Jasper asked:

I am a 16 year old Dutch philosophy student. After my rejection of Roman Catholicism I went on a
search for something to believe in, some religion or conviction. I found out that both Existentialism
and structuralism interested me but not the "whole" part. There were in both convictions things I
couldn't agree with and things I accepted as the truth, so I tried to combine structuralism and
existentialism.

In short: I believe that every being is put in a cage or a box, due to this, nobody is able to use his
free-will because every made choice is influenced by the surroundings of "the chooser". It is
impossible to have no surroundings, so even JP Sartre couldn't have been "free": He was Man, white,
French, heterosexual, lived in the 20th century, smoked, and so on. All these things must have
influenced his life, his choices.

Now there is one way to escape those structures, there is, I think, a way to feel free for a moment. By
founding new structures; then you can feel freedom for a few moments. When people start to accept
or reject "your" structure, your freedom's gone, these people will start making choices influenced by
your structure.

What I want to ask: Is my reasoning right? Do you agree or don't you and why? Are there other
people who think this, I'd like to communicate with them.

============

Wow, not many 16 year olds think like this! The existential and structuralist traditions are more
historical and literary in their sensibility than the British analytical tradition and 'reason' tends to mean
something slightly different. With this in mind I would say that you have succumbed to the sociological
reduction. Certainly these things you list - white male, French, heterosexual, smoker etc. - are
dimensions of who he was, but Sartre cannot be reduced to those dimensions. The same goes for
those who say that 'we are determined by our genes'. They confuse a dimension with a cause.

You need also to distinguish the public and private life. The Sartre you describe is social Sartre, the
persona, but the real Sartre was the one who wrote La Nausee(Nausea), Les Chemins de la Liberte
(The Roads to Freedom) and L'Etre et le Neant(Being and Nothingness). These books issue from
what Proust in his essay, "The Method of Sainte-Beuve" called "the deep self". Public life, says
Proust, "is the work of a far more external self, not of the deep self which is only to be found by
disregarding other people and the self that knows other people, the self that has been waiting while
one was with others, which one feels clearly to be the only real self, for which alone artists end by
living, like a god whom they leave less and less and to whom they have sacrificed a life that serves
only to do him honour." Artistic work which is not the work of this deep self is not art, but the
simulation of it, on this theory. Hence, we remember the work of Flaubert (and Proust) who wrote out
their deep self, but not the work of Sainte-Beuve who wrote for the public from his social self.

I would keep these distinctions in mind, between a dimension of something and a cause and between
the exterior and interior person. It is a reductionism to see one purely in terms of the other. To discuss
existential and structuralist matters further, a society or group devoted to Kierkegaard would be a
good place to start.

Matthew Del Nevo