The aging of Dr. Kreeft frightens me more than most things these days because we will be without an incredible voice for Truth, wisdom, and sanity when he is called home ... Perhaps one of the great things of our technological age is that we will still have these remarkable lectures to learn from when he parts our immediate company. God's blessings be continually to him! 🙏
These five philosophers were the enablers of the perpetuating of superstition. Superstition starts with the belief in god whose existence as creator of all of the existence is very much in doubt. Homo sapiens moved from mythological delusions to the illusion of god and they didn’t stop there. They continued with imagining an entire other world which ought to exist after death. These ideas are not only false but very dangerous for humans to live a full life. We are completely capable of living without god and in fact live better lives. But superstitions are carried out through generations, each generation leaving the mark of such untruths by influencing little children. 99% or more of religious people have the religions they’re born into. What truth can a reasonable person draw from these facts. Morality is not the monopoly of religions and in fact religions promote corruption in their believers. Look at so many cases of child abuse in churches going back to many centuries. How can a person seriously say religions are the origins of morality?!
This is one of the best things I've ever listened to, out of untold hours of podcasts and videos. Incredibly well-prepared material and clear delivery. I suppose the content boils down to the opposing ideas of freedom, which Bishop Barron has specifically drawn attention to, namely arbitrary freedom of choice between options and "the disciplining of desire such that attainment of the good becomes first possible and then effortless." If there are real values that exist outside of yourself, then you have to accept the second idea of freedom. I'm still sorting through a lot of difficulties about what religious belief involves, but I think anyone should be able to see that there are objective values in the world which exist outside of themselves. You can't be a great artist or athlete or be loved by people just by deciding you want it to be so. You have to conform yourself to something outside yourself. It's the worldview of a relatively immature and spoiled high school student (or younger) to expect your life to instantly become what you will it to be. Even more juvenile to think that all values are subjective - to believe that goodness isn't good and beauty isn't beautiful unless you say so. Only someone with no experience of the world, who has never encountered anything greater than himself, could be so deluded. Instead of that worldview, you might imagine that objective values are not only greater than your own individual person, but that they are transcendent relative to all the rest of reality. You might have faith that beauty and goodness and truth point to a metaphysical state of being. You might reason that mercy is more real than evil because it envelops and contains it, and that beauty is more real than ugliness which is only its absence, and that all this might say something about the ultimate point of life. This all seems like it would be pretty straightforward and obvious, if people like Sartre hadn't wormed their way into the culture in relatively recent history. And if we weren't all mini-existentialists in our immature and confused natures, particularly when we're young.
In the end Even Sartre could not live like Sartre. In an interview in 1980 before he died he gave an interview to his former secretary Benny Lévy. Sartre had said In the interview and I quote "“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to god.” From Hope Now The 1980 Interviews
It's a good quote, but while it provides a grain of hope that the man's not lost it doesn't actually indicate he didn't like himself. This isn't to say that he didn't experience such an inner conflict of course - all things considered it's far more likely than not the case that he did.
@@ironymatt I don't like MY self. I think that this is not uncommon. I don't know that it has anything to do with conversion. I love God and His creatures in Heaven.
@@SuperIliad loving God and his creatures is ideal. Focusing too much on ourselves can only lead to a disordered dislike of the self or an equally destructive vainglorious pride. Trust in Christ that he'll keep us in balance
Philosophy is an ocean , we get lost on , and I never have been able to run a line through “ Existentialist choice “ and Christian truth . Contrasting Augustine and Sartre / Nietzsche would never have occurred to me , and is definitely beyond me , so I am really grateful for your deeply thoughtful and wise distillation of this topic , and the eternal harm of nihilism. I used to believe our character is our destiny , and our destiny arises from the choices we make in life - but now I understand ‘ the gravity of love ‘ determines our identity _ as Aquinas put it “ The things we love , tell us who we are .” - the heart leads , the mind follows ( justifies ) , the will is conformed . I feel certain most people are unaware of these differing understandings of freedom . Sincere gratitude !
I am a pastor gone through all most all philosophy. His understanding in philosophy incredible same time he evaluate all in light of theology, there is gold and Dimond in it those who hear
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:21 📜 Augustine's "City of God" is a significant work, responding to Rome's decay and fall, influencing Western civilization. 01:19 📚 Augustine's writings, like "Confessions" and "On the Trinity," shaped Christian civilization and philosophy. 02:30 🏛️ Augustine was a deeply converted Christian philosopher, while Sartre stood as a committed atheist. 03:54 🧠 Augustine's light can be compared to Sartre's, while Augustine's passion and wisdom surpassed Nietzsche's fire. 04:52 ⚖️ Augustine's "Confessions" and "City of God" were influential books throughout the Middle Ages. 05:18 ✝️ Both Augustine and Sartre recognize the profound impact of the concept of God on human life and culture. 06:46 🕊️ Sartre's atheism hinges on the absence of Eternal truth and values, embracing absolute freedom from God's constraints. 07:42 🔄 Sartre argues for the incompatibility of a perfect, unchanging God with personal subjects and free will. 09:19 🕰️ Augustine's God exists timelessly, coexisting with the present, avoiding limitations of past and future. 10:46 🌍 Augustine asserts that without God, there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in human life. 11:58 💔 Sartre finds freedom in God's absence, viewing existence as purely subjective and void of ultimate judgments. 14:11 🛤️ Sartre and Augustine's opposing conclusions emerge from the same principle: "If God does not exist, everything is permissible." 16:45 🗝️ Sartre's atheism is shaped by his desire for radical freedom, affecting his philosophical arguments. 19:20 🔒 Sartre's metaphysical arguments against God stem from preconceived notions, driven by his will and desires. 20:57 🌌 Augustine's philosophy accommodates the timeless existence of a personal God, distinct from Sartre's limited categories. 24:24 ⚖️ Sartre's atheism is based on his desire, contrasting with the more honest atheistic argument from the problem of evil. 25:47 🕊️ Sartre's atheism reflects his personal choice, either leading to misery or satisfaction, mirroring the devil's choice. 26:26 😔 Nietzsche and Sartre reject God's existence due to fear of being known and judged by God. 27:36 🙅♂️ Sartre demands absolute freedom, which he sees as incompatible with the existence of God. 28:17 🕊️ Augustine's conversion includes heart, mind, and will, leading him to seek truth, wisdom, and divine love. 30:08 🌟 Augustine's core values are truth, goodness, and beauty, driven by his love for God. 31:31 💔 Augustine longs to be known and loved by God, while Sartre fears dependence on God and seeks total freedom. 34:51 🛑 Sartre's atheism leads to nihilism, denying objective meaning, value, and virtue; values are arbitrary and invented. 36:57 🗽 Augustine's freedom is positive, seeking union with God; Sartre's freedom is negative, avoiding all limits. 39:05 🏙️ Augustine worships God, valuing truth and love; Sartre worships self, rejecting truth and love, leading to isolation and hell. 43:41 ⚖️ Sartre's pessimism and nihilism can push individuals toward deeper questioning and potential religious exploration. 44:06 🌅 Choosing between Augustine's path of love and light or Sartre's path of darkness and isolation has significant societal consequences. Made with HARPA AI
Dr. Kreeft contradicts the notion "history" of Sartre that he served in the French Underground in WWII, but rather that he was complicit by just ignoring what was going on & continuing his writing. Why then, was he imprisioned? Could he have been just a "decoy" for others doing more "damaging duties" against the Nazis? His philosophy has caused me to wonder in the past, why he would care what was happening to the Jewish people or others. He could escape, avoid it all, & his freedom not be bothered. If Dr. Kreeft is correct, Sartre did follow that path of lest resistance! Excellent lecture. THANK YOU!
Thank you Sir, for your great efforts of deep wisdom and philosophy. While I was listening your lecture, remembering philosophy class in Major Seminary.
Sartre misses Kierkegaard - the concept of anxiety is the possibility of freedom in the sense that one can have that anxiety and still be a Christian .
Yeah, his construct of anxiety is very profound, but he misses so many issues that it raises. As Peter said, his views of God and life are full of prejudice.
Ay esta Moritano, do you know that we are all call to be saints? To be kind, caring, generous, to love others as God love us, to be truthful and faithful. We can all be saints, it is not easy but could do it! I am trying, not because I want to be call a saint but to be able to seeHIM and be in HIS presence!
Thank you for this wonderful conference that enlightens about the true meaning of what is being said in our culture. I love St Augustine of Hipona. Thank you ❤
A gem to be sure. Subscribed. I am grateful for having the privilege to study your body of work in it's entirety, as am I eager to see what is yet to come. Take care and God bless. ✝️
Brilliant, thanks for posting. Sartre's desire to exist apart from God is the result of a tiny mad idea called the Ego. The Ego is the antithesis to the thesis of God. It's the insane belief that to be a separated self is freedom. It is an illusion. To live in an illusion is to live in bondage, not freedom..
No not really it only tells you how he treated one person. Could we assume you didnt bother ro view augustines relation with women. Not rhe greatest either.
@@Urbanity_Kludge Considering his influential views on women mainly being vessels for procreation , id say it got worse when he became a Christian. Much worse.
@@Suzume-Shimmer views interpreted by others isn't equivalent to how you treat another person, but I know nothing about Sartre and how he treated Simone. As a parting thought, I imagine he didn't think of his mother as simply a vessel for procreation. I think much of his theology was misused over time
Thank you! An excellent lecture presents an honest breakdown of the two opposite works. Carl Jung argued that Nietzsche was not an atheist; his God was his Ubermunsche ( his fantasy figure he worshiped)
Sartre couldn't admit one truth. The truth is that the only thing he knew was that he didn't know. Intellectual arrogance always takes them down. But on the way down their constructed sinkholes, they take many down with them.
@@ClaudioBenassiSartre viewing God as a competitor in the sense of God being an obstruction to Sartre actualizing his own will makes a great deal of sense. Rejecting the possibility of a God influencing human morality is exactly what one who views God as competitor would want, since it would seemingly grant one license to determine for oneself what should or shouldn't be considered moral. It's the classic misunderstanding of freedom to equate it with licentiousness. Thanks be to God that he was wrong.
@@ironymatt it might be. I still think he was an obsessive atheist, he would just live without it or thinking about it. He just couldn’t. Imho he lived in dirty places….
This is difficult for me to write this and i hope Dr. Kreeft, whom i admire so much, won't be offended. At any rate if you want to listen the Younger versión of Dr. Kreeft we've heard for so many years put the speed at 1:25 and it's awesome. Thank you Dr. Kreeft for these precious lessons. We r listening n learning:)
This is good really glad to see it as pure as philosophy and theology can be. There’s been a plethora of so called cross disciplinary thinkers who think their experts about everything because they had conversations on their podcasts. many
(A full transcription; I apologize for inaccurate hearing) Lesson four is on Saint Augustine versus Jean-Paul Sartre on the difference God makes to everything. Augustine's The City of God is the world's first and greatest philosophy of history and society. Like the Bible, it begins at the beginning, the creation, and goes on to the very end, the last judgment. It was Augustine's response to the greatest crisis in the history of Western Civilization the decay and fall of Rome, and of civilization itself. When Augustine died - in 430 A.D. - he could see and smell the fires of the barbarians burning his North African home city. His other masterpiece, The Confessions, narrates an even greater drama. The greatest drama in human life is the drama of a soul poised between two opposite eternities. Both books show the interaction between Divine Providence and human free choice. Both of which Augustine strongly defended. A third masterpiece, On the Trinity, is even more ambitious. It explores the supreme mystery of the nature of ultimate reality: the inner life of God. All three books defined the fundamental direction of Christian civilization for millennia to come. Every person in our culture would be very different or would not be at all if Augustine had not lived. I strongly believe that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas are the five greatest and wisest philosophers of all time. So, it's natural that we begin with these five. And all had a philosophical enemy or opponent or opposite during his lifetime or later. The Sophists versus Socrates, concerning objective truth and objective values. Machiavelli versus Plato on justice. Kant versus Aristotle on both knowledge and goodness, both epistemology and ethics. And Sartre versus Augustine on the difference God makes in everything. And as we shall see in the next lecture Averroes and Sigier of Brabant versus Aquinas on the relation between faith and reason.
