There is an apparent inconsistency in Sartre.
On one hand, he says that there is no such thing as human nature or a human essence, and consequently there are no "a priori" values.
That is, there exist no values prior to our choice of a "configuration" for our life.
On the other hand, Sartre affirms the existence of a universal human condition, and he derives from this condition a number of universal, a priori values:
1. Truth/rationality/honesty. (p. 44) These are not "moral" values, but they clearly involve a value judgment.
2. Responsibility/ethical consistency. The Golden Rule
If we claim rights for ourselves that we do not acknowledge for others, we suffer an "uneasy conscience".
3. Freedom. (p. 46)
"...he can no longer want but one thing, and that is freedom, as the basis of all values."
"I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time I want my own freedom."
Freedom plays the role for Sartre that eudaemonia plays for Aristotle, or the Tao for Lewis.
4. Unity, harmony, correspondence to reality. (pp. 42-43; the analogy to art)
In addition, the radical negation of human nature is absurd.
Nothing can create itself from nothingness: to create anything, the self must already exist. Hence, the self cannot create itself.
How to interpret Sartre?
Most charitable interpretation is to take the earlier, negative statements as hyperbole (intentional exaggeration for effect).
We have a human nature, and that human nature is the basis for value.
What, then, is Sartre rejecting?
Key: story of the young man and the Resistance
Thick conception of human nature (Aristotle): we can find a definite answer, by consulting human nature and the young man's concrete situation.
Which action will in fact most fully realize that nature?
Straw man version of this view: we can find a mechanical recipe for doing this.
Some eudaemonistic calculating device.
This is clearly not Aristotle's position: discerning what to do requires the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom.
Practical wisdom cannot be reduced to a set of instructions. It requires the exercising of sound judgment.
What Sartre is clearly rejecting is this thick conception of human nature.
Thin conception of human nature: we have a human nature, and it does provide a basis for value, but it also suffers from considerable indeterminacy.
There are many questions of value and of decision for which human nature provides no answer.
We can partially define ourselves: fill in the blank slots in our nature through our own decisions.
Human nature itself gives us the capacity and the responsibility of doing so.
Consider again the young man and the Resistance.
Sartre is claiming that all the ethical insight and practical wisdom in the world does not suffice to justify a unique solution to the young man's dilemma.
Kierkegaard anticipated this problem, and Sartre's solution, in The Sickness Unto Death.
According to Kierkegaard, it is precisely dilemmas like the young man's that provide us the opportunity of becoming an individual self.
In the absence of such dilemmas, human beings are merely stamped out by the cookie cutter of human nature, universal ethics. We are different only to the extent that we are defective.
For Aristotle: all good characters converge on a single type, a state of perfection.
For Kierkegaard, the solution to the dilemma lies in the discerning of the will of God for me as an individual, of my individual calling or vocation.
This cannot be found by any recipe or formula: it arises in a unique way from a personal relationship to God.
The paradigm: Abraham. God calls him to leave his home, to believe that he will have a son in his old age, to sacrifice that son, etc.
Abraham emerges as a unique, unrepeatable individual, yet his life has a unity and a continuity through time.
Kierkegaard also anticipated Sartre's solution:
in place of God's will, I interpose my own. It is my will (and not God's) that fills in the indeterminacies of my life, producing a unique, unrepeatable individual.
Kierkegaard called this approach "the despair of wanting to be one's own self."
The problem lies in the temporality of the self. I change through time, and since my individuality is not yet fully formed, there is an element of caprice, accident and arbitrariness to these changes.
I cannot now bind myself in the future.
Consequently, my attempts to form myself into an individual must fail.
The individual choices by which I define myself cannot cohere into a single unity.
To use the analogy to a work of art: I am like a mural, each part of which is painted by a different artist. The overall work lacks unity, continuity.
In contrast, God is eternal, timeless. If I can discern His will for my life, the result will be a life that is simultaneously unified and unique.
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