Anguish and Abandonment in Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism"

When I first began reading philosophy, I was a huge fan of Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism." It is short, stakes out clear positions, and highlights a few thoughtful puzzles of interest for the philosophically inclined. I read it in a class and was thrilled to be able to get something entirely done and be armed with ideas from it. Later, I wasn't so thrilled with "Existentialism is a Humanism" because it doesn't overtly do what, say, the Platonic dialogues do. One issue in philosophy morphs into another in the strangest way. You think you're talking about logic, but what you're really doing is talking through how a concept like "god" would even work. Or you're trying to get to a conclusion about ethics, but it depends on how you evaluate your data. The ethical decision is supposedly the last one in a number of other observations and judgments. So I found the directness of Sartre's remarks lacking. No one can precisely identify why a resident of the Cave would become restless and turn toward natural light, but that "turn" is certainly present in realizing that the thought devoted to one issue describes another perfectly. Good works of philosophy are not simple polemics; they push you to see the world differently, if not completely anew.

Now I'm back to "Existentialism is a Humanism." I mean, the United States is a country full of cranks. Not just people one disagrees with, but people devoted to denying the most basic of facts, indulging paranoia, and insisting on total control or else. And Sartre's famous line about ethics and responsibility, about the heart of ethics residing in a humankind "condemned to be free," looks like a powerful weapon against the cranks who insist you serve their every whim:

We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.

Existentialism, Sartre stresses, does not lend itself to excuses. Sartre's version starts with a strict atheism which holds that the absence of God can mean permission for anything. And because anything could happen, you have to be that much more responsible. You have to create a credible ethics, one that others see as uplifting. The responsibility for this does not lie in being given an ethical code. It is prior, stemming from the very idea that you are free. If you're free, how do you show that your freedom benefits yourself and others? How do you find the limits you want to define you?

This seems extremely useful against the sort of crank dominating the United States. The ones that scream "they don't follow politics," or attack vaccines because of addiction to the algorithm, or are straight up racists. Sartre's insistence on being responsible despite being "thrown into this world" calls out the carelessness of so, so many. No, you are not allowed to say that the misery of others or threatening other countries are just jokes. If you do, you're ignorant, unethical, and should be stripped of power. And if you are a more disciplined lover of authoritarians, Sartre indirectly attacks you too. Responsibility, to me, doesn't mean lots of organization, regulations, and hierarchies. All that stuff can mask the work one ought to be doing. If you follow all the rules and support your coworkers, and you operate a concentration camp for children, that is not responsibility. That's a mockery of the things used to make the world run properly.

When moral rhetoric is good, there must be depth to be uncovered. Sartre grapples with the terms "anguish," "abandonment," and "despair," and I think it is worth wrestling with his illustrations of "anguish" and "abandonment" in particular. Can we get clarity on the responsibility which defines us?

Sartre's depiction of "anguish" leads to a line of thinking recognizable in Aristotlean notions of virtue. You don't just make decisions for yourself; if you reason correctly, you make a decision which serves as a model for anyone like you. Sartre:

When a man commits himself to anything, fully realising that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind – in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.

You not only make the commitment for yourself, deciding on action (or inaction) and who you ultimately "will be." You are a "legislator" of sorts. And this moves us from Aristotle to Kierkegaard. What do we make of Abraham desiring to sacrifice Issac because of the voice of God? This is where Sartre's musing gets particularly interesting. Sure, we are anguished because we have responsibilities. You can see it at work in Abraham or generals who must make choices about who or what is expendable. But consider someone who may not be in the best condition to figure out right from wrong:

A certain mad woman who suffered from hallucinations said that people were telephoning to her, and giving her orders. The doctor asked, “But who is it that speaks to you?” She replied: “He says it is God.” And what, indeed, could prove to her that it was God? If an angel appears to me, what is the proof that it is an angel; or, if I hear voices, who can prove that they proceed from heaven and not from hell, or from my own subconsciousness or some pathological condition? Who can prove that they are really addressed to me?

Sartre provides an example of a woman suffering from hallucinations. She claimed people called her on the telephone and dictated orders. Those people identified themselves as God. Sartre's example is shrewd: the woman puts distance between those she claims to hear on the telephone and the voice of God. You get the sense that existentialism desires to have a great respect for those striving for mental clarity. And then he drops this question: "Who can prove that they [any supernatural voices] are really addressed to me?" The skepticism he introduces aims at Kierkegaard and Abraham. Before you decide on an obviously harmful course of action, before you declare a "teleological suspension of the ethical," have you considered who or what was speaking to whom? Did you know whether you were even being spoken to?

