ABSTRACT

During the inter-wars years in Europe, particularly in Germany and France, away from the fury of fascist politics, an intense interest in the problem of human nature was brewing. The strenuously assertive secular philosophy that emerged out of that maelstrom came to be associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. It is an anti-religious version of existentialism. The movement, in its aboriginal form, is found in the writings of the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. As its name suggests, it deals with the experience of our existence, an internal reckoning with the fact of our being. Human beings, unlike objects, have no assigned essence and are therefore radically free to decide their own nature. Existence precedes essence: we exist before we behave in a given way.1 In Sartre’s version, we must remove the props of religion and the consolations of another life which could support or distract us; we must bear the burden of freedom on earth. ‘Nothing can save a man from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God’, pontificates Sartre, the Pope of existentialism.2