Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

47
The Mind of Sartre
Sartre’s views and writings were very offensive to many. The Roman Catholic
Church, for instance, prohibited his books as early as 1948. Jean-Paul Sartre was clearly
influenced by Descartes, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and
Ventre. He believed that “man is condemned to freedom” (Feinberg, 1980:46). For him,
there were no values discoverable in the factual or objective realm. To his mind, values
are never discovered; they are created by free choice.
Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make
every man aware of what he is and to make
the full responsibility of his existence rest on
him. And when we say that a man is
responsible for himself, we do not only mean
that he is responsible for his own individuality,
but that he is responsible for all men (Sartre,
1947:19).
The existentialists argued that the path to truth in values, was not the same path one
takes to attain scientific truth, and largely sought to bring a corrective balance to the
purely scientific approach. “To put it another way, there is more to truth than pure
scientific fasticity” (Feinberg, 1980:47). The Pythagorean theorem from Euclid’s axioms,
for instance, cannot tell us why a marriage falls apart, or a nation goes to war. Science
cannot provide moral answers, insights, or boundaries; yet, rationalism thoroughly
dominates Western societies, and attempts to ‘inform’ morality. Like Husserl and
Heidegger, Sartre distinguished ontology from metaphysics, favouring the former. He did
not combat metaphysics like Heidegger, however. Rather he takes a more Kantian
approach, arguing that metaphysics raises questions we cannot presently answer.
As Dostoyevsky said, “If there is no immortality then all things are permitted” (Craig,
1994:61; cf., Sartre, 1947:27). Sartre adds: “That is the very starting point of
existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result
man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.
He can’t start making excuses for himself” (Sartre, 1947:27). Should we live for self
only, as Ayn Rand suggests, being accountable to no one else Can science set the
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa