Question

I will confess a bias towards what I'm choosing to call the the "old" atheists (Sartre and Nietzsche) rather than the new; I think that what Nietzsche and Sartre had to say about the implications of atheism is more interesting than all of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris put together. I have put a lot of effort into trying to explain the Sartre excerpt. This is because Sartre attempts to criticize the relevance of religion, whereas the New Atheist writers (see Hitchens) tend to focus on the truth of religion. If something is irrelevant, it no longer matters whether it is true, allowing Sartre's perspective to circumvent the endless debates on whether or not this or that miracle happened, or whether to trust the feeling one might have when one prays.

Nietzsche is, significantly, who Sartre is responding to in his excerpt. There is no assigned reading for Nietzsche in this class; for our purposes, his thoughts on ethics can be summarized thus: all morality consists of different fictions, not unlike novels, that different groups make up from scratch. The primary genres of morality are 'master morality' and 'slave morality.' Nothing actually is right or wrong, just as nothing actually is beauitful or ugly, true or false. This is why Nietzsche's philosophy is sometimes called 'nihilism.' Nietzsche responded to the challenge from religion in the following way: you're right, he said. There is no morality without God. However, there also is no God. There simply is no morality, and almost no-one can handle the truth of that, which is why most of us turn to God. Hargrave, Lewis, and many others claim that lack of religion leads to nihilism. Ironically, religious thinkers tend to love teaching Nietzsche.

Sartre's objections to religion are obvious; it is important to note that Sartre did NOT believe that he could prove that God did not exist, but rather that if He did exist, God, gods, or anything else supernatural is simply irrelevant to our moral situation, our moral plight.

Sartre's objection to other atheists is more subtle. Sartre's mission in his 1946 speech is predominately to, as the title implies, defend the idea that existentialism is a form of humanism, that it is not nihilism. Another way of putting this is that Sartre was trying to argue that there was at least one form of atheism (existentialist) that was NOT nihilistic. All of which begs several questions, but let's start with: what's nihilism?

A humanist is someone who believes that a, "man is the measure of all things," and takes joy in this, feels like the potential of the human being to create art, ideas, community, values, etc. is beautiful, is sublime, and can give life true meaning. At the heart of Sartre argument is a very simple, very idealistic claim: that if we only made all decisions in total freedom, if we only thoughts of these decisions in terms of complete responsibility, then the world would be a much better place. There is a right and wrong way of making decisions, but no absolutely right or wrong decision.

What do you think of Sartre's foundational premise that existence precedes essence, that there is no human nature? Are we blank slates, or is this idea a bit dated??

Answer 1

Existential philosophers such are Sartre were well-known in their time for being involved in resistance, unforgiving of collaborationism and conformity, and for having an active interest in revolutionary movements. Sartre says that tree precedes the seed. By and large, every thought-system says that essence precedes existence; without essence or soul , existence is not possible. But Sartre asserts that existence comes first and essence later. The ideas at that time, when most researchers were working around the philosophy of essence and core were highly revolutionary. They gained criticism for the same reason as well. Also, at this point in time after reading a lot of work around the area of regression therapy and unconscious as well as collective unconscious, it seems hard to believe the tree precedes the seed. It is the seed, the core or the essence that has a role to play in the manifestation of any being. We are beings that are vibrational and have an innate energy to us. This energy is unexplainable otherwise. This is to say that the energy which is innate makes us into who are, rather than the other way round. Being too empirical and relying on evidences while discarding abstract thought is also a limitation to thinking. The fact that the essence precedes us as beings is therefore a belief system that must be considered and has been the groundbreaking work of many scholars who have spent their years of training into the domain. These ideas presented by Sartre in that sense are too simplistic and ideal to believe.