The Shadow of God in Jean-Paul Sartre's Metaphysics

Abstract

The author in this manuscript tries to show that the latent intellectual and spiritual basis of some schools of Western philosophy was Christianity, and Western philosophy is often correlated to it in one way or another (sometimes paradoxically) – be it religious, atheistic or non-theistic. That is true for Jean-Paul Sartre's metaphysics. The concepts of subjectivity and personality are inseparably connected with the Western culture and philosophy, which were (among other) intrinsically generated by the intentions of religions of the "Bible root” – Christianity, in this case. As the "core” of existential philosophy in general are the problems of personality ("being-to-death”, "the border situations”, human freedom, choice, guiltiness, responsibility, alienation etc.) – so, its ideas are at the uttermost correlated to Christian anthropology. Nevertheless parallels of Sartre's texts with Christian mystical and ascetic practices were not clearly demonstrated in any research yet. The author also demonstrates that contrary to his heralded "atheism” Sartre's existentialism latently implies the ontological "melancholy for God” and that the "absence of God” was the cardinal principle for the composition of the whole Sartre's metaphysics and his concepts of being, subjectivity and consciousness.