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Existentialism Is a Humanism has been "a popular starting-point in discussions of existentialist thought," [4] and in the philosopher Thomas Baldwin's words, "Seized the imagination of a generation." [5] However, Sartre himself later rejected some of the views he expressed in the work, and regretted its publication. [4]
Sartre's definition of existentialism was based on Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time (1927). In the correspondence with Jean Beaufret later published as the Letter on Humanism , Heidegger implied that Sartre misunderstood him for his own purposes of subjectivism, and that he did not mean that actions take precedence over being so long as ...
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in Beijing, 1955. Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (/ ˈ s ɑːr t r ə /, US also / ˈ s ɑːr t /; [5] French:; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.
In Sartre's account, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion" (what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, meaning literally "a being that causes itself"), which many religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in a material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being.
Martin Heidegger attacked Sartre's concept of existential humanism in his Letter on Humanism of 1946, accusing Sartre of elevating Reason above Being. [5]Michel Foucault followed Heidegger in attacking Sartre's humanism as a kind of theology of man, [6] though in his emphasis on the self-creation of the human being he has in fact been seen as very close to Sartre's existential humanism.
According to Sartre, a person can only be defined negatively, as "what it is not", and this negation is the only positive definition of "what it is". [3] From this, an individual is aware of a host of alternative reactions to our freedom to choose an objective situation, since no situation can dictate a single response.
So Sartre claims at the end of his first nonfiction book that, given that life is without meaning, as he spent the whole book arguing, we, as individuals, must make an existential leap, which is our pretense that life is meaningful. It doesn't matter what you believe or who you are or your money or race or sexuality.
György Lukács argued that existentialism and Marxist materialism could not be compatible, Sartre responds with a passage from Engels showing that it is the dialectic resulting from economic conditions that drives history just as in Sartre's dialectically driven existentialism. Sartre concludes the chapter by citing Marx from Das Kapital: "The ...