Sartre, existentialism, and science

Faith & Science Conversation
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After watching Bishop Barron’s talk on Foucault again, I found I wanted to watch his talk on Sartre as well. I wanted to comment on this but realizing the guidelines of the forum I knew I had to connect this up with science as well. And frankly I think existentialism fits very well with scientific way of looking at things. Existence first is in many ways very similar to the scientific approach of putting the observational evidence first in science. In both case we seek to avoid imposing preconceived notions whatever the source on the data and taking an honest look at where the data leads us. I think it likely that this approach of science and its success is somewhat behind Sartre’s approach to philosophy.

Of course I don’t share Sartre’s conclusions, but frankly by Sartre’s own philosophy, I don’t l have to. I am free to look at my OWN experiences and make my own evaluation of where this lead me. But I think it is clear that I am starting in much the same way with my own existence and experience with little reason to accept either the Bible or Christianity, let alone anything else to start with. I should also say that my first introduction to existentialism was not Sartre but Camus and then Kierkegaard. So the first was a great skepticism of Christianity and the second was a framework of understanding what is objective and what is subjective.

Anyway… I will add more in later posts as I watch more of Barron’s talk on Sartre.

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I got to the part where freedom is put in opposition to God.

And this is definitely a point of departure from Sartre in my case. In my view, God gives us freedom rather than taking it away. As finite beings we are so limited in our understanding of even the possibilities of existence, and it is in a relationship with the infinite being that we have a hope of transcending these limitations and seeing possibilities we could never imagine otherwise.

I wonder if we can connect this up with the current impasse we find ourselves in with physics and cosmology. We know or at least suspect there is something we just haven’t figured out yet which will take us beyond this road block we are facing. We confront our own limitations and struggle to imagine what it is that we are missing.

Barron says it is a battleground and says we have to decide which side we are on: existentialist or classical. This just makes me laugh. My answer is clear: existentialist all the way. BUT with the existentialist way we are completely free to choose what we do with it, INCLUDING going back to the classics and the Bible and see if there is anything of value there. Certainly they (Barron and Brandon) are right in suggesting that freedom can be a bit of a trap when your freedom becomes an unthinking rejection of everything. Real freedom is in considering all of it and choosing among ALL the possibilities.

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Well the video is finished. So there isn’t anything to add in that regard, but what comes to mind are metaphors for understanding the basic flaw in Sartre’s thinking which puts God in opposition to freedom, and thus the trap which he turns freedom into.

How about a child playing with toys or playing a computer game, and the parent wanting the child to see more of the world. Is it freedom for the child to ignore the parent’s concern about seeing more of the world, or is the child just trapping themselves in the tiny world of their toys or game. Which is the greater freedom? Really?

A connection with God and evolution also comes to mind. To be sure, I think life is all about self-organization (freedom indeed) but I am always adding the caution that it is always in relationship to an environment which typically includes parent and teachers (or perhaps even God). And thus evolution is ultimately inclusive rather than necessarily just about material causes.

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Thanks for pointing to the video and for your comments. I think I have read nothing by Sartre, so your comments are useful, and thanks for the video link. Aside from your responses to Sartre’s ideas and the bishop’s views of them, how accurately does the bishop represent Sartre’s ideas and views? (My experience with reading or hearing Christians write or talk about philosophy they disagree with or critical theory in general is that they ususally misrepresent it. Sometimes this is in subtle ways, but they make a real difference and turn the work being addressed into a strawman.)

Wow, yes.
Maybe this is what is “wrong” with me.
Until recently I never heard the matter put so bluntly as I have in church, that “God tells us who we are.” There are things I find utterly puzzling about that claim, and they are nearly always related to doctrine resulting from specific (and always changing) readings of the Bible. These readings are more reflective of the reader and the human writers, rather than what God is trying to communicate through the Bible.

Mitchell, maybe it’s fruitless to ask, but do you have any particular limitations in mind. I understand you say that seeing the possibilities is beyond our imagination. Are there any examples, though, that you can give where this transcending has already occurred?

What does he mean by “classical”? Thanks.

