Below is an article writen by Jean-Paul Sartre, first published as "A More Precise Characterization of Existentialism" in a newspaper called "Action", December 29, 1944. Sartre is commonly considered to be the most important of this centuries existentialists. He wrote the article as a reply to various criticisms of existentialism that were common at the time. I have reproduced a translation of it here, mainly because it gives a very clear statement of the central themes of existentialist philosophy

Newspapers - including "Action" itself - are only too willing these days to publish articles attacking existentialism. 'Action' has already been kind enough to ask me to reply. I doubt that many readers will be interested in the debate; they have many more urgent concerns. Yet if, among the persons who might have found principles of thinking and rules of conduct in this philosophy but have been dissuaded by these absurd criticisms, there were just one I could reach and straighten out, it would still be worth for him. In any case I want to make it clear that I am replying in my own name only: I would hesitate to involve other existentialists in this polemic.

What do you reproach us for? To begin with, for being inspired by Heidigger, a German and a Nazi philosopher. Next for preaching, in the name of existentialism, a quietism of anguish. Are we not trying to corrupt the youth and turn it aside from action by urging it to cultivate a refined dispair? Are we not upholding nihilistic doctrines (for an editorial writer in L'Aube, the proof is that I entitled a book "Being and Nothingness". Nothingness; imagine!) during these years when everything has to be redone or simply done, when the war is still going on, and when each man needs all the strength that he has to win it and to win the peace? Finally your third complaint is that existentialism likes to poke about in muck and is much readier to show men's wickedness and baseness than their higher feelings.

I'll give it to you straight: your attacks seem to me to stem from ignorance and bad faith. It's not even certain that you have read any of the books you're talking about. You need a scapegoat because you bless so many things you can't help chewing out someone from time to time. You've picked existentialism because it's an abstract doctrine few people know, and you think no one will verify what you say. But I am going to reply to your accusations point by point.

Heiddegger was a philosopher well before he was a Nazi. His adherence to Hitlerism is to be explained by fear, perhaps ambition, and certainly conformism. Not pretty to look at, I agree; but enough to invalidate your neat reasoning. "Heidegger," you say, "is a member of the National Socialist Party; thus his philosophy must be Nazi." That's not it: Heidegger has no character; there's the truth of the matter. Are you going to have the nerve to conclude from this that his philosophy is an apology for cowardice? Don't you know that sometimes a man does not come up to the level of his works? And are you going to condemn "The Social Contract" because Rousseau abandoned his children? And what difference does Heidegger make anyhow? If we discover our own thinking in that of another philosopher, if we ask him for techniques and methods that can give us access to new problems, does this mean that we espouse every one of his theories? Marx borrowed his dialectic from Hegel. Are you going to say that "Capital" is a Prussian work? We've seen the deplorable consequences of ecconomic autarky; let's not fall into intellectual autarky.

During the Occupation, the slavish newspapers used to lump together the existentialists and the philosophers of the absurd in the same reproving breath. A venomous little ill-manered pedant named Alberes, who wrote for the Petainist "Echo des etudiants", used to yap at our heals every week. In those days this kind of obfuscation was to be expected; the lower and stupider the blow, the happier we were.

But why have you taken up the methods of the Vichyssoise press again?

Why this helter-skelter way of writing if it's not because the confusion you create makes it easier for you to attack both philosophies at once? The philosophy of the absurd is coherent and profound. Albert Camus has shown that he was big enough to defend it all by himself. I too shall speak all by myself for existentialism. Have you ever defined it for your readers? And yet it's rather simple.

In philosophical terminology, every object has an essence and an existence. An essence is an intelligible and unchanging unity of properties; an existence is a certain actual presence in the world. Many people think that the essence comes first and then the existence: that peas, for example, grow and become round in conformity with the idea of peas, and that gherkins are gherkins because they participate in the essence of gherkins. This idea originated in religious thought: it is a fact that the man who wants to build a house has to know exactly what kind of object he's going to create - essence precedes existence - and for all those who believe that God created men, he must have done so by refering to his idea of them. But even those who have no religious faith have maintained this traditional view that the object never exists except in conformity with its existence; and everyone in the eighteenth century thoghhat all men had a common essence called 'human nature'. Existentialism, on the contrary, maintains that in man - and in man alone - existence precedes essense.

This simply means that man first 'is', and only subsequently is this orthat. In a word, man must create his own essense: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself. And the definition always remains open ended: we cannot say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared. It is absurd in this light to ask whether existentialism is facist, conservative, Communist, or democratic. At this level of generality existentialism is nothing but a certain way of envisaging human questions by refusing to grant man an eternally established nature. It used to be, in Kierkegaard's thought, on par with religious faith. Today, French existentialism tends to be accompanied by a declaration of atheism, but this is not absolutely neccessary. All I can say - without wanting to insisoo much on the similarities - is that it isn'oo far from the conception of man found in Marx. For is it not a fact that Marx would accept "this motto of ours for man: make, and in making make yourself, and be nothing but what you have made of yourself?"

