Sartre's Thoughts On Personality

Sartre was an existentialist, and there are a series of quotes from Sartre that best describe his view on the personality of the human race. "Man has a human nature; this human nature, which is the concept of the human, is found in all men, which means that each man is a particular example of a universal concept man." He follows this with a comparison of a paper cutter, "the concept of man in the mind of God is comparable to the concept of paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer, and, following certain techniques and a conception, God produces man, just as the artisan, following a definition and a technique, makes a paper-cutter." So, Sartre believes that everyone is made in the same concept, however he also points out that, "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It is also what is called subjectivity." He also, like the Platonists, believes that man cannot choose evil when he says, " we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good at all." Another point that Sartre lays in front of us is the level of responsibility of mankind, "Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man." In other words, what he does builds on the view of man in general, so he is responsible for the image of mankind.

Sartre describes the three existential emotions, anguish, forlornness, and despair, and offers us his opinion on each of them. For anguish he gives us a definition that anguish is felt by a person "who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself." He gives us the example of Abraham believing that an angel of God has ordered him to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, this shows the anguish of trying to act rightly without ever being able to secure any conclusive evidence of what is the right course of action. The second emotion, forlornness, Sartre says that it is "very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it." The third and last emotion, despair, is the realization that we cannot ultimately rely on anyone else for anything. It is a rather disturbing realization. "But, given that man is free and that there is no human nature for me to depend on, I can not count on men whom I do not know by relying on human goodness or man's concern for the good of society."