Is this possible? I mean to know and consider ALL possibilities. I think that is beyond me.

Did Sartre suggest that God (that he didn’t believe in, right?) was like a puppetmaster? So, that is one of many possible views of God.

How does this metaphor play out with God as you conceive God in contrast to the God of Sartre’s view?

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Have you read any of Thomas Aquinas?

I have. It is impressive.

BUT, I feel no obligation whatsoever to accept his conclusions. Just because he thought well and precisely about things doesn’t mean he is correct.

Of course there are many others. I zero in on Aquinas because he is such a favorite.

Well of course. But the point is to consider all you are aware of, and reject nothing out of hand. Just because your parents or others dismissed something and wouldn’t look at it doesn’t mean you have to do the same. LOL And when your parents are as left wing as mine were, such rebellion can you lead in odd directions. And I can tell you right off… this doesn’t mean you don’t find lots of reasons to respect and love your parents.

I think he and many liberals have simply assumed that God was nothing more than a rhetorical device for imposing their own thinking and choices on other people.

Yeah… hard question to answer… more so because specific answers will lead right to the question of how is that from God, since for most people (and I am no exception) God is not some voice from the sky… like most Christians I am likely to think of things I have learned from the Bible, though I am different in the fact that I don’t think the inspiration of God is limited to the Bible. I see it as pouring down upon us in everything.

But for the most part, this is purely theoretical rather than practical and it kind of has to be, because we are talking about seeing past our finite limitations. Any answer to this is just added to those finite limitations after all, right? Like many things with God and Christianity, it is a hope we have because of our belief in God.

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I must say, Mitchell, that a great many of your posts just irritate me to death, but then you come up with a gem, and all is forgiven.

I consider myself a Christian Existentialist, if I had to choose a label. My introduction was the reverse of yours: Kierkegaard, Camus, then Sartre. I have zero respect for Sartre. A person is the sum of their choices, and Sartre’s philosophy is zeroed out by his actions. He was the leading intellectual defender of Stalin in the 1950s, which was the cause of his falling out with Camus. As others have said: “Sartre believed the use of terror and violence (such as the Gulags) were justified means to the noble end of Communism, whereas Camus believed in the value of the individual human life.” I know whose philosophy is worthwhile considering in light of history.

That’s the same experience of every human – we are born knowing nothing, but we’re initiated into language and culture by our parents, our aunts and uncles, our siblings, our peers, our teachers, etc. It’s around adolescence that kids begin to question the “rightness” of the rules they’ve been taught, including religious rule, as well as the motives of the “lawgiver.” It doesn’t matter what culture or religion a child is socialized into. Sooner or later, they evaluate their own experience against what they’ve been taught.

Agree. But few people educate themselves about other possibilities, let alone ALL the possibilities.

Yes. Last year I attended an ASA presentation on “Christian identity formation” by a psychologist and a couple of scientists doing theology. The subtext was rejection of transgender and LGBT, but the objection I raised at the end was that I don’t find the Bible telling me who I am. I’d read through the entire Bible the first time by a young age (12), and I don’t recall it telling me who I was. It had a bit to say about who I should be, but none of it related to sex or gender or how being a manly man was pleasing to God.

Yeah. A lot of former YEC who are now atheists will cite the literal reading of Scripture as a reason not to believe Christianity in general. Sartre uses the Reformed view of God as in control of all events to argue against Christianity in general.

Right. We can’t see past the horizon, and God is always just beyond the horizon. Or, as the proto-Existentialist Pascal put it, what can the finite know of the infinite? It’s beyond our capacity, which he saw as the reason for Christ – a mediator between the infinite and the finite.

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Certainly my least favorite of the three, but “existence precedes essence” is one statement of Sartre I quote often. I didn’t know about his support for Stalin.

It is typical with philosophy that we borrow what we like from a philosopher and use the pieces how we choose. The bogus idea often bandied in religion that you have to buy the whole package isn’t there and it is funny when religious critics go by that assumption.

But I think starting at birth is going back a bit too far. Early years we are still learning how to evaluate things. And that is when the Bible might be made a part of how things are evaluated.

