Stevenson Core Fall 2014
Sabrina Kenney
October 24, 2014
Who We Are and What We Make of Ourselves
Existentialism and Humanism was first introduced as a public lecture at the club Maintenant in Paris in October 1945, at the end of WWII. Paris had just been freed of Nazi occupation, and French people were trying to rebuild their destroyed nation. Citizens, leaders, and philosophers were questioning the foundations of society and reexamining the meaning of morality. The horrors of the concentration camps and the atom bomb had just been brought to the surface. Evidence of the human capacity for evil and destruction was everywhere. Jean-Paul Sartre, like many other philosophers at the time, wrote his own essay, Existentialism, in an attempt to answer these moral and ethical questions about human nature and free will. Sartre is correct to say that people are free and must choose their own path in life, but also contradicts himself and fails to appreciate people’s diversity.
Sartre begins his essay in a very confusing way. He brings the reader into a very complicated argument over the meaning of Existentialism. He says that the word has lost its meaning and needs to be redefined, “…by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, it no longer means anything at all” (343). Sartre begins clarifying existentialism by focusing on the individual. He says, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (345). Here Sartre explains how human beings have no pre-determined destiny but are in charge of their own fate, and ultimately choose who they are going to be. Sartre, as an atheist, doesn’t believe there exists a divine being laying out rules for humans to follow. He says, ““…if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this