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Ideas Have Consequences BISHOP ROBERT BARRON THE PHILOSOPHERS WHO HAVE SHAPED OUR CULTURE

The document discusses four influential philosophers - Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault - who have shaped modern culture. It outlines some of their key ideas like Marx's views on religion, economics, and revolution. For Nietzsche, it examines his idea of the 'death of God' and the implications of lacking an objective foundation for truth and morality.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
60 views25 pages

Ideas Have Consequences BISHOP ROBERT BARRON THE PHILOSOPHERS WHO HAVE SHAPED OUR CULTURE

The document discusses four influential philosophers - Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault - who have shaped modern culture. It outlines some of their key ideas like Marx's views on religion, economics, and revolution. For Nietzsche, it examines his idea of the 'death of God' and the implications of lacking an objective foundation for truth and morality.

Uploaded by

John
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Ideas Have

Consequences
THE PHILOSOPHERS WHO
H A V E S H A P E D O U R C U LT U R E

BISHOP ROBERT BARRON


Transcript taken from a talk given by
Bishop Robert Barron.

Cover image: Giammarco Boscaro, Unsplash.

© 2023, All rights reserved.


In recent years, many people have asked me: “What’s
going on in our culture?” There have been all kinds
of analyses—political, economic, sociological—but to
understand what is going on, we have to look at this
question philosophically by stepping back a bit from
it. I propose four thinkers—two Germans from the
nineteenth century and two Frenchmen from the
twentieth century—who have been extraordinarily
influential on the way we think and the way we act
today. Understanding these philosophers will help us
understand what’s happening in our time. Now, the
four I have in mind, chronologically, are Karl Marx,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel
Foucault.

Karl Marx is undoubtedly the best known of these


four figures. Many of us who lived through the events
of the 1980s and 1990s, with the downfall of the
Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc and so on, might be
forgiven for thinking that Marx was going to be placed
on the ash heap of history. But Marx has been taught
now for the past fifty years in most of the academies
of the West. He is undergoing a sort of revival today,
especially among the young.

Marx was born in Trier in the western part of


Germany in the year 1818, descended on both sides

1
of his family from a long line of rabbis. And you will
see something of the biblical prophet, I think, in Marx
and something of a religious view of things. As a young
man, he studied the fashionable Hegelianism of the
time and very quickly drifted into radical politics, first
in Germany and also in Belgium and France. Because
of his agitations, he was expelled from those three
countries and eventually found his way to a more
tolerant England and settled in London, where he
spent the rest of his life and where he wrote his major
work, the famous Das Kapital. If you go to the British
Museum today, they will show you the desk and the
chair where Marx sat and wrote Das Kapital. He died
in London in 1883 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery
there. It isn’t hard to see the extraordinary impact that
Marx has had throughout the 20th century and up till
today, politically speaking. The first theme in Marx I
will look at is his atheism.

Now, the young Marx was a devotee of a man named


Ludwig Feuerbach, and Feuerbach is quite rightly
called the “Father of Modern Atheism.” Most atheists
you read today are echoing themes in Feuerbach.
Feuerbach said that we human beings have a tendency
to project outside of ourselves an idealized self-
understanding. I’m intelligent, but I would like to be all
intelligent. I’m loving, but I would like to be all loving.
I’ve got some power; if I only had all power. We take this
idealized self-understanding and we project it outward

2
and call it God. Then we spend our pathetic religious
lives petitioning this fictional character to give back to
us what we gave to him. So Feuerbach sees religion as
a kind of alienation, a psychological problem. Young
Karl Marx takes this in, and all his life long, he remains
a devotee of Feuerbach. In fact, he said famously that
everyone must be baptized in the Feuerbach, which in
German means “the brook of fire.” But Marx asked a
further question, namely, how come we human beings
almost universally think of how universally applicable
religion is around the world? Why do we do it? Why do
we engage in this alienating move? Marx’s extremely
influential answer is because we are already so unhappy
and so alienated in our economic lives. Because we
are so oppressed, we invent a fantasy world to live in.
Hence his famous line, “Religion is the opium of the
people.” It was actually in Marx’s time in places like
London that opium dens were opening up. People
would retreat from the world, take opium, and live in
a fantasy world. They destroy their lives in the process.
Marx said that that is most human beings. They take
the opium of religion to dull their sensitivity to their
suffering and to invent a fantasy world.

