If God is gone and nothing tells us how to live, what does it mean that we must choose?
29 claims from this lecture, in the order Marci Shore makes them, with the 9 terms it leans on and its 15 links to other lectures.
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism". The epigraph Shore gives this lecture.
By number of claims in this lecture.
Shore’s own judgments and connections
The 5 claims the lecture spends most time on.
The heart of French existentialism, in Shore's one-line summary, is decisionism: like Boynton's hippopotamus, the individual has to decide for herself whether she stays or goes.
Put simply Shore's one-line summary of French existentialism: each person must decide for herself, which she calls "decisionism." Her picture is a children's book by Sandra Boynton, whose hippopotamus must choose whether to join the other animals or not.
Existence precedes essence: no human nature is given in advance. We arrive in the world first and only afterward make ourselves into something definite.
Put simply Sartre's slogan "existence precedes essence": there is no human nature set in advance. We first find ourselves in the world, and only afterward make ourselves into someone in particular.
Nothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves.
Put simply Sartre: where Heidegger's "nothingness" points to death, Sartre's means what is not yet settled about us. That is not meant to depress but to free: it is the open space in which we make ourselves.
Sartre's moral imperative is about choosing, not about what gets chosen: no code says which option is right, and declining to decide is itself a decision one answers for.
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is not the everyday English sense of hidden motives but self-deception: a lie in which the same person is both deceiver and deceived.
Put simply Sartre's "bad faith" does not mean, as in everyday English, acting from hidden motives. It means self-deception: lying to yourself, so that you are both the liar and the one lied to.
Read down to follow the lecture. The time opens that minute on YouTube.
The heart of French existentialism, in Shore's one-line summary, is decisionism: like Boynton's hippopotamus, the individual has to decide for herself whether she stays or goes.
Put simply Shore's one-line summary of French existentialism: each person must decide for herself, which she calls "decisionism." Her picture is a children's book by Sandra Boynton, whose hippopotamus must choose whether to join the other animals or not.
Interwar polarization is the backdrop to Sartre's preoccupation with choice: with liberalism collapsed and movements claiming every corner of life, nothing moderate seemed left and nobody could sit it out.
Put simply Shore: the years between the World Wars are the backdrop to Sartre's obsession with choice. Liberal democracy had collapsed, mass movements aimed to control every part of life, no middle ground seemed left, and nobody could stand aside.
In his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it.
Put simply In an early work, Sartre rejects Husserl's method of setting aside our belief that the world is real. Following Heidegger, he says we cannot: we are always already caught up in the world.
In the text In The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37; Williams and Kirkpatrick translation), Sartre applies Husserl's reduction to the ego itself: "the transcendent I must fall before the stroke of phenomenological reduction".
Literature should be engagée: writers and philosophers belong in the thick of things, taking political positions, rather than hiding in a forest hut or behind university walls.
Put simply Sartre: literature should be "engaged". Writers and philosophers should take political positions and get involved, not hide away in a hut in the forest or behind university walls.
Where Heidegger's Dasein could be read as either radicalizing or dissolving the subject, Sartre opts for the radically subjectivist reading: for him Dasein is, if anything, more of a subject.
Put simply Shore: Heidegger's "Dasein" (human existence) can be read as making the self more central or as dissolving it. Sartre takes the first reading as far as it goes: for him Dasein is, if anything, more of a self.
A cow or a plant merely is; a human being also exists, meaning it has to make itself through its own choices. Its essence lies in that existing.
Put simply Sartre: a cow or a plant simply is. A human being also "exists": it has to make itself through its own choices, and what it is lies in that making.
Following Husserl, Sartre keeps the human subject at the center: all meaning has its source there.
Put simply Sartre, following Husserl: the human being, the one who experiences and thinks, stays at the center, as the source of all meaning.
Without God, there is no "intelligible heaven" in which values might be found; human beings must create them themselves.
