Writing in the Modern Times: Responding to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism
by Stephanie Ann Devito
A self-satisfying essay response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s, Existentialism is a Humanism. It’s a bit flowery but serves as an approachable introduction to Existentialism and my early ideations about how art, community, culture, and philosophy intersect.
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True of all humans, is that we indulge in consciousness at the crest of human progress.
Peering out from the summit of modernity, it’s a brilliant view; but gaze beyond the horizon, squint just so to see past the shine of progress, 
and you can make out the murky storm cell of human ignorance.
From this vantage, we still cannot see any recent wisdom or past enlightenment that will allow us to escape the duality of our nature.
When shifting perspectives to look back at where humanity has climbed up from, and it’s made absolutely clear that there will never be a new day for us. Mankind will scale the same mountain, tame the same sky, and weather the same storm. Each new generation asking itself the unanswerable question of how best to be human.
The thing of it is, our visceral reality doesn’t unfold on a metaphorical mountaintop, but rather in mundanity. For me, days unfurl in the second to last plot on a dead-end street, in a nice house, with a nice husband, and a nice cat. On any given day, my most poignant observation could be that the cat’s full coat of fur on her hind legs makes her look like she’s wearing tiny, white bloomers.
I might ruminate on that for about half a day. Then, borrowing time intermittently between chores, I will meditate on the serenity of her sunbathing.
Now and again I even engage her in a dialog for my own sake.
By the time my head hits the pillow, a whole day will have passed without paying any mind to humanity’s pressing anguish or our perpetual missteps through this absurd world.
Other days, I obsess over it.
On each day in between, I fail to figure out just what responsibilities an awareness of humanity’s cyclical failures demands of a person who is no less fallible herself.
What was I, a woman with no power or platform, supposed to do in an era ravaged by rampant consumption and threatened by tyranny?
Questing for that answer, I have gone down many paths: I’ve been a would-be activist, would-be philanthropist, and a would-be revolutionary. At the point I retreated, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of futility and swaddled by Netflix and the effortless passage of time.
Then, a casual review of my bookshelf offered me as much of an answer as I could ever expect to find.
It wasn’t even in Jean-Paul Sartre’s actual essay, Existentialism is a Humanism, but rather just an excerpt from a lesser-known work in the preface. On editing his publication, Les Temps Modernes, Sartre explained
“We are siding with those who want to change both the social condition of mankind and its concept of itself.”
Shuddering a little from its squeaking, I dragged my highlighter across the words: Its concept of itself. Philosopher is not a contemporary career path, but rather one taken up posthumously, so I’d never considered it imminently useful until I read that.
“Its concept of itself.”
And while the phrase struck me, coupling it with “changing the social condition” validated the equality of their respective necessity. Struggling to find my footing as an activist, as a philanthropist, and as a revolutionary, I would always fall back into mundanity, but I never stumbled as a thinker.
Having opinions always came quite naturally. But an opinion is not concrete action. Musing the day away yields more questions than answers and is reliably proceeded by a sense of frivolity. A weighty feeling of uselessness in a time when the world is, quite literally, burning.
But there Jean-Paul was, in 1945 France, addressing the communists who felt contemplation was a luxury of the bourgeois, explaining to them, and now me, why truth is to the contrary.
Gripping Sartre’s Europe was Fascism and all its destruction. In its wake, God was counted among the dead.
Jean-Paul Sartre very keenly understood that, during God’s post-mortem, societal consciousness had to consider that no divine explanation could wash our hands of ourselves.
Embracing our solitude in an absurd universe means a great deal of responsibility falls into the lap of every individual. And embracing that responsibility might just be integral to disrupting the cycle of human ignorance.
“Make every man conscious of what he is and make him solely responsible for his own existence”.
This is the first effect of existentialist philosophy. In a world where you live and you die, and nothing more, who you are, what you are, and where you are going relies on your own intellectual creation. Furthermore, devoid of preordained morality, the conclusions your choices draw dictate not only your purpose but that of humanity as a whole.
“Creating the man each of us wills themselves to be … not a single one of our actions …does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.”
Made clear to me, and perhaps to the party of firing squad victims (the aptly named French Communist Party) was that each generation lives in an era of reconstruction. Despite a lifetime of effort, the work of dead men can never gift a right and just world to the living. Enlightenment is not an inheritance.
“Men are free and will freely choose tomorrow what man is to become.”
Only the advantage of history is left to future generations. As progress recedes from the shores of my current modern times, I find that the defining tides of the 21st century are one and the same as the 20th century which is one and the same as the 19th century and the 18th century.
So, on and so forth.
Yes, we are doomed to repeat the same darkness in our age, but we are likewise privileged to repeat the same renaissance.
That’s the thesis a neglected space on my bookshelf imparted to me; this is existentialism in practice.
If I turned towards philosophy to define the concept of myself, then I too turn towards philosophy to define the concept of humanity itself. If I value the written word for the personal transcendence it offers, then I, prescribed by my own philosophy, value the written word for the societal transcendence it offers.
Contemplation is not a luxury, rather it is a key allowing us to be freed from the binding ties of repetition.
Because of that, the illumination of philosophy cannot come from flames lit in a vigil to the past. It must be that of a torch passed on to the current generation. For it is our time to freely choose today what man is to be.
Thus, begins my venture to carry the torch of Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. To publish writing on current events, history, philosophy, and art in an attempt to change the social conditions of humanity and its concept of itself.
My own words will set out to encourage my readers to embrace their position in modernity. Allow them to see, not man’s past, not man’s future, but rather the perpetual responsibility of creating the present.
What am I to do, a woman with no power and no platform? I am to create it.
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