Such is Marx’s very influential view of what


religion is and why we engage in it. This gives us a clue
toward the second major idea: religion is part of what
Marx calls the “superstructure.” Every society from
ancient times to the present day, Marx thought, has

3
a “substructure” that is always economic, whether it
is the slave economy of the ancient world, the feudal
economy of the medieval world, a serf-based economy
in Russia of the 18th century, or the capitalist economy
of his own time. That is the core or the substructure
of any society. But the substructure throws up
around itself what he calls the “superstructure.” The
superstructure has one purpose: to enhance and
protect the substructure. What is the superstructure?
Everything else in society. For example, what is the
whole purpose of politics? To protect the economic
substructure. What do most politicians talk about
most of the time but economic matters? What are wars
fought over? Always over economic matters according
to Marx. What is entertainment’s purpose? To distract
us from our suffering, which is why rich people often
support forms of entertainment. There, it is a bit like
religion, “the opium of the people.” How about the
arts? The arts are part of the superstructure. The arts
are, for the most part, subsidized by wealthy people
and the arts over the centuries tend to glorify those
in the power structure. The substructure is protected
by this elaborate superstructure. Now, the point of
the Marxist is to break through the superstructure, to
expose it for what it is, to break its power over us so
that we can get at the economic substructure and fight
to revolutionize it. But we can’t foster the revolution
until we break through the superstructure.

4
We all know the Wizard of Oz. There is a very
Marxist way to read the Wizard of Oz, where the tin
woodsman stands for industry that has no heart. The
cowardly lion is the military that has no real courage.
The scarecrow is the farmer that has no brains. The
one I find really interesting in the Marxist reading of
the Wizard of Oz is the man behind the curtain, this
little figure who is pulling the levers and producing
this grand delusion of the Wizard of Oz. Who is the
wizard? To the Marxist, that is God and religion. But
Toto, the little dog, pulls back the curtain and reveals
this little figure behind the curtain. That is Marx’s
superstructure and substructure. The idea is to break
through the protective shell, get to the core, and
then get the revolution going. How? By stirring up an
antagonism between oppressor and oppressed. At the
heart of the Marxist theory is an oppressor-oppressed
relationship, the capitalist oppressing the worker and
thereby deriving profit. The Marxist revolutionary has
to cut through all the superstructure and then foment
the class struggle that will lead to the revolution. I think
you can begin to hear overtones in the way people are
speaking and acting today.

The second person is Friedrich Nietzsche. I have


become convinced that this 19th-century philosopher
is at least as influential in our time as Karl Marx.
Nietzsche, like many other modern thinkers, and this in
itself is kind of an interesting theme, was the son of the

5
parsonage—his father was a Lutheran pastor. He was
born near Leipzig in 1844. Very early on he abandoned
the Christian faith, which he would have inherited from
his father, and he became a student of classical philology.
So the study of language became his preoccupation.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who I will look at next and who was
deeply indebted to Nietzsche, was fascinated with the
power of language as well. In fact, his autobiography is
called Les Mots, “The Words.” Michel Foucault was also
deeply influenced by Nietzsche because language is a
central preoccupation of his.

Nietzsche held a university position for a time.


In fact, he was one of the youngest professors in the
German system. But his rather strange personality and
bad health compromised his academic career. He did
most of his writing in the 1880s when he was in his
forties. In 1889, he endured a kind of collapse, both
physical and mental. People speculate what it was—
psychological, illness, syphilis, brain issues—we don’t
really know. But for the last 10 years of his life, he lived
basically in seclusion and in a kind of madness. He died
in the year 1900.

I am in radical disagreement with Nietzsche,


but I have to say he was one of the most fecund and
creative thinkers in the Western tradition. He had
an extraordinarily fertile mind. He wrote somewhat
in the manner of Blaise Pascal, by which I mean he

6
wrote aphoristically, in short little declarations and
sentences. It makes reading him interesting. It is not
like plowing through a text.

The first idea from Nietzsche important for today,


and he is probably best known for this, is the death
of God. Here he is like Feuerbach and Marx. “God is
dead and we killed him.” That is the famous line he
puts in the mouth of one of the characters in Thus
Spake Zarathustra, maybe his most famous line. What I
want to explore is the implication he draws from this.
We saw what Marx did with the nonexistence of God.
What does Nietzsche do? He draws the conclusion that
the foundation for meaning, truth, and value, which
held sway in the West really from biblical times and
from ancient times until his time, was now giving
way. For most of Western thought, God serves as the
foundation for objective truth and objective moral
value. God is the Logos, or the supreme reason. God
is the summum bonum, the ultimate good. And in God,
all the truths and goods that we intuit about the world
are finally grounded and find their justification. So if
there is no God, “God is dead and we have killed him.”
If there is no God, then there is no foundation for the
claim that there are objective truths and objective
moral values. All of that gives way. What are we left
with? Nietzsche calls it perspectivism: my perspective
on it, your perspective on it, his perspective, her
perspective, all these millions of perspectives. In our

7
language today, we might say, “Well, it’s my truth and
you got your truth and she’s got her truth over there.”

