Here's what he told them:
There is no ultimate meaning or purpose inherent in human life. People are nothing at birth and throughout life they are only the sum of their past
commitments. We need a rational basis for our lives but there isn't one.
Human life is a "futile passion."
Sartre's only foundation for values is your freedom; thus there are no external or objective justifications for the values we select for ourselves. Forget about a God with laws.
When you hear someone say Existentialism they are talking Sartre.
His maxim was "Existence is prior to Essence." He emphasized human
freedom, choice, and responsibility for those choices.
All this high brow stuff can be retranslated:
Selfish is OK; as long as you let the other guy be selfish too and that you take the consequences that
self-centeredness brings.
People bought it.
More importantly, Sartre lived it.
For most but the last three years of his life he described his most common emotion as Despair. Hard drinking and chain smoking was how his brilliant mind coped with the results on his own mind of his teachings.
Jean-Paul had a close friend: his secretary Benny Lévy. He was an avid Marxist. He led students in the 1968 protests in France. With emotional speeches Levy turned crowds into mobs.
He went on to edit extreme left, socialist newspapers.
His militant atheism drew him to Sartre. In 1974 he devoted himself as Sartre's aid. They spent 6 years together.
Benny & Jean-Paul discussed the need for another revolution in
France. Both shuddered at the blood-letting of the first one. They made a
careful study spanning more than 8 months of the history and philosophies
that founded the French Republic.
Years later, Benny told of how they
came to compare the violence in France with the English civil war. Lévy
discovered the Biblical language used to justify opposing the King. That
was the major difference.
Who would have "thunk" it? A pair of avid atheists began reading
the Bible. Not two impressionable kids, but minds that had rejected God
and carefully constructed reasons for doing so. They even read the early
Christian heresies like the Manicheans and Gnosticism.
A word to
atheists: it's a bad idea to let either very young minds or very gifted
minds study the Bible. Most of them end up believing that stuff!
To this day the final utterances of Sartre are ignored in many
universities. A month before his death the French magazine Le Nouvel
Observateur published a series of interviews between Jean-Paul and Lévy.
They had abandoned existentialism and Marxist Utopianism. Worse still,
they said they'd embraced Messianic Judaism. "The Jew lives," Sartre
said, "He has a destiny. The finality towards which every Jew moves is to
reunite humanity. It is the end that the Jewish people know."
History
moving towards the reign of a Messiah! Atheist intellectuals were
outraged. Denouncing Levy, the interviews were called fraudulent &
distorted. As the death dew gathered on his brow, Sartre boldly confirmed the authenticity of the publication.
More than 25,000 people thronged Paris for his funeral procession
on 19 April 1980. Sartre died of a smoking related complaint. Lévy, who
was born to Jewish parents in Egypt, later remarked: "I became a Jew
against my will, out of intellectual necessity. Sartre sobered me up. I
saw the intellectual world in all its ugliness."
Lévy moved to Israel.
5 years ago he said: "I lost my political view of the world. I thought I
would die. I was totally empty. The Torah (Old Testament) has refreshed
my soul like life-giving water. I have found in it all the depth I was
seeking."
Perhaps you're not as brave as Sartre. You might need to cling to
your atheism a little longer. I pray that one day soon you'll begin a
serious study of the Book that has outlasted Das Capital or the Thoughts
of Chairman Mao.
