Materialism reduces persons to mere objects, while existentialist subjectivity grounds human dignity.

Evidence

In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object. All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object – that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone. Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world. … Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He recognises that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 22

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs directly with Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity — the intersubjective grounding of freedom and the rejection of treating others as objects. — connects to: Existentialism is by nature applied to real individual lives — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 687; Existential humanism rests on transcendence and subjectivity, not a cult of man. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 33
• DEFINE: Clarifies Sartre’s reworking of the Cartesian cogito into an intersubjective one, a key concept for someone versed in Descartes and Kant.

Related

• Existential humanism rests on transcendence and subjectivity, not a cult of man. (similarity 0.87)
• Existentialist ethics demand acting as if the fate of humanity rests on each choice (similarity 0.83)
• Existence precedes essence and carries a subjective quality in human reality. (similarity 0.83)
• Sartre replaces universal human nature with a universal human condition of shared limitations. (similarity 0.82)
• Human beings create their own essence through action rather than inheriting a fixed nature (similarity 0.80)
• Sartre rejected Cartesian dualism by treating material givens as meaning-sedimented facticities (similarity 0.80)
• Sartre’s Cartesian subject-object split produces his overestimation of matter (similarity 0.79)
• The unique person is an absolute totality not reducible to any empirical desire (similarity 0.79)
• A person is nothing but the sum of his actions and undertakings (similarity 0.79)
• The individual’s concrete being grounds and fills the universal, not vice versa (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Existential humanism rests on transcendence and subjectivity, not a cult of man. #corroborates (0.92) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 33
• Existentialism is by nature applied to real individual lives #expands (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 687