…more than some might realize. Mathematicians deal with the infinite a lot… summing up infinite series, arguments from incremental change, comparing different kinds of infinity.

In general, I would say it is the power of abstract thought. Of course it isn’t trivial and so Kendel asked a difficult question. In many ways, it is great deal like our belief in God in the first place. The sun may be over the horizon but light suggests to us that it is there.

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If birth is too far, we know from research into childhood development and learning that children have absolute trust in what they learn from teachers and adults until about the age of 7. That would include everything they heard about Jesus and the Bible by that age.

As a former teacher, Bloom’s taxonomy applies: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. Kids move through these levels as their own cognition becomes more complex. First, they have to learn, understand and apply the rules to their own situations. Only later do they learn to analyze and evaluate situations, then create novel solutions for themselves.

Sure. The dawn of abstract thought is what I’ve been researching for years.

But what relationship can the mathematician have with an equation? Human relationships are built upon empathy, a form of which we’ve learned to call “love.” I can’t empathize with an infinite being. Where to begin? Christ is the “touchstone” between my finite being and the infinite God. Emmanuel.

I like the metaphor, but it only makes sense because we see the sun all day every day before it disappears over the horizon. Instead, what if every day was like dusk: the sun forever below the horizon, and people speculating endlessly about the source of the light? I think that’s closer to our situation.

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Thanks for that link back to the Barron talk, Mitchell. I had seen at least some of those a while ago - but needed to hear them again (especially Sarte) to remember what that was all about.

To hear Barron tell it, Sarte believed that true freedom would mean casting not just God aside, but culture, family, and especially church too - anything that might attempt to circumscribe any of your freedom in any way. And maybe the fault here is really in Barron’s 20 minute summary of it all which will no doubt leave out much significant nuance. But taken as I received it there, I would say Sartre doesn’t get that right at all. There is no such thing as “a blank slate”, and never could be or will be. To quote somebody else recently (a book title of theirs actually) … “The World Born in Us”. Ok - that’s a phrase and not a statement of anything. But there is still a thought encapsulated there: each of us enters this life with an entire world bequethed to us whether we would have it or not. Even if I pretend to “reject it all” somehow (which I don’t even have the capacity to do in any informed way as a young child) I would still in my rejection of it be reacting to it and therefore circumscribed by it in significant ways. So Sartre - with his “blank slate” idea is just nuts on that front as far as I can see.

It interested me how Barron wove Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre into Foucault’s later ideas (giving rise to ‘Wokism’ to hear Barron tell it - which I think left out some significant discussion to be had). As an Anabaptist here, I wished to could have stepped into the discussion to inform Barron that there were people from long before Foucault (or even Marx), who were happy to put a spot light on power and what happens when power is grabbed up by just a few or one. The critical examination of power has a much older pedigree than what Barron ever acknowledged in any of these four talks. Barron seems to be echoing our current pop culture climate in imagining it sees a socialist or Marxist demon behind every bush without recognizing that there are many of us from traditions that have held power up to cross-examining scriptural light from long before the likes of Marx ever existed - much less present day manifestations of it such as might be found in wokism. But the good Bishop can probably be forgiven since none of this was the subject at hand. He might have mentioned though how Nietzsche’s “will to power” doesn’t really line up with Foucault’s view - which is in at least one sense - a suspicion of power; maybe an overboard and even bonkers suspicion, to be sure; but never entirely.

Back to Sartre, though; his line intrigued me: “essence always precedes form” which I guess was the opposite of the classical view. I wonder if we might find an echo of at least something similar in scriptures, though … from 1 Corinthians 15:

But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual.

Granted - the above verse is nestled in a context where it is clear Paul is speaking of Adam and Christ (incarnate). So I’m dreadfully wrenching that out of context to think it could be applied beyond that. Still - I can’t completely resist the thought.

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Huh? You have that backwards.

“Essence precedes form” is the classical approach back to Plato adopted by Christian theologians. Sartre’s line is “existence precedes essence” in opposition to this.

In other words, the classical thinking is that essence comes down from on high and we must rationally conform ourselves to this. The existentialist says NO. We discover our essence for ourselves in our own experience of existence, for it is our own choices which define us.

