From bourgeois humanism to existentialist humanism: the path of the classical intellectual to Sartre

Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand the notion of classical intellectual in Sartre's thought, more specifically in the conferences Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. We will see that the path of transformation of the technician of practical knowledge to intellectual begins with the unveiling of the contradiction of the society and of its own role, in the discovery of the falsity of the abstract and excluding bourgeois humanism. Against the ideology that have selected and educated him, the intellectual places the need to think from the concrete and the particularities, which does not imply a subjectivist relativism. By abandoning the abstract universal, the intellectual proposes, instead, a singular universalization, assuming the paradox proposed by Kierkegaard and updated by Sartre. In this sense, to approach the 1965 conferences about the intellectual to the conference about Kierkegaard, given the following year, is fundamental to better understand the role of the classical intellectual. In the theoretical questioning of the false humanism of the ruling class and in the practical questioning of its daily attitudes, he maintains the ambiguity between universal and singular, objectivity and subjectivity. Thus, we can finally understand how existentialist humanism stands.