Socrates Meets Sartre by Peter Kreeft

Author:Peter Kreeft [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898709711
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2010-03-02T06:00:00+00:00

8

Responsibility

SOCRATES: We should now more carefully examine your challenging notion that we are each totally and solely responsible for our own lives.

SARTRE: Oh.

SOCRATES: You sound surprised already.

SARTRE: I am pleased. I thought your idealism would be so shocked by my low view of man, that you would spend more time attacking my negative ideas instead of looking at my positive one.

SOCRATES: Why would I do that?

SARTRE: To win the argument, of course.

SOCRATES: But I have no need or desire to win, and certainly none for you to lose. Even on earth I had no such desire, though others did, and consequently misunderstood me. But here—

SARTRE: All right, get on with it, please. What about my doctrine of total responsibility?

SOCRATES: I want to test a suspicion of mine.

SARTRE: Ah, I knew it. Here comes the dark stuff.

SOCRATES: The suspicion is this: that it is only a striking way of wording a truth that many others have professed, though seldom lived up to. One sage put the idea this way: “Whenever the time comes to make excuses, the time has come to do the thing you are making excuses for not doing.”

SARTRE: In other words, the idea that people are far too quick to make excuses and pass the buck; that they do not live up to their own standards; that they take responsibility for only, let’s say, one tenth of their lives, while they should take responsibility for nine tenths.

SOCRATES: Something like that, yes.

SARTRE: No, it is more than that. That is a common idea.

SOCRATES: God forbid your ideas should be common. People would start calling you “bourgeoise”!

SARTRE: Oh, so you are capable of sarcasm after all.

SOCRATES: I have that potentiality, whether you believe in it or not. But what I am searching for now is a definition. What do you mean by total responsibility?

SARTRE: Not just that people make excuses and don’t live up to their philosophy, but that their philosophy is wrong.

SOCRATES: So it seems that, as usual, your point is as unusual as it seems.

SARTRE: Yes. I take responsibility for all my words.

SOCRATES: You poor man! That is an enormous pile to carry on your shoulders. For instance, the following passage from your book:

[EHE, 54-56] There are no accidents in life. . . . If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion. . . . For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it. This can be due to inertia, to cowardice in the face of public opinion, or because I prefer certain other values to the value of the refusal to join in the war (the good opinion of my relatives, the honor of my family, etc.). Any way you look at it, it is a matter of a choice. This choice will be repeated later on again and again without a break until the end of the war.

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