Tutorial # 8.Meta - Ethics. Sartre on God and Morality

The atheist and existentialist writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) accepts that God’s death makes our existence completely absurd (inexplicable) and in his various writings he tries to work out how it might be possible for human beings to live in a superfluous world in which there is no good and bad, no right and wrong, no ultimate meaning and so no reason for anything.

In Existentialism and Human Emotions (1957, pp. 9-16), he writes:

"Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism."