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Existentialism Is a Humanism (French: L'existentialisme est un humanisme) is a 1946 work by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture by the same name he gave at Club Maintenant in Paris, on 29 October 1945.
In the wake of Being and Nothingness, Sartre became concerned with reconciling his concept of freedom with concrete social subjects and was strongly influenced in this regard by his friend and associate Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Sense and Non-Sense, were pioneering a path towards a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism. [9]
Sartre sees Marxism as the dominant philosophy for the current era of history and existentialism as a reinforcing complement. Most of the chapter discusses how existentialism fails to stand on its own as a school of thought while Marxism has become corrupted by the Soviets and other orthodox Communists who abuse the system of thought.
As a result, for Sartre, "existence precedes essence" not only defines and determines his own existential thinking or interpretation of existentialism, but also any thinking or philosophising that declares itself to be existential. Despite Sartre's later efforts to distance himself and his thinking from this remark and its consequences, it has ...
Martin Heidegger attacked Sartre's concept of existential humanism in his Letter on Humanism of 1946, accusing Sartre of elevating Reason above Being. [5]Michel Foucault followed Heidegger in attacking Sartre's humanism as a kind of theology of man, [6] though in his emphasis on the self-creation of the human being he has in fact been seen as very close to Sartre's existential humanism.
Being "a moral person" is one of the most severe forms of bad faith. Sartre essentially characterizes this as "the faith of bad faith" which is and should not be, in Sartre's opinion, at the heart of one's existence. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional ethics, condemning it as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses.
The waiter thinks of himself as being a waiter (as in being-in-itself), which Sartre says is impossible since he cannot be a waiter in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell. He is primarily a man (being-for-itself), just one who happens to be functioning as a waiter – with no fixed nature or essence, who is constantly recreating himself.
Existentialism is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that study existence from the individual's perspective and explore the human struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of the universe.