Existentialism vs Humanism

Question

When Sartre stood before a packed lecture hall in Paris in 1945 and announced that existentialism was a humanism, he was responding to critics on all sides. Communists accused existentialism of bourgeois individualism; Catholics called it nihilistic and pessimistic; even former allies like Camus had their doubts. Sartre's lecture, published the following year, was meant to defend existentialism as an optimistic, action-oriented, deeply ethical philosophy. Yet the very claim that existentialism is a humanism became one of the most contested propositions in modern thought. Heidegger rejected it; Foucault buried it; and the question it raises — does existentialism elevate the human subject or expose it as a fiction? — remains unresolved. What, then, is the relationship between existentialism and humanism?

Quick Answer

Sartre's argument in "Existentialism is a Humanism" rests on a single, stark claim: existence precedes essence. If a paper knife is designed before it is made — its essence comes first — then the human being, in a godless universe, has no pre-given essence. We exist first, and then, through our choices and actions, we define what we are. This means there is no human nature to fall back on, no universal formula to tell us what to do. Every person is wholly responsible for what they become, and because in choosing for oneself one inevitably chooses an image of humanity, that responsibility extends to all. Sartre called this the deepest humanism — not because it flatters human beings but because it refuses to let them off the hook. There is no alibi, no determinism, no excuse. You are what you do.

The problem, as Heidegger saw it, is that Sartre had simply turned the traditional formula around. Classical humanism says essence precedes existence — there is a human nature, designed by God or reason, that defines what humans are. Sartre says existence precedes essence — there is no nature, only freedom. But both, Heidegger argued, remain trapped in the same metaphysical framework: both take the human subject as the center, the foundation, the being in terms of which everything else is understood. In the Letter on Humanism (1947), Heidegger wrote that Sartre's formula merely inverts the traditional one without escaping it. The real task of thinking is not to place the human subject at the center, whether as essence or as existence, but to recover the question of being — the question of what it means for anything to be at all — which humanism, in all its forms, has systematically forgotten.

Camus, for his part, never accepted the label of existentialist and was suspicious of Sartre's system-building. His own philosophy of the absurd was not a humanism in Sartre's sense; it did not claim that humans create their own essence through choice. It claimed, rather, that the human demand for meaning confronts a silent universe, and that the proper response is lucid revolt — neither the creation of meaning nor the flight into faith. Camus's humanism, to the extent he had one, was rooted in solidarity and limits, not in radical freedom and total responsibility.

Historical Wisdom

Humanism has a long and complicated history. In its Renaissance form, it meant the revival of classical learning and the celebration of human dignity — the idea, articulated by Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, that humans are uniquely free to determine their own nature. In the Enlightenment, humanism became identified with reason, progress, and the belief that human beings, freed from superstition and authority, could build a just and rational society. By the twentieth century, humanism had acquired a more specific meaning in philosophy: any position that takes the human being — the subject, consciousness, the person — as the central or foundational term.

Sartre's lecture was an attempt to claim this tradition for existentialism. He argued that existentialism is more truly humanist than the classical versions, because it takes human freedom seriously rather than treating human nature as a given. If there is no God, then man is "nothing else but what he makes of himself," and this radical freedom is the basis of all value and all responsibility. The lecture was enormously popular — it made existentialism a public philosophy, accessible to readers who would never tackle Being and Nothingness — but Sartre himself later regretted it, calling it a text he would have preferred not to publish, too hasty and too concessive in its attempt to win over a popular audience.

Heidegger's response came from a different philosophical universe. By 1947, Heidegger had moved well beyond the existential analytic of Being and Time, which Sartre had taken as (part of) his starting point. The later Heidegger saw the history of Western thought as a history of the "forgetting of being" — a progressive narrowing of the question of what it means to be, until being was reduced to the being of entities, and the human subject was installed as the master and possessor of those entities. Humanism, in this genealogy, is not a benign celebration of human dignity but a symptom of metaphysical decline. It places the human being at the center and thereby obscures the more fundamental question: not what the human being is, but what the being of the human being is — how being itself shows itself, withdraws, and sends itself across epochs. The Letter on Humanism is thus both a critique of Sartre and a programmatic statement of Heidegger's later philosophy, often called the "turn" (Kehre).

The anti-humanist current did not end with Heidegger. In the 1960s, French structuralism and post-structuralism took up the critique with new vigor. Foucault, in The Order of Things (1966), famously declared that "man is a recent invention" — a figure constructed by the human sciences in the nineteenth century, and one that was already beginning to dissolve. Lacan psychoanalyzed the subject as a product of language rather than a sovereign agent. Althusser argued that history is a process without a subject. These thinkers did not all agree with Heidegger, but they shared his suspicion of the humanist subject that Sartre had tried to defend. The "death of man" was, in a sense, the culmination of the line of thought that Heidegger had opened.

Different Cultural Perspectives

The existentialism-humanism debate played out differently across intellectual cultures. In France, the stakes were immediate and political. Sartre's lecture was delivered in a liberated Paris still raw from occupation, collaboration, and the moral compromises of war. To say that humans are radically free and responsible was, in that context, a double-edged claim: it was a call to action and a judgment on those who had claimed they had no choice. French existentialism's humanism was inseparable from the question of what one owed to one's fellow human beings in the aftermath of catastrophe. When the anti-humanists later declared the subject dead, they were also, in a sense, declaring the questions of guilt and responsibility dead — or at least relocating them from the individual subject to impersonal structures of language, power, and history.

In the German tradition, the debate had a different texture. Heidegger's rejection of humanism was bound up with his own compromised political history — his rectorship under the Nazi regime, his silence after the war. Critics have noted that the Letter on Humanism's turn away from the human subject and toward the "history of being" can look less like philosophical profundity and more like an evasion of the very moral questions that Sartre was trying to foreground. The German reception of existentialism was also shaped by the legacy of Nietzsche, whose own relation to humanism was ambiguous: he demolished the humanist faith in reason and progress, yet his ideal of the overman is arguably a hyperbolic humanism, a vision of what the human being might become.

From outside the European tradition, the debate can look parochial. Both Sartre's humanism and Heidegger's anti-humanism take the Western philosophical subject as their point of departure, and both operate within a conceptual vocabulary that assumes a particular relationship between self, world, and language. Confucian thought, for instance, does not begin from the isolated individual subject at all but from relationality — the self is constituted through roles, relationships, and rituals. From a Confucian perspective, the existentialist anxiety about freedom and the Heideggerian anxiety about being are both symptoms of a culture that has lost its social fabric. The question is not whether the subject is free or dead but whether the practices that sustain human flourishing are being maintained.

Practical Lessons

The practical force of Sartre's humanism is the demand for responsibility. If you are what you do, and if your choices commit not just yourself but an image of humanity, then the question "what should I do?" is never merely personal. Every decision — the career you pursue, the person you love, the cause you serve or decline — is a statement about what you think a human life is for. This is a heavy burden, and Sartre knew it. The lecture is full of examples of people facing impossible choices: the student torn between staying with his ailing mother and joining the Resistance, the young man who must decide whether to marry. Sartre's point is not that there is a right answer to be deduced but that there is no authority to consult except your own freedom. You must choose, and in choosing, take responsibility for the value you thereby create.

Heidegger's anti-humanism, in practical terms, is a warning against the hubris of the subject. If humanism places the human being at the center, it risks treating the world — nature, other beings, the future — as material for human projects. Heidegger's later essays on technology develop this critique: the technological framing that reduces the Rhine to a hydroelectric resource, the forest to lumber, the human being to "human resources," is the practical consequence of a metaphysics that places the subject in command. To think beyond humanism, for Heidegger, is to cultivate a different relation to being — one of listening, sparing, and letting-be rather than mastery and control. This is not passivity; it is a reorientation of what it means to act.

For anyone navigating the tension between these positions, the practical upshot is a double awareness. Sartre is right that you cannot hide behind structures, roles, or determinism to avoid the weight of your own choices; you are responsible, and pretending otherwise is bad faith. Heidegger is right that you are not the sovereign center of the universe, that your choices unfold within a historical and ecological situation you did not create and cannot fully control, and that treating the world as raw material for your will is a form of ontological blindness. To hold both truths at once — responsible yet finite, free yet thrown — is the difficult wisdom that the existentialism-humanism debate, at its best, makes available. It is a wisdom that demands neither the triumphalism of the subject nor the abdication of the subject, but a humility that does not collapse into passivity and a freedom that does not inflate into domination.

Further Reading

To explore Sartre's side of the debate, visit Sartre and Existentialism. For Heidegger's critique, see Heidegger and the comparison in Sartre vs Heidegger. The Existentialist Wisdom collection gathers the central texts, while Understanding Yourself addresses the broader question of what it means to be a self. For the phenomenological foundations that both thinkers inherited, see Existentialism vs Phenomenology.