One of the journals I read regularly is a rather geeky one called Philosophy Now. It’s not exactly mass-market: I think Smith’s
in Lancaster have about two copies, and it comes out every two months. So I have it on subscription. In the present issue, the focus is on the
notion of consciousness, and there is a piece on the significant twentieth
century philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).
At the heart of Sartre’s philosophy is the apparently paradoxical
notion that humanity’s freedom is a burden, because of the responsibility for self-determination it brings.
This is explained by a present-day commentator as follows:
When we make something – a
clock, an engine, a butter knife – we begin with an idea of what that thing
will do, so that the purpose of that thing is built into it. In other words, we start out with the idea of
its purpose before even we begin to make it.
But human beings are not like that.
We come into the world without a purpose. We first come into being, and then must
decide for ourselves for what purpose we exist.
We cannot ascribe our actions to some pre-existing human nature, in the
way that we can explain a clock’s actions by virtue of its nature…Sartre says
that we must accept responsibility for who we are and what we do. It is our fate to create ourselves through
the choices we make (Terence
Green).
We can see straightaway that Sartre is working with a modern, secular
idea of humanity as being in some sense self-sufficient and
self-determining. Humanity (not God) is
placed the very centre of reality in this scheme of thought. It is a million miles away from the idea of
humanity which our Catholic faith gives to us; as is Sartre’s contention that
we come into the world without a purpose and that, by implication, there is
nothing distinctive or God-given about human nature as such.
By contrast, Christians do not believe that we have simply come into being by chance and
with no purpose. We have been created in
the image and likeness of God with the purpose of entering into a free
relationship with God so that he can share with us the fullness of his
life. We are not compelled, of course,
to respond to his gracious invitation nor to his desire that we be at all; but we do believe that this
is the purpose set out for human beings.
This conviction lies at the heart of the Church’s life and the imperative
we have for mission to the world; it is our responsibility to help others to
share this conviction, so that they begin to see that there is a transcendent
purpose to our lives, and which lies profoundly beyond the desire for material
affluence or well-being in this world.
Jesus’ claim to have come so that people may have life to the full is an
objective claim about what that fullness consists in, namely communion with
God. It’s a far more exciting prospect
than Sartre’s mundane view that we have to find a purpose for ourselves, with the miserable implication that if we fail,
there is no point in our existing at all.
I wonder how many people in our society operate with that model without
even realising it.
Sartre’s atheism is well known but, reflecting on himself shortly
before his death he made this remark: ‘I do not feel that I am the product of
chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected,
prepared, prefigured. In short, a being
whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to
God.’ I wonder if, in a strange kind of
way, Sartre came to some appreciation of his true (inherent) purpose, and of how this
purpose, far from being something of his own creation, was actually bestowed
upon him as a gift, from the very first moment of his existence.