But there is nothing like the truth to which we are


all beholden. “Well, there’s my set of values. From my
perspective, I see it this way. You’ve got your set of
values.” But there is no such thing as the valuable, the
good in itself. The death of God has led to a radical
relativization of truth and moral value. What does
Nietzsche recommend in light of this situation? He
recommends that we face this world of no objective
truth and no objective value with the power of the
will. In the face of this bleak situation, I assert my will
to power.

Hence, Nietzsche became a harsh critic of the


morality coming up out of the Christian tradition.
Our morality puts a stress on pity, compassion, love,
forgiveness, nonviolence. What is that in Nietzsche’s
terms but a slave morality. It is a resentful morality.
Those who have not effectively asserted their will to
power, those who have been put down are now kind
of urging the powerful people to be nice to us. Rather,
Nietzsche says, assert your will to power. Now this
does lead to a kind of Hobbesian world of clashing
wills. I got mine, you got yours, and there is no really
objective measure by which we can determine which
of us is more right or more justified. And so you have
a clash of powerful wills leading to the Übermensch, a

8
very influential idea of Nietzsche’s, often translated as
the “Superman” or “Overman.” This is Nietzsche’s hero
and it is reflected, he thinks, in some of the best of the
Greek and Roman myths. The great heroic figure who
stands up and asserts himself and the primacy of will in
the howling winds of this world of no objective truth
and value. That issue of the primacy of will over reason
is visible on the streets of our cities today.

So the first two philosophers are Germans from


the 19th century, and the next two are Frenchmen
from the 20th century. The first of the Frenchmen is
probably the most famous philosopher of the 20th
century. Probably most of us who took Philosophy 101
would have had some exposure to Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. He studied at the École
normale supérieure, the “Superior Normal School,”
which is about 10 minutes from the house that I lived
in when I was a doctoral student in Paris. It is the
cream of the crop of the French intellectual system.
The best and brightest figures in the 20th century
tended to be students at the École normale, what they
call normalien. Sartre studied there then entered into
the French educational system. So the graduates are
typically then sent out to lycées, high schools, and
then they move up through the system. Sartre did
that for a time, but then eventually left it behind and
became, by the 1940s and 1950s and onward, perhaps
the paradigmatic public intellectual.

9
More than a philosopher, Sartre is also a playwright
and a novelist, a social commentator, and a man of
social action. His greatest work undoubtedly is Being
and Nothingness, “L’Être et le Néant” in the French He
was involved famously in the resistance to the Nazis
during World War II. Sartre died in Paris in 1980.

To understand his thought, a really good place to


go is a little book he wrote in 1946 called Existentialism
is a Humanism, based on a lecture he gave right after
the war. Here the central idea of his existentialist
philosophy is clearly articulated. By existentialism
I mean the view that existence precedes essence. It
sounds desperately abstract, but it is actually a pretty
straightforward idea. By essence, Sartre means that
whole system of ideas and patterns and ideals and
forms by which an individual and a society typically
would be governed. So what does it mean to be human?
There is an essential pattern that has been presented
by philosophers and theologians and the state. What
does it mean to lead a good life? Listen to all these
representatives of these essential forms and they will
tell you what that looks like. What is the drama of life?
To bring existence, my individual self, my freedom, into
line with essence. Imagine a little kid trying to learn
to be a responsible adult. All kinds of people will tell
her, “Here’s what that looks like. Here’s the essential
form of being human. Now bring your freedom, your
individuality, your existence into line with essence.”

10
So in the classical reading, essence precedes existence,
both chronologically and ontologically, meaning there
is a kind of superiority to essence over existence. My life
is to accept in a humility of spirit the objectivity of these
essential principles. To this Sartre says, My philosophy
is a Copernican revolution. My philosophy is going to
turn that upside down because I say existence precedes
essence. A plague on your essential forms, a plague on
your idea of what the good life is. What comes first is
existence, my individuality, my freedom. On the base
of that freedom, I determine who I will be. I determine
the form or pattern of my life. You don’t tell me how to
live. No institution, no society, no church tells me how
to live. I will decide how to live.

