RT Article
T1 Sartre’s Godless Theology: Dualist Monism and Its Temporal Dimensions
JF Open theology
VO 5
IS 1
SP 182
OP 197
A1 Liu, Renxiang
LA English
PB De Gruyter
YR 2019
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1830005170
AB My task in this paper is to study Sartre’s ontology as a godless theology. The urgency of defending freedom and responsibility in the face of determinism called for an overarching first principle, a role that God used to play. I first show why such a principle is important and how Sartre filled the void that God had left with a solipsist consciousness. Then I characterize Sartre’s ontology of this consciousness as a "dualist monism", explaining how it supports his radical conception of freedom. Then, by assessing Sartre’s dualist monism through a theological lens, I disclose an inconsistency in his thought concerning the idea that the in-itself is a deterministic plenitude, which presumes a theos different from consciousness and hence threatens monism. Finally I argue that his inconsistency originates from the finitude of Sartre’s first principle and analyze this finitude by examining the modes of temporality it implies. The entire trajectory problematizes the practice of theo-logy, the idea that a theos stands at the origin of the "logic" (organization or intelligibility) of everything such that all must be conceived under the logos of the theos . While Sartre forcefully criticized the theology of the infinite, his was nonetheless a theology of finitude.
K1 Dualist monism
K1 Finitude
K1 Freedom
K1 Godless theology
K1 Jean-Paul Sartre
K1 Ontology
DO 10.1515/opth-2019-0017