Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism › A Philosophy Under Attack

To understand *Existentialism Is a Humanism*, we need to understand what Sartre was defending against. By 1946, existentialism had become fashionable in Parisian cafés, associated with black turtlenecks, jazz, and a vague sense of artistic rebellion. But it had also attracted fierce criticism from multiple directions. The Communists attacked existentialism as bourgeois navel-gazing, a philosophy of individual angst that ignored the material conditions of class struggle and offered no basis for collective action. If everyone creates their own values, how can we build solidarity? How can we condemn exploitation as objectively wrong? The Catholics attacked it as godless nihilism. Without God, they argued, everything is permitted. Existentialism strips away moral foundations and leaves us with nothing but subjective preferences dressed up as philosophy. Conservative critics saw it as an ugly philosophy that dwelt on human misery, bad faith, and the sordid aspects of existence while ignoring beauty, nobility, and transcendence. Even fellow travelers worried that existentialism's emphasis on radical freedom was psychologically naive. Surely we are shaped by our upbringing, our biology, our social circumstances. The idea that we are completely free to choose ourselves seemed to ignore everything psychology and sociology had taught us. Sartre's lecture was a direct response to these charges. He wanted to show that existentialism, properly understood, was deeply humanistic rather than nihilistic. It took human dignity more seriously than any philosophy that grounded morality in God or human nature.