In light of Sartre’s little book, we can understand


more clearly his big book, Being and Nothingness.
Some may think, “Okay, nothingness. Is he a nihilist?”
Well, he is a Nietzschean in the sense that he is indeed
denying the objectivity of truth and moral values. But
Sartre understands le néant, nonbeing, nothing, not as
something oppressive and negative but kind of like a
blank canvas. There is no objective truth or value, so
I can invent it. I can paint my own beautiful picture
according to my lights on the blank canvas of le néant.
Just as, in Nietzsche, this death of God opens up this
space into which the will to power can assert itself,
so now, in Sartre, it opens up the space for existence,
for my self-assertive freedom to say, “Here’s who I am,

11
here’s what I’m about.”

Here there are all kinds of overtones for the way


an awful lot of people think today. I have said for
years that what was once whispered in the cafes of
Paris, this idea, is now the default position of most
young people today. “Don’t tell me who I am. Don’t
tell me what to believe. Don’t tell me how to behave. I
decide the assertion of my liberty, my existence, which
precedes essence.” Here is a final connection: Marx
was an atheist. Nietzsche was an atheist. Sartre, too,
is aggressively atheist. How come? He puts it in a very
pithy formula in Existentialism Is a Humanism: If God
exists, I cannot be free. But I am free. Therefore, God
does not exist.

To some degree the political structure represents


essence. It tells you who you should be, how you
should behave. To some degree, the family and
culture represent essence to us. What is the ultimate
representative, the ultimate avatar of essence? God.
God, the ground of objective truth and moral value,
proposes to us this essential form of life that we ought
to conform to. Therefore, if God exists, Sartre says,
I can’t really be free. God is the ultimate limit to my
freedom. Therefore, as I discover the primacy of my
freedom, of my existence, I realize God does not exist.
God is the ultimate threat to the Sartrean program.

12
And that leads me to the final of these four players,
Michel Foucault. He is perhaps the least known of
the four, but he is, I would argue, perhaps the most
directly influential on the present-day conversation
and proxies. In some ways, he represents the summing
up of the three figures I have already looked at. He
was born in Poitiers in 1926, closer to our own time.
Like Sartre, he was a normalien, so he studied at the
École normale and was at the very height of the French
educational system. He taught for some years in that
system afterward and also taught at the University of
Uppsala in Sweden in the sixties.

During the sixties and seventies, Michel Foucault


produced a series of books that were sensations in
France, even though they were extremely complicated.
Some became best sellers, and then they became very
well known around the Western world. His famous
studies of sexuality, madness, and incarceration were
very widely read. He died in 1984 at the young age of 57.

I came to France in 1989 to begin my doctoral


studies. In Paris every block has a restaurant and a
bookstore. They want to feed your body and they want
to feed your mind. When I first went there, practically
every bookstore that I would go to was the owlish
visage of Michel Foucault. He had this striking face, a
bald head and little glasses and an intense expression.

13
His writing is dense and his thought is notoriously
complicated, but the main lines of his philosophy can
be articulated fairly simply. In the books that I just
described, he engages in what he himself called an
“archeology of knowledge.” Think of an archeological
dig. You begin on the surface, what is there today, but
as you dig down in the same location, you come to an
earlier version of that place, and then you dig down
more to an even earlier version of that city. And you
go through various layers in the same spot, but yet
different incarnations of that same place.

Here is the way it typically works in Foucault. Take


something like sexuality. You begin on the surface and
say, “What does our society today say about sexual
behavior? What is acceptable? What is unacceptable?”
Then dig down below that to earlier expressions
of what we thought was right, wrong, acceptable,
unacceptable. Go all the way down to ancient times,
and what you will find, Foucault typically would say, is
an extraordinary variety. What we say now is good and
right and appropriate sexually was not true in ancient
times. Their sexual mores were certainly not the same
as ours. Apply the same thing with something like
incarceration. Foucault was fascinated by that. Why do
we punish certain people? What crimes are punishable?
Why do we, for example, punish certain things with
capital punishment? And why do we incarcerate for
certain periods of time? Start today with the way we

14
think about those issues and then keep digging. Go
back in time, go back to the 19th century, go back to
the 17th century, go back to the Middle Ages, go back
to ancient times. You come to all kinds of different
ways of understanding it. Issue after issue, that is what
Foucault typically does. Two observations. First, it is
to some degree in service of the Nietzschean idea that
there really is nothing like objectively true and good
states of affairs. To the attitude that “this is the right
way to think about sexuality” or “this is the right way to
think about incarceration,” he says, “Look, we thought
about them differently all throughout our history.”

