SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL (1905–1980), French philosopher and man of letters, is generally regarded as the chief exponent of the atheistic branch of existentialism. Soon after World War II, Sartre wrote in Existentialism and Humanism (London, 1948): "Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares … that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man" (pp. 27–28). Sartre's existentialism, given its most sophisticated expression in Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York, 1956), is a philosophy of human reality that views human beings without recourse to any divine creator, that is, without appeal to God. Neither a virulent nor a polemical atheist, Sartre is not interested in the traditional philosophical or theological proofs for the existence of God. It would be more precise to say that Sartre is concerned with other matters, for, according to him, even if God did exist, his existence would be irrelevant to Sartre's fundamental project: to draw the final conclusions of a view of reality in which human beings define themselves through the choices that they make of their lives and that form the portraits of their being. In Existentialism and Humanism Sartre quotes Dostoevskii's statement that "if God did not exist, everything would be permitted" and adds: "that, for existentialism, is the starting point" (p. 33). Whether or not God does exist, it might be said, in Sartrean terms, "everything is permitted"—and that means that human beings are the source of value, choice, and responsibility. At the same time, Sartre holds that the individual's choice is not a solitary event but a moment of responsibility in which the chooser chooses an image of existence for everyone
Although Sartre considers the existence of God irrelevant, he "finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven" (Existentialism and Humanism, p. 33). That "embarrassment" is explored more cautiously and profoundly in Being and Nothingness, where Sartre maintains that the basic polarities of being, the "For-itself" and the "In-itself," are incapable of synthesis. The For-itself, or the human reality, is understood as consciousness (both pre-reflective and reflective), a continually nihilating movement of temporality that arises, absurdly, from being In-itself. The In-itself is simply that which it is: an opaque plenum. The In-itself is underivable from God or from any divine act of creation; in its utter density, the In-itself, according to Sartre, "is never anything but what it is" (Being and Nothingness, p. lxviii). The For-itself is empty and seeks to fill itself, to ground itself in the fullness of the In-itself. But a paradox ensues: The more human beings endeavor to become "something," stable, fixed, assured in their status, the more they are In-itself-like, the more they lose their freedom and choose "bad faith," a negation of human authenticity. Yet the primordial ontological project of the For-itself is to achieve a stable synthesis with the In-itself. That synthesis, for Sartre, would be God. "To be man means to reach toward being God. Or, if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God" (Being and Nothingness, p. 566). What Sartre calls the "passion" of the human being to unite itself with the plenum of being In-itself and become For-itself-In-itself is from the ontological outset doomed to defeat. Sartre writes:
Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion. (Being and Nothingness, p. 615)
The striking feature of Sartre's atheism is that it remains so closely in touch with—even in ontological terms—the concept of God. The anguish of human beings, ultimately, is that they cannot be God and that in consequence they are forced back upon themselves—utterly and without recourse. But it is evident that however "religiously unmusical" Sartre's writings may be, there is not only in Being and Nothingness but in later works, such as his book on Genet and his study of Flaubert, the intransigent recognition that fellow human beings believe. The faith of others haunts the human reality. In his autobiographical study Words (London, 1964), Sartre explores the complex religious background of his childhood. The harsh and thorough repudiation he has given his Protestant-Catholic heritage has negated its essentials; but he has not succeeded altogether in ridding religious nuances from his writing: "I depend only on those who depend only on God, and I do not believe in God. Try and sort this out" (ibid., pp. 172–173). Sartre's atheism is not a state of being or a fixed condition. Rather it is a provocative affirmation that "becoming-an-atheist is a long and difficult undertaking" ("The Singular Universal," in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, N.Y., 1972, p. 264).
In contrast to Camus, a writer whose honey of the absurd has attracted many theistic readers—that is, believers—Sartre's bitter gift to the faithful and the theologians is a replication of Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" (see Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 90). Viewed in religious terms, Sartre is an aberrant supplicant to a shattered God.
Bibliography
Bibliographies
Contat, Michel, and Michel Rybalka, comps. The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, A Biographical Life. Evanston, Ill., 1974.
Lapointe, François H., with the collaboration of Claire Lapointe. Jean-Paul Sartre and His Critics: An International Bibliography, 1938–1980. 2d ed., annot. & rev. Bowling Green, Ky., 1981.
Wilcocks, Robert. Jean-Paul Sartre: A Bibliography of International Criticism. With a preface by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka. Edmonton, 1975.
Secondary Sources
Desan, Wilfred. The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Cambridge, 1954.
