Existentialism Is a Humanism has been "a popular starting-point in discussions of existentialist thought,"[4] and in the philosopher Thomas Baldwin's words, "Seized the imagination of a generation."[5] However, Sartre himself later rejected some of the views he expressed in the work, and regretted its publication.[4] Other philosophers have critiqued the lecture on various grounds: Martin Heidegger wrote in a letter to the philosopher and Germanist Jean Beaufret that while Sartre's statement that "existence precedes essence" reverses the metaphysical statement that essence precedes existence, "The reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement." In Heidegger's view, Sartre "Stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of Being."[6]. Heidegger reportedly told Hubert Dreyfus that Sartre's work was "dreck."[7] Marjorie Grene found Sartre's discussion of "the problem of the relation between individuals" in Existentialism and Humanism to be weaker than the one he had previously offered in Being and Nothingness (1943).[8] Walter Kaufmann commented that the lecture "has been widely mistaken for the definitive statement of existentialism," but is rather "a brilliant lecture which bears the stamp of the moment." According to Kaufmann, Sartre makes factual errors, including misidentifying philosopher Karl Jaspers as a Catholic, and presenting a definition of existentialism that is open to question.[2] Thomas C. Anderson criticized Sartre for asserting without explanation that if a person seeks freedom from false, external authorities, then he or she must invariably allow this freedom for others.[9] Iris Murdoch found one of Sartre's discussions with a Marxist interesting, but otherwise considered Existentialism and Humanism to be "a rather bad little book."[10] Mary Warnock believed Sartre was right to dismiss the work.[4]
The philosopher Frederick Copleston stated that Sartre, like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Edmund Husserl, interpreted the views of René Descartes as an anticipation of his own philosophical views.[11] The neurobiologist Steven Rose described a statement in which Sartre maintained that man "will be what he makes of himself" as a "windily rhetorical paean to the dignity of universalistic man" and "more an exercise in political sloganeering than a sustainable philosophical position." He pointed to aging and disease as examples of factors that limit human freedom.[12] The philosopher Slavoj Žižek argued that there is a parallel between Sartre's views and claims made by the character Father Zosima in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880): whereas Sartre believes that with total freedom comes total responsibility, for Father Zosima "each of us must make us responsible for all men's sins".[13]
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