Western Thinker Sartre, Essay Example

Sartre, inspired by Kierkegaard, preached an existentialist message but from an atheistic platform. Sartre’s French point of view from a war torn 20th century showed his bias toward the abject helplessness of humanity. He emerged from childhood with beleaguered remnants of parental loss and peer alienation to become a man of deep, seemingly desperate and conflicting words about the meaning of life. His response was to forego all customary philosophical principles to proclaim a message of despair, and this was a message that seemed affirmed by the events upon the world stage that shadowed his years with the dawning of the nuclear age. Sartre’s relevance, then, becomes his ability to put into words the groaning of his generation of disenfranchised Europeans.

Freedom, for Sartre, is not a thing for people to know; freedom is the only thing that really must be understood (Flynn, 1984). Sartre addressed freedom directly. Existence before essence, or making life possible, Sartre reasoned, makes us beings with subjectivity. This means that people can only define themselves after they have come into being (Sartre, 2000). This means that what we do, how we act in life, determines our apparent qualities. Existence before essence was necessary for Sartre’s paradigm, for to have essence before existence would require a god figure that he did not choose to accept. In Sartre’s view, we have to come to terms with the fact that our choices have consequences, and those consequences portend effects on other people. When we act, we set a chain of events in motion. Another way of expressing the existentialist mindset about freedom is that when we make choices, our choices affect the whole of humanity in some way. Through actions, we are free as people. Through inaction, we cease to be human and become like objects. Most of us think of freedom in terms of the number of possibilities that are available for an individual, but freedom, measured by an existentialist gauge, cannot be as absolute as that; it always places freedom in a personalized context.

Freedom, in truth, finds inextricable linkage to choice (Banach, 2006). We choose from our own possibilities. Freedom’s choice can take us into a state of actualization. Along the way, other possibilities find abandonment. Dynamics appear between what is possible, what is, and what is to be. This becomes the three load bearing walls in the platform known as existentialism. An inherent aspect to this notion of freedom to choose is responsibility. The existential perspective suggests that the individual freedom of choice brings a responsibility to accept them. One thing that existential writers have identified, is that individuals find it difficult to accept the presence of possibilities they are free to choose between (Cline, 2006). They may not have the freedom to affect the cold reality of things as they are, but they do have possibilities in how they relate to other people and things. The strong implication is that individual people are responsible for their inward existence and actions, which is quite unsettling for many who really focus on this complexity.

For Sartre, humans are not objects used by God or a government or a corporation or a society. Nor did Sartre feel that are we molded into roles –or identified only as a certain person of a specific occupation (Jack, 2001). We must look deeper, he would direct, into our roles and find ourselves and to know the company of truth. The existentialist finds it basic to human nature to be free to create and recreate itself at will. Our actions define us. We are free to assign values to our actions. This gives our lives meaning. “The problem with Existentialism is that it leaves us without absolute foundations, encourages a separate/individual sense of self and gives too much power to our imagination and how we may choose to live” (Howie, 2006, p. 1).

Our direction should not come from outside of ourselves. Faith is an individual thing. We make choices, from an existentialist standpoint, without a clear road map. This is contrasts by other, more structured philosophies. People are ambiguous. When a person realizes the absurdity of the human condition, the existentialist would say that his/her actions begin to lead to values. Existentialism begins and ends with the individual. The individual is its solitary subject. Existence is not rational –it is absurd (Howie, 2006), and absurd is perhaps the most commonly used word of the existentialist. Rose (2003) studied Sartre’s interpretation of the concept of human nature, highlighting Sartre’s subjectivity of man to causal law, his view of human nature and modes of consciousness, and his universal account of humanity and non-causal freedom. Sartre said, “In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait, and there is nothing but that portrait” (Sartre, 2000, p. 7).

Our illusions and imaginings about ourselves, about what we could have been, are nothing but self-deception. A brave person is simply someone who usually acts bravely. Each act contributes to defining us as we are, and at any moment, we can begin to act differently and draw a different portrait of ourselves. There is always a possibility to change, to start making a different kind of choice. We have the power of transforming ourselves indefinitely. Despite different roles and historical situations, we all have to be in the world, to labor and die here. These circumstances are everywhere and recognizable, and they are subjective because they are lived.

Ashworth (2003) examines the theories of human nature from evolutionary psychology to postmodern thinking, with a view to probing the orientation that the theories have to consciousness and provides details on Sartre’s understanding of the radical meaning of the intentionality of consciousness. Sartre’s view of the soul, or human reality, identifies and defines itself by the ends that it pursues, rather than by alleged causes in the past (Rose, 2003). Qizilbash (1998) argues that both Aristotle and Sartre characterize the human condition in terms of lack and insufficiency and that they both hold that people are responsible for their actions.

References

Ashworth, P. (2003). The representation of the openness of consciousness in some current theories of human nature. Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 141(1), 98-111.
Banach, D. (2006). The ethics of absolute freedom. Retrieved February 28, 2010 from http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/sartrelecture.htm
Cline, A. (2006). Biographical history of existentialism. Retrieved, February 28, 2010 from http://atheism.about.com/od/existentialistphilosophers/a/kierkegaard.htm
Flynn, T. (1984). Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Howie, K. (2006). Existentialism philosophy. Retrieved February 28, 2010 from http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-Existentialism.htm
Jack, D. (2001). Nice one, jean paul! The Lancet, 358(9293), 1656.
Qizilbash, M. (1998). Aristotle and Sartre on the human condition. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 31(1), 29-37.
Rose, D. (2003). Sartre and the problem of universal human nature revisited. Sartre Studies International, 9(1), 1-19.
Sartre, J. (2000). Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: C Trade Paper Reissue Edition.