This is both its weakness and its strength, for it enables us to capture
Sartre’s thoughts “on the wing” as it were, as he stretches to accommo-
date his established individualist concepts to social categories. Rather
than a principled argument, the address is a concatenation ofaperc ̧usthat
gesture toward a kind of “argument” that can be reconstructed with the
help of other value concepts voiced elsewhere yet within the temporal
neighborhood of this talk.
I have reconstructed the “argument” of this lecture in detail in
another work.^16 It consists of eight insights-premises that can be loosely
linked to form a rational reconstruction of his case. Let me summarize
them briefly.
- Since there is no God (Sartre’s atheism being a conclusion of his definition of
God as an impossible ideal, “Being-in-itself-for-itself ”), there is no human nature
or essence that could serve as an a priori norm. This is his objection to natural law
ethics and to “essentialism” of any sort. - Bereft of necessary norms, the human is what he makes himself to be; in a
lapidary phrase adapted from Heidegger, his “existence” precedes his “essence.”
Sartre terms this “the first principle of existentialism” (EH 22 ). “Existence” is a
rich expression, as we have seen inBeing and Nothingness, which few in the
audience will have read. It comprises the “not yet” of ekstatic temporality, the
nothingness and possibility of our ontological freedom, and a host of other
features that follow from our nonself-coincidence. But here it suffices to describe
existence loosely as our “original Choice.” Recall fromBN, “For human reality
there is no difference between existing and choosing for itself ” ( 572 ). If “exist-
ence” is coterminous with choosing, “essence” denotes our prior choices. That we
are our choices is the motto of this lecture. But that remark, so understood as we
noted earlier, makes “existence precedes essence” true by definition, a tautology.
Nevertheless, it is a fruitful tautology as our brief unpacking of “existence” will
suggest. - If existence precedes essence, the human being is responsible for his creation, for
what he is. In choosing, he chooses himself and his world. Thus far, Sartre is
merely restating the position elaborated inBeing and Nothingness. We now reach
his threshold-crossing claim that will lead us to responsibility for others. It
requires two subsidiary arguments. - 1 His first argument has been underrated, if not totally ignored by commentators
whose fire has been drawn to the next, quasi-Kantian claim. Yet this argument
(^16) SME 33 – 41. All quotations are fromEH.
“Is Existentialism a Humanism?” 237