Unit 6: Overview

You have now worked through five very different answers to the question of what it means to be a human being thinking in a world.

Socrates thought that the unexamined life was not worth living — that reason, rigorously applied, could bring us closer to the truth about justice, piety, and how to live. Descartes thought the self was fundamentally a thinking thing, transparent to itself in the moment of doubt. Hume dismantled that confidence: the self, on his account, is just a bundle of perceptions, and even causation — the bedrock of science — is a habit of mind, not a feature of the world.

Then came Hegel, who argued that individual selves are intelligible only within a larger historical whole — that Spirit moves through time, realizing freedom in ever more adequate forms, and that history has a direction. Marx took the historical framework and turned it upside down: it is not Spirit but material conditions that drive history, and the ideas people live by are, more often than not, the ideas of the class that benefits from them believing those things.

Sartre inherits this wreckage and refuses it all. There is no rational Spirit unfolding in history. There is no inevitable logic of class struggle moving toward a determined end. There is no God who designed you with a purpose. And — most radically — there is no human nature that specifies in advance what kind of being you are supposed to become.

What remains? You. Choosing. Without a map, without excuses, without the possibility of not choosing. Sartre calls this condition freedom — and it terrifies him as much as it does anyone else.

Before you read: watch this first

Existentialism Is a Humanism is Sartre’s most accessible text — it was a public lecture, not an academic treatise, and he is talking to a general audience rather than to other philosophers. But the terminology is still unfamiliar, and the argument builds on itself in ways that are easy to miss on a first read. This video introduces the core ideas — existence precedes essence, radical freedom, bad faith — before you encounter them in the text, so you have something to orient yourself by when you start reading.

Crash Course Philosophy: “Existentialism” (~10 min). Captions available via YouTube.

What to notice in the video

— The paper cutter example and what it illustrates about essence and existence

— Why Sartre thinks even an atheism that eliminates God doesn’t go far enough, if it keeps the idea of a fixed human nature

— The difference between bad faith and simple lying

— Why Sartre insists that existentialism is a form of humanism, not a counsel of despair

Unit reading

This unit has one text: Existentialism Is a Humanism, a lecture Sartre delivered in Paris in 1945 and published the following year. It is the shortest primary text in the course — about 25–30 pages depending on the translation — and one of the most re-readable. Plan to read it twice: once to get the shape of the argument, once to press on the details.

Primary text

Handouts

What you need to complete this unit

Work through each item in order.

• Watch the introductory video
• Read the lesson pages in this unit
• Read the assigned text and review the handouts
• Complete the reflection prompt
• Take the unit quiz

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

•  Explain what Sartre means by “existence precedes essence” and why he takes this to follow from atheism

•  Describe the distinction between the in-itself (things) and the for-itself (consciousness), and explain why it matters for his account of freedom

•  Explain Sartre’s three existential moods — anguish, abandonment, and despair — and what each one names

•  Define bad faith and give at least one concrete example of how it works

•  Reconstruct Sartre’s argument for the claim that existentialism is a humanism, not a counsel of despair

•  Identify the tension between Sartre’s denial of objective moral norms and his apparent moral condemnation of bad faith

•  Situate Sartre’s position in the arc of the course: how does he respond to Hegel’s historicism and Marx’s materialism?