The anguish of choice

Listen to this essay 25 minute listen On 29 October 1945, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emerged alone from the Paris Métro. He was about to deliver a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme est un humanisme’ (‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’) at the Club Maintenant. No one had any idea it was going to become one of the most famous lectures of the 20th century. As Sartre walked towards the venue, he saw a huge crowd of people gathered outside. He wondered if Communists were protesting him and whether he should go home. He pushed ahead – really only because he’d made a professional commitment. While the crowd parted for celebrities, no one knew what Sartre looked like. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, and as he slowly nudged his way towards the front, he was jostled about by brutal scrimmages for seats. The room was overheated and overcrowded. Fifteen people collapsed. An hour late, Sartre climbed to the stage to defend existential philosophy against his critics and argue that existentialism is a humanism. He had no notes, his hands remained in his pockets, but he was well prepared. He said what he came to say and then left. The hosts of Sartre’s lecture, Jacques Calmy and Marc Beigbeder, had a modest budget. They bought simple ads in newspapers. Their wives posted fliers in Latin Quarter bookstores. Calmy worried: ‘With a title like that! Existentialism!’ Just two months earlier, Sartre had publicly stated: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is.’ (Still, Simone de Beauvoir writes in her autobiography: ‘In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us [existentialism] and used it for our own purposes.’) Along with recent accusations that Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) was anti-humanist, they hoped the title might at least be a ‘paradoxical provocation’. The morning after the lecture, Sartre met with Beigbeder at Sartre’s unofficial office, the Café de Flore. Beigbeder apologised for the chaos, and explained that, between advertising, space rental and the damage to club – including 30 broken chairs and a destroyed box office, meaning that they were unable to sell tickets – they were having trouble coming up with the payment they’d promised Sartre. Sartre had read the morning papers over coffee and croissants and interrupted: ‘As for my fee, forget it! Besides, it looks like we were a success!’ One headline read ‘Too Many Attend Sartre Lecture. Heat, Fainting Spells, Police. Lawrence of Arabia an Existentialist’. The papers reported ‘elbow fights’, ‘nonexistential angst’ and ‘a No Exit situation’ where the mob feared ‘dying of suffocation’. Critics accused Sartre of being ‘too scholarly’, but he was charismatic. His ‘cool’, his ‘courage’, his ‘grit’ and the force of his presence were striking. By the autumn of 1945, the atrocities of the Second World War had been exposed: the gas chambers, the camps, the friend betrayals, and the avalanches of banal evils. Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong partner, wrote that people ‘had discovered History in its most terrible form.’ Sartre was popular because, according to Beauvoir, ‘there existed, at least at first glance, a remarkable agreement between what he was offering the public and what the public wanted.’ In post-liberation Paris, people realised they needed to reconstruct both their buildings and their moral foundations. Sartre challenged the idea that the only viable response to the Second World War was nihilism Sartre’s lecture was so successful that the publisher wanted to release it for those who missed out. It went internationally viral. ‘And that bothered me,’ Sartre said in an interview almost 30 years later, while acknowledging the contradiction: ‘If I found what I said meaningful for 500 or 1,000 people, why wouldn’t I have found it equally meaningful for all the people who wanted to buy it?’ He said he was still working out the moral side of existentialism and the ideas weren’t as clear or finished as he would have liked. Plus, it tended to be read as a substitute for the harder work of Being and Nothingness (1943) and reduced his thinking into pullquotes. Although the lecture was framed as a defence of existential philosophy, it was actually a lot more than that. ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ was a sincere attempt to address where our values come from. Sartre was challenging, in a serious way, the idea that the only viable response to the Second World War was nihilism. He was trying to construct a morality that avoids the ‘anything goes’ mentality. According to Beauvoir: ‘[Existentialism] seemed to offer the solution they had dreamed of. In fact, it did not.’ Although people were hungry for guidance and Sartre set himself up as a guru telling people how they should live, paradoxically, he was about to tell them to guide themselves. The official purpose of the lecture was to promote ‘literary and intellectual discussion’, but Sartre worried that the media was distorting his ideas and fuelling his notoriety. He was also battling Communists who blamed him for young people’s suspicion of them, Christians who took issue with his atheism, and those who thought existentialists were people who swear a lot. Sartre felt his public image escaping him – a relatable modern anguish of watching a version of yourself circulate in the world, distorted and out of reach. He wanted to take back control and be better understood. As Sartre notes in the post-lecture discussion, he didn’t want ‘merely to impose [his philosophy] on others in books’ and felt ‘an obligation to make it comprehensible to those who are discussing it on a political or moral plane.’ The lecture can get dismissed as ‘Sartre regretted it, therefore let’s ignore it,’ but the truth is that Sartre had mixed feelings about it. The passion with which Sartre communicated his ideas – especially to a live audience, especially after saying that ‘[existentialism] is strictly intended for specialists and philosophers’ and then presenting ideas that were both scholarly and accessible, and vastly more understandable than his notoriously unwieldy Being and Nothingness – made ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ powerfully resonant. While Sartre’s lecture had a huge effect during postwar France, its influence has not been preserved. It should be. ‘Let us begin by saying that what we mean by “existentialism” is a doctrine that makes human life possible and also affirms that every truth and every action imply an environment and a human subjectivity,’ Sartre tells the audience. He was pushing back against the idea that objectivity is the most important way of understanding human life. Truth and action can’t be abstracted from actual people knowing and doing things. While there are atheist and religious existentialists, what’s common to them is the idea that ‘existence precedes essence’, Sartre explains, ‘or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be our point of departure.’ This means that, at first, humans are nothing. We are thrown into existence, we encounter ourselves (our ‘subjectivity’), and then define ourselves through willing. If existence precedes essence, then we’re responsible for creating our essence A knife is the other way around: its essence precedes its existence because a knife-maker thinks about the knife’s purpose and properties (essence) and then crafts it (brings it into existence). By contrast, ‘man is, before all else, something that projects itself into a future, and is conscious of doing so. Man is indeed a project that has a subjective existence, rather unlike that of a patch of moss, a spreading fungus, or a cauliflower.’ (The fungus claim may no longer hold, but the others do, as far as we know.) Conscious projection makes humans unique and also means that ‘man is constantly in the making,’ Sartre says. If existence precedes essence, then we’re responsible for creating our essence. ‘Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself,’ Sartre explains, and this is the core of his existentialism. If existence precedes essence, then ‘man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.’ We’re also responsible for what we don’t do: ‘if I decide not to choose, that still constitutes a choice.’ Some humanisms place humanity on a pedestal or treat it as a fixed ideal. ‘Existentialist humanism’ is different because it places the full responsibility of human existence on human shoulders. We are the legislators of our own lives, abandoned but capable of choosing. ‘By constantly seeking a goal outside of himself in the form of liberation, or of some special achievement, that man will realise himself as truly human.’ The next step is one of the most contentious parts of Sartre’s lecture: ‘I bear the responsibility of a choice that, in committing myself, also commits humanity as a whole.’ His logic is that, whatever you do, you’re implying that the action is worthwhile and that others could and should do the same. Marry, or don’t marry, you’re making a statement about the value of that institution and what you think is the best option for yourself and for everyone else too: ‘We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.’ This realisation is a major source of existential anguish: ‘a man who commits himself, and who realises that he is not only the individual that he chooses to be, but also a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be, cannot help but be aware of his own full and profound responsibility.’ And if you’re thinking that many people don’t seem particularly anguished, Sartre’s response is that ‘they are merely hiding their anguish or trying not to face it.’ Another source of anguish is our abandonment. None of us chose to be born, and yet here we are. Sartre was an atheist and found God’s non-existence ‘extremely disturbing’ because that means there are no a priori values, no ready-made purpose, no external authority to tell us what to do. But if God does not exist, it’s not true that anything goes, because each of us is responsible for our actions. We have no excuses. ‘I very much regret it should be so,’ Sartre explains, but ‘there has to be someone to invent values.’ That someone is each of us, which is why Sartre says: ‘Such abandonment entails anguish.’ Sartre’s advice to the student was: ‘You are free, so choose; in other words, invent’ ‘Even if God were to exist, it would make no difference,’ Sartre argues, because you still have to choose which God, interpret which commands, and decide how they apply to your situation. ‘What man needs is to rediscover himself and to comprehend that nothing can save him from himself, not even valid proof of the existence of God.’ ‘Obviously, I do not mean that when I choose between a cream pastry and a chocolate éclair, I am choosing in anguish,’ Sartre quipped in the post-lecture discussion. But when the choice is whether to go to war or not, anguish is the right word. Sartre tells the story of a student who came to him for advice. He was torn between joining resistance fighters to avenge his brother’s death in the war, or staying home to care for and comfort his mother. Ethical codes can’t resolve the student’s dilemma. Christianity says love thy neighbour. But which neighbour? His mother or fellow soldiers? Through a Kantian lens, in every situation, he’ll be treating someone as a means and another as an end. There are no signs to read, because the student is responsible for deciding what counts as a sign. ‘Man is responsible for his own passion,’ so there’s no point trying to listen to what his emotions are telling him to guide him. He will know what he values only when he acts. Moreover, ‘to choose one’s adviser is only another way to commit oneself.’ Sartre’s advice to the student was: ‘You are free, so choose; in other words, invent.’ ‘Moral choice is like constructing a work of art,’ Sartre says. ‘We are in the same creative situation.’ If you’re thinking that some choices are gratuitous, Sartre says that’s ludicrous because our commitments define us, and we can’t escape that. We don’t call a Picasso gratuitous, because his works became what they are through his painting them. ‘What art and morality have in common is creation and invention.’ Sartre highlights two fictional innovators: Maggie Tulliver – George Eliot’s brilliant, ardent Victorian heroine in Mill on the Floss (1860), who doesn’t pursue the man she loves out of loyalty to her cousin and what Sartre calls ‘human solidarity, self-sacrifice’; and La Sanseverina – Stendhal’s duchess in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), who tries mercilessly to get her beloved to leave what Sartre calls his ‘silly goose of a fiancée.’ Sartre reflects: ‘Here, we confront two diametrically opposed moralities, yet I maintain they are equivalent, inasmuch as the ultimate aim in both cases is freedom.’ One is selfless and one is ruthless, but both acted authentically because they both chose deliberately and passionately. Neither was a passive victim blaming circumstances for their situations. Contrary to his reputation for individualism, Sartre argues that subjectivity is ‘not strictly individual’ because ‘it is not only oneself that one discovers in the cogito [“I think therefore I am”], but also the existence of others.’ A person becomes who they are through others and, according to Sartre, ‘he cannot be anything (in the sense in which we say someone is spiritual, or cruel, or jealous) unless others acknowledge him as such.’ We discover ourselves through other people’s perceptions and demands, so much so that ‘we each attain ourselves in the presence of the other.’ This intersubjective relationship is, in Sartre’s view, the foundation of what connects humans to one another. While Sartre denies human nature, he argues we share the same human condition. ‘Historical situations vary,’ Sartre explains. ‘What never varies is the necessity for [a man] to be in the world, to work in it, to live out his life in it among others, and, eventually, to die in it.’ This human condition is what makes it possible to understand lives very different from our own. Also all-too-common to the human condition is bad faith – the attempt to deny freedom and responsibility. Sartre describes two archetypes of bad faith: cowards (lâches) and bastards (salauds – in the sense of morally filthy). The person who says ‘I had no choice’ is Sartre’s coward. Bastards act as if the rules don’t apply to them, as if their power were a fact of nature, or as if the world owes them their place in it. ‘Bad faith is obviously a lie because it is a dissimulation of man’s full freedom of commitment.’ The good news is that people are free to change. When you accept despair, you can stop waiting for the world to cooperate, and get on with life The personal costs of bad faith are serious but, at scale, the political costs are devastating. Writing in the shadow of the Second World War, Sartre was all too aware of the stakes: ‘Tomorrow, after my death, men may choose to impose fascism, while others may be cowardly or distraught enough to let them get away with it. Fascism will then become humanity’s truth, and so much the worse for us.’ Sartre says, ‘In reality, things will be what men have chosen them to be.’ Sartre’s antidote to bad faith at both the personal and political level is despair: ‘It means that we must limit ourselves to reckoning only with what depends upon our will, or on the set of probabilities that enable action.’ Despair is what’s left when you stop lying to yourself about what you can control, and then act without optimism or illusions. When you accept despair, you can stop waiting for the world to cooperate, and get on with life. Sartre says you have to commit anyway, because ‘[man’s] only hope resides in his actions and … the only thing that allows him to live is action.’ ‘[Man] is nothing more than the sum of his actions,’ Sartre declares. Blaming circumstances or claiming you deserve better is, for Sartre, self-deception. According to Sartre, ‘there is no love other than the deeds of love; no potential for love other than that which is manifested in loving.’ You make yourself through what you do, not what you might have done. ‘In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing.’ Sartre’s lecture is motivating but not philosophically watertight. For example, the idea that you are the sum of your actions is controversial because some people think we have traits that aren’t always realised. You might be a musical genius but if you’ve never had the opportunity to learn how to play music, are you a musician? Sartre would say no, but Aristotle’s concept of potentiality suggests a person can have unrealised capacities, just as a seed is potentially a tree, even if it never actually becomes one. Or consider glass. Brittleness is a quality of the glass, even if no one breaks it. But Sartre seems to be saying that it’s got the capacity to shatter only when it’s actually shattered. Some, like Aristotle, suggest that we are more than the sum of our actions. Sartre extends the same logic to our emotions, with equally questionable results. We are free to choose our passions, and to deny this is bad faith, according to Sartre. But people with depression or trauma don’t experience their condition as chosen. For anyone whose freedom has been constrained, Sartre’s confidence about choice can come across as tone-deaf. Sartre doesn’t answer why what’s best for me is