Person

Jean-Paul Sartre

French philosopher, novelist and playwright (1905-1980), the leading figure of atheist existentialism. His major philosophical work, L'Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), and his popular lecture L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism Is a Humanism, delivered 1945, published 1946) made "existence precedes essence" one of the most famous slogans of the century. He described existentialism as "nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position."

That candor is what makes him valuable to apologetics. Sartre did not treat the absence of God as a cheerful liberation that leaves morality untouched. He said it changes everything: no human nature, no given values, no excuses. The question his work forces is whether value that is chosen rather than found can bear the weight he put on it.

Biography

• 1905, born in Paris on 21 June
• Studied at the École Normale Supérieure; Simone de Beauvoir became his lifelong companion
• 1933 to 1934, studied the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl in Berlin, the method behind his later work
• 1938, La Nausée (Nausea), a philosophical novel of contingency and the absurd
• 1940 to 1941, spent nine months as a prisoner of war; in the camp at Trier he wrote his first play, Bariona, a Christmas drama
• 1943, Being and Nothingness, his systematic ontology of consciousness and freedom
• 1945, delivered Existentialism Is a Humanism in Paris on 29 October at the Club Maintenant; it was published in 1946. After the war he also co-founded the journal Les Temps Modernes
• 1960, Critique de la raison dialectique, his attempt to join existentialism to Marxism
• 1964, Les Mots (The Words), his autobiography of childhood; awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he declined
• 1980, died in Paris on 15 April

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The core argument

Sartre's atheism is less an argument against God than an account of what follows once God is absent, joined to one argument that the very idea of God is incoherent.

1. No designer, so no human nature. A paper-knife is made to a plan; its essence comes before its existence. If God made humans, the same would be true of us. "Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence." Hence: "there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it."
2. We make ourselves. "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." There is no fixed self that excuses what we do.
3. Condemned to be free. Sartre quotes Dostoevsky as saying that if God did not exist everything would be permitted, and calls that "the starting point" of existentialism. Without God there are no values written in an "intelligible heaven," and so "We are left alone, without excuse." In his words: "That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free."
4. Choosing for all. When I choose, I choose an image of what a human being should be, and so "that image is valid for all." This is how Sartre tries to keep moral seriousness without God: my choice is a kind of legislation for humanity.
5. God as a contradiction. In Being and Nothingness, the human project is the desire to be God, to unite free consciousness (the for-itself) with the solid completeness of a thing (the in-itself). Sartre holds that this synthesis is impossible, so the idea of God is self-contradictory and man is, in a phrase Beauvoir later summarized, a "useless passion."

A Christian response

He grants the conditional the moral argument needs. Sartre agrees that if God does not exist, there are no objective values to find, only values we choose. He even says: "The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven." The Moral Argument runs the same conditional in the other direction. If some things really are wrong whatever anyone chooses, such as torturing a child for fun, then value is found and not merely made, and Sartre's starting point is false. See Atheism Moral Neutrality Failure and Atheist Moral Realism Defeater.

Chosen value cannot ground "valid for all." Sartre's step from "I choose" to "my choice is valid for all" does the work God used to do, but nothing in his system earns it. If there is no given human nature, why must my choice bind anyone else, and why is bad faith worse than authenticity? Argument from the Unlivability of Nihilism presses this: Sartre's authentic projects presuppose that authenticity is better, which on his view has no ground.

Existence precedes essence assumes what it should prove. The slogan follows only if there is no Creator. It is a consequence of atheism, not evidence for it. Christianity holds the reverse, that humans have a given nature: "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27, ASV). See Imago Dei.

The argument from the desire to be God cuts both ways. Sartre observes that humans long to be complete and grounded. The Christian reading is that this longing is real and is meant for God rather than to be God, the shape of the Argument from Desire and Argument from Restlessness. Classical theism also denies that God is a fusion of consciousness and inert thing, so the alleged contradiction attacks a concept no classical theologian held.

"It would make no difference." Sartre says existentialism holds "that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view." That is a decision to bracket the question, not an argument that settles it. See Atheism Promotes Hatred Lies and Self-Idolatry for the codex's account of the self taking the place God vacated.

See also

• Atheism, the domain hub; Sartre leads its twentieth-century continental section
• Simone de Beauvoir, his companion and the ethicist of his circle
• Albert Camus, his friend, then critic, on the absurd
• Friedrich Nietzsche, the predecessor who first faced the death of God without flinching
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, co-founder of Les Temps Modernes
• Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenology Sartre adopted
• Moral Argument, the argument Sartre's conditional feeds
• Argument from the Unlivability of Nihilism, the case that chosen meaning cannot be lived consistently
• Argument from Purpose Meaning and Hope, the positive case for meaning found rather than made
• Libertarian Free Will, the freedom Sartre affirmed without a ground for it
• Imago Dei, the given human nature Sartre denied