As featured in Now, my relationship with reading has been quite unstable for quite a good deal of time. I’m talking about years now: since the beginning of high school, I’ve been going from periods of great involvement and enthusiasm, to periods of extreme lethargy.
However, since I started studying at university instead of high school, I’ve been feeling increasingly drawn to it again, in a much more concrete way – likely because now that I’m taking Electronics and Computing Science classes, the bulk of my studying is done around computers instead of on books, and my mind is way less fed up from reading all day already.
And now that I’ve built this space, it’s the perfect opportunity for me to motivate and expand my reading with a gentle challenge: following up the books I read with a loose review.
I’m not looking for anything serious or even structured – simply a collection of my thoughts about the book, or whatever else may be. Firstly, because I don’t want this to feel like a chore to me – or I’d be even less drawn to actually reading the books; secondly, to just keep an open record of the reflections that originate from my readings.
Here’s the first one.
Sartre, from Protagoras to Leopardi: a different take on what humanism means
This all started with a present: I was browsing some books to buy on Amazon when I stumbled upon this essay among my suggestions.
High school had planted in me a deep interest for philosophy in its most informal kind, and I remembered existentialism as one of my teacher’s favourite currents – with which I’ve grown to feel quite aligned. Plus, I recalled reading and analysing an excerpt of this very essay in class, and finding it really interesting and enlightening. What we’d read was its Italian translation, but I always like to take the chance and read the original version – if I know the language.
However, I immediately thought of a good friend of mine who’s studying philosophy at my same university and who I often speak French with just for practice. I even had a clear memory of having chatted with her about this very topic! – she just had to read it.
So, I decided that was the perfect wee present for her upcoming birthday. However, she wasn’t going to come back to Scotland until much later than me, so I took the chance to both read a nice short book I’d been interested in for long and give her the annotated version of the essay – and set off to read it.
This book is actually the transcript of a conference the author held in Paris in 1946, in order to defend his philosophy from a number of critiques and promote the humanism of his thesis: that is, its pro-human, human-centric – and ultimately, even optimistic qualities.
I already knew about the bases of existentialism from high school, but I’m not the right person to explain them in an introductory way – however, I found this book to be quite suitable for the case: its solid essay structure, pointed towards proving its thesis while disproving the critiques, makes it a very logical reading well fit to introducing newcomers.
And for once, I’ll try not to overlook its formal, strictly philosophical aspects, since Sartre presents it in such a light and simple way even I managed to find it clear and fluent, despite my total uninterest towards the formal structures of philosophy.
The existentialist current, and with it the essay, builds starting from the following premises:
- There is no God – in its philosophical sense; even if there was, this wouldn’t provide anything different. Which implies:
- There is no fixed ethical system, neither external nor internal to man.
- It is therefore necessary to adopt subjectivity as the starting point, as directly quoted from the author himself.
Now, while I do find these premises – especially the first, atheist one – to be slightly unsatisfying, tracing why they were chosen and how they were implied is outside the scope of this post, and of my full understanding too. Simply consider sufficient the fact that the first, starting premise was basically unavoidable in any philosophy built after Nietzsche’s legacy and after World War II, while the following couple are explained very clearly in the book.
Starting from the last one – the one that’s most clearly stated at the very beginning of the essay – it is probably the single most important foundation for this philosophy. As part of the subjectivist current, its roots can be traced all the way back to the incredibly foreseeing Greek thinker Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.”
This alone is already enough to lead the author to one of the central points of his philosophy: “man exists first and foremost, meets himself, rises in the world, and defines himself later.”
This quotation is key to the existentialist vision of the human, which is developed in great depth throughout the book: the human being is born being nothing but a blank slate, and it’s entirely up to them to define what they are through their choices and actions. This concept has two implications: first, that the human is fully responsible for the choices they make and that define them; second, that the human experiences the feeling of anguish originally conceived by Søren Kierkegaard, another philosopher I hold particularly dear. That is to say, the feeling of “terror and anxiety” that derives from the realisations that defining oneself is solely and entirely up to oneself, and that making choices – and therefore defining oneself – cannot be escaped in any way whatsoever.
