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Sartre’s ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’: Some Thoughts

I’ve always found Sartre a better writer (novelist, playwright, and so on) than a philosopher. Certainly, Being and Nothingness is an impressive work — an intelligent, thorough, analytic tome inquiring into the roots and nature of human subjectivity. And yet this text, at least, is a mixed bag for me. I’m not entirely sure why I decided to return to this text for the first time in God knows how many years and to read it afresh. But I did, and I wanted to collect some thoughts I had reading through it. I came away with quite a mixed impression. Let’s start with some of the negatives. At times, it’s almost sloppy: For example, with one hand he rejects Kant’s moral framework for its abstract and universal nature. It cannot, as Sartre says, provide us with any reliable answers in concrete moral situations because moral situations are always unique in their specificity. Granted.

Then, with the other hand, he smuggles back in Kant’s three formulations of the categorical imperative as the underlying axiom of free human acts. “When I affirm that freedom, under any concrete circumstance, can have no other aim than itself, and once a man realizes, in his state of abandonment, that it is he who imposes values, he can will but one thing: freedom as the foundation of all values.” (p. 48) For Sartre, one should always ask oneself, “What would happen if everyone did…