sin_blog

An excerpt from Existentialism and Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre (Eyre Methuen, 1973):

“Quietism is the attitude of people who say, ‘let others do what I cannot do.’ The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, ‘Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’ Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, ‘Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.’ 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. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptivce dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, ‘You are nothing else but what you live,’ it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.”

I totally believe that we are no more than what we are and what we’ve done; for the flesh we possess is the person that we present, and the actions that we have done are the only manifestation of our own being. There is no excuse to claim we are more than that, though when someone says “I could have done that, only that I didn’t”, it is not necessarily false that they have the capacity to do so. When a person of normal physicality holds a glass of water and says “I could have taken three sips of water, only that I did not”, it is almost certain that he has the ability to drink the water in his hand, and that it is true that it is his decision not to drink, unlimited by his physical ability. Yet it is exactly this decision that he made that he should be responsible for, and this deed and the corresponding consequence would still leave a mark in (his) history and contribute to evaluation, if any, of him as a whole. We can always throw excuses, but in the end oneself is the only person who is responsible for what he does. And that is the existentialist teaching.

*Seeing what he said in the second lesson, Jimmy could well be an existentialist, despite he does not exist.