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SARTRE_HUM
October 7, 2013
January 13, 2014
The younger Sartre wrote
some pretty slick, engaging,
philosophically interesting The elder Sartre, to my eye,
fiction... did a lot of flapping back
and forth, trying to keep
NAUSEA up with the Left without
entirely repudiating his
earlier work...
In a famous essay, Sartre tries
to square Existentialism with POLAR_SARTRE
Humanism and such, despite the
fact that in one of his first
big hits he got in some serious The autodidact in Nausea (named
cheapshots against Humanism. only "The Self Taught Man") is a
"humanist": a serious pervert who
"loves all mankind".
HOLDING_ABOVE
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
From "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946),
trans. Philip Mairet:
Sartre discusses an objection
"... 'your values are not serious, since you
choose them yourselves.' To that I can only say
that I am very sorry that it should be so; but
if I have excluded God the Father, there must
be somebody to invent values. We have to take
things as they are. And moreover, to say that
we invent values means neither more nor less
than this; that there is no sense in life a
priori. 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. Therefore, you can see that there is a
possibility of creating a human community."
Well, I see that possibility, but I'm
not sure that Sartre has really
established it here. Okay, let us say
I check the box "member of humanity",
what if the other humanoids don't feel
like letting me in the club? Or what
if all of us, independently choose our Is there a human nature?
own meanings of humanity, without much Many people these days seem
agreement about the club's activities? convinced that there is,
and they take it as a given
it's rooted in our biology.
"I have been reproached for suggesting that
existentialism is a form of humanism: people
have said to me, 'But you have written in your
Nausée that the humanists are wrong, you have
even ridiculed a certain type of humanism, why
do you now go back upon that?' In reality, the
word humanism has two very different meanings."
Uh oh. Here we go with the definition game.
He ridiculed a *certain type* of humanism
(that that character was supposed to serve
as representative of part not the whole
was not at all made clear).
"One may understand by humanism a theory which
upholds man as the end-in-itself and as the
supreme value. Humanism in this sense appears,
for instance, in Cocteau's story 'Round the
World in 80 Hours', in which one of the
characters declares, because he is flying over
mountains in an airplane, 'Man is magnificent!'"
Sartre essentially complains this is
trying to take credit for something
someone else did.
"It is to assume that we can ascribe value to
man according to the most distinguished deeds
of certain men."
And you are allowed to choose the standard
by which you measure your existence, but
you're not allowed to choose this one,
because...
"That kind of humanism is absurd, for only the
dog or the horse would be in a position to
pronounce a general judgment upon man and
declare that he is magnificent ... "
What?
"But neither is it admissible that a man should
pronounce judgment upon Man. Existentialism
dispenses with any judgment of this sort: an
existentialist will never take man as the end,
since man is still to be determined."
But... by what standard can you reject
my freedom of determination, my
feeling that the achievements of A better argument I think:
humanity reflect well on it's members? do you also take the
failings of humanity as a
reflection on yourself?
"And we have no right to believe that humanity
is something to which we could set up a cult,
after the manner of Auguste Comte. The cult of
humanity ends in Comtian humanism, shut-in AUGUSTE_COMTE
upon itself, and-- this must be said-- in
Fascism. We do not want a humanism like that."
And do you know who else
thought humanity was cool?
"But there is another sense of the word [humanism,
remember], of which the fundamental meaning is
this:"
It may be me, but I don't recall ever
hearing this proposed as a meaning for
humanism prior to this. It sounds a lot (A is cool, therefore we will
like Sartre's existentialism, though: invent a new definition of A
so we can be cool too.)
"Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in
projecting and losing himself beyond himself that
he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it
is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is
able to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing,
and can grasp objects only in relation to his
self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and center
of his transcendence. There is no other universe
except the human universe, the universe of human
subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as
constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is
transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing)
with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not
shut up in himself but forever present in a human
universe)-- it is this that we call existential
humanism. This is humanism, because we remind man
that there is no legislator but himself; that he
himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself;
also because we show that it is not by turning back
upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond
himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of
some particular realization, that man can realize
himself as truly human."
So:
Bad: "man is the measure of all things"
Good: You are the measure of yourself.
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