Existentialism Is a Humanism

Introduction

On 29 October 1945 Sartre gave this lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris to an overflowing audience; it appeared in print the following year. Defending existentialism against Communist and Catholic critics, he presents it as a doctrine of action and responsibility: in choosing myself, I choose an image of what a human being should be. His example is a student who asked him whether to join the Free French forces or stay with his mother; no ethical theory, Sartre says, can decide for him. The lecture popularised the concepts of anguish, abandonment and despair. Sartre later had reservations about this simplified version of his thought; Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism responded to it.

Connections

Builds on

• Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre

Criticized in

• Letter on Humanism1946 · Martin Heidegger

More works by Jean-Paul Sartre

• 1943Being and Nothingness
• 1960Critique of Dialectical Reason