Since existentialism defines man by action, it is evident that this philosophy is not a quietism. In fact, man cannot help acting; his thoughts are projects and commitments, his feelings are undertakings, he is nothing other than his life, and his life is the unity of his behavior. "But what about anguish?" you'll say. Well, this rather solemn word refers to a very simple everyday reality. If man 'is' not but 'makes himself', and if in making himself he makes himself responsible for the whole species - if there is no value or morality given a priori, so that we must in every instance decide alone and without any basis or guide lines, yet 'for everyone' - how could we possibly help feeling anguished when we have to act? Each of our acts puts the world's meaning and man's place in the universe in question. With each of them, whether we want to or not, we constitute a universal scale of values. And you want us not to be seized with fear in the face of such a total responsibility? Ponge, in a very beautiful piece of writing, said that man is the future of man. The future is not yet created, not yet decided upon. We are the ones who will make it; each of our gestures will help fashion it. It would take a lot of pharisaism to avoid anguished awareness of the formidable mission given to each of us. But you people, in order to refute us more convincingly, you people have deliberately confused anguish and neurasthenia, making who knows what pathological terror out of this virile uneasiness extistentialism speaks of. Since I have to dot my i's, I'll say then that 'anguish, far from being an obstacle to action, is the very condition for it, and is identicle with the sense of that crushing responsibility of all before all which is the source of both our torment and our granduer.'

As for despair, we have to understand one another. It's true that man would be wrong 'to hope'. But what does this mean except that hope is the greatest impediment to action? Should we hope that the war will stop all by itself without us, that the Nazis will extend the hand of friendship to us, that the privilaged of capitalist society will give up their privilages in the joy of a new "night of August 4"? If we hope for all of this, all we have to do is cross our arms and wait. Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he can count on nothing but himself: that he is alone, left alone on earth in the middle of his infinite responsibilities, with neither help nor succor, with no other goal but the one he will set for himself, with no other destiny but the one he will forge on this earth. It is this certainty, this intuitive understanding of his situation, that we call despair. You can see that it is no fine romantic frenzy but the sharp lucid conciousness of the human condition. 'Just as anguish is indistinguishable from a sense of responsiblity, despair is inseparable from will.' With dispair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

Are you going to condemn existentialism for saying men are free? But you need that freedom, all of you. You hide it from yourselves hypocritically, and yet you incessantly come back to it in spite of yourselves. When you have explained a man's behavior by its causes, by his social situation and his interests, you suddenly become indignant at him and you bitterly reproach him for his conduct. And there are other men, on the contrary, whom you admire and whose acts serve as models for you. All right then, that means you don't compare the bad ones to plant lice and the good ones to useful animals. If you blame them, or praise them, you do so because they could have acted differently. The class struggle is a fact to which I subscribe completely, but how can you fail to see that it is situated on the level of freedom? You call us social traitors, saying that our conception of freedom keeps man from loosening his chains. What stupidity! When we say a man who's out of work is free, we don't mean that he can do whatever he wants and change himself into a rich and tranquil bourgeois on the spot. 'He is free because he can always choose to accept his lot with resignation or to rebel against it.' And undoubtably he will be unable to avoid great poverty; but in the very midst of his destitution, which is dragging him under, he is able to choose to struggle - in his own name and in the name of others - against all forms of destitution. He can also choose to be a man who refuses to let destitution be man's lot. Is a man a social traitor just because from time to time he remindes others of these basic truths? Then the Marx who said, "We want to change the world," and who in this simple sentence said that man is master of his destiny, is a social traitor. Then all of you are social traitors, because that's what you think too just as soon as you let go the apron strings of a materialism that was useful once but now has gotten old. And if you didn't think so, then man would be a thing - a bit of carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, and nothing more - and you wouldn't have to lift a finger for him.

You tell me that I work in filth. That's what Alain Laubreaux used to say, too. I could refrain from answering here, because this reproach is dirrected at me as a person and not an existentialist. But you are so quick to generalize that I must nevertheless defend myself for fear that the opprobrium you cast upon me will redound to the philosophy I have adopted. There is only one thing to say: I don't trust people who claim that literature uplifts them by displaying noble sentiments, people who want the theater to give them a 'show' of heroism and purity. What they really want is to be pursuaded that it's easy to do good. Well no! It isn't easy. Vichyssoise literature and, alas, some of today's literature would like to make us think it is: it's so nice to be self satisfied. But it's an outright lie. Heroism, greatness, generosity, abnegation; I agree that there is nothing better and that in the end they are all what make sense out of human action. But if you pretend that all a person has to do to be a hero is to belong to the 'ajistes,' the 'jocistes,' or a political party you favour, to sing innocent songs and go to the country on Sundays, you are cheapening the virtues that you claim to uphold and are simply making fun of everyone.

Have said enough to make it clear that 'existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, solidarity? After my attempt to make things clear, will we still find journalists making allusions to the "despair of our eminent ones" and other claptrap? We'll see. I want to tell my critics openly: it all depends on you now. After all you're free too. And those of you who are fighting for the Revolution, as we think we are fighting too: you are just as able as we are to decide whether it shall be made in good or bad faith. The case of existentialism, an abstract philosophy upheld by a few powerless men, is very slight and scarcely worthy. But in this case as in thousands of others, depending on whether you keep on lying about it or do it justice even as you attack it, you will decide what man shall be. May you grasp this fact and feel a little salutary anguish.