I would even use this in theology to refute the idea that God is defined by the essence (or nature) which is frankly assigned to God by theologians, and I call that an enslavement of God to theology. Instead, I think just like us God is defined by His choices and this is why we can say “God is love” because God chooses love and freedom over power and control.

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There is something bizarre in this idea.
Much depends on what we mean by the word ‘essence’ - is it a defined philosophical label or is it what something is? I am not a fan of Greek philosophy and can understand if there is criticism against the beliefs included in particular strands of Greek philosophy. If we take ‘essence’ in a wider sense, as a word that tells what or who someone is (without the burden of Greek ideals), then we need to have being before there can be actions.

God cannot choose and act before He is. What He is, is the essence of God. Therefore, ‘essence’ comes before choices or experience.

With humans, what we choose and how we live can define us. God is who He is - I believe He is, He does not change as humans. The choices and actions of God can reveal to us who He is, what kind of God we have, but I would not say that those actions define God.

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Indeed I did! I had the concepts in the correct order at least as I was conceiving them - that physical reality precedes spiritual reality, but was misremembering how those labels were applied. I shouldn’t have been trying to repeat that from memory.

Existence precedes essense - according to existentialists like Sartre … and you!
As others have jumped in and suggested, it seems there is more good discussion to be had around that.

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Neither can we.

LOL

People complain that they didn’t choose to exist and make that an excuse for behaving contrary to life. But this isn’t rational because that is an impossibility. Of course you cannot choose before you exist. The only choice any of us have is what to do with our existence now that we have it.

That is the classical way of thinking. That essence comes before existence.

According to the existentialists it does define us. Our essence is a creation of our choices. No we cannot choose before we exist. Therefore do we exist without essence before we make choices? Not exactly. We exist before we have the essence of what we become, and that can change because we are always becoming more. And as living organisms we are a product of many choice which go back to the beginning of time (in both evolution and abiogenesis).

And this is the difference with God which makes it more difficult to apply the same thinking to God. For we do not believe in a finite God who is becoming more. I believe in a God who already is and has everything, and that is where I think His basic motivation for creation comes in, to give of His abundance to others. So in the case of God, what is growing and becoming more isn’t God Himself, but God plus others. And in this God plus others, as He gives of Himself to them, you might be tempted to say God is becoming less percentage-wise, but since God is infinite this is not so. In any case, that is where the change is in the choices made by God, for God gives of Himself by His own choices and not as a slave to theology and some nature we choose to assign Him.

Yes that is the God enslaved to theology – a God who is less than we are, because such a God is really just a tool of rhetoric for power over other people. I will never believe in such a God. Atheism is preferable.

The God I believe in is capable of all the things we are capable of and more. This God can make choices, change His mind & essence, take risks, make sacrifices, put power and knowledge aside, and give privacy and trust to others – all of the things required for love.

The classical theology is to make God love by nature not choice. But the result is something so alien it is unrecognizable. A god who loves not by choice but because of some theological definition frankly looks more like a creation of rhetoric than anything real. It starts to sound far more like the ultimate scam George Carlin talks about than anything else.

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One might also ask why the reverse given as the classic view is “essence precedes form” rather than “essence precedes existence.”

I think this distinguishes this issue from Aristotle’s hylomorphism. And I happen to be a fan of this way of thinking. IOW one can still believe that being consists of matter and form by denying that essence precedes form. Thus you can have an existence of matter and form before the essence which comes from the choices we make.

Actually from my response to knor, you might think that I don’t actually believe in “existence precedes essence” because I am basically saying that with our choices we become more than we were, and thus what I am really saying is that our essence changes. But I think the truth is more that I just don’t buy into the classic notion of essence. I frankly think this so called essence is just an artifact of our abstractions in language. And the point is that if there is any essence which I can believe in, it is an essence which comes from making choices.

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I’m hoping people a lot smarter than I am can give you some good reactive feedback and exchange on all that … so that I can follow the conversation and maybe learn. I wasn’t packing nearly so much into my carelessly used term “essence” as what needs to be recognized (and maybe unpacked) here.