Opposing Views On Sartre And The Existence Of God

Sartre argues the idea of human nature without God and a “heaven of ideas”, because there is no God to create us according to his plan. Human beings just appear on the scene for no reason and cannot appeal to anything above them to give their lives meaning or direction. This concept is forlornness. In Sartre’s eyes, man must come to grips with the fact that he is alone in his decision making. He states by saying that humans occupy the ontological category of “the for-itself.” That is, they have consciousness and goals. Sartre cannot even begin to explain this “upsurge,” since it is absurd, not being grounded in a Creator and Designer.

An existentialist is a humanist, says Sartre, in the sense that he does not judge man but sees him as

He sets up a world in which man is alone, anxious, forlorn, anguished, without a God and without any external or even internal essence to guide him. Then, however, step by step, he dismantles these basic tenets in order to make his harsh philosophy palatable to others and himself. He also underestimates the anguish which non-existentialists experience. How can he be so arrogantly claim that a man who believes in God or a man who lives by secular ethics does not experience anxiety and forlornness similar to, or even more extreme than Sartre's? A man who believes in God but acts otherwise certainly can.

Although Sartre agrees with Dostoevsky who says, “If God does not exist, then everything would be possible,” he tries to pull back from nihilism by saying that each human must act “for all humanity” and before the audience of all of humanity. Sartre claims that all humans have no nature or essence, he disqualifies himself from calling them “all humans.”

First Sartre affirms that human beings lack a nature, but if we lack a nature, then the term “human being” has no reference at all. The descriptive term that applies to something with inherent qualities and do what is required of the qualities can be identified as “human being”.

If “existence precedes essence” in the case of human beings, then something comes out of nothing. An essence is