My sister Sabrina and I went to Thomas Mohrs‘ speech “Zur Freiheit verdammt - Unbequeme Thesen des Existenzialismus” last week. Sabrina made some nice mind-map on that topic. Check it out at her wiki.
One of the most interesting topics in Sartre is for me, how he tries first to develop something like a conditio sine qua non for morality and then - and that’s the most critical part - tries to develop some kind of morality, which gets most explicit in “Why Existentialism is a Humanism”. He first takes Heidegger’s terminology of the “throwness into the world” and conceptualizes a pre-moral notion of responsibility, which is in my reading strongly connected to Heidegger’s pre-moral notion of “existential guilt”. My problem with Sartre is that he bridges the gap of this pre-moral state to moral norms (although very abstract ones) too fast. Where Camus is content with a “breathing is valueing”, Sartre jumps too fast to humanistic values and the thesis that every single existence serves as a prototype of a moral outline for whole humanity.
The other critical topic is Sartre’s thesis of the priority of existence towards essence. I had a longer email correspondence with Thomas on that about two years ago, where I tried to defend Sartre’s dialectic conception. I will dig it out again one of these days.
