living individuals.

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What the Lecture Is About

By October 1945, Sartre was a public figure. [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]] had been out for two years, his plays were running, and “existentialism” had been picked up by the French press as a fashionable scandal. He was being attacked from both sides: the Communists said he was a bourgeois quietist offering despair instead of revolution; the Catholics said he was a nihilist who wallowed in the ugly and denied eternal values. Sartre decided to answer them both in a single public lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The hall was over-packed. The lecture, transcribed and published as a slim book, became the single most widely read statement of existentialism, ever.

Sartre’s defensive strategy is to concede nothing and instead sharpen the attack. Yes, he says, existentialism starts from atheism. Yes, that means we’re abandoned. Yes, it means anguish. No, none of this is pessimism. It is the only philosophy that takes the dignity of human beings seriously — precisely because it refuses to let us off the hook.

His opening move is the analogy of the paperknife. A paperknife has an essence before it exists: an artisan conceives it for a specific purpose, then manufactures it accordingly. For a paperknife, essence precedes existence. If God exists, the same is true of human beings — God is the divine artisan, and we are built for a purpose. But Sartre’s starting point is atheism. There is no divine artisan. So for us, the order is reversed: we exist first — thrown into the world without a blueprint — and only afterwards do we define what we are, through what we do. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

From this, three consequences. Abandonment: since there is no God, there are no objective values waiting for us in any “intelligible heaven.” We are alone with our choices. Anguish: every choice I make is not just for me; because I am choosing what a human being ought to be, I am implicitly legislating for everyone. The weight of that universal responsibility is anguish. Despair: I cannot rely on guaranteed outcomes — no historical necessity, no providence — to bail me out. I can only act on what lies within my will.

Sartre then illustrates all of this with his most famous concrete example: the student torn between his mother and the Resistance. A young man comes to Sartre during the Occupation. His father is a collaborator, his older brother was killed by the Germans, his mother lives alone and depends on him. He wants to join the Free French in England and fight — but doing so will abandon his mother, whose life hangs on his presence. What should he do? Sartre runs through every available moral framework. Christian ethics tells him to love his neighbor — but which neighbor, mother or country? Kantian ethics tells him not to treat persons as means — but either choice treats someone as a means. All abstract principles fail when they meet a concrete life. “You are free, therefore choose,” Sartre tells him. “That is to say, invent.”

Then, against the charge of solipsism, Sartre argues for inter-subjectivity. Because I begin in the Cartesian cogito — “I think, therefore I am” — I discover the existence of others immediately, as the necessary background of my own self-knowledge. My freedom cannot be exercised except in a world with others’ freedoms. Willing my own freedom authentically requires willing theirs too. This is how Sartre’s existentialism reaches an ethics: not through a prior law, but through the structural interdependence of free consciousnesses.

The lecture closes by flipping every accusation. Existentialism is not pessimism — it is “stern optimism,” because it strips away determinist excuses and places the destiny of humanity entirely in human hands. It is not quietism — “there is no reality except in action.” It is not anti-humanist — it is the only real humanism, because it doesn’t worship an abstract concept of Man but empowers actual, living individuals to transcend themselves in action.

Sartre later grew uncomfortable with the lecture, especially its somewhat schematic presentation of “choosing for all humanity” — a formula that flirts dangerously with a Kantian categorical imperative the rest of his philosophy is built to reject. But as an entry point it has never been superseded.

Key Concepts

• Existence precedes essence. The core axiom. Human beings exist first, as blanks, and invent themselves through action. Everything else in the lecture follows from this reversal.
• Abandonment (délaissement). Not a feeling of being let down — a structural condition. Since God does not exist, there are no pre-given values anywhere. We are “abandoned” in the world with no one to consult.
• Anguish (angoisse). The lived awareness that every choice I make is simultaneously a choice about what humanity ought to be. Not fear, not paralysis — the accurate emotional recognition of moral responsibility.
• Despair (désespoir). Not hopelessness. The recognition that we cannot rely on guaranteed outcomes, and must act only on what lies within our own will.
• Bad faith / self-deception (mauvaise foi). Taking refuge behind passions, deterministic doctrines, or inherited identities in order to avoid acknowledging one’s own freedom. “A coward is defined by the deed that he has done” — and he can stop being one whenever he chooses.
• Inter-subjectivity. The Cartesian cogito reveals not a solitary ego but a self that discovers itself always already among others. My freedom requires the freedom of others.
• Humanism. Not the abstract worship of Man-with-a-capital-M. The concrete insistence that individual human beings make themselves, and are therefore the only possible source of value.