Photos by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash
Following the first implication – human responsibility – quickly leads to a second main point of existentialism: the universal responsibility of man. This means that by simply making a choice, the human promotes their own choice as good, meaning good for humanity as a whole: their choice engages the entire humanity. This, however, is achieved through quite a particular sequence, involving the quote “we can never choose evil; what we choose is always good”, which I remember to have always puzzled me:
How is it possible for man never to choose evil, given that it is indeed an existing entity that is observed in the world?
The most coherent interpretation I found to this involved considering Hannah Arendt’s concept of “banality of evil”: since evil is the result of the lack of choice, simply choosing already implies choosing good.
However, I wasn’t satisfied yet. The quote continued: “nothing can be good for us without being good for everyone”, another puzzling section:
How is it possible for a choice to be good for everybody while still considering each one’s subjective differences?
The philosophy seemed to be contradicting itself, cancelling human subjectivity and therefore refuting one of its main premises. The answer lay not much later in the book, and involved its other main premise: since there is no fixed ethical system, every choice is moral for someone while immoral for someone else. While this didn’t initially seem like a step forward, it made way for a coherent interpretation: good is the choice itself, and by simply choosing – albeit following their own subjective judgements, which others will not share – the human does the good of all humankind.
Sartre then proceeds to invoke what he considers “the only absolute truth”: Descartes’ “cogito, ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am” – and blends it with the Protagorean relativism that underpins the whole system to conclude that man can only seize himself without any intermediary.
However, he characterises this new implication with a new vision of subjectivity: by discovering oneself through the cogito, one discovers other people too; indeed, man discovers himself before others. By adopting this, the concept of subjectivity expands to include humanity as a whole – the realisation that lead Giacomo Leopardi’s to compose his beautiful poem “La Ginestra”, which I’ve always found particularly philosophical and even spiritual.
The last section of the essay is dedicated to the final havens Sartre’s philosophy concludes at. That is to say, exposing the existentialist morale: since, building on from the previous results, man must subjectively choose his own ethical system to follow, good is only found in freedom – the freedom of choosing according to one’s own, subjective engagement, conclusion that supported my previous interpretations and possibly closed off the loop.
Throughout the whole book, I also often bumped into principles I recalled to be starting or central points to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy, which I had also found incredibly interesting and inspiring: discovering ourselves before others, and being contested by the other’s sight – but that’s another story, for another time.
Photo by Kris Atomic on Unsplash
This book really proved to be full of surprises: throughout its dense pace and solid logical structure, granted me a true rollercoaster of emotions, which I definitely didn’t expect from a philosophical essay – from being in awe at a new concept implied by the previous one, to feeling let down by an appearingly shallow new implication, to the enlightenment of suddenly realising a possible coherent meaning, able to hold the whole system together.
I very enthusiastically recommend it!
Now, I do not believe in quoting for quoting’s sake, and I find most quotes about existentialism, and Sartre’s works in particular, to be incredibly misleading out of their complex context – take for example “L’enfer, c’est les autres”: “Hell is other people”, probably one of Sartre’s most misinterpreted quotes.
You can find a good explanation of its real meaning here.
So, to conclude, here is a personal selection of relevant quotes, not meant to be catchy phrases ready for anyone to distort and exploit, but instead to synthesise the author’s philosophy in a brief yet meaningful way:
L’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il se fait:
Man is nothing else than what he makes himself.
Je construis l’universel en me choisissant:
By choosing myself, I build the universal.
En voulant la liberté, nous découvrons qu’elle dépend entièrement de la liberté des autres, et que la liberté des autres dépend de la nôtre:
By wanting freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on others’ freedom, and others’ freedom depends on ours.
Happy reading.