The older Sartre
 

Rel 198 Jean Paul Sartre,  1905-1980 
Existentialism and Human Emotions
NY: Philosophical Library, 1957; selections from pp. 21-23, 51.

This book is a collection of excerpts from Sartre's writings. These excerpts together form a defense of existentialism. Sartre's famous phrase "existence precedes essence" is intended to signify that we human are the kinds of beings who exist first of all with the internal freedom to choose what kind of person (what "essence") to be. 

When Sartre says that God could provide an a priori good, he means that if God existed God might be able to tell us prior to any decisions of ours what is already intrinsically good. Or God could decree absolute norms of good and evil.

But Sartre's conviction is that even if there were a God, that would be no help. We would still have to decide whether God is worth following or listening to, and that would require us to first make up our own standards about what is worth while. This is what Sartre means by saying that we humans are fully responsible for our own values, and so forth.  We are "condemned to be free," and therefore responsible for ourselves. (Autonomy and responsibility are the core issues here.)

 Second, Sartre fears that if God existed this would be dangerous because we would then always be tempted to let God take over our lives and make our decisions for us. To Sartre that would mean giving up our freedom. As our freedom is the basis of our humanness, we would then be giving up our humanness. So Sartre claimed.

Excerpt from the essay:  Existentialism is a Humanism

When we speak of forlornness, a term Heidegger was fond of, we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face all the consequences of this. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense. About 1880, some French teachers tried to set up a secular ethics which went something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis; we are discarding it; but, meanwhile, in order for there to be an ethics, a society, a civilization, it is essential that certain values be taken seriously and they be considered as having an a priori existence. It must be obligatory, a priori, to be honest, not to lie, not to beat your wife, to have children, etc., etc. So we're going to try a little device which will make it possible to show that values exist all the same, inscribed in a heaven of ideas, though otherwise God does not exist. In other words--and this, I believe, is the tendency of everything call reformism in France--nothing will be changed if God does not exist. We shall find ourselves with the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanism, and we shall have made a God an outdated hypothesis which will peacefully die off by itself.

The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it 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. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoievsky [sic] said, "If God didn't exist, everything would be possible." That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can't start making excuses for himself.

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.

That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefor an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

The existentialist does not think that man is going to help himself by finding in the world some omen by which to orient himself. Because he thinks that man will interpret the omen to suit himself. Therefore, he thinks that man, with no support and no aid, is condemned every moment to invent man.

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Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing.