to literature and will go on to undergird his theory of history, though
without bearing the label “committed.” “We write for our contemporar-
ies,” he insists, and not for the ages (Introduction 253 ). So he entitles
a chapter ofWhat is Literature? “Situation of the Writer (l’e ́crivain)
in 1947 .”
“Is Existentialism a Humanism?”
This scandalous event has become emblematic of thel’enfant terribleimage
cast by Sartre’s debut. The hall in which he lectured was overcrowded.
As Beauvoir recalls, so many people were turned away that “there was a
frenzied crush and some women fainted” (Force of Circumstance 39 ). By all
accounts, it was a performance. Except for its performative character,
“debut” is scarcely the proper term. Not only had the first issue of
Les Temps Modernesappeared two weeks before, prefaced by Sartre’s
“Introduction,” but the first two volumes of hisThe Roads to Freedom:
The Age of ReasonandThe Reprieve, had arrived in the bookshops a month
earlier andNo Exithad premiered quite successfully the year before. This
combination suggested an existentialist onslaught. Sartre could not have
been surprised at the crowd.
Speaking without notes, Sartre seized the teachable moment to com-
bine a simple summary of existentialist thought with a robust, if not
entirely consistent, defense of the social dimension of its seemingly
individualist ethics.^14 Given the nature of the occasion, one could not
expect a fully formed social ethic, much less an ontology geared to
sustain it. The latter would come with Search for a Method and
especially theCritiquesome fifteen years later. The former was emerging
in his frequent ascriptions of individual and collective responsibility in
the media.
This stenographic transcript of a public lecture, as we noted above, is
the only piece that Sartre publically regretted having published.^15 And
yet it is this philosophical piece, if any, that most people read. It exhibits
the weakness of an informal address where the ideas are still in gestation.
(^14) The original title for the lecture was interrogative and this is how Beauvoir lists it inForce of
15 Circumstance,^38. The initial German translation also retains the interrogative title.
SeeFilm 94 – 95 ; see also Francis Jeanson,Sartre and The Problem of Morality, trans. Robert
V. Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980 ), 22 and translators’s note.
236 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation