100 Great Books: (Book 23: Existentialism is Humanism)

“Life has no meaning a priori... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”

In October 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre walked into a packed hall in Paris to defend himself against critics who accused him of moral irresponsibility. The Second World War had just ended, and he was already a household name in France. During the German occupation, he had published Being and Nothingness (1943), a difficult philosophical book that nevertheless reached a wide audience. His plays filled theaters. He had been a prisoner of war and later became involved in the Resistance.

After the liberation of Paris from Nazi rule, he became a central figure: the philosopher holding court at the Café de Flore, the public intellectual writing for Les Temps Modernes, and the man living openly with Simone de Beauvoir in defiance of bourgeois convention. Existentialism was the fashionable intellectual current, and Sartre was its chief proponent. This meant he’d become a target. Marxists called him a bourgeois navel-gazer, peddling a philosophy of individual angst while the real struggle was collective and material. Catholics said he’d thrown out God and kept nothing but despair. Both sides agreed that existentialism was dangerous, probably immoral, and certainly irresponsible.