Sorry, but Satre's conclusion (as presented here) is not logical. He's missing a key point; an eternal, unchanging being can exist in time and make choices in the timeline if those actions do not cause him to change who he is. Thus even if we overlook the weird assumptions Satre makes like the idea that a dog is unchanging (nonsense to any dog owner) he's still wrong right from the get-go. Thank you very much for the video, I think you've done a sterling job overall.
44:47 I am reminded of a Catholic priest, a friend of Monsignor Lefebvre, who on an occasion said "I have seen Sartre, his philosophy refutes itself, he had rings below the eyes, he had dirty fingernails" ... The problem is not his rejection of Sartre. The problem is, his criterium was how certain Pharisees rejected Christ. By contrast, unlike Père André, Peter Kreeft has really done a refutation of Sartre. Or denunciation.
“Thou Hast made us for thyself and therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” That rest is what Augustine calls - in The City of God - peace. Peace is positive not negative. It is not merely the absence of war. It is the attainment of our objectively true end and meaning and perfection which can be done only by surrendering to Divine Grace. Augustine is often called the “doctor of Grace.” He knows the priority of Grace not by theological reasoning but by his own experience. Augustine's and Sartre's philosophies are opposites because their hearts are opposites. Augustine's heart beats passionately for the very thing Sartre hates, and fears above all: to be known and loved by God. And Sartre's deepest heart beats passionately for the thing Augustine hates and fears above all: to be free from God!! To be free from grace, free from all dependence on his love, and on objective truth, and meaning, and values, and ends, and purposes and directions. Augustine longs for his true home and his divine family. Sartre apprises his homelessness and his autonomy. Sartre is the philosopher of the “I”, while Augustine is the philosopher of the “we,” of The City of God, of the Community of love, in the three places that his three greatest books are about. In his life, in the Church and in the Trinity. Sartre explicitly says that the word “we” does not designate anything real any real possibility. That little word “we” - that is a merely ordinary word for ordinary people but is magical and heavenly for lovers-, that is a hell or an illusion for Sartre! Shocking point of his famous play “No Exit,” is that hell is other people! That is the difference between Heaven and Hell. Hell is not “other people” - as Sartre says. It's precisely the refusal of other people. I think Hell, probably, does not contain physical fire because that would at least bring the damned out of themselves and focus their attention on something else than their own total emptiness and loneliness and hopelessness. If Christ speaks the truth when he says that: “All find what they truly seek,” then Augustine must be in “we” forever and Sartre must be in “I” forever! Sartre would hate heaven. It's full of “we”, of love, of togetherness (a family) and of children. It interferes with his freedom and his autonomy. God would interfere with it most of all, so God will be Sartre's most terrible enemy. Why is Sartre so threatened by the God that Augustine longs for? Sartre is not threatened by all gods equally. God as an ideal, God as a human construct is not so threatening to him, although of course for Sartre it can be only a myth, but that myth is not what he fears. He fears the living God, the Home of Heaven. Not the god whom we make as our construct, but the God who made us as His construct, by creating us as his objects, as his creatures, as relative to Him. For Sartre, if God exists, we are His inventions, which means not as children but his machines, his objects. We couldn't be free if we were created by God.
Dr. Kreeft is amazing, brilliant. I found his Aristotle vs Kant talk especially excellent. While I'm no expert, I think maybe Augustine vs Schopenhauer would've been more challenging than Augustine vs Sartre and a fairer contrast. Nobody likes Schopenhauer because he is so pessimistic, but popularity doesn't necessarily equate with truth. And Schopenhauer, I think, had far more humility than Sartre or Nietzsche and had a more compassionate nihilism (and I don't think that's a contradiction) and perhaps even a more pragmatic, justifiable type of nihilism when we see what the will of humans has done to our planet, other people, and other species. I don't think he would be so easy to call "demonic", though maybe rightfully "depressed" unless you are a lover of art. Certainly as much evil has spawned from religion as it has from atheism. Evil exists in humankind. A lot of hateful people think they're good Christians and they don't know the first thing about Christ. (Or should I say St. Paul?) Also, Dr. Kreeft says Sartre is an a priori atheist and I don't doubt the Doctor on that. But don't most Christians believe a priori.? Any belief in the supernatural is ultimately a priori, isn't it? Isn't that kind of what Kierkegaard meant by "a leap of faith"? I understand why St. Thomas Aquinas is so popular, I WISH I could be a Thomist. As a child, I believed in God and loved Him and felt he loved me personally. And I was certainly happier and felt more at home in the world. But, I'm sorry, so many of Thomas' core arguments for God can't be proven and seem based in nominalism, and I don't think Dr. Kreeft agrees with much of nominalism. And I know that he's right that much of nominalism goes way too far, absurdly so. But that doesn't mean that words don't very often wag the dog of meaning. Everyone lumps agnostics like me and atheists together. But I lump the very religious and atheists together in that both are absolutist about that which they cannot possibly truly know with utter certainty. Agnosticism seems a more humble, honest belief (or lack of it.) I'm not a coward. To be a nonbeliever, especially if you grew up believing in God and even felt a relationship with Him, is not at all easy. I don't feel more free or whatever. It sucks to lose my early faith. But I have to be honest with myself. Certainly Dr. Kreeft is right that people are becoming too selfish and individualistic and that love of Christ can be a counter to that. But many devout Christians often use their Christianity as a cover for bad behavior, a "Get Into Heaven Free Card", despite using their religion to justify slavery in the 1800s or elevate Trump today, etc etc. They are not immune to selfishness and evil, just more hypocritical about it. I know this is a bit of an ad hominem attack on many Christians, but shouldn't they get their own house in order before going after the secular world as much as they do? Maybe the religious themselves are greatly to blame for increasing secularism. I wish more Christians were true, like Dr. Kreeft seems to be. This man is the opposite of a preening, money-grubbing televangelist. I find his lectures fascinating and incredibly enlightening. But clearly his arguments can cut several ways. Unfortunately, I'll have to stick with Schopenhauer, take a hard look at my own human will and how I use it, and embrace the original type of Buddhism as the most honest of religions, if you can even call a Godless philosophy a religion. (It certainly doesn't lack serenity and compassion. I'll take a pass on making any claims about reincarnation, I'm agnostic about that as well.) And before any of y'all attack me out of spite, ask yourself what would Jesus say? Peace.
I'd love to hear Dr Kreeft talk about Schopenhauer. He's certainly a more respectible philosopher than Sartre and I personally don't think he is any more pessimistic than Camus, Sartre, Nietzche, or any other atheistic philosopher. If anything I think he's less depressing.
Jesus hopefully would tell you not to be an agnostic. Please don't take this to be spiteful, but agnosticism ultimately doesn't lead you anywhere. Under such an ideology there's no real way to substantiate anything - certainly not the statement that just as much evil has spawned from religion as it has from atheism.
Aquinas is not a nominalist and belief in God is not a priori, since it is not done by “pure reasoning” (whatever the hell that means). Schopenhauers nihilism is problematic, as is all nihilism. But also not pragmatic, I would say. Schopenhauer has two modes of seeing the world: the desire to nut, and post-nut depression. Anyway, Thomas Nagel has pretty good criticisms of nihilism on logical grounds. For example, if nothing we do matters in x amount of time, then reciprocally, x amount of time shouldn’t matter to us. But nihilism is about caring and moaning and complaining about what doesn’t matter.
As a communist, Sartre was all for Hitler until the latter invaded the Soviet Union, and once it was obvious the war was to be won by the Allies he suddenly became a "resistance fighter." However, no one ever saw him lift anything heavier than a cigarette in defense of La Belle France.
For me, the greatest Philosopher of our time, who like Socrates, engaged in philosophical battles to expose the Fallacies, Errors and Illogic of other philosophers, is no other than Peter Kreeft! He praises Chesterton and CS Lewis, but these two were not philosophers like he. I believe Kreeft will go down in history as equals or greater than these two in philosophical circles.
God is perfectly Loving and Just ... I hope nobody notices the contradiction. But, just in case, we need a perfect victim of divine Justice to demonstrate divine Love.
ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE: "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love. He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will." (Ep 1:4-5)
Reference to the first book of the bible Genesis Chapter 1&2 we're find out the existence of God and creation including the failure of humans and the existence of all evilness. And after those times God blessed his creation and used it as co-workers of his own. Thank you very much for the lecture and may God bless you.
What must Sartre have thought of Augustine's experience of the baby on the beach? He certainly must've been aware of the tale, and yet he failed to heed the lesson in his pursuit into parsing the mind and persons of God - a pursuit taken so far that it led to the inevitable rejection of that which man cannot ever fully grasp. It is, after all, the only fully consistent and logical conclusion one could arrive at when faced with such an end, faith be damned. What might have been had he taken the only other tenable choice, to simply recognize the one true God in the person of Christ and acquiesce to His infinite love, as a mere child would, and as Augustine did with the selfsame childlike purity?
Hmmm... A few initial thoughts.. I'm inclined to ask why you suppose Satre was "unhappy" other than he had to deal with a kind of smugness that I am feeling here. The problem has always been that the "faithful" presume to understand the mind of God and the ensuing tyranny is epic. Maybe a dash of Plotinus is in order.. I have not the background to make any great argument here .. just my amateur intuitions..
5:07 It seems that Engels, Wells, Chesterton, Noah Yuval Hariri have tried to reply to St. Augustine. It's disconcerting that only Chesterton says "yes" to the City of God.
I’m not convinced Augustine is the clear victor of “head and heart” over Bonaventure. Quite the opposite: the twin-poles of Catholic philosophy are Aquinas and Bonaventure. Bonaventure completed Augustine’s unrealized vision. He is a synthesizer of Augustinian thought and eclectic Aristotelianism in the highest. Aquinas and Bonaventure are co-primary. It would be wonderful for Thomists to show more appreciation for Bonaventure…
I feel your arguments for the evidence of God complements Satre’s arguments against a divine perfect being. I’d say that the belief in a perfect loving God requires a leap of blind faith without any evidence, a desire to believe in something higher than ourselves and that of a purpose that is eternal, borne out of our desire to live without dying. Satre’s arguments seems to have been strengthened by history and modern events. The argument that God’s allowing evil to exists is a statement not backed by any evidence or logical reasoning, neither is it rational. For what wisdom is there in a loving God allowing the atrocities and evil that have befallen humanity that can conceivably be justified? Satre is neither a pessimist but a rationalist and ironically a seeker of truth, more in tune with the scientific method. Augustine rather prefers not to confront the pressing questions of our existence and is thus enslaved. My points might make me seem an atheist, but in reality I believe in a divine being but not in the same way Western Christianity practise and teach about God. The God as preached by Western christianity is a God who condones conduct that even our own inner consciences balk at: slavery, misogyny, loveless and vengeful. I believe there is a lot we don’t understand about the Divine but we all have a slice of the divine in us, ingraining us with the ability to recognise evil and good, as a general rule.
Among philosophers, Augustine was not only the most famous convert but also the most totally converted one, while Sartre is probably the most complete and consistently unconverted. God's reality changes everything for Augustine and God's unreality changes everything for Sartre. Both are totally and uncompromisingly clearly and comprehensively committed to their completely opposite philosophies. Augustin's conversion was the archetypal example of the conversion of Western Civilization to Christ and Sartre’s conversion away from that faith is equally the archetype of our civilization's ongoing and increasing anti-conversion. It was Nietzsche rather than Sartre who actually called himself the Antichrist and wrote a whole book by that title, but Sartre has at least an equal right to that name and his concepts are much clearer and more consistent than Nietzsche's sparkling but chaotic fireworks. Augustine gives us both fire and light, both passion and reason, both heart and head, but it's clearer to compare his light to Sartre's light than his fire to Nietzsche's fire. However, Augustine is unrivaled in these two powers, heart and head, love and understanding, passion and wisdom, and medieval statues of him always show him holding an open book in one hand and a burning heart in the other, no mere man who ever lived exceeded him in both powers at the same time. If you doubt that tell me one book that can rival his Confessions in both. Comparing Augustine and Sartre, comparing two prophets and prophecies of the two new directions, the two radical turnings that our culture has taken - the first one 16 hundred years ago, when it was converted to Christianity -, and the second one being the opposite new direction, it is increasingly taking today. These two men exemplify these two options everywhere, both in their individual lives, in personalities, and also in their social and political philosophies. If Sartre had been asked to pick the two great books that he thought were most disastrously wrong, he might well have picked Augustine's Confessions and The City of God, the two books that were after the Bible the two most popular and influential books in Christendom for well over a thousand years after Augustine, throughout the Middle Ages and which defined the culture that used to be called Christendom and which is now called simply Western Civilization. For both, Augustine and Sartre, no idea makes more of a difference than the idea of God. Both to the mind and to the heart. Augustine and Sartre take up their opposite positions regarding God, both with their heads and with their hearts, with reason and the will. So, let's look at their reasons first. Augustine's signature argument for God's existence is the argument from the premise that we can know eternal truths - like two plus three equals five - with certainty. He uses this to prove the conclusion that there must be some eternal and infallible divine Mind in which we see these truths. For we see these truths not just in changing human minds and in changing material things. When the teacher teaches the student that two plus three equals five the student does not see this truth in the changing world or in the changing and fallible mind of the teacher or in his own changing fallible mind but in the mind of God! If there is eternal truth there is an eternal mind, and this is especially true of truth about values. Sartre replies with exactly the opposite argument. He argues from the premise that there is no eternal and infallible divine mind, and that there can be no eternal truth and no eternal values. Dostoyevsky, like Augustine, famously argued that if God does not exist everything is permissible and not everything is permissible therefore God must exist. Sartre replies explicitly to Dostoevsky's argument - which is essentially the same as Augustine's argument - that the premise is true. That if God does not exist everything is permissible. But Sartre then takes the opposite path from the principle that God does not exist and therefore everything is indeed permissible. Sartre also has a signature argument for God's non-existence and this is a very difficult and abstract metaphysical argument but it is so central to his philosophy that we cannot ignore it. I shall try to make it as clear as I can. I begin with the premise that there are only two kinds of reality, two kinds of being, which he calls “being for itself” and “being in itself.” “Being for itself” is his term for “persons,” subjects, and “I’s.” They think and choose, therefore they act and change in time. He also calls this existence meaning “personal existence”, or “human existence.” And since his philosophy centers on this, he calls it “existentialism.” It is the philosophy of subjectivity, of the priority of subjects over objects, of existence over essence. “Being in itself”, on the other hand, is his term for “objects,” objects of thought or choice - whether those objects are physical or mental. The essence of an idea or a physical thing does not change or act in time. Trees grow and dogs bark with them, but the essence of a tree and the essence of a dog does not change. So, “being in itself” is static and timeless, and complete and perfect, while “being for itself” is dynamic and changing, and incomplete. It's on the way to its identity, rather than secure in it. That's why dogs can't be un-doggy but humans can be inhuman. We experience identity crises, we can struggle with ourselves, and we can construct different personalities for ourselves as nothing else can. Sartre then argues that nothing can be both “being in itself” and “being for itself.” Both perfect and personal, both static and dynamic, both unchanging and changing, both object and subject. But the concept of God is the concept of a perfect eternal person: a mind and a will that acts but not in time. Thus, Sartre argues the concept of God is self-contradictory. For Sartre, the gods of pagan religions were projections of ourselves as personal subjects and Plato's eternal truths or forms or essences or projections of our own subjective ideas. And the God of the Bible is a projection of the double perfection that we most desire but cannot possibly be: the synthesis of both eternity and time, inaction and action, changelessness and change, essence and existence, objectivity and subjectivity, being in itself and being for itself. We can't ignore those two arguments, but I think we can find a deeper source of Sartre's atheism and of Augustine's theism than either of those rational arguments. It is the total difference God makes to both of them. For Augustine, if God does not exist there is ultimately nothing: no meaning, no purpose, no value, no good, no hope, nothing lovable in human life. In the words of a great title of Cardinal Sarah's book, it's “God or nothing.” For Sartre God does not exist, and he goes in his right: ultimately, there is nothing! Nothing greater than us, nothing to judge us as good or evil, true or false, and that's great for Sartre! That's what freedom means for Sartre: freedom from everything, even God. So, Sartre’s god is his own freedom! If there is a God above us, we are not totally free, and we are totally free! Therefore, there is no God above us. That's the foundation of Sartre’s atheism. Sartre sees freedom as essentially negative: freedom from being reduced to an object, an object of God. Augustine sees freedom as essentially positive. Freedom to attain our happiness, our perfection, our destiny, our true identity in God. The difference is so total that these two brilliant philosophers are perhaps the most totally and radically theistic and the most totally and radically atheistic thinkers who ever lived. Mankind has come up with millions of ideas throughout its long multicultural life and one of them is the idea of God, the idea of something like God, some superhuman absolute that is common to the religions of all the world. Now, if we weigh this single idea against all other ideas. If we put the idea of God on one side of our mental scales and if we put on the other side of the scale all the millions of ideas that all the millions of human beings throughout all of history have ever come up with, every other idea that any human mind has ever conceived, what will happen? God’s idea will be so heavy that it will lift all the other millions of ideas into thin air, like clouds! That's why religion has always been the single most passionately important dimension of human life to every culture that came before our own Brave New World. If this idea is true, it is the greatest of truths. If it is false, it is the greatest of falsehoods! Religion is either mankind's greatest wisdom or mankind's greatest illusion.
Dr. Kreeft, strictly speaking is bereft of moral knowledge. He knows Only what he's told. God says, or is thus and so..and Dr. Kreeft replies "Amen". So it is with any theist whose moral worldview is sourced outside themselves
If truth exists, then so do moral truths. Truth is independent of our mind because reality doesn't conform to our mind, rather our mind conforms to reality. If the mind understands truth and can experience it, it has the capacity to reason and gain experience. Every mind can reason and arrive at the same truth conclusion through experience. Therefore, Dr. Kreeft conforms to the truth revealed in the word of God through his reason and experience.
@@zadok6709 You said, "Therefore, Dr. kreeft conforms to the truth revealed in the word of God". Couldn't have said it better myself. He conforms to a "revealed" word. Dr. Kreeft does not have moral knowledge..he knows what he's been told. For example, if such a person were told to sacrifice their son..their only son they would say "Thy will be done". Such a person knows only what they're told to do.
@@thuscomeguerriero What you know has also been revealed to you, as you are not the omniscient perfect being. Be patient, charitable and understanding and God will guide you to him. God bless you.
I never understood the appeal of Sartre. When one of your stated influences publicly comments you didn't understand him at all...that makes me skeptical at best.
Why? Because it's impossible to love anyone you truly know. Why? Because to know anyone is to know their unlovable faults, and the unlovable is not lovable! Why can't these people be pitied and forgiven? Well, for Sartre, that would be even worse: that would make them objects and take away their freedom. He tries to show this in “No Exit,” which is about hell. The hell we make in this life for each other. In this play, each of the three people in Hell functions as the torturing demon to the other two. So, that no two can form any kind of love union, because they are objectified and known by the third. They are under the Gaze of the third, as Sartre feared being under the Gaze of God, under the Gaze of Truth, being pinned like an insect to the page in a book, captured by a light that did not emerge from himself. It's true. But Sartre's ultimate enemy -like Nietzsche-he questions the will to truth, any truth that he did not create himself. But must humbly discover and surrender to. For Sartre, surrender is the antithesis to freedom. But for any lover, and especially for Augustine, the great philosopher of Love, surrender is the secret of true freedom. And the secret of true happiness. Sartre was one of the unhappiest and loneliest philosophers who ever lived. His self-centered life on earth was a foretaste of the self-centered life that is the heart of hell. It was so self-centered that he habitually refused to listen to other people. In fact, he had the habit of just talking continually even when the others left the room. During World War II in Paris even after the German occupation, Sartre never lifted a finger or a pen to help the Jews. He just kept writing under the approving eyes of the Nazi censors. And then after the war, he spoke of the Brave French Resistance Fighters as “we.” He quarreled with nearly every man he ever met and tried to seduce nearly every woman he ever met. He refused the Nobel Prize because he hated his own civilization that gave it to him. Likewise, he joined the Communist party after the war and knowingly lied about the great freedom and happiness in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he praised Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in history and tried to export his Revolution to Europe, his philosophy inspired a group of Cambodian intellectuals in Paris and their leader Pol Pot, who murdered one-third of all the citizens of Cambodia for ideological reasons. If his Khmer-rouge discovered that you wore glasses, you were killed, because that meant you could read and were an intellectual and therefore a possible threat to Pol Pot. Ideas have consequences. I think Sartre is a very useful philosopher for the unbeliever or agnostic to read because he can be a more effective hellfire indignation preacher than Jonathan Edwards. Sartre's pessimism and nihilism and despair makes him a missionary despite himself, because this philosophy will send any sane agnostic running away in terror into the arms of the nearest priest. Unfortunately, our society is not quite sane and therefore Sartre was enormously popular in his lifetime, as especially among the young. 50 000 young women flocked to his funeral, one even throwing herself on his coffin. Please pray that our whole civilization does not follow them there because that is a coffin indeed, the philosophy of the culture of death, which is what Saint John Paul II, the greatest man of the worst Century in history, called it. To exorcise a demon, you must expose its true name. The holy water that the demon fears the most is not made of hydrogen and oxygen, it is made of truth. Augustine on the other hand is loved by every saint and every sane person who reads The Confessions. Our culture could still choose to take his road back to the source of all love and light and life, or it could choose Sartre's road into the darkness. And because the lower freedom of free choice is real and the higher freedom of liberty is always choosable, therefore every single individual has a momentous role to play in that choice. Every single person has a vote in that election. When you vote for Augustine, you vote for Christ as the king of your life, when you vote for Sartre you vote for the Antichrist.
The west sees Augustine & Augustine institute in terms of his earlier Gnostic belief, Said Jesus "You know not the Father, neither the Son but them unto whom the Son pleases to reveal' amounts to revelation of the Covenant as stated in 2 Macabess 2, & when such a revelation is given there is no scope for confusion, including the basic revelation of Genesis : "God made he him : male & female created he them,
God makes a difference a persons on a perspective angle .. Like a knowledge has a few knowledge category.. But philosophy never makes a persons fail example we has knowledge about tech , biology , chemistry knowledge n anything we are have it .. But with analysis weakness and excess ourselves for accept a persons has got development your passion n hobbies ourselves .. Okay thanks
Augustine in his the confessions admits he was a sophist, he taught rhetoric, which is as you say is not objective truth but simply rhetorical tricks to win arguments. He also admits to looking up to the philosophers because they were always right. Augustine’s sophism seems an odd thing to not mention? As you noted sophism is opposed to absolute truth.
