Jean-Paul Sarte and Christianity

[Patty23]

Anyone here familiar or at least interested in Sartre?

I’m a practicing and sincere Catholic but I find his works very compelling and true. I think people who don’t appreciate him never really read him. My philosophy teachers didn’t even take his philosophy seriously.

Just a brief background, his works are almost totally the opposite of Thomism. He was able to give a real description of what is existence like without God. Any thoughts?

 

[Lancer]

The Pillars of Unbelief - Sartre
PETER KREEFT
We need to talk about “enemies” of the faith because the life of faith is a real war.

Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980)
Jean-Paul Sartre may be the most famous atheist of the 20th century. As such, he qualifies for anyone’s short list of “pillars of unbelief.”
Yet he may have done more to drive fence-sitters toward the faith than most Christian apologists. For Sartre has made atheism such a demanding, almost unendurable, experience that few can bear it.

Comfortable atheists who read him become uncomfortable atheists, and uncomfortable atheism is a giant step closer to God. In his own words, “Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position.” For this we should be grateful to him.

He called his philosophy “existentialism” because of the thesis that “existence precedes essence.” What this means concretely is that “man is nothing else than what he makes of himself.” Since there is no God to design man, man has no blueprint, no essence. His essence or nature comes not from God as Creator but from his own free choice.

There’s profound insight here, though it is immediately subverted. The insight is the fact that man by his free choices determines who he will be. God indeed creates what all men are. But the individual fashions his own unique individuality. God makes our what but we make our who. God gives us the dignity of being present at our own creation, or co-creation; He associates us with Himself in the task of co-creating our selves. He creates only the objective raw material, through heredity and environment. I shape it into the final form of myself through my free choices.

Thus Sartre’s legitimate concern with human freedom and his insight into how it makes persons fundamentally different from mere things lead him to atheism because (1) he confuses freedom with independence, and because (2) the only God he can conceive of is one who would take away human freedom rather than creating and maintaining it — a sort of cosmic fascist. Furthermore, (3) Sartre makes the adolescent mistake of equating freedom with rebellion. He says freedom is only “the freedom to say no.”

But this is not the only freedom. There’s also the freedom to say yes. Sartre thinks we compromise our freedom when we say yes, when we choose to affirm the values we’ve been taught by our parents, our society, or our Church. So what Sartre means by freedom is very close to what the beatniks of the 50s and the hippies of the 60s called “doing your own thing,” and what the Me generation of the `70s called “looking out for No. 1.”

Another concept Sartre takes seriously but misuses is the idea of responsibility. He thinks that belief in God would necessarily compromise human responsibility, for we would then blame God rather than ourselves for what we are. But that’s simply not so. My heavenly Father, like my earthly father, is not responsible for my choices or the character I shape by means of those choices; I am. And the fact of my responsibility no more disproves the existence of my heavenly Father than it disproves the existence of my earthly father.

catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0013.html

 

[kubark]

Anyone here familiar or at least interested in Sartre?

I’m a practicing and sincere Catholic but I find his works very compelling and true. I think people who don’t appreciate him never really read him. My philosophy teachers didn’t even take his philosophy seriously.

Just a brief background, his works are almost totally the opposite of Thomism. He was able to give a real description of what is existence like without God. Any thoughts?

Read “Participation or Alienation”, delivered by Karol Wojtyla in 1975.

Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic existentialist, speaks of the need for “ontological humility” as a corrective for Sartre’s loveless consciousness. We are not autonomous, as Sartre concludes.

To be alone in a Godless universe, without a nature, without guidance, and without hope, can be torturous. “Life is a absurd”, Sartre concludes, and “man is a useless passion”. Indeed, life is brutal. But, he insists, we must make something of ourselves, even though that something does not amount to anything. Yet nothingness cannot satsify our deepest yearnings. We yearn for being, not nonbeing. In this regard, it is not suprising to discover Sarte telling us, “I was intoxicated with death because I did not like life.” Nor is it the least suprising, as Sartre confesses, that sex preoccupied him far more than philosophy.

In his book *The Gods of Atheism *, Fr. Vincent Miceli concludes, “Sartre’s philosophy leads logically to despair and suicide…His world of atheism is a kingdom of nothingness plunged into intellectual darkness, convulsed with spiritual hate and peopled by inhabitants who curse God and destroy each other in their vain attempt to seize his vaccant throne.” This is not hyperbole, but the inevitable consequence of Sartre’s thinking, which is congruent with the present Culture of Death.

 

[Kismetji]

Anyone here familiar or at least interested in Sartre?

I’m a practicing and sincere Catholic but I find his works very compelling and true. I think people who don’t appreciate him never really read him. My philosophy teachers didn’t even take his philosophy seriously.

Just a brief background, his works are almost totally the opposite of Thomism. He was able to give a real description of what is existence like without God. Any thoughts?

