Why is sartre wrong

But at least five features of Sartre's thought seem particularly relevant to current discussions among philosophers both Anglo-American and Continental. And its location within a mundane ontology may resonate better with philosophers of a more secular bent. From a philosopher suspicious of moral recipes and focused on concrete, lived experience, this is perhaps as much as one could expect or desire.

Sartre dealt implicitly with issue of race in many of his works, beginning with Being and Nothingness. Race relations, especially segregation in the South, figured centrally in his reports from the United States during two visits after the War and and were a major topic of his many writings on colonialism and neocolonialism thereafter. This may serve as his lesson to the ontology and the ethics of race relations in the twenty-first century.

His appeal for violence to counter the inherent violence of the colonial system in Algeria reached hyperbolic proportions in his prefatory essay to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth Of the other topics in current philosophical discussions to which Sartre offers relevant remarks, I would conclude by mentioning feminism.

This suggestion will certainly raise some eyebrows because even his fans admit that some of the images and language of his earlier work were clearly sexist in character. And yet, Sartre always favored the exploited and oppressed in any relationship and he encouraged his life-long partner, Simone de Beauvoir, to write The Second Sex, commonly recognized as the seminal work for the second-wave of the feminist movement.

In addition to the plausible extrapolations of many remarks made apropos the exploitation of blacks and Arabs, just mentioned, I shall cite two concepts in Sartre's work that I believe carry particular promise for feminist arguments. The first occurs in the short work Anti-Semite and Jew The second concept that issues from Sartre's later writing which is of immediate relevance to feminist thought is that of positive reciprocity and its attendant notion of generosity.

But in his aesthetic writings and in the Notebooks for an Ethics, he describes the artist's work as a generous act, an invitation from one freedom to another. He even suggests that this might serve as a model for interpersonal relations in general.

And in his major work in social ontology, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre charts the move from objectifying and alienating relationships series to the positive reciprocity of the group members.

Some feminist authors have employed these Sartrean concepts in their arguments. There remains much still to extract from Sartre's later works in this area. As Sartrean existentialism frees itself from the limitations of its post-war adolescence and shows its mature psychological, ontological and ethical face to the new century, it enters with adult standing into the ongoing conversation that we call Western philosophy.

Its relevance remains as actual today as does the human condition that it describes and analyzes. Philosophical Development 2. Ontology 3. Psychology 4. Ethics 5. Politics 6. Art and Philosophy 7. Philosophical Development Sartre was born in Paris where he spent most of his life. Ontology Like Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre distinguished ontology from metaphysics and favored the former.

Psychology Sartre's gifts of psychological description and analysis are widely recognized. Still Husserl continued to appeal to mental images in his account of imaging consciousness while eventually avoiding them in analyzing the imagination. Ethics Sartre was a moralist but scarcely a moralizer. Sartre in the Twenty-first Century Foucault once dismissed Sartre testily as a man of the nineteenth century trying to think the twentieth.

Outline of a Theory , tr. Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, []. George J. Becker, New York: Schocken. Reprinted with preface by Michael Walzer, []. Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk respectively, New York: George Braziller, [].

Reprinted in , forward by Fredric Jameson. London: Verso. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Braziller, []. Carol Cosman 5 vols. Auster and L. Davis, New York: Pantheon. And Other Essays , [including Black Orpheus ] tr. Bernard Frechtman et al. Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass. Adrian van den Hoven, intro.

Ronald Aronson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, []. Quentin Hoare,New York: Pantheon, []. Simone de Beauvoir, tr. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, []. Jonathan Webber, London: Routledge, []. Carol Macomber, New Haven: Yale, []. Barnes, Hazel E. Bell, Linda A. Richard Howard, New York: G. Putnam's Sons. O'Brian, New York: Pantheon.

Quentin Hoare, New York: Arcade. He was forced to choose between filial loyalty and the preservation of his country. Sartre first of all shows the poverty of traditional Christian and Kantian moral doctrines in dealing with such a dilemma.

Christian doctrine would tell the youth to act with charity, love his neighbour and be prepared to sacrifice himself for the sake of others. However this gives little help since he still would have to decide whether he owed more love to his mother or to his country. The Kantian ethic advises never to treat others as means to an end. But this gives no satisfactory solution:.

Sartre maintains that even if he were to ask for advice, the choice of advisor would itself be highly significant since he would know in advance the sort of advice different people would be likely to give. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world.

In Existentialism and Humanism Sartre does not always provide arguments for his contentions. Much of the lecture is delivered in rhetorical and exaggerated terms.

He does not for example defend but merely states his belief in the extent of human freedom. But, perhaps more damagingly, it is questionable whether he actually achieves his most important stated aim, namely to rebut the criticism that if there is no God then anything is permitted - or to put it in other words, he never demonstrates that his philosophy genuinely is a humanism, that it does not encourage the moral anarchy that some of his contemporaries believed it did.

Sartre would argue that the fact that existentialists actually increase the scope of responsibility beyond its usual domain, making each of us responsible for a whole image of humankind, puts it beyond criticism in this respect. However, his move from individual morality to responsibility for the whole species is at least contentious.

This is how he puts it:. What we choose is always the better. What he means here is that the fact that we choose any one course is evidence that we think it the best course of action, that that is the way that we show what we sincerely value in life.

He goes on:. This is unclear. Why, because something is better for us should it be better for all? It is also self-contradictory because it assumes the human nature that elsewhere he is at such pains to say does not exist. On the basis of this unelaborated stipulation he continues:. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image if valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves.

Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. This is surely a sleight of hand. In one swift movement Sartre has moved from the individual choosing for him or herself to the whole of humankind in an entire epoch. This at least needs some kind of argument to support it. Particularly in view of the pivotal role it plays in his lecture.

A precise definition of his atheism may be elusive. Search for:. Kate Kirkpatrick August 7th, Sartre Does God 2 comments 34 shares Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

Sartre Does God Kate Kirkpatrick on the variety of atheisms. But, he clarified: We should not understand by that that He does not exist, nor even that he now no longer exists. About the author Kate Kirkpatrick. Related Posts Read. The Origin of Belief August 15th, Seeing Is Believing? July 4th, Art Is a Game August 17th, Presence of Mind May 23rd, We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.