There is a profound truth here in Sartre's distinction. Who we are is not the same as what we are! Persons are not merely objects, or things, or entities. We are “he's” and “she's”, not its. Mere things have no free will, no free choice. Only persons do. But the eternal God is a person, in fact three Persons. For Sartre, if God is a Person or Persons, then God must be in time and change! But there is no compelling reason for that assumption. It is arbitrary! It is Sartre's own invention and choice. There is no necessary reason for that choice! But there is clearly a motive. It's Sartre's metaphysics of “being in itself” versus “being for itself” is designed from the beginning to exclude God. Sartre erects his categories like gates in his City, precisely in order to keep God out! He does not prove that there cannot be a third category: a perfect changeless eternal Person and thus a God! Rather, he begins by demanding that there be no God, and then he wrecks the categories that exclude Him. He locks the gates of his mind from the beginning. It's a prejudice, a pre-judgment. Not a rational judgment. It is not open-minded and honest. It is not based on received data. Likewise, it is based on invented categories. Contrast this a priori metaphysical argument of Sartre for atheism with the most popular argument for atheism: the famous problem of evil. That is at least an honest and open-minded argument, based on real data and experience, namely evil - both physical and moral, both death and sin. And there is a real test of faith! If a perfectly good and perfectly powerful God existed, how could there be evil? If God had both the power over evil and the will against evil, He would not allow any evil at all! So, why does evil still exist? If God exists, He must be either weak or wicked, either unable or unwilling to destroy all evil! The answer to that very good objection - which comes from Augustine - is that God is also supremely wise, as we are not! And He deliberately allows evil for the sake of a greater good in the end that we cannot fully understand yet because we are not God! What a shock! Because we are not God and therefore do not see the end yet, the answer appeals to our faith and trust, rather than proof. But it shows that that faith and trust is reasonable! The point here is that Sartre's real reason for atheism is that it is not the conclusion of a rational argument not a humble discovery of the mind, like the atheism that comes from the problem of evil, but rather is a demand of his will! And so, Sartre admits that!! He says that his whole philosophy is a deduction from atheism as his first principle. So, why does he begin with that first principle? By his own admission, it is based on the will -not the reason-on his demand that God not exist, on his desire that God not exist! If Sartre went to heaven and found that God did indeed exist, he would not be satisfied! He would not be happy. He would be profoundly miserable. Furthermore, he would be in hell!! Sartre would find heaven a hell! And if he went to hell by his own free choice, by his own demand, then that hell would be his Heaven, his satisfaction! It's exactly the devil's choice in Milton's “Paradise Lost.” “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” [On the contrary, St. Joseph Bernardian's account would be: “Melius est feliciter subesse quam infeliciter praeesse.” O’ gallo in copp’a mundizza, on say in Naples, to match Milton's quote, my add] So, Sartre is in Hell either way. Whether any individual human being is in Hell or not, of course no one knows, except God. My point is not to claim to know Sartre's present eternal address, but to claim that for Sartre, atheism is his non-negotiable absolute. It is not based on objective data - like the problem of evil - but on a subjective desire. It is a leap of faith (“atto di fede”) or rather of desire. So, our trip passionately desires that no divine eye knows him. No Creator designed him. But why? His reason is similar to Nietzsche's. Nietzsche wrote: “I will now prove the non-existence of all gods. If God's existed, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods!” Nietzsche says that he could not live in a universe where there was a God because God would know him through and through including his dark side, his failures and miseries, and God would either condemn him or even worse pity him! And forgive him! And that would be hell to him.
I was long ago surprised to find that some of the more brilliant minds had a veritable stupid side to them. Sartre was such a man. To think that hell is other people poses such a blazing irony as to at once be tragic and laughable.
And Augustine and Sartre both agree with that either. To see this, to see the enormity of the practical difference God makes to human life, remember what we just said about what Sartre does with Dostoevsky's argument for the existence of God in his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. Let's put the abstract argument in the context of the plot of that great novel. Ivan Karamazov, perhaps the most winsome and convincing atheist in the history of human literature, is attracted to atheism for the same reason Dostoevsky is repelled by it. The reason is that if God does not exist then everything is permissible. For without a God, without an absolute standard of good and a judge who knows all things and will judge all things infallibly and inevitably, without this God we can say: “Why not do anything?” Even the murder of Ivan's despicable father that he is tempted to! And the only possible answer to that: “Why not?” is that other men - not God - will know it and judge us and punish us. But most crimes go unsolved and unpunished in this world. So if you are clever enough it is very likely that you will never get caught. So, Ivan has a kind of Pascal's wager for atheism: it's profitable, if there is no God. Sartre surprisingly agrees with Dostoevsky's principle, but instead of arguing that since not everything is permissible God must exist, and seeing Ivan is wrong, he sees Ivan as right when he argues that since God does not exist everything is permissible. And these totally different roads are the only two roads that lead from Dostoevsky's premise. It makes a total and absolute difference whether there is a God or not. And it is atheists - especially totally consistent atheists, like Sartre and Nietzsche - who show us this difference more clearly than most them used to do. We can be grateful to them for this service. And they do this both by their heads and by their hearts. Like Augustine, they work both from the heart and the head, both from the will and the reason. Whichever road one takes to arrive at the point of belief or unbelief, whether by the step-by-step road of recent argument or by a single simple leap of faith and free choice, that point - God or no God - is a sharp point of an all-encompassing cone that contains the whole universe and all of life. Sartre and Augustine show that this is equally true for the atheist and the theist. I said that the road of the heart is deeper and more powerful than the road of the head. We can see that if we look again at Sartre's philosophical argument for atheism and see how it's his heart, not his head, what he loves rather than what he thinks, that most inspire that argument. Sartre's argument - remember - is that the God idea is the most totally self-contradictory idea possible. It is the confusion and impossible synthesis of being in itself with being for itself. The synthesis of an eternally perfect platonic idea, an objective truth known or goodness chosen, with acting choosing knowing and therefore imperfect ongoing personal subject, a knower and chooser. The argument is logical. Its premise does entail its conclusion. But Sartre does not have to begin with this premise. And thus, he can avoid the conclusion of atheism, if he wants to. But wanting is an act of the heart, not of the head! What does Sartre want? Freedom. How much does he want it? What does he choose to give up to get it or have? The answer is almost everything! The cost of his atheism is the loss of truth and goodness and love and meaning and purpose and faith and hope and charity, and in fact, being itself!! Sartre is a nihilist. The title of his major work is: “Being and Nothingness.” There is no being for Sartre: there is only “being in itself” and “being for itself.” So, man in nature, subject and object, stand over each other as strangers and enemies, not as brothers and sisters from a common Father. So we are aliens and strangers in the world and the objective world is alien and indifferent to our personal subjective desires especially the desire for meaning and purpose and value. So this is a kind of cosmic alienation. Marxism is based on the concept of alienation too but that is trivial compared with Sartre’s because that is only the political alienation between economic classes. Well, Sartre's alienation is the metaphysical alienation between “being in itself” and “being for itself,” “existence and essence,” “subject and object,” and “man and nature,” including human nature. Human nature is not part of nature for Sartre. In fact, according to Sartre, there is no such thing as human nature, because there is no God to conceive it and invent it. We are not objects to God, because there is no God. We are only subjects, not objects. We have what Sartre calls “existence” but not “essence,” not any objective human nature. He calls his philosophy “existentialism” because its fundamental principle is that existence precedes essence. What does that mean? It means that we - not God - design our own essence, including our own nature, our own meaning, our own truth, and our own values. Values do not judge us: we judge values! Our free choices are not judged as good or evil by any higher objective truth or objective values. It's exactly the opposite! Our values are good only because we freely choose them. To back up and move from the will back to the reason now, how would Augustine respond philosophically to Sartre's metaphysical argument against God as the self-contradictory concept of the eternally perfect person acting in time? By his philosophy of time and eternity! Time does not bind God or define God or limit God or even characterize his existence until His Son becomes incarnate in Christ. God's being has no past, no future, and no change. He is an infinite being an infinite perfection in his timeless and eternal present. He does not grow or diminish. He does not change, for if He changed, He would grow either better or worse. And if he grew better than in the past he was not wholly perfect. And if he grew worse than in the future he would not be holy, perfect! Augustine argues that past time and future time exist only for a consciousness like ours that is in time. And that the present is the only totally real dimension of time because only in the present do we exist as active as acting to remember the past and anticipate the future. God is not like us: He does not have any part of His reality and life and being in the dead past or in the still unborn future. Thus, God exists as a Person. In Sartrian terms, He is “being for itself,” but timelessly. Although He is timeless, He is not an object or an essence or a platonic idea, but a Person existing and alive and active! His name is “I am.” The subject of His actions is eternal even when the objects of His actions in our lives are temporal. Time is a very tricky thing! Augustine famously said, when reflecting on the mystery of time: “When you don't ask me what time is, I know what it is, just as everyone else does. But when you ask me exactly what time it is I find out that I don't really know, and neither does anyone else.” Augustine would argue that Sartre has no good reason for limiting timelessness to impersonal objects and not persons. For Sartre all “being for itself,” all persons, all subjects, all entities that have a mind and will - whether human or superhuman -, must be in time and change. That's why Sartre calls there being “being for itself,” is on the way to itself. Being that has to achieve its identity and perfection in the future. The only things that are timeless for Sartre are objects. The truths of geometry do not change. Essences do not change their identity but humans have to choose their identity and create their identity through their choices. This is true!
It's exactly the devil's choice in Milton's “Paradise Lost.” “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” On the contrary, St. Joseph's Bernardian account would be: “Melius est feliciter subesse quam infeliciter praeesse.” And this was the choice of St.Joseph. He preferred to serve in the hipostatic order, than be master in the create one. Anyway, according to St. Rabano Mauro - the author of Veni creator-, St. Joseph is the counterpart or better antithesis of the devil (being Jesus, Mary and the three of the Cross the counterpatrs of the old Adam, Eve and the three of knowledge of the evil and the good.) In Naples there is a joke about it (the parallel is obviously mine), about the devil figure in the sentence from above: ‘O GALLO ‘NCOPP’Â MONNEZZA, that's, "the rooster on top of the garbage." I think any comment superfluous.
Did you meet him in person? I'd agree that you can infer from photos that he doesn't come across as a man at peace in his soul - which is certainly consistent with his writings - but to judge someone purely from a snapshot is hardly thorough.
The aging of Dr. Kreeft frightens me more than most things these days because we will be without an incredible voice for Truth, wisdom, and sanity when he is called home ... Perhaps one of the great things of our technological age is that we will still have these remarkable lectures to learn from when he parts our immediate company. God's blessings be continually to him! 🙏
These five philosophers were the enablers of the perpetuating of superstition. Superstition starts with the belief in god whose existence as creator of all of the existence is very much in doubt. Homo sapiens moved from mythological delusions to the illusion of god and they didn’t stop there. They continued with imagining an entire other world which ought to exist after death. These ideas are not only false but very dangerous for humans to live a full life. We are completely capable of living without god and in fact live better lives.
But superstitions are carried out through generations, each generation leaving the mark of such untruths by influencing little children. 99% or more of religious people have the religions they’re born into. What truth can a reasonable person draw from these facts.
Morality is not the monopoly of religions and in fact religions promote corruption in their believers. Look at so many cases of child abuse in churches going back to many centuries. How can a person seriously say religions are the origins of morality?!
It's up to us to keep it up when that day comes
Bless him
So hard to live with or without God
I AM so scared to live
I pray this video gets to the millions confused and stuck in the mud and muck that is relativism.
Praying is a waste of time.
@@pipster1891 why??? That is the biggest lie of the devil that I know lmao
Amen to this.
These lectures are so rich. What immense wisdom from Dr. Kreeft.
The world doesn't make sense with out God. Wonderfu and educative presentation, indeed!
Rationally, it makes perfect sense.
Thank you so much, Dr. Kreeft, for the rich lectures. I think you may have saved my Catholic faith.
The education I never got. Loved this! ❤
Thank you Dr. Kreeft. God Bless you.
These videos are an immense treasure. Thank you, Dr. Kreft!
Bravo! This is a proof of God's love
You have a strange definition of 'proof'.
@@pipster1891 Not strange. It depends on your epistemology.
Peter Kreeft will be more ALIVE in Heaven and the HS will keep his wisdom going here.
This is one of the best things I've ever listened to, out of untold hours of podcasts and videos. Incredibly well-prepared material and clear delivery. I suppose the content boils down to the opposing ideas of freedom, which Bishop Barron has specifically drawn attention to, namely arbitrary freedom of choice between options and "the disciplining of desire such that attainment of the good becomes first possible and then effortless." If there are real values that exist outside of yourself, then you have to accept the second idea of freedom.