I actually agree with Kreeft more or less (and I’m a Hindu!). Sartre was not an entirely thorough thinker. I think if you presuppose no essence, no foundational structure at all from which to work from, then you can only rely on yourself and become an isolated little ego with nowhere to turn but equally isolated little egos. Sartre was right in trying to combat alienation, but it seems his solution is only more poision in the end. One tries to be authentic to the point at which authenticity becomes one’s crutch, one’s own pretentious support that never amounts to much.

The individual can never be a complete individual without society.

 

[Patty23]

@Lancer

Thanks for the reply, I actually Own 6 of Peter Kreeft’s books including the “Socrates Meets Sartre”, he’s actually the only person that I know who at least has some appreciation of Sartre’s atheism.

People often times dismiss him as nonsense because for him everything is meaningless since there is no God. His position is not so much on the proof of the non-existence of God but rather on the unreasonableness of everything since only the existence of God can be the reason for meaning. Secular atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens are ridiculous for Sartre since secular humanism for him is still insufficient if its foundation is not transcendent.

Here are some points:

1.) “Hell is other people.” - This is profoundly inversely true. If you see that every person is a threat to your happiness then truly hell is other people. In Sartre’s play “No Exit”, his characters were in hell but were surprised to learn that there were no torture chambers or anything, their mere presence with each other caused them their own hell. Our union with the absolute other is our heaven, while our separation from God and the unbearable existence with all the damned souls (Sartre’s No exit). Every other punishment should be secondary.

I will just continue next time, I have to get ready for work.

 

[levinas12]

While it’s all true that Sartre was (except maybe towards the end of his life) an atheist and a marxist, and sexually promiscuous (in a dark dispassionate way), nonetheless he was a good phenomenologist (especially in his earlier work).

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argued persuasively against the Lockean view of perception, i.e., that all we have immediate access to are private sense data locked up (no pun intended) in the closed cabinet of our own minds. Instead, according to Sartre, we are always already out in the world, with real things and people, etc. - in Heideggerese, each of us is a being-in-the-world (a Dasein).

Additionally, the Sartre of Being and Nothingness would have no truck with determinism. We are free.

Sartre drifted later on to Marxism where the issue of freedom became a little murky.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

The evidence is quite good that Sartre moved to a belief in God before his death.

The repellent nature of his personal life - his vocal and public advocacy for repealing the laws against paedophila, to cite just one instance - make it difficult to give much credence to his philosophical beliefs. A house built with a faulty foundation, and all that.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

Probably not on the topic, although I am trying to wade through one of Sartre’s novels, but my old pastor once commented that if there was a philosophy closest to Christianity, it would be existentialism.

He commented, “Most people exist, and that’s about it”. And when you think about it, it’s true.

I suppose he had Kierkegaard’s existentialism in mind rather than Sartre’s, but that was his opinion.

Sartre’s novels have rather unlovable characters in them. But I suppose they were the circles he moved in before, during and after the war.

 

[utunumsint]

Interesting posts.

Pope John Paul II once said somewhere that we are the sum of our actions. This would probably be a statement in line with his philosophy of phenomenology. I also suppose that the Pope would disagree with Sartre that we do not have an essense. The more we chose things that are evil, and sinful, the more we depart from what and who we are, or perhaps, what and who we were meant to be. Sin, and the turning away from God, is a turning away from ourselves and from the other, into alienation.

I also recall someone saying that Sartre also had a profound influence on Feminism, and Simone de Beauvouir. Beauvouir’s brand of feminism seemed to deny any value in femininity whatsoever.

God bless,
Ut

 

[dhduffy]

long ago, after reading a small book by Sartre, I came to the understanding that there is no such thing as a coward, there is only cowardly behavior, likewise hero’s and heroic behavior.

Much later in my life, this type of reasoning helped me to realize that there is no such thing as a homosexual, there is only homosexual behavior, just as there is no such thing as a lesbian, there is only lesbian behavior. Legitimizing same sex marriage is government destruction of our way of life.

To give special rights to persons who indulge in abnormal behavior is, in itself, abnormal behavior.

 

[Tybourne]

Sartre says that life without God is absurd, I agree. Sartre says there is no God, I disagree.

I think the best philosophical critique of Satre’s position comes from Levinas, who posits the ontological primacy of the Other, to whom I owe my existence. My ethical obligation comes first, before my existence. This position lends itself to the kind of phenomenological Personalism that JPII developed.

 

[David_Castlen]

Anyone here familiar or at least interested in Sartre?

I’m a practicing and sincere Catholic but I find his works very compelling and true. I think people who don’t appreciate him never really read him. My philosophy teachers didn’t even take his philosophy seriously.

Just a brief background, his works are almost totally the opposite of Thomism. He was able to give a real description of what is existence like without God. Any thoughts?

