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Sartre's Essence And The Non-Existence Of God

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Sartre commented that, “We should refer here to Hegel’s statement: ‘Wesen ist was gewesen ist.’ Essence is what has been…Essence is all that human reality apprehends in itself as having been.”
What does Sartre mean by this proclamation that existence precedes essence? He makes his meaning clear that the human reality of man first “surges up in the world and defines himself afterwards.” Further, “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.” Thus, “there is no human nature.”
Sartre reasons that there is no human nature “because there is no God to have a conception of it.” No proof of the non-existence of God is given; we may freely counter-axiom to the contrary. Yet the existence or not of God is not dispositive of there being a human nature in the first instance. That God exists and has a conception of a human nature does not require its existence – this being tantamount to a form of the ontological proof. Likewise the non-existence of God does not preclude a human nature. Even though being existential, existentialism must still be logical. …show more content…

He makes himself. His course is not predetermined: he does not proceed, as it were, along a pair of rails from which he cannot diverge…what he becomes depends on himself, on his own

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