Jean-Paul Sartre, wrong and incoherent as he often is about human reality,⁽¹⁾ occasionally provides incisive insights about it. One of them shows certain parallels with the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan.

Sartre’s basic notion is that each human being is always able to make free choices. We are not determined by our past. We can always choose what to do, both in individual situations and in comporting ourselves in general. Our free choices determine what we make of ourselves. Sartre famously asserts that “existence precedes essence.”⁽²⁾ Medieval scholastic philosophers defined “essence” as what something is and “existence” as whether something is.⁽³⁾ The essence of a unicorn is a horse-like animal with a pointy horn coming out of its forehead. Whether any such animal actually exists is another question. For Sartre, the essence of an individual human being is not preordained or defined in advance. Instead, what each of us is becomes known only after we exist for a while and make choices that define us. We each make something of ourself through our choices of what to do and how to relate to others and the world. Free choice is central to Sartre’s understanding of human reality.

The principle way our choices define us is through our projects. A project for Sartre is uncontroversial; it is simply taking action to achieve an end or to accomplish something. We envision a state of affairs that does not currently exist (Sartre calls this a type of nothingness) and do something to bring it about. A project can be as simple as getting a drink of water or as complex as writing a several-hundred-page tome on phenomenological ontology. It can be accomplished very quickly or take years and years. Through our projects we define ourselves, and the way to understand others is by discerning what their projects are.

But we are more than just a collection of projects. We are each in some way a unified being, not just a bundle of impulses or predilections or undertakings. Sartre gives the example of his friend Pierre, who enjoys boating.⁽⁴⁾ What explains why Pierre likes boating? Not just that he likes sports in general and not just because he likes being outdoors and so on. You can think of these as types of projects, but they have “a secondary and derivative quality.”⁽⁵⁾ What Sartre is after is a something more foundational.

Unwilling to explain human reality as a causal result of external forces such as, for instance, childhood trauma or social influences or economic status and the like, Sartre wants to explain a person in terms of their freely chosen projects. What gives unity to us over time is our fundamental choice of how to approach the world in which we find ourself. He calls this choice our “fundamental project” or “original project” or sometimes “essential” or “initial” project.

He speaks of

… the fundamental project that I am ….⁽⁶⁾

and says that

In rejecting with equal force both the theory of compliant clay and the theory of the bundle of tendencies, we will encounter the person in his constitutive initial project.⁽⁷⁾

So this project constitutes who we are. Referring to things that have already happened, he says that

… the set of these layers of being-past is organized by the unity of [one’s] project.⁽⁸⁾

The original or essential project is the basis for our unity over time. And it seems to have some defining power over us:

Changes [in my surroundings] cannot bring me to abandon my original project.⁽⁹⁾

… to the extent that our past appears within the framework of our essential project, we are constrained to act in these ways.”⁽¹⁰⁾

But what is this essential project? To ascertain it, he says, we need a special method:

By means of a comparison of a subject’s various empirical tendencies … we may attempt to discover and isolate the fundamental project that they have in common …. In these investigations we will … stop only when we encounter something whose irreducibility is evident ….⁽¹¹⁾

“… it is a matter of finding, beneath some partial and incomplete aspects of the subject, … the totality of his impulse toward being, his original relation to himself, to the world and to the other, within the unity of … a fundamental project.”⁽¹²⁾

This sounds like an observational method; each person might have a different fundamental project, and to find out what it is we must examine their individual projects to find out what is common to all of them. But in fact, we don’t have to do that, because Sartre claims to know what everyone’s original project is. It is our impulse to survive, to continue to exist:

a [person]’s original project can aim only at its being … the project of being, or desire to be, or tendency toward being …. Man is fundamentally the desire to be ….⁽¹³⁾

The original project that is expressed in each of our empirically observable tendencies is therefore the project of being, or alternatively, each empirical tendency relates to the original project of being as its expression and symbolic fulfillment….⁽¹⁴⁾

On the face of it, this sounds plausible but vacuous. After all, the goal of every living organism is first to survive, then to thrive and reproduce.⁽¹⁵⁾ Many people have noted the same thing. One of Sigmund Freud’s two basic drives is Eros, which is not just a sexual drive but “interest in one’s own survival.”⁽¹⁶⁾ The master of speculative metaphysics Alfred North Whitehead says “the art of life is first to be alive ….”⁽¹⁷⁾ The desire to be is obviously not unique to human beings. The ancient oracle exhorted “know thyself,”⁽¹⁸⁾ but just knowing that you, like every other living being, want to stay alive is not particularly helpful. We need something more.

