Re: Grim, or humane society II

This follows my note to Michael Kaplan. These passages from
Sartre's "Existentialism and Human Emotions" bear on the
question he raised about 'humane society," and "what do we do
in the meantime?"

Forgive the 'biblical' technique, but this was prepared for a
scholar who inquired about Sartre's ideas in comparison with
Kant's 'categorical imperative.' It in no way intends to give
to Sartre's writings here the status of holy writ.




EXISTENTIALISM (pp. 9 - 51)

"What is meant by the term existentialism?" (p.12)

"...there are two kinds of existentialists; first, those who
are Christian, among whom I would include Jaspers and Gabriel
Marcel, both Catholic; and on the other hand the atheistic
existentialists, among whom I class Heidegger, and then the
French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is
that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you
prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point." (p. 12,
13)

"In the eighteenth century, the atheism of the philosophes
discarded the idea of God, but not so much for the notion that
essence precedes existence. To a certain extent, this idea is
found everywhere; we find it in Diderot, in Voltaire, and even
in Kant. Man has a human nature; this human nature, which is
the concept of the human, is found in all men, which means that
each man is a particular example of a universal concept, man.
In Kant, the result of this universality is that the wild-man,
the natural man, as well as the bourgeois, are circumscribed by
the same definition and have the same basic qualities. Thus,
here too the essence of man precedes the historical existence
that we find in nature." (p. 14, 15)

"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the
first principle of [atheistic] existentialism. It is also what
is called subjectivity, the name we are labeled with when
charges are brought against us...we mean that man first exists,
that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself
toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as
being in the future...Man is at the start of a plan which is
aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of
garbage, or a cauliflower; nothing exists prior to this plan;
there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have
planned to be. Not what he will want to be. Because by the word
'will' we generally mean a conscious decision, which is
subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves....If
existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for
what he is. Thus existentialism's first move is to make every
man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of
his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is
responsible for himself, we do not mean only that he is
responsible for his own individuality, but that he is
responsible for all men....Subjectivism means on the one hand
that an individual chooses and makes himself; and, on the
other, that it is impossible for man to transcend human
subjectivity. The second of these is the essential meaning of
existentialism. When we say that man chooses his own self, we
mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean that
in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in
creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one
of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of
man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or that is
to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because
we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and
nothing can be good for us without being good for all....If
existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and
fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid
for everybody and for our whole age [see Sartre's definition of
'bad faith' for elaboration of this crucial point]. Thus our
responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed,
because it involves all mankind." (p.15, 16, 17)

This entire book should, of course, be read. I've chosen only a
few references that might be useful.

Sartre's search for a moral basis for existence after 'the
death of god' parallels so much that developed in twentieth
century science (including physics and cybernetics). It is a
moral quest that was left unfinished, and therefore continues
today, even in the face of revived 'fundamentalisms' of every
kind.