Put simply Sartre: without God, there is no higher realm where values are waiting to be found. People have to create their values themselves.
Sartre shifts Heidegger's thrownness toward abandonment: we find ourselves dumped in a world without God, forlorn, with nothing either inside us or outside us to rely on.
Put simply Heidegger said we are "thrown" into a world we did not choose. Sartre stresses being abandoned there: no God, nobody to turn to, nothing inside or outside us to rely on.
Existence precedes essence: no human nature is given in advance. We arrive in the world first and only afterward make ourselves into something definite.
Put simply Sartre's slogan "existence precedes essence": there is no human nature set in advance. We first find ourselves in the world, and only afterward make ourselves into someone in particular.
Nothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves.
Put simply Sartre: where Heidegger's "nothingness" points to death, Sartre's means what is not yet settled about us. That is not meant to depress but to free: it is the open space in which we make ourselves.
Shore hears in Sartre's equation of nothingness with freedom less Heidegger's being-toward-death than the nihilism of the 1910s avant-garde: if anything is possible, nothing has a ground.
Put simply Shore: when Sartre equates nothingness with freedom, she hears less Heidegger's focus on death than the mood of the 1910s avant-garde artists: if anything is possible, nothing stands on solid ground.
The in-itself (en-soi) is everything already fixed about us: our past deeds, who we have so far been, inert and beyond revision, close to the facticity of our situation.
Put simply Sartre's "in-itself" is the part of us already fixed: what we have done and who we have been so far. It is inert and cannot be revised, much like the given facts of our situation.
The for-itself (pour-soi) is consciousness as an activity, not a thing: a fluid negating of what one has been, reaching past the given into the future to do something different.
Put simply Sartre's "for-itself" is consciousness as an activity, not a thing: it keeps pushing away from what we have been and reaching into the future to do something different.
Sartrean freedom, like Heidegger's, operates inside a situation already given: I may walk, run or jump, but not fly. Within those limits, though, possibilities never run out.
Sartre's moral imperative is about choosing, not about what gets chosen: no code says which option is right, and declining to decide is itself a decision one answers for.
A person has no reality apart from action: we amount only to what we do, are nothing until we make ourselves, and remain subjects rather than objects.
Put simply Sartre: a person has no reality apart from what they do. We are nothing until we make ourselves through action, and we remain agents who act, never mere things.
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is not the everyday English sense of hidden motives but self-deception: a lie in which the same person is both deceiver and deceived.
Put simply Sartre's "bad faith" does not mean, as in everyday English, acting from hidden motives. It means self-deception: lying to yourself, so that you are both the liar and the one lied to.
In its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object.
Put simply Sartre: the commonest way of lying to ourselves is to plead that we had no choice, blaming fate, the laws of nature or "the way I am". That denies our freedom and treats us as mere things.
A rarer, second form of bad faith overlooks facticity: fantasizing that wishing makes anything possible, one makes a decision that is no real decision at all.
Put simply Sartre: a rarer way of lying to ourselves ignores the hard facts of our situation. Like a child demanding to fly to grandma's, we pretend wishing makes anything possible, so our "decision" is no real decision.
Against Freud, consciousness cannot be cleanly cut into an opaque unconscious and a transparent conscious half; the whole of it is translucent, neither one nor the other.
Put simply Sartre, against Freud: the mind cannot be neatly split into a hidden unconscious part and a fully visible conscious part. All of it is "translucent": neither hidden from itself nor fully clear to itself.
What makes bad faith possible is the translucency of consciousness: because it is neither opaque nor transparent, a person can get away with lying to themselves.
Put simply Sartre: because the mind is neither wholly hidden from itself nor wholly clear to itself, we can get away with lying to ourselves.
In the text In Being and Nothingness (1943; Barnes translation), Part One, ch. 2, Sartre presents "the total translucency of consciousness" as a difficulty for lying to oneself, since the liar and the one lied to are the same person.
