SARTRE: APPROACH TO TRUTH
The phenomenon of death finds a special emphasis in existentialism . Inevitability of death and transitoriness of human existence are affirmed by this form of thought: some of the existentialists consider man as a 'being unto death' or man 'as a useless passion', and death as the last possibility. The acceptance of death as the inevitable prospect of man's present life awakens from his inauthentic existence and directs him to authentic existence.
There seems to be an agreement on the need to strive for a new experiential perspective in which man can accept, modify, and transcend the problems of life. In this regard this system of thought agree that truth is highly subjective that it is realized in the subjective experience of the individual.
The word "subjectivism" is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism.
There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man with subjectivity – it is this that we call existential humanism. This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realisation, that man can realize himself as truly human.
The concreteness and subjectivity of human exxistence cannot be exteriorized and comprehended by means of objective thought; objective thought is incompetent either to produce existence or to substitute itself for it; each individual has to grasp his own existence from within, in his own self-experience in which 'knowing' and 'being' are one. Being is the ground of all that is and the presupposition of all knowledge, and hence cannot itself be comprehended as a finite object of thought. Man's encounter with being takes place within himself and he is fully aware of his own reality as identified with or related to being.
At the point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual, and that for strictly philosophic reasons. It is not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching upon the truth, and not upon a collection of fine theories, full of hope but lacking real foundations. And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think, therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory which begins with man, outside of this moment of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby suppresses the truth, for outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable, and any doctrine of probabilities which is not attached to a truth will crumble into nothing. In order to define the probable one must possess the true. Before there can be any truth whatever, then, there must be an absolute truth, and there is such a truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of everybody; it consists in one's immediate sense of one's self.
We can judge, nevertheless, for, as I have said, one chooses in view of others, and in view of others one chooses himself. One can judge, first – and perhaps this is not a judgment of value, but it is a logical judgment – that in certain cases choice is founded upon an error, and in others upon the truth.
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