It's that suggestion I want to indulge, that anguish and identity can be fruitfully linked. It's not something many want to accept. I spent time above talking about those always making excuses for their carelessness or violence. It's not hard to link them with poor or extremely immature notions of identity. I have known one or two who cannot take the question "Who am I?" seriously. They love to rant about others they claim are selfish or materialistic, how they personally have been robbed of opportunities, how change for the better is impossible. They say everything to avoid the question of who they are. A certain kind of anguish–not one that is paralyzing or even particularly hurtful–could be helpful in the face of an anxiety shaped into complacency. Better to be in flux, wondering what you want to bring into your life, than stand on denial. Sometimes, that denial claims no less than the authority of God, as if God exists to license depravity.

Sartre's use of "abandonment" leads to the famous quote about a humankind "condemned to be free." We noted above that it is rooted in atheism, but how far does that atheism go? Sartre holds that it is a great loss there is no God, because it would be very useful for moral propositions such as "not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth" to have a priori status. "God" entails the question of how morality ought to work: if there is no universal law-giver or enforcer, then what? Ultimately, it isn't, I think, as simple as "everything is permitted," the direction "Existentialism as a Humanism" goes. The problem becomes that the propositions we want to be a priori, the ones we associate with various religions, have a strange power. They act as cultural touchstones, sometimes allowing communication with those who have different values. They point at higher notions of truth despite being, at times, ossified opinions. And that is all very strange. How do we know they are pointing in the correct direction? The only thing we know is that the tradition is better than those who make anything up, claiming on Reddit, for example, to be able to disprove the whole of mathematical truth. But we may not really understand how the tradition stacks up against a uniquely moral mind, and at times those minds have helped change the course of history.

So I want to just think about what "abandonment" is by touching on Heidegger. Sartre is conscious he is simplifying the term: "And when we speak of 'abandonment' – a favorite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end." "Abandonment" for Heidegger may be a bit more complicated. The question it deals with asks how it is possible to think God. For Hegel, the problem of thinking God is how our finitude could possibly deal with an infinite, absolute knowledge. Fine, you say, we can claim abandonment by God and not have to deal with any such question. But Heidegger chooses to respond to Hegel, and in doing so has to be more specific about what finitude means. It is not simply "not infinite." What if it is of a completely different character than the infinite? (1)

"Abandonment" and our finite station are intimately connected. Inasmuch as we think about what is historical or eternal, those ideas are coming from our finitude, our partial, anguished existence. Also, given that Being has disappeared from our conception of beings–we have lost sight of the fundamental question of "Why is there anything at all?"–you can say the problem is that we've abandoned our quest for meaning for the sake of power. I'm tempted to treat "abandonment" as several overlapping problems: 1) an inability to declare certainty about the most obvious moral truths 2) an acceptance of our radical freedom 3) the question of where the historical and eternal emerge 4) the withdrawal of Being (and the question of meaning) from our consciousness.

All four problems, you could say come back, to use some famous Heideggerian terminology, to our "concretized" existence, our "facticity." I feel like the atheism Sartre is so insistent on doesn't quite do justice to how complicated it is for individuals to truly be individuals, as well as the parallel but separate practice of a people, perhaps the entirety of humankind, trying to define itself. Heidegger speaks of the fourfold, one part of which is the gods. I simply want to draw attention to the idea that there are structures of belief we have created which have a life of their own. We are abandoned and there are ghosts everywhere.

Nowadays, I look at the responsibility of living this way. One must develop one's voice, do the work to shape one's identity. That work does not mean being overbearing or obnoxious, making every situation about you. Someone who genuinely knows what they are about listens. Often, the most valuable thing you can offer is presence. A worthwhile life is one people ought to know, not one that constantly declares itself. There are a number of quiet virtues which create quiet titans.

Our concrete existence doesn't demand the jettisoning of the imagination–far from it. But it doesn't dwell only in abstractions, exercises of a fevered mind (e.g. paranoia), or lies. It demands an appraisal of how we live now. An emphasis on our concrete existence doesn't ignore the needs of water, power, and prices which many are struggling with. It hears the poetry of people's voices as it should. That poetry, more often than not, is rooted in our deepest needs, such as community, love, and trust. Existentialism as critique makes this easy to articulate, as it started in a way with how one would turn towards one's own soul.

References

(1) Baker, G. (2024). Thinking finitude as abandonment: Heidegger’s death of God. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 85(3–4), 180–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2024.2410704

The entire section about abandonment owes itself to this paper in ways direct and indirect. I needed Professor Baker's careful study to track how finitude changed in Heidegger's thinking, but I obviously am not faithful to Heidegger's exact moves.