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Related Books Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Related Audiobooks Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Views Total views. It was a non-entity to him. To quote Camus in Le Parisien , 'I'm theologically indifferent to god and religion and spiritually casual about any esoteric belief s. I've no time to think or condemn god. But this wasn't the case with Sartre. He was ostensibly obsessed with the 'non-existence' of god and his atheism bordered on militant atheism of today's Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens.
It was a pathological negation of god that was bound to recoil and re-blossom into equally strong faith in god. That's why he called out to a priest just prior to his death. Dismayed, his followers asked him as to what happened to him when death was at his doorstep. His reply was, 'In case Benny Levy , who spent much of his time with the dying Sartre and interviewed him on several of his views. According to Victor, Sartre had a drastic change of mind about the existence of god and started gravitating toward Messianic Judaism.
In Being and Nothingness Sartre elaborates an ontology an account of the fundamental make-up of reality that leaves no room for God or for a cosmos ordered or invested with meaning and value by God or, indeed, for a world populated by objective values or essences. How does Sartre reach these conclusions? His root notion is that of intentionality, namely that all consciousness conscience is directed upon objects—which, Sartre insists, are not intra-mental ideas but are really in the world outside consciousness ibid.
Consequently, consciousness is entirely empty and translucent, a pure openness onto objects outside it. It consists merely in a series of intentional acts, ways of directing itself upon outer reality, with no substantial core or essence. As a pure series of p. Moreover, whatever objects a consciousness intends, it necessarily has some immediate, pre-reflective awareness of carrying out this intentional act and thus also of itself as distinct from its objects ibid. Insofar as consciousness is always immediately self-aware, it never coincides with but always differs, however minimally, from itself the aware self from the self of which it is aware.
This again renders consciousness radically free: whatever actual features it has, whatever current situation it is in, it always is-not those features and situation. Consequently, they never determine or exhaust what consciousness is. I may feel depressed, but I must decide what attitude to adopt towards this mood: to succumb, resist, even embrace it. Even a slave, Sartre controversially claims, remains free to decide what attitude to take to their condition and slave-master ibid.
Because it is consciousness that brings negativity to the world, the world just in itself, independent of consciousness, can contain no negativity, Sartre rather dubiously reasons. The outer reality upon which consciousness directs itself must therefore be pure, brute being.
Distinctions and order are brought to being-in-itself by consciousness and do not pre-exist it. Brute being versus radically free consciousness: this ontology leaves no room for the Christian God. Having no divisions, order or structure, being-in-itself cannot have been created, designed or ordered by God. How then has belief in God arisen? For Sartre, human individuals cannot attain lasting happiness, for we can never simply be what we are but inevitably exist beyond our present states, thus being condemned to perpetual restlessness.
Unable to achieve this impossible condition, we project it outside ourselves as an external ideal: God. For Sartre, God is merely a human projection that encapsulates our deepest existential longings ibid. Camus sketches a related picture of the human condition in his essay the Myth of Sisyphus. But what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and p.
Like Sartre, then, Camus rejects traditional Christian views of a meaningful and ordered cosmos and asserts that value and meaning can arise only insofar as we create them. We may react to the discovery that the world is intrinsically meaningless by committing suicide. But ideally, Camus claims, we will instead choose to create value and meaning in a spirit of revolt: defiantly acknowledging that, indifferent as the world is, I shall introduce value into it anyway, without losing sight of its real indifference.
Have Sartre or Camus conclusively established that existentialism must be atheistic? I think not. Kierkegaard could still reply that our existential, creative freedom can be fully realized only if we embrace rather than reject the Christian God. Moreover, insofar as Sartre and Camus seek to establish an ethics on the basis of their existentialism, they are pushed back towards elements of the Christian moral framework that they profess to reject—or so I will now suggest.
Sartre insists that traditional moral frameworks deriving from Christianity cannot honestly be retained without their religious underpinnings. He therefore confronts the problem: what moral framework is available to Europeans today? It might seem that, for Sartre, we may act however we choose. For if we each choose the values by which we live, and if no prior values objectively exist to guide our choices, then it seems that any and every choice must be equally legitimate.
No choice may be judged better or worse than any other, for there is no external standard by which to make such judgements. Indeed, Sartre appears at times to embrace this conclusion. The protagonist Meursault admits the indifference of the world around him.
Or maybe yesterday. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely. It may have been p. Meursault is often morally neutral about events that we might expect to arouse his moral repugnance or remorse. He shoots an Arab man whom he perceives to have been threatening him and his friends, committing the murder apparently without motive: his only explanation is that he did it because of the glare and heat of the sun. He then fires four more times at the dead body; after all, this does not have the intrinsic meaning of desecrating the corpse, for no intrinsic meanings exist.
