Essai

1945-2005, Existentialism and humanism sixty years on

Debbie Evans

In his 1945 lecture, Jean-Paul Sartre defends Existentialism against the ‘charges' of being a philosophy of pessimism, despair, nihilism, anarchy, vulgarity, baseness, ugliness and last but definitely not least the ‘charge' of amorality since Sartre, restating the position of Dostoyevsky affirms the humanistic starting-point of Existentialism: ‘Si Dieu n'existe pas tout est permis.' The alleged Sartrean ‘starting point' of the Cartesian cogito, the maîtrise of the ‘je pense' as the isolated presence of a pure subjectivity was considered by both...