“There are people”

“There are people” is a humanist expression through which Antoine Roquentin measures the Self-Taught Man’s professed love of humanity against the ways that ideal is spoken and lived. The phrase first carries the weight of an admired Parisian speaker’s rhetoric; in the Self-Taught Man’s mouth, it sounds provincial and unpracticed. Set beside the novel’s account of existence as immediate and irreducible, the expression also exposes the distance between naming humanity in general and attending to what is actually there.

The phrase and its model

The Self-Taught Man describes humanity as a goal and says that the people he sees on his morning journey to work are the purpose of his efforts, even though they do not know it. He imagines that he might smile at them and treats the thought as a holiday. His claim is generous, but it remains abstract: he says that all men are his friends without describing an intimate knowledge of them.

Roquentin recognizes this language as humanism and recalls hearing “there are people” from Parisian humanists. He singles out Virgan as an especially compelling speaker. Virgan removes his spectacles, looks at Roquentin with a weary, insistent expression, and repeats the phrase as if his love of people were new each time. The delivery makes the words seem to disclose a human essence in the listener. The contrast is not simply between sincerity and insincerity: it is between an eloquence that gives the formula persuasive force and the Self-Taught Man’s less assured imitation of it.

The Self-Taught Man’s humanism

Roquentin calls the Self-Taught Man’s love of people naive and barbaric, describing him as a provincial humanist. The phrase captures both his earnestness and the distance between his ideal and his manner of expressing it. He is a solitary reader, usually alone with a book, although he presents the people around him as the object of his hopes and labor.

When Roquentin points out that apparent contradiction, the Self-Taught Man answers by describing the workers he sees on his way to the office. He says he knows the people in the Socialist section mostly by name, but asks whether friendship must be chosen narrowly. His imagined solidarity extends beyond personal acquaintances: the people walking before and behind him are, in his account, the purpose of his efforts, whether or not they recognize that role. The passage makes his humanism a conviction about the collective rather than a record of close personal relationships.

A catalogue of humanist roles

Roquentin’s response broadens from the Self-Taught Man to a satirical catalogue of humanists. He distinguishes the radical humanist, associated with officials; the left humanist, who seeks to preserve human values while sympathizing with the humble; the Communist writer, whose love of humanity is joined to punishment; and the Catholic humanist, who turns the lives of workers into subjects for edifying novels. He adds philosophers and advocates who disagree over whether people should be loved as they are or as they ought to be, and whether they should be saved with their consent or despite themselves.

These figures share the language of concern for humanity but differ in their political affiliations, moral purposes, and preferred forms of intervention. Roquentin says they hate one another as individuals, even while presenting themselves as lovers of humanity. The Self-Taught Man, he imagines, has gathered these incompatible roles inside himself without noticing their conflict. The catalogue turns “there are people” from a simple declaration of benevolence into a formula that can shelter rival, even antagonistic, commitments.

Words and immediate existence

The expression’s limits resonate with Roquentin’s separate account of his encounters with things. After being unable to pick up a rain-soaked, mud-covered page from beside a puddle, he says that objects should be useful and kept in place, yet their contact with him has become unbearable. He connects this bodily disturbance to the earlier sensation of holding a pebble at the seashore, which he recalls as a nausea in his hands. These episodes place immediate experience before comfortable categories: an ordinary object can cease to feel like a neutral tool and press itself upon consciousness.

On a tram, Roquentin tries to name the red plush seat. The word remains on his lips without seeming to settle on the object, which he imagines instead as an immense, grotesque thing. In the park, facing a chestnut-tree root, he describes existence as something that had previously escaped him beneath familiar names and uses. These scenes do not directly refute the humanist ideal. They sharpen a related distinction: a general word such as “people” cannot by itself guarantee contact with particular existence, any more than the word “seat” can make the material thing disappear into its ordinary function.

Narrative significance

The phrase is therefore both a social aspiration and an object of scrutiny. The Self-Taught Man means to affirm a broad fellowship, but Roquentin hears in his declaration the conventions of humanist speech and the contradictions they can contain. The recalled performance of Virgan shows how rhetoric can make the phrase feel emotionally forceful; the catalogue shows how many competing programs can claim its authority.

Placed alongside Roquentin’s attention to paper, stone, a tram seat, and a tree root, “There are people” also belongs to the novel’s wider examination of language and reality. Words organize experience, but they do not exhaust it. The phrase names humanity as a collective ideal, while Roquentin’s reflections insist on the difficulty of reaching existence through names alone.