JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

50Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsthe past, when one spoke of human nature, one was thinking of something morelimited than if one were speaking of a condition in general. For nature—that is alreadysomething else: in a sense it is something more than a condition. Human nature is nota modality in the sense that the condition of man is a modality. For that reason itwould be better, in my view, to speak of naturalism than of humanism. In naturalismthere is an implication of realities more general than are implied in humanism—at least,in the sense in which you take the term ‘humanism’—we are dealing with reality itself.As to human nature, the discussion of it needs to be widened: for the historical pointof view must also be considered. The primary reality is that of nature, of which humanreality is only one function. But for that, one must admit the truth of history, and theexistentialist will not, as a rule, admit the truth of human history any more than thatof natural history in general. Nevertheless, it is history which makes individuals: it isbecause of their actual history, from the moment when they are conceived, that theyare neither born nor do they live in a world which provides an abstract condition forthem. Because of their history they appear in a world of which they themselves havealways been part and parcel, by which they are conditioned and to the conditions ofwhich they contribute, even as the mother conditions her child and the child alsoconditions her from the beginning of its gestation. It is only from this point of viewthat we have any right to speak of the condition of man as of a primary reality. Oneought rather to say that the primary reality is a natural condition and not a humancondition. These are merely current and common opinions that I am repeating, but inno way whatever that I can see does the existential argument refute them. After all, ifit is certain that there is no human nature in the abstract, no essence of man apart fromor anterior to his existence, it is also certain that there is no human condition ingeneral—not even if you mean by condition a certain set of concrete circumstances orsituations, for in your view these are not articulated. In any case, upon this subjectMarxism has a different idea, that of nature within man and man within nature, whichis not necessarily defined from an individual point of view.This means that there are laws of the functioning of man, as of every other objectof science, which constitute, in the full sense of the word, his nature. That nature isvariable, it is true, but bears little resemblance to a phenomenology—that is, to anyperception of it that is felt, empirical, or lived, or such as is given by common sense orrather by the assumed common sense of the philosophers. Thus understood, theconception of human nature as the men of the eighteenth century had it, was undoubtedlymuch nearer to that of Marx than is its existential substitute, “the condition of man”—which is a pure phenomenology of his situation.