Why Sartre Was Wrong - Personal Statement Example

One of the most famous quotations from Being and Nothingness is “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” The idea that freedom is a negative thing, is something that a person is condemned to, is very strange. It is a bit like saying the light is darkness or absence is a presence. What Sartre means is that freedom is a terrible responsibility if all you have is your one life and nothing more. But this doesn’t make too much sense, if a person believes, like Sartre, that the world is meaningless.

The nausea of seeing yourself and your perceptions reflected back in the world or the world filling with yourself is also something to be disagreed with. In a way, the kind of existentialism Sartre complains about is really solipsism: the belief that you are the only thing in the world, or the only thing that exists. If Sartre stopped for a moment to look at the world, he wouldn’t see his own ugly face reflected back in the petal of a flower or in a sunrise: he would see a dazzling display of the natural world and the fact that people are part of it all, that this is designed to be our world where we should be happy.

Sartre was clearly a very smart man, but he was too much a product of his time and unable to get outside of his gloomy state of mind to see the world as it really is. There is so much wonder and strangeness in the world that it is actually quite difficult to do what he did: reduce it all to ash.. His old world was destroyed and he literally had to try to come up with new values for a new world. It is just a bit disappointing that these new values are not based in the past and are cut free from any tradition or original truth like the existence of God.

One of the most famous quotations from Being and Nothingness is "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."3 The idea that freedom is a negative thing, is something that a person is condemned to, is very strange. It is a bit like saying light is darkness or absence is presence. What Sartre means is that freedom is a terrible responsibility if all you have is your one life and nothing more. But this doesn't make too much sense, if a person believes, like Sartre, that the world is meaningless.

The nausea of seeing yourself and your perceptions reflected back in the world or the world filling with yourself is also something to be disagreed with. In a way the kind of existentialism Sartre complains about is really solipsism: the belief that you are the only thing in the world, or the only thing that exists. If Sartre stopped for a moment to look at the world, he wouldn't see his own ugly face reflected back in the petal of a flower or in a sunrise: he would see a dazzling display of the natural world and the fact that people are part of it all, that this is designed to be our world where we should be happy.

Sartre was clearly a very smart man, but he was too much a product of his time and unable to get outside of his gloomy state of mind to see the world as it really is. There is so much wonder and strangeness in the world that it is actually quite difficult to do what he did: reduce it all to ash.