The Humanist Principle of Loving Everyone

The Humanist Principle of Loving Everyone turns love into a universal ethical program: humanity is the goal, and all people are to be embraced as friends. In conversation with the Self-Taught Man, Antoine Roquentin tests that ideal against the particulars it claims to honor. The principle’s warmth is genuine as an aspiration, but its universal categories can displace the individual people supposedly loved; Anny’s account of her former moral rules offers a contrasting vision in which meaning depended on what a particular situation demanded.

Humanity as a Goal

The Self-Taught Man gives his humanism its simplest formulation: there is a goal, and that goal is humanity. He imagines the people walking to work around him as the purpose of his efforts, even though they do not know it. He knows members of the Socialist section, mostly by name, but does not regard friendship as something that must be restricted to personal acquaintances. The morning commute becomes, for him, a holiday in anticipation: ordinary strangers are already his friends because they belong to the humanity he serves.

His conviction is not presented as an organized doctrine so much as a way of looking at other people. He hopes he might smile at the workers before and behind him, and imagines himself acting for their sake without their awareness. Roquentin recognizes in this outlook the familiar language of humanism, yet doubts its authenticity. His skepticism arises not from a claim that people should be hated, but from the gap between professed love of humanity and an actual relation to particular human beings.

The Test of Particular People

Roquentin puts that gap under pressure by asking whether the Self-Taught Man loves a young couple nearby. The Self-Taught Man admits that he does not know them, then wonders whether love might itself be a form of knowing. What he can say is that he loves the youth he sees in them. His response reveals both the attraction and the limitation of his principle: he is moved by what the couple represents, not by any knowledge of them as distinct persons.

Roquentin sharpens the criticism by naming the abstractions that have taken the couple’s place: Youth, the Love of Man and Woman, and the Human Voice. The couple become symbols through which the Self-Taught Man’s humanism can affirm itself. Roquentin denies that categories such as Youth, Maturity, Old Age, or Death exist as independent realities. The exchange therefore distinguishes a universal declaration of love from attention to individual lives: a person may love humanity in principle while remaining untouched by the actual people standing before him.

The Self-Taught Man nevertheless insists that everyone must be loved, including the people around them. When Roquentin says that one cannot hate a person more than one can love one, the reply is a repeated appeal to love them all. The radiant couple and an older man become immediate tests of that universal claim. Roquentin refuses the demand and then accuses the Self-Taught Man of not loving them either. The scene does not resolve the disagreement by establishing a better universal rule; instead, it makes the principle’s difficulty visible in the distance between its sweeping language and the encounter it is meant to guide.

Humanism and Its Rhetoric

Roquentin’s criticism is also directed at the ways humanists make their convictions persuasive. He recalls Parisian humanists whose phrase about there being people carried force through gesture and voice: one man removed his spectacles, fixed Roquentin with an insistent gaze, and seemed to draw out his human essence before speaking of people with renewed wonder. Against this remembered eloquence, the Self-Taught Man’s appeal feels inexpressive to Roquentin. The comparison shows how humanism can depend not only on what it asserts but on a practiced performance of compassion—an intensity that may sound like proof while leaving the question of particular knowledge unanswered.

Roquentin resists accepting the identity of either humanist or anti-humanist. He rejects the idea that he must be integrated into a collective ideal, but refuses to turn that refusal into an opposing label. His point is not that the humanist’s benevolence should simply be inverted into hatred. Rather, he distrusts the transformation of living people into a single reassuring object called humanity, as well as the rhetoric that presents such an abstraction as direct intimacy with everyone.

Anny’s Situational Ethics

Anny’s remembered rules for privileged situations provide a revealing contrast. She describes a sequence in which signs announce that an exceptional situation is arriving; the situation then unfolds, and a person must decide whether to make a perfect moment from it. Such a moment required acts, attitudes, and words appropriate to the circumstances, with other responses forbidden. For Anny, the situation supplied the material, and transforming it into a perfect moment was a duty—a moral question, not merely an aesthetic pleasure.

Her story of a captured king makes the strictness of this situational code concrete. The king does not weep when he sees his son and daughter led past in chains, but groans and tears at his hair when a servant follows. The story exemplifies a world in which grief is not governed by one rule for every occasion: there are moments when crying would be unclean, while an ordinary injury, such as dropping a log on one’s foot, permits whatever reaction comes. Stoicism itself is not an absolute virtue; its appropriateness depends on what the occasion demands.

Anny then recalls their first kiss at Kew Gardens, beside the Thames. While Roquentin remembers the place, he did not know that she was sitting on nettles, her thighs covered in stings. She had decided that the kiss would be an engagement, a pact, and judged her physical suffering irrelevant to that purpose. For more than twenty minutes, while Roquentin pressed for the kiss she had resolved to give according to form, she anesthetized herself completely. The episode shows how a privileged situation could command not merely outward restraint but the suppression of pain itself. Her account does not establish that such discipline is universally right; it shows the exacting, personal labor her former system demanded.

The Limits of Universal and Perfect Forms

Anny eventually says that there are no more privileged situations. She once thought that love, hate, or death descended on people like tongues of fire, lifting them above themselves. Now she sees these supposed forces differently: she is the one who hates or loves, and what happens seems like one piece of dough stretching longer and longer, with experiences growing so alike that the names invented to separate them lose their force. Her changed outlook unsettles both the humanist’s confidence in universal categories and her own former effort to shape life into exceptional moments.

Roquentin responds that they have changed together, though in different words. He is glad not to remain, in her account, a fixed milestone marking the point from which she departed; he recognizes that he has arrived at a similar understanding. Their convergence does not restore the humanist principle or the doctrine of perfect moments. Instead, it exposes the fragility of systems that promise to make experience legible through a single name—Humanity, Love, Hate, or the privileged situation. The principle remains an earnest demand to care for everyone, but the encounter leaves open whether that demand can reach people as they are rather than as symbols of a universal ideal.