c’s Reviews > Existentialism is a Humanism > Status Update

‘This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realisation, that man can realize himself as truly human.’

‘It is the same upon the plane of morality. There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention.’

many many many thoughts…

‘In this sense we may say that there is a human universality, but it is not something given; it is being perpetually made. I make this universality in choosing myself; I also make it by understanding the purpose of any other man, of whatever epoch. This absoluteness of the act of choice does not alter the relativity of each epoch.’

love the perpetually made line

‘I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me.’

‘That objection is really rather comic, for it implies that people are born heroes: and that is, at bottom, what such people would like to think… Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero.’

many thoughts on this re: narrative choices

‘But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.’

sartre calling me out for being lazy…

‘But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular person to live?’

wow this is very charactercore

‘Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.’

oooo interesting