Existentialism is a Humanism

This semester I am teaching Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism to two of my courses. We've already discussed it in one, and will be reading it soon in the other. As I'm sure you know, EH has received a bad rap over the years. Even Sartre grew to think it a cursed little book. 

Heidegger, as the story goes (and I know this is current, as somebody was rehearsing it  back in November at the RPA during one of our lunches), leveled a number of devastating criticisms of existentialism in his "Letter on Humanism." The history of the critique of metaphysics thus marches on. I'm not convinced by this story. Sure Sartre hadn't really thought through the problem of historicity at that point. But the "Letter on Humanism" story has one major problem: if existentialism was 'over,' why did it increasingly turn toward one of the most pressing post-world-war-two problems: anti-colonialism and decolonization? At the same time, no less, that Heidegger began to transform 'history' into an introverted history of Western metaphysics. Which leads me to the question: when I raise this objection to the "Letter on Humanism" story, why is it that people who rehearse it are completely caught off guard by it?

I'm going to leave that question open, because this post is supposed to be about teaching Existentialism is a Humanism. We'll talk about the problem in its general form when I end the semester with lectures on Senghor and Fanon (note that I am not trying to turn everyone into existentialists, but to think about why the anti-colonialists took up Sartre's concepts for their own ends).

I don't even want to talk about the whole essay, just one passage, to explain what I like about teaching texts that I don't usually use in my research. I've read EH over a dozen times, and can converse about its general themes with relative ease. However, this can mean that I always end up looking for the same passages. 

Yet this time I found something new. Due to all the passages about freedom, people often overlook Sartre's critique of the idea of progress in EH, which is important because the humanism that he doesn't like relies on the idea of progress, which in the moral sphere replaces God by man and secular morality. One the one hand, this conceptual move leaves intact a priori qualities of human nature, when we know that, for Sartre, "existence precedes essence."

On the other hand, the idea of progress privileges 1) the history of great men, and 2) fetishizes technological achievements.  Yes, this is the part that I thought would surprise you. Near the end of the essay, Sartre has some fun at the expense of Cocteau's Around the World in 80 Hours.

Cocteau gives expression to this idea when one of his characters, flying over some mountains in a plane, proclaims "Man is Amazing!" This means: even though I myself may never have built a plane, I nevertheless still benefit from the plane's invention and, as a man, I should consider myself responsible for, and honored by, what certain other men have achieved. 

The absurdity of this position is that it would be possible for somebody to make a complete judgment on an open situation--humans cannot make a judgment on the human condition as a whole, they can only change it through praxis. But here's the 'new' part, which is the way in which Sartre points out the absurdity. He continues:

This presupposes that we can assign a value to man based on the most admirable deeds of certain men. But that kind of humanism is absurd, for only a dog or a horse would be in a position to form an overall judgment about man and declare he is amazing, which animals scarcely seem likely to do--at least, as far as I know.

Those are my italics, because that is the part that impressed me: only animals can make an overall judgment on human beings. And why does it seem unlikely that the would proclaim that 'man is amazing?' Probably because these same advances of progress come at the cost of much of the rest of the world, especially the non-human world: technological leaps, environmental destruction.  Or that humans would be biased toward some advances that to a dog might seem inconsequential (why does this make me think of Kafka?) Even his choice of domesticated animals seems allusive, although I'm still trying to tease that out. 

Sartre wasn't, to my knowledge, too interested in the non-human world or ecology. Nevertheless, this passage works on two levels: on its surface, it's a good joke (it made my class laugh), but it also shows that he had considered, at some point, what the limits of judging the human situation  (and freedom, and universality) were.

Reading Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach is one of those figures of philosophy who for various reasons has become reading material for primarily specialists, despite the extraordinary impact of his book The Essence of Christianity (1841) in his time. Most everybody knows of him through Marx's famous "Theses on Feuerbach," but very few have read him.

Until recently, I had only a passing familiarity with his work, which is why I decided to read The Essence of Christianity, in George Eliot's-- Mary Anne Evan's, that is,-- translation from 1881, which was reprinted by Dover Books in 2008. My interest derives from his contemporaneity with Schelling and Marx, and his place between Schelling's positive philosophy and a nascent historical materialism. 

By April 1841 Marx had only received his doctorate, and the debates that would rage around his work were still many years off. That year they would circle around Schelling and Feuerbach. The former had been invited to the University of Berlin to assume the seat formerly held by Fichte and, more recently, Hegel, with the hope (expressed within royal circles) that he would stamp out the "dragonseed" of Hegelianism. His pan-European audience included Engels, Kierkegaard, and Bakunin. Nevertheless, Schelling's positive philosophy or philosophy of revelation appeared-- despite its critical elements-- to be the retrenchment of religious content in philosophy just at the time that religion as a source of value was in question. Many of the Young Hegelians (including Feuerbach) were turning to history or materialism for the basis of philosophical and political critique, and Schelling had returned to Berlin  with the question of revelation. In a letter to Feuerbach, dated October 3, 1843, Marx writes:

Schelling has not only been able to unite philosophy and theology, but philosophy and diplomacy too. He has turned philosophy into a general diplomatic science, into a diplomacy for all occasions. Thus an attack on Schelling is indirectly an attack on our entire policy, and especially on Prussian policy. Schelling's philosophy is Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae.

Marx proceeds to call Feuerbach "Schelling in reverse," the person who could carry through Schelling's critique of religion found in the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795-1796) that Schelling himself could not accomplish (the Letters is, incidentally, one of my favorite texts of Schelling's).

What, then, is Feuerbach's reversal of Schelling? His general thesis is that "the secret of theology is anthropology," that all  of religious life can be traced back to human ideas and activities. Feuerbach argued for what Marx would later refer to as "sensuous materialism." Each religious doctrine, he claims, is an alienated expression of human values. Each doctrine reflects either a human value or human desire. In general, Feuerbach affirmed the positive aspects of religion as the expression of a disguised humanism, but he also criticized religion for its pernicious effects on society and human values. I will confine this discussion to three points that I think might be of interest (especially if you might be reading Nietzsche at the moment).

1. Although religion initially is an objectification of human values and desires, Feuerbach argues that religious faith-- especially in its Christian version--has become anti-naturalist. Because Christian virtues are characterized by sacrifice, they require that one renounce the sensuous life. For the Christian, the "more anything contradicts man and Nature, the greater the abnegation, the greater the virtue" (216).
2. Faith is indifferent to moral duty and contrary to reason. The emphasis on faith in religion teaches dogmatism rather than the cultivation of virtue for its own sake, or the cultivation of the love of wisdom. Regarding reason: Feuerbach shares with many of his contemporaries a belief in progress, with which religious superstition interferes. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about historical progress, some which were raised here. What is more interesting for our discussion is that Feuerbach accuses religious practice of a variant of nihilism: "the belief that God is the necessary condition of virtue is the belief in the nothingness of virtue in itself" (167).
   
3. Faith is divisive. It separates people on the basis of doctrine. To faith, Feuerbach opposes love, which he argues is the basis not only of religion, but also the social bond. Hence the "the practical, palpable ground of necessity that we should raise ourselves above Christianity, above the peculiar standpoint of religion." Once philosophy reveals theology as anthropology, we ought to reject religion's rejection of sensuous life. Only through the sensuous life can we truly live as humanists.
   

The obvious reason why Feuerbach has become a figure for specialists is his humanism, for as long as 'man' was maintained as a historical invariant and measure of value we have not yet completed 'religious criticism.' Despite a number of criticisms that anticipated Nietzsche and Freud, Feuerbach replaced God with humanity.

And, Marx would add, a historically peculiar kind of humanity. In the "Theses on Feuerbach," he writes: 

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the essence of man is no abstraction inhering in each single individual. In actuality it is the ensemble of social relationships.

The result is that Feuerbach abstracts from historical processes, more specifically the relationship between history and political economy. The result is that Feuerbach mistakes the life of the bourgeois individual, within civil society for the essence of humanity. This theoretical mistake is to be rejected by  revolutionaries because it assumes one historical form of social relationships for the measure of these relationships themselves, rather than locating them within political economy. 

My suspicion is that this spectre of 'Feuerbachianism' lurks behind both the humanism and belief in progress of the New Atheists and, sometimes, the religious-exegetical impulse of the post-secular turn in continental philosophy.