I'm still sorting through a lot of difficulties about what religious belief involves, but I think anyone should be able to see that there are objective values in the world which exist outside of themselves. You can't be a great artist or athlete or be loved by people just by deciding you want it to be so. You have to conform yourself to something outside yourself. It's the worldview of a relatively immature and spoiled high school student (or younger) to expect your life to instantly become what you will it to be. Even more juvenile to think that all values are subjective - to believe that goodness isn't good and beauty isn't beautiful unless you say so. Only someone with no experience of the world, who has never encountered anything greater than himself, could be so deluded.
Instead of that worldview, you might imagine that objective values are not only greater than your own individual person, but that they are transcendent relative to all the rest of reality. You might have faith that beauty and goodness and truth point to a metaphysical state of being. You might reason that mercy is more real than evil because it envelops and contains it, and that beauty is more real than ugliness which is only its absence, and that all this might say something about the ultimate point of life. This all seems like it would be pretty straightforward and obvious, if people like Sartre hadn't wormed their way into the culture in relatively recent history. And if we weren't all mini-existentialists in our immature and confused natures, particularly when we're young.
Thank you Dr Kreeft. These lectures have been wonderful.
Thank you Dr. Kreeft on these immensely profound digital connection to the great philosophers & their work on reason & thought!
Every person on Earth should watch this video with an open mind.
Yeah, I learned especially at the end, what Sartre's true philosophy is. An evil regime for self-satisfaction.
In the end Even Sartre could not live like Sartre. In an interview in 1980 before he died he gave an interview to his former secretary Benny Lévy. Sartre had said In the interview and I quote "“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to god.” From Hope Now The 1980 Interviews
I am relieved for his sake to learn this.
It's a good quote, but while it provides a grain of hope that the man's not lost it doesn't actually indicate he didn't like himself. This isn't to say that he didn't experience such an inner conflict of course - all things considered it's far more likely than not the case that he did.
@@ironymatt I don't like MY self. I think that this is not uncommon. I don't know that it has anything to do with conversion. I love God and His creatures in Heaven.
@@SuperIliad loving God and his creatures is ideal. Focusing too much on ourselves can only lead to a disordered dislike of the self or an equally destructive vainglorious pride. Trust in Christ that he'll keep us in balance
@@SuperIliad Why?
Wow! This video is full of wisdom! God bless Professor Kreeft
THE LAITY CRAVE THIS CONTENT. PLEASE CONTINUE TO FEED US SO THAT WE MAY BE A LIGHT TO THE WORLD.
Yes, I agree.
I discovered kreeft years ago. He answered tons of questions I had that no one else was answering
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Philosophy is an ocean , we get lost on , and I never have been able to run a line through “ Existentialist choice “ and Christian truth .
Contrasting Augustine and Sartre / Nietzsche would never have occurred to me , and is definitely beyond me , so I am really grateful for your deeply thoughtful and wise distillation of this topic , and the eternal harm of nihilism. I used to believe our character is our destiny , and our destiny arises from the choices we make in life - but now I understand ‘ the gravity of love ‘ determines our identity _ as Aquinas put it “ The things we love , tell us who we are .” - the heart leads , the mind follows ( justifies ) , the will is conformed .
I feel certain most people are unaware of these differing understandings of freedom . Sincere gratitude !
These lectures are fabulous. I've been reaping rewards from each one of them.
I am a pastor gone through all most all philosophy. His understanding in philosophy incredible same time he evaluate all in light of theology, there is gold and Dimond in it those who hear
You were very polite in not exposing more facts about Sartre's private life.
What a treasure these lectures are. A wealth of wisdom!
What a fantastic series.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:21 📜 Augustine's "City of God" is a significant work, responding to Rome's decay and fall, influencing Western civilization.
01:19 📚 Augustine's writings, like "Confessions" and "On the Trinity," shaped Christian civilization and philosophy.
02:30 🏛️ Augustine was a deeply converted Christian philosopher, while Sartre stood as a committed atheist.
03:54 🧠 Augustine's light can be compared to Sartre's, while Augustine's passion and wisdom surpassed Nietzsche's fire.
04:52 ⚖️ Augustine's "Confessions" and "City of God" were influential books throughout the Middle Ages.
05:18 ✝️ Both Augustine and Sartre recognize the profound impact of the concept of God on human life and culture.
06:46 🕊️ Sartre's atheism hinges on the absence of Eternal truth and values, embracing absolute freedom from God's constraints.
07:42 🔄 Sartre argues for the incompatibility of a perfect, unchanging God with personal subjects and free will.
09:19 🕰️ Augustine's God exists timelessly, coexisting with the present, avoiding limitations of past and future.
10:46 🌍 Augustine asserts that without God, there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in human life.
11:58 💔 Sartre finds freedom in God's absence, viewing existence as purely subjective and void of ultimate judgments.
14:11 🛤️ Sartre and Augustine's opposing conclusions emerge from the same principle: "If God does not exist, everything is permissible."
16:45 🗝️ Sartre's atheism is shaped by his desire for radical freedom, affecting his philosophical arguments.
19:20 🔒 Sartre's metaphysical arguments against God stem from preconceived notions, driven by his will and desires.
20:57 🌌 Augustine's philosophy accommodates the timeless existence of a personal God, distinct from Sartre's limited categories.
24:24 ⚖️ Sartre's atheism is based on his desire, contrasting with the more honest atheistic argument from the problem of evil.
25:47 🕊️ Sartre's atheism reflects his personal choice, either leading to misery or satisfaction, mirroring the devil's choice.
26:26 😔 Nietzsche and Sartre reject God's existence due to fear of being known and judged by God.
27:36 🙅♂️ Sartre demands absolute freedom, which he sees as incompatible with the existence of God.
28:17 🕊️ Augustine's conversion includes heart, mind, and will, leading him to seek truth, wisdom, and divine love.
30:08 🌟 Augustine's core values are truth, goodness, and beauty, driven by his love for God.
31:31 💔 Augustine longs to be known and loved by God, while Sartre fears dependence on God and seeks total freedom.
34:51 🛑 Sartre's atheism leads to nihilism, denying objective meaning, value, and virtue; values are arbitrary and invented.
36:57 🗽 Augustine's freedom is positive, seeking union with God; Sartre's freedom is negative, avoiding all limits.
39:05 🏙️ Augustine worships God, valuing truth and love; Sartre worships self, rejecting truth and love, leading to isolation and hell.
43:41 ⚖️ Sartre's pessimism and nihilism can push individuals toward deeper questioning and potential religious exploration.
44:06 🌅 Choosing between Augustine's path of love and light or Sartre's path of darkness and isolation has significant societal consequences.
Made with HARPA AI
Dr. Kreeft contradicts the notion "history" of Sartre that he served in the French Underground in WWII, but rather that he was complicit by just ignoring what was going on & continuing his writing. Why then, was he imprisioned? Could he have been just a "decoy" for others doing more "damaging duties" against the Nazis? His philosophy has caused me to wonder in the past, why he would care what was happening to the Jewish people or others. He could escape, avoid it all, & his freedom not be bothered. If Dr. Kreeft is correct, Sartre did follow that path of lest resistance! Excellent lecture. THANK YOU!
Thank you Sir, for your great efforts of deep wisdom and philosophy. While I was listening your lecture, remembering philosophy class in Major Seminary.
Thank you so such a powerful presentation!
This is great. Reminds me of a quote from Tocqueville: "If man has no faith, he must obey, and if he is free, he must believe."
Even a great man like Tocqueville has his weak moments.
Depends what you have faith in and believe in.
Sartre misses Kierkegaard - the concept of anxiety is the possibility of freedom in the sense that one can have that anxiety and still be a Christian .
Yeah, his construct of anxiety is very profound, but he misses so many issues that it raises. As Peter said, his views of God and life are full of prejudice.
This man is a saint!!!!
No he ain't. Define sainthood? You are commiting a blasphemy here.
Ay esta Moritano, do you know that we are all call to be saints? To be kind, caring, generous, to love others as God love us, to be truthful and faithful. We can all be saints, it is not easy but could do it! I am trying, not because I want to be call a saint but to be able to seeHIM and be in HIS presence!
Thank you for this wonderful conference that enlightens about the true meaning of what is being said in our culture. I love St Augustine of Hipona. Thank you ❤
Thank you. I'll watch this a few times.
You have strengthened my faith.
Is that a DRI pfp?
@@Nick-qf7vt yes. I am a child of the 80's. Jesus saves Punks... it's true. ✌️
@@tallmikbcroft6937 Amen to that!
A gem to be sure. Subscribed. I am grateful for having the privilege to study your body of work in it's entirety, as am I eager to see what is yet to come. Take care and God bless. ✝️
Absolutely brilliant!
Many thanks!!!
Was looking for this topic. Thank you.
Kierkegaard states that the freedom in God after the leap of faith is real freedom .
Brilliant, thanks for posting. Sartre's desire to exist apart from God is the result of a tiny mad idea called the Ego. The Ego is the antithesis to the thesis of God. It's the insane belief that to be a separated self is freedom. It is an illusion. To live in an illusion is to live in bondage, not freedom..
Just looking at how Sartre treated Simone de Bouvier reveals all about the man.
And how she put up with it.
No not really it only tells you how he treated one person. Could we assume you didnt bother ro view augustines relation with women. Not rhe greatest either.
@@Suzume-Shimmer didn't Augustine do better after his conversion?
@@Urbanity_Kludge
Considering his influential views on women mainly being vessels for procreation , id say it got worse when he became a Christian. Much worse.
@@Suzume-Shimmer views interpreted by others isn't equivalent to how you treat another person, but I know nothing about Sartre and how he treated Simone.
As a parting thought, I imagine he didn't think of his mother as simply a vessel for procreation. I think much of his theology was misused over time
Thank you! An excellent lecture presents an honest breakdown of the two opposite works. Carl Jung argued that Nietzsche was not an atheist; his God was his Ubermunsche ( his fantasy figure he worshiped)
Sartre couldn't admit one truth. The truth is that the only thing he knew was that he didn't know. Intellectual arrogance always takes them down. But on the way down their constructed sinkholes, they take many down with them.
He who works hardest works hard.
There stands a stone and a worm.
Defeating him before he begins.
Who has whine?
Who's heart does not sup?
Don't mistake humanism for rumination.
This is so helpful!
Satre's view of God as a competitor seems to be where the trouble started for him. What a sad and lonely existence.
Imho Sartre didn’t view God as a competitor, but he rejected te possibility of a God influencing human morality.
@@ClaudioBenassiSartre viewing God as a competitor in the sense of God being an obstruction to Sartre actualizing his own will makes a great deal of sense. Rejecting the possibility of a God influencing human morality is exactly what one who views God as competitor would want, since it would seemingly grant one license to determine for oneself what should or shouldn't be considered moral. It's the classic misunderstanding of freedom to equate it with licentiousness.
Thanks be to God that he was wrong.
@@ironymatt it might be. I still think he was an obsessive atheist, he would just live without it or thinking about it. He just couldn’t. Imho he lived in dirty places….
This is difficult for me to write this and i hope Dr. Kreeft, whom i admire so much, won't be offended. At any rate if you want to listen the Younger versión of Dr. Kreeft we've heard for so many years put the speed at 1:25 and it's awesome. Thank you Dr. Kreeft for these precious lessons. We r listening n learning:)
Thank you! I tried it and it’s absolutely true.
I have to agree that there is no absolute freedom. We are always subject to a certain rule otherwise there's chaos
The professor is profound I can see that he tried his hardest to be unbiased but I will say because of his beliefs
timeless content.
It is timed at 44 minutes 49 seconds.
All things are possible through God. God can let people fly. But I cannot will myself to fly.