Anguish is the price of responsibility: whoever commits to anything settles not only who they will be but, in effect, legislates for all humanity. Absolute freedom means absolute responsibility.
Put simply Sartre: whenever we commit to something, we choose not only who we will be but, in effect, set a rule for all humanity. Total freedom means total responsibility, and that weight is our anguish.
Sartre's anguish is a little different from Heidegger's angst: less connected with finitude and mortality, more with responsibility, the burden of choosing for all mankind.
Put simply Shore: Heidegger's dread ("angst") is tied to mortality and the fact that we will die. Sartre's anguish is tied instead to responsibility: the burden of choosing for all mankind.
Gombrowicz doubts Sartre's airy claim that someone who chooses pain as a good could feel torture as bliss, hearing in it a French bourgeoisie long spared real suffering.
Gombrowicz presses the point: on Sartre's terms, someone who chooses frivolity over authenticity or falsehood over truth faces no hell and no penalty, except lacking a true existence.
Some situations admit no innocent choice: the wartime young man deciding whether to leave his sick mother for the Resistance has no clean option, yet must still decide.
Put simply Sartre: sometimes every option does harm. His example is a young man in wartime choosing between staying with his sick mother and joining the Resistance. No choice is clean, yet he must still choose.
In the text In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), Sartre's pupil must choose between staying with his mother, who lives only for him, and "going to England to join the Free French Forces."
What Judt calls the Great Absence is Sartre's postwar refusal, or failure, to speak out about Stalinism's crimes, the East European show trials among them.
Sartre brooded for years on the despair left by God's death, yet died in 1980 regarded as France's, perhaps Europe's, conscience: in Shore's phrase, the nearest thing postwar Europe had to a God.
8 of these 9 first come up in this lecture. Definitions are our paraphrase.
Where a claim here answers an earlier lecture, and where a later lecture answers a claim here. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
KantKant's test when unsure whether an act is moral: imagine everyone acting on your principle. Should disaster follow, the act fails. L3 · 32:07
SartreAnguish is the price of responsibility: whoever commits to anything settles not only who they will be but, in effect, legislates for all humanity. Absolute freedom means absolute responsibility. L13 · 44:48
Choosing for oneself is choosing for everyone: a Kantian universalizing moment inside existentialism
NietzscheAnnouncing "God is dead" is not atheism. It reports an event: humanity has crossed from a world God organized into one without him, and we ourselves did the killing. L6 · 43:30
SartreWithout God, there is no "intelligible heaven" in which values might be found; human beings must create them themselves. L13 · 28:22
Takes the death of God with full seriousness: with no heaven of values, humans must make them
FreudWhat matters in the mind happens below awareness: Freud holds that "mental processes are essentially unconscious," with conscious ones only scattered fragments of the whole. L9 · 22:57
SartreAgainst Freud, consciousness cannot be cleanly cut into an opaque unconscious and a transparent conscious half; the whole of it is translucent, neither one nor the other. L13 · 43:50
Rejects the split into an opaque unconscious and a conscious part: consciousness is translucent
ShoreOn Shore's reading, the avant-garde took Nietzsche literally: if God's loss was to be compensated at all, his death had to be embraced without reservation, and whatever was toppling given a push. L10 · 34:56
SartreNothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves. L13 · 33:22
Nothingness as radical freedom resembles the avant-garde's ungrounded sense that everything is possible.Our inference
HusserlThe phenomenological reduction jolts us from the natural attitude, where the world's existence is taken for granted, into reflection on consciousness; the reality question is bracketed, suspended rather than doubted. L11 · 30:57
SartreIn his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it. L13 · 19:10
The reduction is impossible: we cannot suspend belief in a world we are always already in
HeideggerDasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. L12 · 24:14
SartreIn his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it. L13 · 19:10
Takes Heidegger's always-already-in-the-world to its anti-Husserlian conclusion: no reduction is possible.
