One can see… [Sartre’s] point. At times life does seem uncompromisingly bleak. Terrorism, starvation, war, disease, climate change and the ticking nuclear clock threaten humanity on the global front. Broken relationships, street violence, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual crime and depression lurk demonically on the domestic horizon. Even the religious dimension is bedevilled by fanaticism, intolerance, infighting and bigotry.
So is that it? Is life a nihilistic endurance test, a tortured journey through a cosmic desolation? If so, we might as well jump off the nearest cliff.
There is an exit strategy from the mire. It springs from a realisation that the future is always pregnant with unformulated possibilities and hope, and that an unrelieved pessimism for what lies ahead might prove unfounded.
At its most fundamental level this implies that life forges ahead inexorably with a kind of Hegelian dialectic. The cosmic wheel of fortune throws up a grim actuality such as terminal illness or a bereavement. Our gut response is one of despair or even rage. But as time passes events slowly meld themselves into a synthesis, a compromise with the stark hand of fate, or maybe God.
Ah yes. What does it all mean?
No one else has the ability to take away your right to be confused.
Jean-Paul S. … ou Jean-Paul II?
(mieux: Jean, Paul et les autres apotres du Seigneur …)
But in the natural materialistic worldview, at the end of the day, there is no exit. There is only an existance that goes no where. The life is the product of blind chance and at the end of life, extinction.
Or is it that no one else has the right to take away your ability to be confused.
“Is that all there is?” Ole Jean-Paul just could not see the glass half full. There’s a guy who needs Jesus!
What’s nifty about the negative human condition expressed in existentialism, is its phenomenological revealing of a central theological problem. If Christ offers us ontological clarity, then we might have a solution to this existential state of affairs.
Ah, the possibility of a metaphysics not divorced from reality.
I majored in philosophy in college. One of my professors referred to Sartre and Camus as “those French madmen”.
As much as I detest Sartre, one thing he had to say concerning ethics gives me pause lately. Sartre believed in radical freedom, and that whatever we do is purely our choice. Sartre would have no patience with Freud, for instance. For example, Sartre believed that if a man serves in his country’s military and war breaks out, if the man goes to battle, he must take responsibility for the entire war because he has willingly chosen to take part in it. Whoever gets killed, whatever property is lost or damaged is partly his fault for having chosen to fight in the war.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. But it makes me wonder about why I am still in the Episcopal Church. As long as I choose to remain in the Episcopal Church, Sartre would say, then I’m partly responsible for the heresy and apostasy.
I know some people will say “So go, then!” But if I stay, wouldn’t I then be making an authentic choice if I fight against those things from within?
Dave W
It has been some years since I read Nausea and Being and Nothingness but you did remind me of one instance that Sartre gave of choice, though I can’t remember where it is found. A young man in occupied France is faced with a conflict of duties: to travel to an ill relative in need of him; to collaborate for his own self-preservation or to fight for the resistance. His point was that there is nothing outside yourself that can abrogate your duty to make up your own mind on the matter. You cannot indeed say “I have no choice” but to do something. If you were to, that would of itself represent a decision.
One of the problems with dialectic is that the starting point or assumptions determine where the argument leads.
Ha, ha! I had to learn all this nonsense in high school 35 years ago when “existentialism” was the “in” thing. Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Durrenmatt, Kierkegaard, Kafka and so on. Never saw a need for it, although I would say that being an Episcopalian is remarkably like the plot of Kafka’s “The Castle.”
Or maybe “Waiting for Godot.”
Somebody once described ‘Waiting for Godot’ as a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’ – although the move to entropy in the second (non) act is discernible. So, fairly apt for Tec.
But Satre is right in this, that when you make a decision you must answer for the outcome because the decision is yours. You may get all sorts of advice and you may hope that God will somehow clue you in to the right answer, but none of this alters the final judgment,that your decision is yours alone. This is what “alone” means and Satre drew this somber picture clearly. LM
No, no, I mean Sartre. Can’t spell. L