Dr Skye C. Cleary is a philosopher and writer. She teaches at Columbia University, Barnard College, and the City University of New York, and is the author of “Existentialism and Romantic Love” and co-editor of “How to Live a Good Life”. In this piece she analyses one of the most celebrated lectures ever given on philosophy, a lecture whose message is particularly relevant in contemporary India.
The year is 1945. The venue is an overcrowded lecture hall in Paris. World War II has just ended and people are learning all sorts of horrific things done by their governments and by their allies & friends. The speaker is Jean-Paul Sartre and he is about to change the way people think about themselves. Stay with Dr Cleary as she takes you through Sartre’s pathbreaking lecture and ends the essay with an explosive intellectual punch.
Sartre arrived at exactly the moment France needed him to. Beauvoir, his lifelong partner, put it this way: “there existed, at least at first glance, a remarkable agreement between what he was offering the public and what the public wanted.” By the autumn of 1945, Cleary writes, “the atrocities of the Second World War had been exposed: the gas chambers, the camps, the friend betrayals, and the avalanches of banal evils,” and people, per Beauvoir, had “discovered History in its most terrible form.” Sartre, Cleary notes, “challenged the idea that the only viable response to the Second World War was nihilism,” trying to construct a morality that avoids the “anything goes” mentality.
(Note: Wikipedia says that Nihilism is the philosophical belief that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Coming from the Latin word nihil (meaning “nothing”), it rejects traditional morals, absolute truths, and conventional religious or political authority.)
So, what was Sartre’s actual argument? It starts with existentialism’s calling card: “existence precedes essence,” or “subjectivity must be our point of departure.” A knife’s essence is decided before it’s made; a human being, Sartre argues, works the other way around: “man is, before all else, something that projects itself into a future, and is conscious of doing so. Man is indeed a project that has a subjective existence, rather unlike that of a patch of moss, a spreading fungus, or a cauliflower.”
The consequence of that reversal is total responsibility: “If existence precedes essence, then ‘man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.'” Even inaction – and this is obviously particularly relevant to each of us in India at this point in the Republic’s history – is a choice, Sartre insists — “if I decide not to choose, that still constitutes a choice.”
Sartre then makes a leap Cleary flags as the lecture’s most contentious move: every individual choice is also, implicitly, a vote for what all of humanity should do. “I bear the responsibility of a choice that, in committing myself, also commits humanity as a whole.” Marry or don’t marry, either way you’re making a claim about what’s good — “we always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.” [Underlining is from Marcellus as we believe that this point of view is particularly relevant for us in our current circumstances.]
Dr Cleary then takes us into a part of Sartre’s lecture which blew people’s mind for decades.
Sartre was an atheist and found God’s non-existence “extremely disturbing,” because that means there are no a priori values, no ready-made purpose, no external authority to tell us what to do. But, Cleary writes, “if God does not exist, it’s not true that anything goes, because each of us is responsible for our actions. We have no excuses.” Sartre’s own words: “I very much regret it should be so, but there has to be someone to invent values.” That someone is each of us — “such abandonment entails anguish.” To make the stakes concrete, Sartre tells the story of a student torn between joining the resistance to avenge his brother, or staying home to care for his grieving mother — a dilemma no ethical rulebook can resolve, because “to choose one’s adviser is only another way to commit oneself.” Sartre’s advice: “You are free, so choose; in other words, invent.”
Cleary questions Sartre’s point of view and says “Sartre doesn’t answer why what’s best for me is also best for everyone else. Running marathons is good for some people, but that’s no reason to think everyone should run them.” Worse, Sartre’s own test case undercuts him. He treats two fictional heroines with opposite moralities — one selfless, one ruthless — as equally authentic because “they both aim at freedom.” But if authenticity alone is the test, Cleary notes pointedly, “the authentic egomaniac and the authentic saint both pass.” Hitler, she reminds us, “seems to have believed he was choosing passionately, deliberately, for the good of both himself and humanity, and thought it’d be good if everyone did as he did.”
Sartre’s partner Beauvoir supplies the missing piece by insisting that freedom is never abstract — it’s always situated. “A person born into poverty, raised under oppression or denied education faces a structurally different existential situation than the one Sartre’s lecture assumes. The choices available are narrower, the costs of choosing against the grain are higher, and the anguish of freedom can be taken over entirely by the anguish of survival.”
As to why we should care about others’ freedom, Beauvoir’s answer follows more naturally: “the obligation to others’ freedom doesn’t need to be smuggled in, because it follows from taking seriously the fact that freedom is always lived in conditions shaped by others.”
None of this, Cleary argues, cancels out why the lecture still matters eighty years on. Sartre knew the philosophy sounded bleak, and answered the charge directly: “no doctrine is more optimistic, since it declares that man’s destiny lies within himself.” [Underlining from Marcellus.]
Cleary’s own verdict on the lecture’s afterlife is worth quoting at length: “The afterlife of ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ is as a psychological self-help book under the guise of philosophy… It works because it encourages people to seize life by the throat, to make decisions for themselves, and not to feel constrained by social categorisations or what other people think they ought to do.”
She closes on Sartre’s own terms: “What Sartre leaves us with is that we didn’t choose to be here, in this world or at this time, but we have to choose our way of living in it. Nothing can save us from ourselves, which is bleak only if you confuse salvation with agency.” Or, in Sartre’s own, simpler words on the value of the whole exercise: “the only way to learn is to question.” [Underlining from Marcellus.]
If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/
Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
MORE FROM Aug WEEK 3
