It Cannot Be Accepted for a Second…

It cannot be accepted for a second that authors such as Kierkegaard, Pascal and Dostoevsky have been lumped together with figures such as Heidegger and Sartre in this so-called existentialism. In fact, what is most surprising is that it was precisely Sartre who proposed such a bundling, as if he were part of a fictitious current and claiming to have absorbed them all, without being immediately challenged on the absurdity of imagining an evolution from Pascal to Sartre. One can see, for example, that Sartre uses arguments such as “l’existence précède l’essence” or “l’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il se fait” in order to paint a man isolated from his circumstances, created from nothing and independent from the start, something visibly antagonistic to Christian thought. And it is certainly similar disparities that separate Sartre from many others labeled “existentialists”. Imagining a “philosophical current” that unites them is something that only interests Sartre himself, and it should not convince anyone.