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The Lack of Afro-Caribbean Boys in Higher Education

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Assess Whether Sartre Was right To Claim That Man Is Completely Free
Although Soren Kierkegaard is known as the godfather of existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre was a French philosopher who popularised it. This essay will look at his claim that man is completely free and try to draw a conclusion on whether he was right, wrong or maybe even a middle ground to this assertion.
To understand his claim that man is completely free, it will be necessary to look at what existentialism is and what it says about the notion of freedom. According to Sartre we are condemned to be free because we are ontological beings (Sartre, 1973 p.29-30) Sartre described humans as a being-for-itself because they have an awareness of themselves, their existence and are able to change by manipulating different factors and making decisions that suit them. He then went on to describe innate objects as a being-in-itself meaning they have no consciousness, and cannot change; they cannot manipulate the environment for better or worse (Bochensky, 1974, p.175)
Sartre stated that existence precedes essence. By this he meant that we exist first and only after that occurs do we start making sense of the world and ourselves. This view is an atheistic approach to existentialism because he believed that God does not exist, but Christian existentialists like Kierkegaard and Heidegger would disagree with this approach. According to Sartre we are born tabular rasa and thrown into existence without our will. By arguing that we are born tabular rasa (blank slate); Sartre suggests that we have the freedom to give meaning to our lives by choosing what we want to be. For Sartre “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world and defines himself (Sartre and Priest, 2001 p28), He will be what he makes himself.” Basically if God exists then man is not free as god would have designed man and his

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