Yes, I am … Peter Kreeft quotes him a lot… a man that when satisfied with a search for god and finding not became depressed… that has always hit my heart …

 

[David_Castlen]

Anyone here familiar or at least interested in Sartre?

I’m a practicing and sincere Catholic but I find his works very compelling and true. I think people who don’t appreciate him never really read him. My philosophy teachers didn’t even take his philosophy seriously.

Just a brief background, his works are almost totally the opposite of Thomism. He was able to give a real description of what is existence like without God. Any thoughts?

Yes, I am … Peter Kreeft quotes him a lot… a man that when satisfied with a search for god and finding not became depressed… that has always hit my heart …

 

[Nooj]

Beauvouir’s brand of feminism seemed to deny any value in femininity whatsoever.

I don’t think that’s true. A lot of the misconceptions surrounding her thinking can be attributed to the fact that English translations of her works are shoddy, most notably ‘The Second Sex’. Until someone does justice to her work in English, I recommend reading her in French.

 

[Patty23]

Jean-Paul Sartre is a the only coherent atheist I know out there. William James might classify him as one tough minded philosopher as opposed to those who are tender minded. He said that the result of atheism is not pleasure or liberation but despair. Since God doesn’t exists,every meaning,value,morality,progress disappears along with him.

What I’m trying to point out is that he has a more profound sense of the role and difference God would make to our lives. He said that if God doesn’t exist then everything is meaningless, and conversely for Aquinas, since God is the source and end of all things, all things are meaningful. Sartre criticized the enlightenment by saying “The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense”.

His work No Exit, the three characters as I’ve mentioned before were tormented by their existence and their longing for love. But Sartre shows that love is not possible with human beings since it’s impossible to love someone when you see their imperfections. He cannot reconcile the being-for-itself (a being which is free or simply humans) and the being-in-itself (objects).

The core of Aquinas’ Philosophy is the unity and identity of God’s essence and existence, that is his essence is his existence and his existence is his essence. Sartre’s starting point for atheism is the irreconcilable nature of the being-for-itself and the being-in-itself. He can’t conceive of a being that is totally free and at the same time possesses an immutable essence.

It’s hard to explain why his atheism is so radically different with that of Nietzsche, Marx, Schopenhauer, etc.

In short, his atheism can slam nominal Catholics, dishonest agnostics, secular humanists, and atheists.

 

[Tybourne]

Well put Patty!

 

[Sair]

People often times dismiss [Sartre] as nonsense because for him everything is meaningless since there is no God. His position is not so much on the proof of the non-existence of God but rather on the unreasonableness of everything since only the existence of God can be the reason for meaning. Secular atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens are ridiculous for Sartre since secular humanism for him is still insufficient if its foundation is not transcendent.

Then, in many ways, Sartre was less an atheist than a non-believing theist - his approach, from what is represented here, was to assume that everything meaningful required some kind of religious faith in a divine meaning-bestower, and without this personal being, meaning for mere individual humans is nothing concrete. I suspect this is why he is so popular with religious believers - you all assume he has found the “real” essence of atheism in an all-consuming nihilsim.

He didn’t, apparently, countenance the notion that meaning doesn’t have to be universal, doesn’t have to be cosmic. Meaning needs no transcendence, only immediacy - we can look back on this when we need to. Why should anyone care beyond the moment of interaction? Why must we explain our actions beyond the lives and circumstances in which they occur?

If you see that every person is a threat to your happiness then truly hell is other people.

Yet most atheists don’t see other people as an automatic threat to their happiness - quite the opposite, I would suggest. Some people may be so; others are vehicles of happiness, depending upon our interaction with them.

Our union with the absolute other is our heaven, while our separation from God and the unbearable existence with all the damned souls (Sartre’s No exit). Every other punishment should be secondary.

More indication that Sartre, as you read him, was a non-believing theist rather than an atheist - who damns anyone in the absence of a god?

 

[Sair]

long ago, after reading a small book by Sartre, I came to the understanding that there is no such thing as a coward, there is only cowardly behavior, likewise hero’s and heroic behavior.

Much later in my life, this type of reasoning helped me to realize that there is no such thing as a homosexual, there is only homosexual behavior, just as there is no such thing as a lesbian, there is only lesbian behavior. Legitimizing same sex marriage is government destruction of our way of life.

To give special rights to persons who indulge in abnormal behavior is, in itself, abnormal behavior.

So, how do you define a person apart from their behaviour? Is there a line of separation somewhere? Do you imagine that the person is wholly separate from the physical body?

 

[tonyrey]

So, how do you define a person apart from their behaviour? Is there a line of separation somewhere? Do you imagine that the person is wholly separate from the physical body?

If a person is equated with a physical body there is no need to distinguish them with different words. The body does what it is compelled to do like every other physical object and its behaviour is simply an amoral, scientific fact which has no significance whatsoever…

 

[Abba]

Nice thread.