This is good really glad to see it as pure as philosophy and theology can be. There’s been a plethora of so called cross disciplinary thinkers who think their experts about everything because they had conversations on their podcasts. many
(A full transcription; I apologize for inaccurate hearing)
Lesson four is on Saint Augustine versus Jean-Paul Sartre on the difference God makes to everything. Augustine's The City of God is the world's first and greatest philosophy of history and society. Like the Bible, it begins at the beginning, the creation, and goes on to the very end, the last judgment. It was Augustine's response to the greatest crisis in the history of Western Civilization the decay and fall of Rome, and of civilization itself. When Augustine died - in 430 A.D. - he could see and smell the fires of the barbarians burning his North African home city. His other masterpiece, The Confessions, narrates an even greater drama. The greatest drama in human life is the drama of a soul poised between two opposite eternities. Both books show the interaction between Divine Providence and human free choice. Both of which Augustine strongly defended. A third masterpiece, On the Trinity, is even more ambitious. It explores the supreme mystery of the nature of ultimate reality: the inner life of God. All three books defined the fundamental direction of Christian civilization for millennia to come. Every person in our culture would be very different or would not be at all if Augustine had not lived. I strongly believe that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas are the five greatest and wisest philosophers of all time. So, it's natural that we begin with these five. And all had a philosophical enemy or opponent or opposite during his lifetime or later. The Sophists versus Socrates, concerning objective truth and objective values. Machiavelli versus Plato on justice. Kant versus Aristotle on both knowledge and goodness, both epistemology and ethics. And Sartre versus Augustine on the difference God makes in everything. And as we shall see in the next lecture Averroes and Sigier of Brabant versus Aquinas on the relation between faith and reason.
Sorry, but Satre's conclusion (as presented here) is not logical. He's missing a key point; an eternal, unchanging being can exist in time and make choices in the timeline if those actions do not cause him to change who he is. Thus even if we overlook the weird assumptions Satre makes like the idea that a dog is unchanging (nonsense to any dog owner) he's still wrong right from the get-go.
Thank you very much for the video, I think you've done a sterling job overall.
I see no self love in the Atheist in my life, i see self hate denied through superficial distractions and then projected outward onto the world.
Loving these
Thank you so much! Very very useful
44:47 I am reminded of a Catholic priest, a friend of Monsignor Lefebvre, who on an occasion said "I have seen Sartre, his philosophy refutes itself, he had rings below the eyes, he had dirty fingernails" ...
The problem is not his rejection of Sartre. The problem is, his criterium was how certain Pharisees rejected Christ.
By contrast, unlike Père André, Peter Kreeft has really done a refutation of Sartre. Or denunciation.
Great lecture love you
We need an analysis/critiquof Foucault's philosophy from a great mind!
Truth is goodness
“Thou Hast made us for thyself and therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” That rest is what Augustine calls - in The City of God - peace. Peace is positive not negative. It is not merely the absence of war. It is the attainment of our objectively true end and meaning and perfection which can be done only by surrendering to Divine Grace. Augustine is often called the “doctor of Grace.” He knows the priority of Grace not by theological reasoning but by his own experience. Augustine's and Sartre's philosophies are opposites because their hearts are opposites. Augustine's heart beats passionately for the very thing Sartre hates, and fears above all: to be known and loved by God. And Sartre's deepest heart beats passionately for the thing Augustine hates and fears above all: to be free from God!!
To be free from grace, free from all dependence on his love, and on objective truth, and meaning, and values, and ends, and purposes and directions. Augustine longs for his true home and his divine family. Sartre apprises his homelessness and his autonomy. Sartre is the philosopher of the “I”, while Augustine is the philosopher of the “we,” of The City of God, of the Community of love, in the three places that his three greatest books are about. In his life, in the Church and in the Trinity. Sartre explicitly says that the word “we” does not designate anything real any real possibility. That little word “we” - that is a merely ordinary word for ordinary people but is magical and heavenly for lovers-, that is a hell or an illusion for Sartre!
Shocking point of his famous play “No Exit,” is that hell is other people!
That is the difference between Heaven and Hell. Hell is not “other people” - as Sartre says.
It's precisely the refusal of other people.
I think Hell, probably, does not contain physical fire because that would at least bring the damned out of themselves and focus their attention on something else than their own total emptiness and loneliness and hopelessness. If Christ speaks the truth when he says that: “All find what they truly seek,” then Augustine must be in “we” forever and Sartre must be in “I” forever! Sartre would hate heaven. It's full of “we”, of love, of togetherness (a family) and of children. It interferes with his freedom and his autonomy. God would interfere with it most of all, so God will be Sartre's most terrible enemy.
Why is Sartre so threatened by the God that Augustine longs for? Sartre is not threatened by all gods equally. God as an ideal, God as a human construct is not so threatening to him, although of course for Sartre it can be only a myth, but that myth is not what he fears. He fears the living God, the Home of Heaven. Not the god whom we make as our construct, but the God who made us as His construct, by creating us as his objects, as his creatures, as relative to Him. For Sartre, if God exists, we are His inventions, which means not as children but his machines, his objects. We couldn't be free if we were created by God.
Dr. Kreeft is amazing, brilliant. I found his Aristotle vs Kant talk especially excellent.
While I'm no expert, I think maybe Augustine vs Schopenhauer would've been more challenging than Augustine vs Sartre and a fairer contrast. Nobody likes Schopenhauer because he is so pessimistic, but popularity doesn't necessarily equate with truth. And Schopenhauer, I think, had far more humility than Sartre or Nietzsche and had a more compassionate nihilism (and I don't think that's a contradiction) and perhaps even a more pragmatic, justifiable type of nihilism when we see what the will of humans has done to our planet, other people, and other species. I don't think he would be so easy to call "demonic", though maybe rightfully "depressed" unless you are a lover of art.
Certainly as much evil has spawned from religion as it has from atheism. Evil exists in humankind. A lot of hateful people think they're good Christians and they don't know the first thing about Christ. (Or should I say St. Paul?) Also, Dr. Kreeft says Sartre is an a priori atheist and I don't doubt the Doctor on that. But don't most Christians believe a priori.? Any belief in the supernatural is ultimately a priori, isn't it? Isn't that kind of what Kierkegaard meant by "a leap of faith"?
I understand why St. Thomas Aquinas is so popular, I WISH I could be a Thomist. As a child, I believed in God and loved Him and felt he loved me personally. And I was certainly happier and felt more at home in the world. But, I'm sorry, so many of Thomas' core arguments for God can't be proven and seem based in nominalism, and I don't think Dr. Kreeft agrees with much of nominalism. And I know that he's right that much of nominalism goes way too far, absurdly so. But that doesn't mean that words don't very often wag the dog of meaning.
Everyone lumps agnostics like me and atheists together. But I lump the very religious and atheists together in that both are absolutist about that which they cannot possibly truly know with utter certainty. Agnosticism seems a more humble, honest belief (or lack of it.) I'm not a coward. To be a nonbeliever, especially if you grew up believing in God and even felt a relationship with Him, is not at all easy. I don't feel more free or whatever. It sucks to lose my early faith. But I have to be honest with myself.
Certainly Dr. Kreeft is right that people are becoming too selfish and individualistic and that love of Christ can be a counter to that. But many devout Christians often use their Christianity as a cover for bad behavior, a "Get Into Heaven Free Card", despite using their religion to justify slavery in the 1800s or elevate Trump today, etc etc. They are not immune to selfishness and evil, just more hypocritical about it. I know this is a bit of an ad hominem attack on many Christians, but shouldn't they get their own house in order before going after the secular world as much as they do? Maybe the religious themselves are greatly to blame for increasing secularism.
I wish more Christians were true, like Dr. Kreeft seems to be. This man is the opposite of a preening, money-grubbing televangelist. I find his lectures fascinating and incredibly enlightening. But clearly his arguments can cut several ways. Unfortunately, I'll have to stick with Schopenhauer, take a hard look at my own human will and how I use it, and embrace the original type of Buddhism as the most honest of religions, if you can even call a Godless philosophy a religion. (It certainly doesn't lack serenity and compassion. I'll take a pass on making any claims about reincarnation, I'm agnostic about that as well.) And before any of y'all attack me out of spite, ask yourself what would Jesus say? Peace.
I'd love to hear Dr Kreeft talk about Schopenhauer. He's certainly a more respectible philosopher than Sartre and I personally don't think he is any more pessimistic than Camus, Sartre, Nietzche, or any other atheistic philosopher. If anything I think he's less depressing.
Jesus hopefully would tell you not to be an agnostic.
Please don't take this to be spiteful, but agnosticism ultimately doesn't lead you anywhere. Under such an ideology there's no real way to substantiate anything - certainly not the statement that just as much evil has spawned from religion as it has from atheism.
Aquinas is not a nominalist and belief in God is not a priori, since it is not done by “pure reasoning” (whatever the hell that means).
Schopenhauers nihilism is problematic, as is all nihilism. But also not pragmatic, I would say. Schopenhauer has two modes of seeing the world: the desire to nut, and post-nut depression. Anyway, Thomas Nagel has pretty good criticisms of nihilism on logical grounds. For example, if nothing we do matters in x amount of time, then reciprocally, x amount of time shouldn’t matter to us. But nihilism is about caring and moaning and complaining about what doesn’t matter.
As a communist, Sartre was all for Hitler until the latter invaded the Soviet Union, and once it was obvious the war was to be won by the Allies he suddenly became a "resistance fighter." However, no one ever saw him lift anything heavier than a cigarette in defense of La Belle France.
For me, the greatest Philosopher of our time, who like Socrates, engaged in philosophical battles to expose the Fallacies, Errors and Illogic of other philosophers, is no other than Peter Kreeft!
He praises Chesterton and CS Lewis, but these two were not philosophers like he. I believe Kreeft will go down in history as equals or greater than these two in philosophical circles.
*claps, repeatedly and enthusiastically*
Well illustrated. If Sartre is wrong, what are the implications?
God is perfectly Loving and Just ... I hope nobody notices the contradiction. But, just in case, we need a perfect victim of divine Justice to demonstrate divine Love.
41:30 OMFG! I knew he looked insane but had no idea he was that insane!!!!
The irony of Sartre is that his ideas are logically self defeating.
ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE: "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love. He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will." (Ep 1:4-5)
Brilliant.
great lecture , but why this unnerving backgound sound???
Reference to the first book of the bible Genesis Chapter 1&2 we're find out the existence of God and creation including the failure of humans and the existence of all evilness. And after those times God blessed his creation and used it as co-workers of his own. Thank you very much for the lecture and may God bless you.
What must Sartre have thought of Augustine's experience of the baby on the beach? He certainly must've been aware of the tale, and yet he failed to heed the lesson in his pursuit into parsing the mind and persons of God - a pursuit taken so far that it led to the inevitable rejection of that which man cannot ever fully grasp. It is, after all, the only fully consistent and logical conclusion one could arrive at when faced with such an end, faith be damned.
What might have been had he taken the only other tenable choice, to simply recognize the one true God in the person of Christ and acquiesce to His infinite love, as a mere child would, and as Augustine did with the selfsame childlike purity?
Hmmm... A few initial thoughts.. I'm inclined to ask why you suppose Satre was "unhappy" other than he had to deal with a kind of smugness that I am feeling here. The problem has always been that the "faithful" presume to understand the mind of God and the ensuing tyranny is epic. Maybe a dash of Plotinus is in order.. I have not the background to make any great argument here .. just my amateur intuitions..
Awesome
5:07 It seems that Engels, Wells, Chesterton, Noah Yuval Hariri have tried to reply to St. Augustine.
It's disconcerting that only Chesterton says "yes" to the City of God.
Maybe we can find some kind of synthesis between Sartre and Augistine...
I’m not convinced Augustine is the clear victor of “head and heart” over Bonaventure. Quite the opposite: the twin-poles of Catholic philosophy are Aquinas and Bonaventure. Bonaventure completed Augustine’s unrealized vision. He is a synthesizer of Augustinian thought and eclectic Aristotelianism in the highest. Aquinas and Bonaventure are co-primary.
It would be wonderful for Thomists to show more appreciation for Bonaventure…
Quite interesting.