Sartre gives us a clue to what that could be, our initial project (or projects). Although at one point he seems to equate a fundamental project with an initial project, at another point he speaks as if an initial project is something different:

… for example, if my initial project aims to choose myself as inferior in the midst of others (the so-called inferiority complex) ….⁽¹⁹⁾

This example is clearly different from the fundamental project of being. (It’s also a bit strange. Why would anyone choose to feel inferior? But that’s Sartre for you.) Now that you are here, being in your world and in your situation or perhaps several situations, the question is how best to keep on being. What is critical to understanding any particular person, including yourself, is not just that they strive to stay alive, but how they do so. Everybody does it differently.

There is not first one desire to be, and then a thousand particular feelings; rather the desire to be only exists, and is only manifested, in and through … the thousand empirical and contingent expressions … manifested by … a particular person.⁽²⁰⁾

At issue is what we might call your strategies for being in the world or for exercising your freedom. Do you have a sort of general or global approach to life? Is it working for you? Even though you might have chosen it some time ago, do you still want to keep on choosing it? These are crucial issues, which Sartre alludes to but does not treat in any detail.

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The Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, in some ways diametrically opposed to Sartre, has an analogous view of human nature. Where Sartre is an atheist, Inayat Khan (“Hazrat” is an honorific meaning, roughly, “honorable”) is fully convinced of the reality of God. Where Sartre thinks that human beings have no defining essence before existing and creating one, Inayat Khan thinks that we are each born with a purpose to be accomplished. But Inayat Khan’s purpose and Sartre’s fundamental project are quite similar. In both cases there is something common to all people and something unique to each individual, and each has a great deal to do with how we comport ourselves in life.

Inayat Khan’s view of reality can be called pantheistic panpsychism, although he himself never used those terms. In this view, everything we can see, touch or feel or be conscious of in any way is an expression or manifestation of one being, which is variously known as God, Allah, Buddha Nature, Brahman, the Dao and many other names. This includes both objective things, those that many people can be conscious of such as trees and rocks and stars and other people, and subjective things, those that only one person can be directly conscious of such as private thoughts, feelings, impulsions to action and the like. That’s the pantheism part; all (pan) is theos, God. Panpsychism is the doctrine that everything has a mental as well as a physical aspect; all contains psyche, mind. Panpsychism holds that everything has an aspect that can be directly discerned only by the individual entity that it is—that’s its inside, the subjective aspect—and an aspect that can be discerned by more than one person—that’s its outside, the objective aspect.

Although we are all manifestations of the One Being, most of us don’t know it. The point of Sufism, along with many other mystical traditions, is to train us to realize, to actually experience, immediately and directly, our unity with the Divine and with all beings. Such experience is said to have a great many benefits: it gives us insight into how the world works; it leads us to feel compassion for all beings; it gives us wisdom to lead our lives well; and it feels really, really good, blissful even.

Inayat Khan says the purpose of our life is to attain just such a realization. Here are some representative passages from his works. (Note that he wrote and spoke before there was any effort to remove gender discrimination from common usage. By “man” he means both men and women as well as those who identify as neither or both.)

Man is here on earth for this one purpose, that he may bring forth that spirit of God in him and thus discover his own perfection.⁽²¹⁾

If man does not realize the kingdom of God within himself …, he does not accomplish the purpose of life.⁽²²⁾

All these different scriptures and ways of worship and of contemplating God are given for one purpose: the realization of unity.⁽²³⁾

The more you reach such a realization, the more you enable Divine Wisdom to work through you:

That which is most precious, that which is the purpose of man’s life is to arrive at that state of perfection when he can be the perfect instrument of God.⁽²⁴⁾

Man’s greatest privilege is to become a suitable instrument of God, and until he knows this he has not realized his true purpose in life.⁽²⁵⁾

These passages parallel Sartre’s insight that the fundamental project is to be, except that Inayat Khan goes farther and gives us a reason to be. And just as Sartre speaks of what we might call subsidiary projects, Inayat Khan recognizes that we have many individual purposes which are underpinned by our ultimate purpose:

In all different purposes which we see working through each individual, there seems to be one purpose which is behind them all, and that is the unfoldment of the soul.⁽²⁶⁾

Unlike Sartre, who says little about how to accomplish our project of being, Inayat Khan gives us some practical advice about how to achieve our ultimate purpose.

