A critical analysis of Jean Paul Sartre's existential humanism with particular emphasis upon his concept of freedom and its moral implications

The term 'existentialism* is extremely vague as is the term 'humanism*„ However, existentialism may be generally characterized as a protest against moral or physical deter­ minism in regard to man. And 'humanism', in its most general application may mean any system centered on the concepts of dignity and freedom of man. Thus Jean Paul Sartre makes his existentialism a humanism through the fundament of human free­ dom. He does this by drawing from and synthesizing notions of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. The result is a unique concept of freedom. Sartre begins, in the manner of Husserl, with a phenom­ enological description of reality. This kind of analysis re­ veals only a consciousness, "the being subject", existing sole­ ly as the consciousness of something,* "the being object"* It is a consciousness situated in the midst of objects which constitute the world. Between subject and object stands a continuous rapport of opposition, of impossible synthesis. For, to see itself as an obj ect is for consciousness to ne­ gate its own existence. Self-determination is the way con­ sciousness maintains itself but only at the price of perpetual annihilation. It can never reflect or return upon its subjeetivity without by that fact ceasing to exist as conscious­ ness. Therefore consciousness must remain in a continual tension of detachment from any concrete determination. This iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. attitude of consciousness is the basis of human freedom. For Sartre human freedom comes to be a capacity of the being-foritself to make itself be in a positive way by pursuing what it wishes to be without binding itself to any of its own de­ terminations, Consciousness,in fact, transcends by its free­ dom every determination imposed on it! natural, biological, or physical. In its free realization of itself consciousness is given primacy over the world of objects, which includes all others outside the individual. What value they have is freely as­ signed to them by consciousness. Since consciousness is not limited by a particular form of being, the subject strives continually to go beyond what it is at any moment. This is expressed as a fundamental drive which implies an infinite possibility of being for the subject, and hence signifies a will to be God himself. But since there is no God, “man is a useless passion". This can only be a humanism on its own terms but its own terms are those of psychological description. But it fails as a psychology for the extremes of feeling and • experience are taken as the normal condition of man. What was meant to be a practical philosophy comes to be anti-philosophical. Man is simply an irrational hole in being.