I feel your arguments for the evidence of God complements Satre’s arguments against a divine perfect being. I’d say that the belief in a perfect loving God requires a leap of blind faith without any evidence, a desire to believe in something higher than ourselves and that of a purpose that is eternal, borne out of our desire to live without dying. Satre’s arguments seems to have been strengthened by history and modern events. The argument that God’s allowing evil to exists is a statement not backed by any evidence or logical reasoning, neither is it rational. For what wisdom is there in a loving God allowing the atrocities and evil that have befallen humanity that can conceivably be justified? Satre is neither a pessimist but a rationalist and ironically a seeker of truth, more in tune with the scientific method. Augustine rather prefers not to confront the pressing questions of our existence and is thus enslaved. My points might make me seem an atheist, but in reality I believe in a divine being but not in the same way Western Christianity practise and teach about God. The God as preached by Western christianity is a God who condones conduct that even our own inner consciences balk at: slavery, misogyny, loveless and vengeful. I believe there is a lot we don’t understand about the Divine but we all have a slice of the divine in us, ingraining us with the ability to recognise evil and good, as a general rule.
Among philosophers, Augustine was not only the most famous convert but also the most totally converted one, while Sartre is probably the most complete and consistently unconverted. God's reality changes everything for Augustine and God's unreality changes everything for Sartre. Both are totally and uncompromisingly clearly and comprehensively committed to their completely opposite philosophies. Augustin's conversion was the archetypal example of the conversion of Western Civilization to Christ and Sartre’s conversion away from that faith is equally the archetype of our civilization's ongoing and increasing anti-conversion. It was Nietzsche rather than Sartre who actually called himself the Antichrist and wrote a whole book by that title, but Sartre has at least an equal right to that name and his concepts are much clearer and more consistent than Nietzsche's sparkling but chaotic fireworks. Augustine gives us both fire and light, both passion and reason, both heart and head, but it's clearer to compare his light to Sartre's light than his fire to Nietzsche's fire. However, Augustine is unrivaled in these two powers, heart and head, love and understanding, passion and wisdom, and medieval statues of him always show him holding an open book in one hand and a burning heart in the other, no mere man who ever lived exceeded him in both powers at the same time. If you doubt that tell me one book that can rival his Confessions in both. Comparing Augustine and Sartre, comparing two prophets and prophecies of the two new directions, the two radical turnings that our culture has taken - the first one 16 hundred years ago, when it was converted to Christianity -, and the second one being the opposite new direction, it is increasingly taking today. These two men exemplify these two options everywhere, both in their individual lives, in personalities, and also in their social and political philosophies. If Sartre had been asked to pick the two great books that he thought were most disastrously wrong, he might well have picked Augustine's Confessions and The City of God, the two books that were after the Bible the two most popular and influential books in Christendom for well over a thousand years after Augustine, throughout the Middle Ages and which defined the culture that used to be called Christendom and which is now called simply Western Civilization. For both, Augustine and Sartre, no idea makes more of a difference than the idea of God. Both to the mind and to the heart. Augustine and Sartre take up their opposite positions regarding God, both with their heads and with their hearts, with reason and the will. So, let's look at their reasons first. Augustine's signature argument for God's existence is the argument from the premise that we can know eternal truths - like two plus three equals five - with certainty. He uses this to prove the conclusion that there must be some eternal and infallible divine Mind in which we see these truths. For we see these truths not just in changing human minds and in changing material things. When the teacher teaches the student that two plus three equals five the student does not see this truth in the changing world or in the changing and fallible mind of the teacher or in his own changing fallible mind but in the mind of God! If there is eternal truth there is an eternal mind, and this is especially true of truth about values. Sartre replies with exactly the opposite argument. He argues from the premise that there is no eternal and infallible divine mind, and that there can be no eternal truth and no eternal values. Dostoyevsky, like Augustine, famously argued that if God does not exist everything is permissible and not everything is permissible therefore God must exist. Sartre replies explicitly to Dostoevsky's argument - which is essentially the same as Augustine's argument - that the premise is true. That if God does not exist everything is permissible. But Sartre then takes the opposite path from the principle that God does not exist and therefore everything is indeed permissible. Sartre also has a signature argument for God's non-existence and this is a very difficult and abstract metaphysical argument but it is so central to his philosophy that we cannot ignore it.
I shall try to make it as clear as I can. I begin with the premise that there are only two kinds of reality, two kinds of being, which he calls “being for itself” and “being in itself.” “Being for itself” is his term for “persons,” subjects, and “I’s.” They think and choose, therefore they act and change in time. He also calls this existence meaning “personal existence”, or “human existence.” And since his philosophy centers on this, he calls it “existentialism.” It is the philosophy of subjectivity, of the priority of subjects over objects, of existence over essence. “Being in itself”, on the other hand, is his term for “objects,” objects of thought or choice - whether those objects are physical or mental. The essence of an idea or a physical thing does not change or act in time. Trees grow and dogs bark with them, but the essence of a tree and the essence of a dog does not change. So, “being in itself” is static and timeless, and complete and perfect, while “being for itself” is dynamic and changing, and incomplete. It's on the way to its identity, rather than secure in it. That's why dogs can't be un-doggy but humans can be inhuman. We experience identity crises, we can struggle with ourselves, and we can construct different personalities for ourselves as nothing else can. Sartre then argues that nothing can be both “being in itself” and “being for itself.” Both perfect and personal, both static and dynamic, both unchanging and changing, both object and subject. But the concept of God is the concept of a perfect eternal person: a mind and a will that acts but not in time. Thus, Sartre argues the concept of God is self-contradictory. For Sartre, the gods of pagan religions were projections of ourselves as personal subjects and Plato's eternal truths or forms or essences or projections of our own subjective ideas. And the God of the Bible is a projection of the double perfection that we most desire but cannot possibly be: the synthesis of both eternity and time, inaction and action, changelessness and change, essence and existence, objectivity and subjectivity, being in itself and being for itself. We can't ignore those two arguments, but I think we can find a deeper source of Sartre's atheism and of Augustine's theism than either of those rational arguments. It is the total difference God makes to both of them. For Augustine, if God does not exist there is ultimately nothing: no meaning, no purpose, no value, no good, no hope, nothing lovable in human life. In the words of a great title of Cardinal Sarah's book, it's “God or nothing.” For Sartre God does not exist, and he goes in his right: ultimately, there is nothing! Nothing greater than us, nothing to judge us as good or evil, true or false, and that's great for Sartre! That's what freedom means for Sartre: freedom from everything, even God. So, Sartre’s god is his own freedom! If there is a God above us, we are not totally free, and we are totally free! Therefore, there is no God above us.
That's the foundation of Sartre’s atheism. Sartre sees freedom as essentially negative: freedom from being reduced to an object, an object of God. Augustine sees freedom as essentially positive. Freedom to attain our happiness, our perfection, our destiny, our true identity in God. The difference is so total that these two brilliant philosophers are perhaps the most totally and radically theistic and the most totally and radically atheistic thinkers who ever lived. Mankind has come up with millions of ideas throughout its long multicultural life and one of them is the idea of God, the idea of something like God, some superhuman absolute that is common to the religions of all the world. Now, if we weigh this single idea against all other ideas. If we put the idea of God on one side of our mental scales and if we put on the other side of the scale all the millions of ideas that all the millions of human beings throughout all of history have ever come up with, every other idea that any human mind has ever conceived, what will happen? God’s idea will be so heavy that it will lift all the other millions of ideas into thin air, like clouds! That's why religion has always been the single most passionately important dimension of human life to every culture that came before our own Brave New World. If this idea is true, it is the greatest of truths. If it is false, it is the greatest of falsehoods! Religion is either mankind's greatest wisdom or mankind's greatest illusion.
Dr. Kreeft, strictly speaking is bereft of moral knowledge. He knows Only what he's told.
God says, or is thus and so..and Dr. Kreeft replies "Amen".
So it is with any theist whose moral worldview is sourced outside themselves
If truth exists, then so do moral truths. Truth is independent of our mind because reality doesn't conform to our mind, rather our mind conforms to reality. If the mind understands truth and can experience it, it has the capacity to reason and gain experience. Every mind can reason and arrive at the same truth conclusion through experience. Therefore, Dr. Kreeft conforms to the truth revealed in the word of God through his reason and experience.
@@zadok6709 You said, "Therefore, Dr. kreeft conforms to the truth revealed in the word of God".
Couldn't have said it better myself.
He conforms to a "revealed" word.
Dr. Kreeft does not have moral knowledge..he knows what he's been told. For example, if such a person were told to sacrifice their son..their only son they would say "Thy will be done".
Such a person knows only what they're told to do.
@@thuscomeguerriero What you know has also been revealed to you, as you are not the omniscient perfect being. Be patient, charitable and understanding and God will guide you to him. God bless you.
Word.
Sartre, Nietszche and C. Hitchens KNOW I Am exists NOW!!😮
I never understood the appeal of Sartre. When one of your stated influences publicly comments you didn't understand him at all...that makes me skeptical at best.
Why? Because it's impossible to love anyone you truly know. Why? Because to know anyone is to know their unlovable faults, and the unlovable is not lovable!
Why can't these people be pitied and forgiven?
Well, for Sartre, that would be even worse: that would make them objects and take away their freedom. He tries to show this in “No Exit,” which is about hell. The hell we make in this life for each other. In this play, each of the three people in Hell functions as the torturing demon to the other two. So, that no two can form any kind of love union, because they are objectified and known by the third. They are under the Gaze of the third, as Sartre feared being under the Gaze of God, under the Gaze of Truth, being pinned like an insect to the page in a book, captured by a light that did not emerge from himself. It's true. But Sartre's ultimate enemy -like Nietzsche-he questions the will to truth, any truth that he did not create himself. But must humbly discover and surrender to. For Sartre, surrender is the antithesis to freedom. But for any lover, and especially for Augustine, the great philosopher of Love, surrender is the secret of true freedom. And the secret of true happiness. Sartre was one of the unhappiest and loneliest philosophers who ever lived. His self-centered life on earth was a foretaste of the self-centered life that is the heart of hell. It was so self-centered that he habitually refused to listen to other people. In fact, he had the habit of just talking continually even when the others left the room. During World War II in Paris even after the German occupation, Sartre never lifted a finger or a pen to help the Jews. He just kept writing under the approving eyes of the Nazi censors. And then after the war, he spoke of the Brave French Resistance Fighters as “we.” He quarreled with nearly every man he ever met and tried to seduce nearly every woman he ever met. He refused the Nobel Prize because he hated his own civilization that gave it to him. Likewise, he joined the Communist party after the war and knowingly lied about the great freedom and happiness in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he praised Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in history and tried to export his Revolution to Europe, his philosophy inspired a group of Cambodian intellectuals in Paris and their leader Pol Pot, who murdered one-third of all the citizens of Cambodia for ideological reasons. If his Khmer-rouge discovered that you wore glasses, you were killed, because that meant you could read and were an intellectual and therefore a possible threat to Pol Pot. Ideas have consequences. I think Sartre is a very useful philosopher for the unbeliever or agnostic to read because he can be a more effective hellfire indignation preacher than Jonathan Edwards. Sartre's pessimism and nihilism and despair makes him a missionary despite himself, because this philosophy will send any sane agnostic running away in terror into the arms of the nearest priest. Unfortunately, our society is not quite sane and therefore Sartre was enormously popular in his lifetime, as especially among the young. 50 000 young women flocked to his funeral, one even throwing herself on his coffin. Please pray that our whole civilization does not follow them there because that is a coffin indeed, the philosophy of the culture of death, which is what Saint John Paul II, the greatest man of the worst Century in history, called it. To exorcise a demon, you must expose its true name. The holy water that the demon fears the most is not made of hydrogen and oxygen, it is made of truth. Augustine on the other hand is loved by every saint and every sane person who reads The Confessions. Our culture could still choose to take his road back to the source of all love and light and life, or it could choose Sartre's road into the darkness. And because the lower freedom of free choice is real and the higher freedom of liberty is always choosable, therefore every single individual has a momentous role to play in that choice. Every single person has a vote in that election. When you vote for Augustine, you vote for Christ as the king of your life, when you vote for Sartre you vote for the Antichrist.
