Eric Voegelin.pdf - Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft

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In 1947 and 1948 Sartre wrote some pages about what he
called „the universe of violence“ which have recently been
published in an Italian translation. In his perceptive
Introduction on „Violence and Revolt in the Thought of J.-P.
Sartre“, Fabrizio Scanzio shows how Sartre adopts
Heidegger’s gnostic image of man as a being „thrown into the
world“, a world into which he does not fit and which he
experiences as a „universe of violence“. Human existence for
Sartre, then, „is nothing else than the movement in which man
seeks to give a foundation to his unjustified being in the
world“. But in this world he confronts a dead end: „no reason,
no project can confer that foundation which nature has not
provided“, and „radicalizing the Heideggerian image of man
as a being ‘thrown in the world,’ Sartre concludes that in the
world man is always ‚de trop’. 70 Thus, the universe of
violence „is always the negation of symmetrical and equal
human relations: it affirms the superiority of being over
man…“. 71
In Sartre’s own text we find him equating the idea of an order
of being with violence. Since for Sartre existence precedes
essence, being represents mere facticity, and is an enslavement
of man. Any notion of essence is anathema to Sartre. The blind
„faith of the masses in the order of being“ is the source „of all
violence“. „My existence is in subjugation to my being“. 72 To
submit to God, the manifestation of pure liberty, is to submit
to violence. „I submit to [His] liberty because I establish that
this liberty emanates from Being“. 73 To those who accept the
order of Being, „it is not the end that justifies the means but
the means that justify the end, and the means that justify the
end (sacrifice of the entire world for an end) confer on
violence an absolute value“. 74