For Meursault recognizes that objects, people and events in the world have value only insofar as he chooses to project value onto them. Yet he refuses to make any such projections, and lets the world remain valueless—leaving him apparently free to do whatever he pleases, even to commit murder at whim, for there are no objective moral grounds on which to condemn him.
Indeed, when he is condemned to death as punishment for the murder, Meursault greets his own impending death with the same indifference, feeling profound calm in his awareness of the ultimate insignificance of his death. In fact, though, Camus was concerned—and became increasingly so during and after the Second World War—to avoid the position that anything goes.
In recognizing that life has value for each person, we also apprehend that murder is wrong ibid. Moreover, anyone who rebels against her oppression does so in recognition of the value of her life, and here she is recognizing this universal value—life.
Thus rebels are always, more or less explicitly, pursuing the universal, common human good, not acting merely egoistically ibid. Sartre, too, seeks to defend existentialism against the charge that it legitimates any and every course of action and to generate an existentialist account of human solidarity in the struggle against oppression.
Although he produced extensive notes towards a treatise on ethics in the later s, posthumously published as Notebooks for an Ethics [—8] , his best-known published statement of an existentialist ethics is in Existentialism and Humanism.
Whatever else I choose to value, I must first be free to be able to confer value upon it; I must therefore value my freedom. The detail of this argument is uncertain and much debated by Sartre scholars Bell ; Anderson Sartre presumes that consistency—or more broadly reason—has inherent value, rather than having value only if I choose to confer value upon it.
Sartre objects that bad faith is self-deception or lying to oneself ibid. Why should I not lie to myself? Indeed, in Existentialism and Humanism Sartre claims that self-deception is a logical but not a moral error [] b: However, he then immediately claims that this logical fault is also a moral fault because it rests on a cowardly retreat from the reality of freedom ibid.
Ultimately, then, Sartre appears to presuppose that truth has value, so that even if illusion or self-deception is more useful to us we ought nonetheless to admit the truth of our fundamental freedom and orient our actions by this truth.
This recalls the Christian view of truth as Nietzsche identified it, on which the ultimate reality is that of spirit, lying beyond the physical world—likewise, for Sartre, the ultimate human reality is that of the fundamental spontaneity of consciousness. Moreover, because spiritual reality is ultimately real, we must know about it and orientate our lives by it on the Christian view —or, for Sartre, we must admit our freedom and orientate our actions around it by recognizing its overriding value.
The same remains true if we read Sartre as presupposing that reason and consistency, instead of truth, have intrinsic value. If Sartre presupposes that rational consistency has value in itself, this is presumably because he has inherited this traditional Christian evaluation of reason.
Sartre maintains that if I value my own freedom then I must also value and defend the freedom of others, and so must act to further universal human liberation. In Existentialism and Humanism , Sartre argues:. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will at the same time as my liberty the liberty of others….
But this assumption has Christian roots. To escape moral relativism, Sartre has had to reintroduce elements of Christian tradition. The same is true of Camus, despite his hostility to Christianity. In The Outsider , Meursault is tried and condemned to death for killing the unnamed Arab. Nonetheless, Meursault refuses to help his case by professing emotions he lacks.
For this Camus praises him as a hero in a interview. This truth is that no objective, God-given meanings and values await our discovery: the world is a godless, indifferent place. Insofar as he recognizes this truth, Meursault also recognizes that there is nothing inherently, objectively wrong in his feeling neither sadness about his mother nor remorse about his crime.
Even as Camus and Meursault affirm that no absolute values exist, Camus and Meursault identify truth as an absolute value. For Camus, Meursault is morally superior to those around him—despite his crime—because he recognizes the truth of the human condition and insists on this truth despite the punishment he thereby incurs. But why does Camus think that truth has such value? He has inherited the Christian assumption that spiritual truth has greater value than physical life.
From the s onwards existentialism declined in popularity. Camus died prematurely in , while Sartre moved away from his classic existentialism to synthesize it with Marxism, above all in his Critique of Dialectical Reason of Sartre turned to Marxism in the effort to conceptualize how social structures and institutions constrain and limit individual freedom.
The rise of French post-structuralism in Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and others in the s reinforced this intellectual turn away from individual subjectivity towards social structures that precondition individuals.
These developments have inclined many recent continental philosophers away from existentialism, whilst Anglo-American philosophers have often regarded existentialism, especially that of Sartre, as unnecessarily obscure and metaphysically excessive. Nonetheless, some contemporary thinkers pursue lines of thought opened up by Sartre and his co-workers.
Aronson aims to provide a coherent secular account of how we ought to live, based—apparently contrary to Sartre—not on our autonomy but on our dependence on others.
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