1. Existentialism and The Meaning of Life
by John McAteer

2. Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre was a French philosopher who lived from
He is probably the most famous and widely read philosopher of the 20th Century – he is actually read outside philosophy classes!
His most important philosophical work was Being and Nothingness, published in 1943.
He was also involved in political activism, advocating communism in France.
And he wrote works of literature, including the novel Nausea (1938) and the play No Exit (1944).
My presentation is based on a series of lectures published as Existentialism and Human Emotion (1957).
Jean-Paul Sartre ( )

3. Existentialism vs. Essentialism
Sartre defines existentialism with the slogan: “existence precedes essence”.
This is an anti-Platonic concept.
Plato thought that everything that exists has a “form” (i.e., an “essence”) that makes it what it is.
In other words, Plato thought that for everything that exists, it is possible to define what it is.
The Platonic view is called “essentialism”: in order to exist at all, a thing must already have an essence.
But existentialism reverses this idea: first we exist and then we have to create our own identity (our essence or “what we are”) through our choices and actions.

4. Example: human vs. paper-cutter
Sartre explains this idea by comparing humans to an artifact like a paper-cutter.
The paper-cutter does have an essence: an “ensemble of both the production routines and the properties which enable it to be both produced and defined”.
Its essence is to cut paper.
And its essence must precede its existence or otherwise the artisan couldn’t create it: the artisan has to have some purpose/function in mind in order to know how to design and build the thing.
But a human being has no creator (since God is dead) and hence has no prior purpose to fulfill and therefore has no prior essence.
We must create our own “essence” through our actions: “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself”.
In other words, as human beings we must choose for ourselves what our purpose in life will be.

5. Truth is Subjectivity
In short, we are not mere objects like paper-cutters but are subjects capable of our own choices.
Unlike “a stone or a table”, a human being “is conscious of imagining himself as a being in the future” and is thus capable of “a plan’”.
Also, Plato said that in order to know the form/essence of something, you have to think about it from the purely objective “God’s eye view”.
But according to existentialism, there is no God’s eye view – all points of view are necessarily subjective.
Hence Sartre: “by existentialism we mean a doctrine which … declares that every truth and every action implies a human setting and a human subjectivity”.
There are two important ethical implications of existentialism.
First, if there is no “universal human nature” (no essence or form of humanity), then we can’t think of ethics as a kind of spiritual health the way the ancient Greeks thought of it.
Without a human nature, there is no standard of what a healthy soul would look like.

6. Radical Responsibility
The second ethical implication of existentialism is that each human being must take “full responsibility” for his or her own existence – and not just his own existence but “he is responsible for all men”.
Sartre seems to accept the traditional idea that something is good to the degree that it fulfills its essence, but he also thinks that we have to make up our own essence.
On the one hand this means that we have to take responsibility for creating our own essence – we can’t wait for God to do it for us.
But on the other hand, when we do create our own essence we “create an image of man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose”.
In other words, we create the standard by which we judge others as well as ourselves.
Now we can understand what Sartre means by his famous phrase that “man is condemned to be free”.
We “can’t start making excuses” for our actions by appealing to human nature: we must take responsibility for our own choices.
And “it is not possible not to choose. I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing”.
But we also can’t use God’s commands to enable us to decide how to act: we have to decide for ourselves.

7. Irrelevance of God and Science
Sartre also points out that even if we wanted to use God’s commands, we ultimately still have to make our own choice about which commands are from God and then how to interpret those commands.
Hence: “existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing”.
Compare the Memento idea that each day you inherit your situation from your past self and must choose how to interpret it.
Furthermore, he rejects the skeptical and scientific idea that “if values are vague, and if they are always too broad for the concrete and specific case that we are considering, the only thing left for us is to trust our instincts”.
He points out that we must decide for ourselves the value of feelings, just as much as we have to decide the value of actions.
Thus it doesn’t make sense to say that we value a feeling until after we have given it value by acting on it.

8. Intersubjectivity
One interesting aspect of existentialism is the concept of “intersubjectivity” – the idea that truth is relative to the agreement within a particular community.
“man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings”.
A person “cannot be anything (in the sense that we say that someone is witty or nasty or jealous) unless others recognize it as such. In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person”.
Note that the fact intersubjectivity in some ways limits Sartre’s earlier claim about radical responsibility: we can choose our own values, but we must make our choices in the context of a particular cultural community: “Choice always remains a choice in a situation”.

9. Human Nature
This is the universal human condition, according to Sartre: “What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be mortal there”.
Question: What is the difference between “human nature” (which Sartre rejects) and the “universal human condition” (which he accepts)?
Answer: There isn’t really a difference. Sartre hasn’t really given up human nature; he has simply changed it.
Instead of thinking there is an objective standard of morality based on what human beings are, he says that we have to make up our own standard. And this provides him with a universal definition or essence of what it means to be human: we are the beings that must choose our own essence.

10. Bad Faith
Moreover the fact that there is a universal human condition seems to imply that some forms of life are actually better than others.
The human condition seems to be an objective standard that can ground moral judgments for Sartre the same way human nature did for Plato.
In other words, Sartre seems to think that it would be “bad” to ignore the human condition and not accept the facts of radical responsibility and intersubjectivity:
“certain choices are based on error and others on truth. If we have defined man’s situation as a free choice, with no excuses and no recourse, every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, every man who sets up a determinism, is a dishonest man”.
Elsewhere he calls this kind of dishonesty “bad faith” (as when you make a promise you don’t intend to keep, we say you made it dishonestly or in “bad faith”).
For Sartre, since we are radically responsible beings, the only choices we make “in good faith” are those that pursue “freedom for freedom’s sake”.
And since we are intersubjective beings, our own freedom “depends entirely on the freedom of others” and vice versa.
Thus, since subjective choice is the starting point of Sartre’s philosophy, freedom inevitably becomes his the highest good.

11. What do you think? Is Sartre right about the human condition?
Are we radically responsible?
Do we construct our identities intersubjectively?
Are God and science both irrelevant to ethics and the meaning of life?
Is saying otherwise an act of intellectual dishonesty and self-deception (“bad faith”)?

12. The dismissal Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
Thanks be to God!