Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sarte 1946 Jean-Paul Sarte 1946
Existentialism is a Humanism
Written: Lecture given in 1946
Source: Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman, Meridian
Publishing Company, 1989;
First Published: World Publishing Company in 1956;
Translator: Philip Mairet;
HTML Markup: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected February 2005.
On the other hand, La Sanseverina in Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme,
believing that it is passion which endows man with his real value, would have
declared that a grand passion justifies its sacrifices, and must be preferred to
the banality of such conjugal love as would unite Stephen to the little goose he
was engaged to marry. It is the latter that she would have chosen to sacrifice
in realising her own happiness, and, as Stendhal shows, she would also sacrifice
herself upon the plane of passion if life made that demand upon her. Here we are
facing two clearly opposed moralities; but I claim that they are equivalent,
seeing that in both cases the overruling aim is freedom. You can imagine two
attitude exactly similar in effect, in that one girl might prefer, in
resignation, to give up her lover while the other preferred, in fulfilment of
sexual desire, to ignore the prior engagement of the man she loved; and,
externally, these two cases might appear the same as the two we have just cited,
while being in fact entirely different. The attitude of La Sanseverina is much
nearer to that of Maggie Tulliver than to one of careless greed. Thus, you see,
the second objection is at once true and false. One can choose anything, but
only if it is upon the plane of free commitment.