Key Quotations

1. “Existence comes before essence.” — the single axiom from which the entire lecture unfolds.
2. “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards.” — the dynamic, unfinished nature of the human at birth.
3. “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.” — the principle of radical self-determination.
4. “Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless is free, because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” — the most quoted line of twentieth-century philosophy, and fairly.
5. “In choosing for himself he chooses for all men.” — the universalizing move that turns individual choice into ethical responsibility.
6. “A coward is defined by the deed that he has done.” — the refusal of determinist excuses.
7. “You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.” — the counsel to the student torn between mother and Resistance.
8. “There is no reality except in action.” — the anti-quietist kernel.
9. “The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.” — the honest atheist’s critique of the secular moralists who want God’s morals without God.
10. “Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.” — the closing existentialist creed.

Concrete Examples That Carry the Argument

Example	What it shows	Where
The paperknife	Essence precedes existence for manufactured objects. For humans, without a God-artisan, the order reverses.	The opening of the lecture.
The student torn between mother and Resistance	No abstract ethical system (Christian, Kantian, utilitarian) can decide a concrete moral crisis. Values are invented in action, not consulted in books.	The central illustration of abandonment.
Abraham and the angel	Even apparent divine commands have to be interpreted by a free subject. The responsibility for reading the sign is never outsourced.	The illustration of anguish.
The Jesuit’s failures	Facts (failing an exam, losing a job) don’t have a built-in meaning. The individual freely interprets them — as a defeat, as a sign from God, as a call to revolution.	The illustration of free self-interpretation.

Who He’s Arguing With

• The Communists. They accused existentialism of bourgeois quietism — a private contemplation of despair that refused commitment to revolutionary action. Sartre answers: “there is no reality except in action,” and the Marxist reliance on a guaranteed historical outcome is itself a flight from freedom.
• The Catholics. They accused existentialism of abandoning eternal values and wallowing in ugliness. Sartre answers that values come from somewhere — and without God they come from us, whether we own it or not.
• The secular moralists (the French Radicals of the 1880s). They wanted to keep Christian morals while dropping God. Sartre finds this the most dishonest position of all: if you drop God, you lose the “intelligible heaven” too, and you have to face the fact that values now have no foundation except human choice.
• The determinists. Heredity, environment, the unconscious — any system that explains cowardice as something the coward couldn’t help. Sartre: self-deception. A coward made himself a coward; he can stop.

How It’s Written

A public lecture, written to be heard. The tone is defensive but unrepentant, polemical but warm, philosophically serious but allergic to jargon. Sartre alternates between first-person declaration (“I am a representative of atheistic existentialism”) and vivid narrative (the student, the weeping woman, the Jesuit). The form is part of the content: because existentialism is “an ethic of action” meant for living human beings and not “technicians and philosophers,” delivering it as a real-time public argument embodies what it teaches.

Connections

• Sartre — the pamphlet-length door into his thought. The treatise is Being and Nothingness; the novel is Nausea; this is the piece that made existentialism a household word.
• Kant — “in choosing for himself he chooses for all men” is the Categorical Imperative without the transcendental foundation. Sartre is trying to preserve Kantian universalizability while refusing Kant’s moral law. Critics have always argued he can’t quite pull it off.
• Dostoevsky — quoted directly: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.” Dostoevsky meant this as a diagnosis of what nihilism does to a mind. Sartre picks it up as a starting point and tries to build an ethics on top of it.
• Kafka — implicit but unmistakable: Kafka’s protagonists are existentialist case studies in bad faith. They accept the Law’s authority while refusing to admit that they are the ones granting it.

Lineage

• Predecessors: Descartes (the cogito as starting point), Kant (universalizability), Kierkegaard (anguish, the leap), Schopenhauer (the groundless Will as the first modern philosopher to say the universe has no purpose), Heidegger (abandonment, thrownness), Dostoevsky (the death of God).
• Successors: Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics of Ambiguity is partly a cleanup of this lecture’s rougher edges); Frantz Fanon (existentialist ethics as decolonial imperative); Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy; the broader post-war cultural absorption of existentialism into psychology, theology, and politics.