The west sees Augustine & Augustine institute in terms of his earlier Gnostic belief,
Said Jesus "You know not the Father, neither the Son but them unto whom the Son pleases to reveal' amounts to revelation of the Covenant as stated in 2 Macabess 2, & when such a revelation is given there is no scope for confusion, including the basic revelation of Genesis : "God made he him : male & female created he them,
God makes a difference a persons on a perspective angle .. Like a knowledge has a few knowledge category.. But philosophy never makes a persons fail example we has knowledge about tech , biology , chemistry knowledge n anything we are have it .. But with analysis weakness and excess ourselves for accept a persons has got development your passion n hobbies ourselves .. Okay thanks
Augustine in his the confessions admits he was a sophist, he taught rhetoric, which is as you say is not objective truth but simply rhetorical tricks to win arguments.
He also admits to looking up to the philosophers because they were always right.
Augustine’s sophism seems an odd thing to not mention?
As you noted sophism is opposed to absolute truth.
There is a profound truth here in Sartre's distinction. Who we are is not the same as what we are! Persons are not merely objects, or things, or entities. We are “he's” and “she's”, not its. Mere things have no free will, no free choice. Only persons do. But the eternal God is a person, in fact three Persons. For Sartre, if God is a Person or Persons, then God must be in time and change!
But there is no compelling reason for that assumption. It is arbitrary!
It is Sartre's own invention and choice. There is no necessary reason for that choice! But there is clearly a motive. It's Sartre's metaphysics of “being in itself” versus “being for itself” is designed from the beginning to exclude God. Sartre erects his categories like gates in his City, precisely in order to keep God out! He does not prove that there cannot be a third category: a perfect changeless eternal Person and thus a God!
Rather, he begins by demanding that there be no God, and then he wrecks the categories that exclude Him. He locks the gates of his mind from the beginning. It's a prejudice, a pre-judgment. Not a rational judgment. It is not open-minded and honest. It is not based on received data. Likewise, it is based on invented categories.
Contrast this a priori metaphysical argument of Sartre for atheism with the most popular argument for atheism: the famous problem of evil. That is at least an honest and open-minded argument, based on real data and experience, namely evil - both physical and moral, both death and sin. And there is a real test of faith! If a perfectly good and perfectly powerful God existed, how could there be evil? If God had both the power over evil and the will against evil, He would not allow any evil at all! So, why does evil still exist? If God exists, He must be either weak or wicked, either unable or unwilling to destroy all evil!
The answer to that very good objection - which comes from Augustine - is that God is also supremely wise, as we are not! And He deliberately allows evil for the sake of a greater good in the end that we cannot fully understand yet because we are not God!
What a shock!
Because we are not God and therefore do not see the end yet, the answer appeals to our faith and trust, rather than proof. But it shows that that faith and trust is reasonable! The point here is that Sartre's real reason for atheism is that it is not the conclusion of a rational argument not a humble discovery of the mind, like the atheism that comes from the problem of evil, but rather is a demand of his will!
And so, Sartre admits that!!
He says that his whole philosophy is a deduction from atheism as his first principle. So, why does he begin with that first principle? By his own admission, it is based on the will -not the reason-on his demand that God not exist, on his desire that God not exist! If Sartre went to heaven and found that God did indeed exist, he would not be satisfied! He would not be happy. He would be profoundly miserable. Furthermore, he would be in hell!! Sartre would find heaven a hell! And if he went to hell by his own free choice, by his own demand, then that hell would be his Heaven, his satisfaction!
It's exactly the devil's choice in Milton's “Paradise Lost.” “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
[On the contrary, St. Joseph Bernardian's account would be: “Melius est feliciter subesse quam infeliciter praeesse.” O’ gallo in copp’a mundizza, on say in Naples, to match Milton's quote, my add]
So, Sartre is in Hell either way. Whether any individual human being is in Hell or not, of course no one knows, except God. My point is not to claim to know Sartre's present eternal address, but to claim that for Sartre, atheism is his non-negotiable absolute.
It is not based on objective data - like the problem of evil - but on a subjective desire. It is a leap of faith (“atto di fede”) or rather of desire. So, our trip passionately desires that no divine eye knows him. No Creator designed him. But why? His reason is similar to Nietzsche's. Nietzsche wrote: “I will now prove the non-existence of all gods. If God's existed, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods!” Nietzsche says that he could not live in a universe where there was a God because God would know him through and through including his dark side, his failures and miseries, and God would either condemn him or even worse pity him! And forgive him! And that would be hell to him.
I was long ago surprised to find that some of the more brilliant minds had a veritable stupid side to them. Sartre was such a man. To think that hell is other people poses such a blazing irony as to at once be tragic and laughable.
Wow!
Another reason why, for the most part - at least in my opinion - the ancients are better (and more true) than the "the moderns."
consciousness is god
And Augustine and Sartre both agree with that either. To see this, to see the enormity of the practical difference God makes to human life, remember what we just said about what Sartre does with Dostoevsky's argument for the existence of God in his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. Let's put the abstract argument in the context of the plot of that great novel. Ivan Karamazov, perhaps the most winsome and convincing atheist in the history of human literature, is attracted to atheism for the same reason Dostoevsky is repelled by it. The reason is that if God does not exist then everything is permissible. For without a God, without an absolute standard of good and a judge who knows all things and will judge all things infallibly and inevitably, without this God we can say: “Why not do anything?” Even the murder of Ivan's despicable father that he is tempted to! And the only possible answer to that: “Why not?” is that other men - not God - will know it and judge us and punish us. But most crimes go unsolved and unpunished in this world. So if you are clever enough it is very likely that you will never get caught. So, Ivan has a kind of Pascal's wager for atheism: it's profitable, if there is no God. Sartre surprisingly agrees with Dostoevsky's principle, but instead of arguing that since not everything is permissible God must exist, and seeing Ivan is wrong, he sees Ivan as right when he argues that since God does not exist everything is permissible. And these totally different roads are the only two roads that lead from Dostoevsky's premise. It makes a total and absolute difference whether there is a God or not. And it is atheists - especially totally consistent atheists, like Sartre and Nietzsche - who show us this difference more clearly than most them used to do. We can be grateful to them for this service. And they do this both by their heads and by their hearts. Like Augustine, they work both from the heart and the head, both from the will and the reason. Whichever road one takes to arrive at the point of belief or unbelief, whether by the step-by-step road of recent argument or by a single simple leap of faith and free choice, that point - God or no God - is a sharp point of an all-encompassing cone that contains the whole universe and all of life. Sartre and Augustine show that this is equally true for the atheist and the theist.
I said that the road of the heart is deeper and more powerful than the road of the head. We can see that if we look again at Sartre's philosophical argument for atheism and see how it's his heart, not his head, what he loves rather than what he thinks, that most inspire that argument. Sartre's argument - remember - is that the God idea is the most totally self-contradictory idea possible. It is the confusion and impossible synthesis of being in itself with being for itself. The synthesis of an eternally perfect platonic idea, an objective truth known or goodness chosen, with acting choosing knowing and therefore imperfect ongoing personal subject, a knower and chooser. The argument is logical. Its premise does entail its conclusion. But Sartre does not have to begin with this premise. And thus, he can avoid the conclusion of atheism, if he wants to. But wanting is an act of the heart, not of the head! What does Sartre want? Freedom.
How much does he want it? What does he choose to give up to get it or have? The answer is almost everything! The cost of his atheism is the loss of truth and goodness and love and meaning and purpose and faith and hope and charity, and in fact, being itself!!
Sartre is a nihilist. The title of his major work is: “Being and Nothingness.” There is no being for Sartre: there is only “being in itself” and “being for itself.” So, man in nature, subject and object, stand over each other as strangers and enemies, not as brothers and sisters from a common Father. So we are aliens and strangers in the world and the objective world is alien and indifferent to our personal subjective desires especially the desire for meaning and purpose and value. So this is a kind of cosmic alienation. Marxism is based on the concept of alienation too but that is trivial compared with Sartre’s because that is only the political alienation between economic classes. Well, Sartre's alienation is the metaphysical alienation between “being in itself” and “being for itself,” “existence and essence,” “subject and object,” and “man and nature,” including human nature. Human nature is not part of nature for Sartre. In fact, according to Sartre, there is no such thing as human nature, because there is no God to conceive it and invent it. We are not objects to God, because there is no God. We are only subjects, not objects. We have what Sartre calls “existence” but not “essence,” not any objective human nature. He calls his philosophy “existentialism” because its fundamental principle is that existence precedes essence. What does that mean? It means that we - not God - design our own essence, including our own nature, our own meaning, our own truth, and our own values. Values do not judge us: we judge values! Our free choices are not judged as good or evil by any higher objective truth or objective values. It's exactly the opposite! Our values are good only because we freely choose them. To back up and move from the will back to the reason now, how would Augustine respond philosophically to Sartre's metaphysical argument against God as the self-contradictory concept of the eternally perfect person acting in time?
By his philosophy of time and eternity! Time does not bind God or define God or limit God or even characterize his existence until His Son becomes incarnate in Christ. God's being has no past, no future, and no change. He is an infinite being an infinite perfection in his timeless and eternal present. He does not grow or diminish. He does not change, for if He changed, He would grow either better or worse. And if he grew better than in the past he was not wholly perfect. And if he grew worse than in the future he would not be holy, perfect!
Augustine argues that past time and future time exist only for a consciousness like ours that is in time. And that the present is the only totally real dimension of time because only in the present do we exist as active as acting to remember the past and anticipate the future. God is not like us: He does not have any part of His reality and life and being in the dead past or in the still unborn future. Thus, God exists as a Person. In Sartrian terms, He is “being for itself,” but timelessly. Although He is timeless, He is not an object or an essence or a platonic idea, but a Person existing and alive and active!
His name is “I am.” The subject of His actions is eternal even when the objects of His actions in our lives are temporal. Time is a very tricky thing! Augustine famously said, when reflecting on the mystery of time: “When you don't ask me what time is, I know what it is, just as everyone else does. But when you ask me exactly what time it is I find out that I don't really know, and neither does anyone else.” Augustine would argue that Sartre has no good reason for limiting timelessness to impersonal objects and not persons. For Sartre all “being for itself,” all persons, all subjects, all entities that have a mind and will - whether human or superhuman -, must be in time and change. That's why Sartre calls there being “being for itself,” is on the way to itself. Being that has to achieve its identity and perfection in the future.
The only things that are timeless for Sartre are objects. The truths of geometry do not change. Essences do not change their identity but humans have to choose their identity and create their identity through their choices.
This is true!
It's exactly the devil's choice in Milton's “Paradise Lost.” “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
On the contrary, St. Joseph's Bernardian account would be: “Melius est feliciter subesse quam infeliciter praeesse.”
And this was the choice of St.Joseph. He preferred to serve in the hipostatic order, than be master in the create one. Anyway, according to St. Rabano Mauro - the author of Veni creator-, St. Joseph is the counterpart or better antithesis of the devil (being Jesus, Mary and the three of the Cross the counterpatrs of the old Adam, Eve and the three of knowledge of the evil and the good.) In Naples there is a joke about it (the parallel is obviously mine), about the devil figure in the sentence from above: ‘O GALLO ‘NCOPP’Â MONNEZZA, that's, "the rooster on top of the garbage." I think any comment superfluous.
Wow
Beautiful
Thank you
I never trusted Sartre for his eyes alone. They say the eye is the window to the soul. His eyes are strange. I therefore instantly dismiss him.
Also, we was literally a cuckold.
Oh come off it.
Did you meet him in person? I'd agree that you can infer from photos that he doesn't come across as a man at peace in his soul - which is certainly consistent with his writings - but to judge someone purely from a snapshot is hardly thorough.
@@ironymatt lol