Existentialism

Existentialism

Introduction

Sartrian Existentialism: a somewhat incompatible set of ideas taken from the writings of Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Jean Paul Sartre was to exert a powerful and lasting impact on several generations of philosophers, creative writers and social scientists. He also created an anti-science version of humanism that is still strongly influencing members of the humanist community, especially in Europe. And his theory is one of the major sources of the "postmodernism" so popular throughout academia today. Perhaps it is time that an attempt was made to assess Sartre's influence, from the perspective of the dying days of the troubled twentieth century which the famous Existentialist did so much to shape. In this essay I would like to critically examine Sartre's approach to causality and objectivity, and his attempted reconciliation of Existentialism and Marxism.

Analysis

For Sartre, it was Martin Heidegger's version of Existential-Phenomenology (introduced to him by his Nazi captors during a brief period of internment at the onset of the Occupation) that exerted the most lasting influence. He found that Heidegger's perspective could be readily accommodated to his own "discovery" of contingency. However, his notion of contingency was very different from that developed earlier by the Pragmatists. Whereas they had recognized an element of contingency in the human process of choice - within the context of a universe of causally related events - Sartre seemed to be rejecting cause and effect entirely. Contingency, for him, was never the "after-the-fact" causality of Darwin and the Pragmatists, nor even the probabilistic indeterminacy recognized by David Hume (and Democritus so long before). For Sartre, the entire concept of causality was nothing more than an abstract fiction of positivistic "scientism". When pressed to define his own notion of contingency he explained it as ...