also best for everyone else An even larger problem at the heart of the lecture is the way Sartre responds to the challenge that if I follow this advice, then anything goes. What stops me from freely choosing to be, for example, an egomaniacal politician with a proclivity for dropping bombs in other countries? Sartre’s response is that if I choose for myself, I choose as if the whole of humanity were going to take my lead and do the same, or at least watch me do it. To do that sincerely will, he claims, involve considerations of what other people think of me, and constrain me. Here, Sartre is smuggling in Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative (act only as you’d be willing for everyone to act). Stepping from ‘choosing what’s best for me’ to ‘my choice is a model for all of humanity’ has been criticised as ‘sketchy’. The argument is weak because Sartre doesn’t answer why what’s best for me is also best for everyone else. Running marathons is good for some people, but that’s no reason to think everyone should run them. Also, Sartre rejects the idea of a common human nature, but claiming ‘nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all’ makes sense only if we share some common standard of what ‘better’ means, which requires some understanding of what’s better for all humans and implies a shared human nature. Moreover, Sartre never answers: why should I care if everyone did the same as me? You could say: ‘I choose to be an egomaniac. Sure, it happens to be pretty evil by other people’s standards, but I’m creating my own values and that’s just what I choose. I’m being authentic.’ If you respond to Sartre’s checks-and-balances-style question ‘What would happen if everyone did what I am doing?’ by saying ‘But everyone does not act that way,’ then, in Sartre’s view, you’d be ‘struggling with a bad conscience.’ Still, the egomaniac might say: ‘Yes, everyone should pursue their own desires, let them, I don’t care.’ Sartre talks as if, somehow, consistency would demand me to respect other people’s freedom, but that’s not automatically built into the concept of freedom. Hitler seems to have believed he was choosing passionately, deliberately, for the good of both himself and humanity, and thought it’d be good if everyone did as he did. Maggie Tulliver and La Sanseverina have polar opposite moralities, but Sartre says they’re the same because they both aim at freedom. Sartre’s test for a good choice is that it be authentic – deliberate, owned, not in bad faith. But the authentic egomaniac and the authentic saint both pass. Sartre never completed a work on ethics (apart from notes published posthumously). In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Beauvoir starts from a different premise: freedom is always situated. A person born into poverty, raised under oppression or denied education faces a structurally different existential situation than the one Sartre’s lecture assumes. The choices available are narrower, the costs of choosing against the grain are higher, and the anguish of freedom can be taken over entirely by the anguish of survival. Willing your own freedom commits you to fighting for the conditions that make other people’s freedom possible. While Sartre acknowledged situation, his version of it is thinner than the concrete social structures on which Beauvoir insists. For Beauvoir, the obligation to others’ freedom doesn’t need to be smuggled in, because it follows from taking seriously the fact that freedom is always lived in conditions shaped by others. Freedom without attention to its conditions is more wishful thinking than philosophy. Sartre knew his philosophy sounded bleak but, he insists: ‘no doctrine is more optimistic, since it declares that man’s destiny lies within himself.’ We create ourselves by projecting ourselves toward goals beyond ourselves. A person is never finished. Recognising that gives humans dignity. We didn’t choose to be here, in this world or at this time, but we have to choose our way of living in it The afterlife of ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ is as a psychological self-help book under the guise of philosophy. One of the central themes is about discovering yourself as the architect of your own life. It works because it encourages people to seize life by the throat, to make decisions for themselves, and not to feel constrained by social categorisations or what other people think they ought to do. Sartre gives people philosophical licence to remake themselves in defiance of the world. That might sound pretentious but it’s also empowering. The lecture is psychological in that it highlights patterns of blaming others and outsourcing decisions. It shows that you can’t shirk responsibility even if it feels like you can. One of Sartre’s most important messages is that we’re responsible for every choice we make, as well as every choice we don’t make. And our actions mean something beyond ourselves because our choices shape society. Every one of us is leading by example, even if in only a small way. Sartre’s lecture was polemical, globally resonant and it’s worth revisiting because it remains the most accessible gateway into some of the hardest questions about freedom, moral responsibility and what it means to be human. What Sartre leaves us with is that we didn’t choose to be here, in this world or at this time, but we have to choose our way of living in it. Nothing can save us from ourselves, which is bleak only if you confuse salvation with agency. Projecting and losing yourself is how you find out who you are. Experiencing anguish of choice is a good thing. Ask yourself: what if everyone did as I am doing; where am I reaching for comfort when I should be sitting with anguish; and what does it mean to live without excuses? As Sartre once said: ‘the only way to learn is to question.’