HeideggerDasein's condition is thrownness (Geworfenheit): it lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place it never chose, with no before and no outside from which to consent. L12 · 31:33
SartreSartre shifts Heidegger's thrownness toward abandonment: we find ourselves dumped in a world without God, forlorn, with nothing either inside us or outside us to rely on. L13 · 29:13
Keeps thrownness but stresses abandonment: cast into the world with nothing to lean on
HeideggerFear always takes an object: snakes, spiders, planes. Angst takes none; what it faces is precisely nothing, the nothingness every existence is inevitably headed toward. L12 · 41:22
SartreNothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves. L13 · 33:22
Nothingness stops meaning death and comes to mean the open space of freedom
HeideggerInauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one. L12 · 32:39
SartreIn its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object. L13 · 40:55
Bad faith parallels flight into das Man, recast as a lie one tells oneself about one's freedom.Our inference
KojèveMan, for Kojève, is not a being but a nothingness, and that gap is exactly what leaves room for freedom: for acting, having a history, being an individual. L16 · 16:22
SartreNothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves. L13 · 33:22
Both treat man as a nothingness that opens the space of freedom; the influence is indirect, since Sartre did not attend Kojève's seminar.Our inference
SartreThe in-itself (en-soi) is everything already fixed about us: our past deeds, who we have so far been, inert and beyond revision, close to the facticity of our situation. L13 · 35:01
BeauvoirBeauvoir's slogan, "Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity": facticity is the thrown, already-there situation nobody can wish away, though anyone can push against it. L16 · 23:34
Freedom must prevail over facticity, the given situation
SartreWithout God, there is no "intelligible heaven" in which values might be found; human beings must create them themselves. L13 · 28:22
BeauvoirFor Beauvoir, values come from nowhere but human existence: there is no higher authority handing them down, so making them is our job alone. L16 · 21:42
Beauvoir grounds Sartre's human creation of values in man as negativity, the lack that permits self-creation.Our inference
SartreIn its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object. L13 · 40:55
BeauvoirBeauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity builds existentialist ethics around resisting bad faith, mauvaise foi: the pull toward escaping one's own freedom and the load of being a subject. L16 · 19:36
An ethics built around refusing bad faith, the temptation to flee one's freedom
SartreThe for-itself (pour-soi) is consciousness as an activity, not a thing: a fluid negating of what one has been, reaching past the given into the future to do something different. L13 · 35:49
MarkovićHumans are essentially beings of praxis: free, creative activity that remakes the world and realizes one's faculties. Alienation is the gap between that potential and what one actually is. L18 · 32:15
Shore hears echoes of Sartre's for-itself, the going beyond, in Marković's account of alienation as the gap between actual existence and potential essence.
SartreBad faith (mauvaise foi) is not the everyday English sense of hidden motives but self-deception: a lie in which the same person is both deceiver and deceived. L13 · 40:24
ShoreThe greengrocer lies twice. Feigning belief in communism is the shallow lie; the deeper one, Sartrean bad faith, is telling himself he is powerless when greengrocers keep the game going. L23 · 43:38
Shore reads the greengrocer's lie to himself about his own powerlessness as bad faith in Sartre's sense.
Throughlines that pass through this lecture.
As they come up in the lecture.
Beauvoir meets Sartre while both prepare for the agrégation in philosophy.
The Transcendence of the Ego La Transcendance de l'ego
Sartre publishes The Transcendence of the Ego.
Nausea La Nausée
Sartre held as a prisoner of war after serving as an army meteorologist.
Being and Nothingness L'être et le néant
Sartre finishes and publishes Being and Nothingness during the Resistance.
Existentialism Is a Humanism L'existentialisme est un humanisme
Sartre delivers the public lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (published 1946).
Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Aron and others found the journal Les Temps Modernes.
The Second Sex Le Deuxième Sexe
Sartre dies; a Paris headline says France has lost its conscience.