Publication Information :
Book Title : Existentialism and Human Emotions.
Contributors : Jean-Paul Sartre – author.
Publisher : Philosophical Library.
Place of Publication : New York.
Publication Year : 1957.
EXISTENTIALISM
I should like on this occasion to defend existentialism against some charges which have been brought against it.
First, it has been charged with inviting people to remain in a kind of desperate quietism because, since no solutions are possible, we should have to consider action in this world as quite impossible. We should then end up in a philosophy of contemplation ; and since contemplation is a luxury, we come in the end to a bourgeois philosophy. The communists in particular have made these charges.
On the other hand, we have been charged with dwelling on human degradation, with pointing up everywhere the sordid, shady, and slimy, and neglecting the gracious and beautiful, the bright side of human nature ; for example, according to Mlle. Mercier, a Catholic critic, with forgetting the smile of the child. Both sides charge us with having ignored human solidarity, with considering man as an isolated being.