The ultimate freedom of the soul is gained by concentration, by meditation, by contemplation, and realization.⁽²⁷⁾

What you are seeking for is within yourself. Instead of looking outside, you must look within. The way to proceed to accomplish this is for some moments to suspend all your senses such as sight, hearing, smell, touch, in order to put a screen before the outside life. And by concentration and by developing that meditative quality you will sooner or later get in touch with the inner Self. … And this gives joy, creates peace, and produces in you a self-sufficient spirit, a spirit of independence, of true liberty. The moment you get in touch with your Self you are in communion with God.⁽²⁸⁾

This passage identifies the inner Self with the Self of God, but explaining that level of theological detail would take us too far afield. See my book How To Be An Excellent Human for specifics.⁽²⁹⁾ The point is that there are methods of attaining the desired goal. In his public talks and writings Inayat Khan gave only a broad overview of them. The esoteric school that he founded offers a plethora of practices that are tailored for each seeker by an experienced guide.

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Both Sartre, the Western atheist existentialist, and Inayat Khan, the Eastern spiritual mystic, recognize that there is something deeper to human existence than the many details of our busy lives. In both cases it behooves us to find out what it is and deliberately choose to embrace it. That’s not something you do from the comfort of a philosophical arm chair. It’s something to be pursued with passion. Achieving it can result in a great sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. So if you haven’t done so already, get started.

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Notes

(1) See my essays “The Anguish of Freedom“, “Sartre, Positionally” and “Sartre’s Bad Logic“.

(2) Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”

(3) Catalano, A Commentary, p. 9.

(4) Sartre, Being and Nothingness tr. Richmond, pp. 729-731.

(5) Idem, p. 729.

(6) Idem, p. 649.

(7) Idem, p. 731.

(8) Idem, p. 651.

(9) Idem, p. 658.

(10) Idem, p. 655.

(11) Idem, p. 732.

(12) Idem, p. 731.

(13) Idem, p. 733.

(14) Idem, pp. 733-734.

(15) Goodenough, “Life and Purpose.”

(16) Gerber, “Eros and Thanatos.”

(17) Whitehead, The Function of Reason, p.8.

(18) Wikipedia, “Know Thyself.”

(19) Sartre, Being and Nothingness tr. Richmond, p. 616.

(20) Idem, p. 734.

(21) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 214, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_30.htm.

(22) Idem, p. 200, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_28.htm.

(23) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. IX, The Unity of Religious Ideals, p. 12, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/IX/IX_1.htm.

(24) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead, https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_21.htm.

(25) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VIII, Sufi Teachings, p. 116, https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VIIIa/VIIIa_2_5.htm.

(26) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_20.htm.

(27) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VII, In an Eastern Rose Garden, p. 197, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VII/VII_28.htm.

(28) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness, pp. 42-43, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_4.htm.

(29) Meacham, How To Be An Excellent Human, pp. 63-66.

References

Catalano, Joseph S. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

Gerber, Timofei. “Eros and Thanatos: Freud’s two fundamental drives.” Epoché Philosophy Monthly, No. 20, February 2019. Online publication https://epochemagazine.org/20/eros-and-thanatos-freuds-two-fundamental-drives/ as of 17 March 2024.

Goodenough, Ursula (Khan Academy). “Life and Purpose: A Biologist Reflects on the Qualities that Define Life.” Online publication https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/big-history-project/life/life-and-big-history/a/life-and-purpose as of 17 March 2024.

Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_30.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_28.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_4.htm as of 18 March 2024.

Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VII, In an Eastern Rose Garden. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VII/VII_28.htm as of 18 March 2024.

Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VIII, Sufi Teachings. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1963. Online publication https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VIIIa/VIIIa_2_5.htm as of 18 March 2024.

Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. IX, The Unity of Religious Ideals. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1963. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/IX/IX_1.htm as of 18 March 2024.

Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead. Online publication https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_21.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_20.htm as of 18 March 2024.

Meacham, Bill. How To Be An Excellent Human: Mysticism, Evolutionary Psychology and the Good Life. Austin, Texas: Earth Harmony, 2013. Available at https://www.bmeacham.com/ExcellentHumanDownload.htm.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. Sarah Richmond. New York: Washington Square Press/Atria, 2018.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman. London: Meridian Publishing Company, 1989.
Online publication https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm as of 20 October 2018.

Whitehead, Alfred North. The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958 (Princeton University Press, 1929).

Wikipedia. “Know Thyself.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself as of 17 March 2024.