with the elimination of religious superstition and metaphysical ignorance, for instance, new values or even old ones have been spontaneously generated from a body of facts. Existentialism reacts, then, to the inadequacy of scientifically oriented philosophies to explain the genesis of values. The positivist approaches place an emphasis on modern logistic methods on the one hand and the explicit restriction of the fact that logic works on on the other hand. For the existentialist, however, it is only within the confines of reality that good and evil can originate, and values are thus created only by the free act of a human agent who takes this or that to be food or bad in the light of his attempt to give significance and order to an otherwise meaningless world. Freedom is the important element included by the existentialist but meaningless to the positivist, for whom there are only two necessities--mathematical and mechanical. Existentialism is as much a reaction against the claims of scientific philosophies as against the more high-sounding systems that preceded them.
3. Sartre's statement "man is not what he is" relates to his concept of negation and to his concept of consciousness. Facts are what they are and so satisfy the demands of ordinary logic. Human beings are not what they are because of the realities of consciousness. Sartre says that the self-conscious structure of consciousness involves negation, and this implies that the constitutive role of self-consciousness is at the same time self-nihilating. This stands at the core of freedom and of human life. Our self-directed nothingness, a nothingness that means that we are not what we are, is found in our capacity to detach ourselves from the roles we find ourselves occupying. We live by self-deception and convince ourselves of something precisely because we already believe the opposite. Sartre places an emphasis on the development in childhood of th
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