So it is in service to a kind of Nietzschean


perspectivism. But here is the second thing, Foucault
isn’t satisfied with that. He asks the follow-up question:
How do you account for these differences? How come
one society thinks about it this way, the next society,
another way, and our society a third way? How do you
explain that? His basic answer, repeated over and over
again in his writings and now a master idea on the scene
today, is that it is a function of power. Those who are
in power will arrange things, states of affairs, and, even
more importantly, will organize language in such a way
as to keep themselves in power. Now I say language, but
his preferred phrase is “modes of discourse.” In other
words, there is a way of talking about things, whether it
is sexuality, insanity, incarceration, or any other issues
that is not reflective of some objective state of affairs,

15
some objectively right or wrong, but rather functions of
the drive to power. One class of people that finds itself
in power will do all they can to maintain themselves in
power. They will indeed manipulate circumstances, but
more importantly, they will manipulate language so as
to maintain themselves in power. Foucault thinks that
heterosexuals will tend to demonize homosexuals and
condemn homosexuality. Why? Foucault would say, in
order to maintain their own societal dominance. Males
will characterize females as misbegotten or incomplete
versions of males so that they, the males, might remain
in charge. Whites stigmatized Blacks first as slaves and
then maybe less dramatically as social inferiors in order
to maintain white supremacy.

Most of this Foucault thinks is done unconsciously


rather than consciously. It is like the way that we
inherit a language long before we begin to speak it in
any distinctive or creative way. I am writing in English
now, but I inherited English with all of its rules and
all of its presuppositions. So in a similar way, Foucault
thought people in a given society will inherit modes
of discourse. So a large part of his program is to see
the play between oppressor and oppressed, to uncover
these dynamics and to see how the modes of discourse
we use are enforcing or propagating these forms of
oppression. You might call it Nietzsche’s will to power
but with a greater stress placed on the injustice of the
power relationship.

16
So how are all these figures influencing the present
conversation and some of the present activity that we
see? As a student and teacher of philosophy for many
years, I have always resented the claim that philosophy
is all these abstract ideas and has nothing to do with
the real world. If there is one thing that history has
proven, it is that ideas have consequences. It might
take time, but the ideas I have been describing here,
this farrago of ideas from these four figures, have
definitely found their way into the academies of the
West, and the academies have now indeed influenced
several generations of people. What we see on the
scene in many ways today are these ideas incarnating
themselves.

What do we see from Karl Marx? I think we see


perhaps above all an antagonistic social theory. For
Marx, the only way profit can be derived is through
some kind of oppression. The capitalist oppressing the
worker. The revolution is all about calling attention
to this oppressive relationship and leading, finally,
to a violent revolution of the oppressed against their
oppressor. The role of the Marxist intellectual is to
break through the superstructure to reveal these
dynamics and foster revolution. Violence for a Marxist
is not a regrettable side effect. In a way, violence is the
point. You want to foment the class struggle and these
antagonisms.

17
The second major theme is the substructure and
superstructure. Marx has been called a “master of
suspicion.” The idea there is, “I know things look this
way, but what’s really going on is something more
fundamental and usually more nefarious.” So things
look nice on the surface, the arts and politics and
religion and so on, but what is really going on is this
grubby substructure. You can hear this rhetoric and see
the process that flows from it today. We need to smash
through elements of the superstructure to get at the
substructure.

How about from Friedrich Nietzsche? We find,


clearly today at least in the minds of some, the rejection
of God and the related calling into question of the
objectivity of truth and moral value. Once these have
been cleared out, what is left is a play of powerful forces,
a clash of wills. I do a lot of work on the Internet where
I try to engage in argument, appealing to something
like a common set of norms and values. How difficult
it is in the social media world to get a real argument
going, because people have denied the objectivity of
truth and value. All that is left is a play of wills.

The movies are a strong indicator of where popular


culture is going. And one thing I find is that in almost
every movie, the climax is the hero or heroine finding his
or her own voice. There is never a question of whether
it is the right voice but just, “I found who I am.” That

18
is the Nietzschean space. There is no objective truth or
value, but there is the heroic assertion of the will.

How about for Jean-Paul Sartre? What I have


often termed the “culture of self-invention,” which is
rampant today, is an entirely Sartrean idea. If essence
has disappeared, and existence precedes essence, my
freedom, my will determines who I am. Everything
from sexuality to gender, human nature, moral systems
is finally just a social construct. They are the invention
of people’s wills so they can be overturned by the heroic
self-assertive freedom.

There was an interviewer that went to a university


campus some years ago. The guy was a young man, six
feet tall, maybe 30 years old. And he was asking people
on campus, “If I said that I’m a woman, would you be
okay with that?” And they answered, “Oh yeah, sure,
as long as that’s what you claim to be.” And then he
said, “Now what if I said, I’m an Asian woman, would
you agree with that?” And they said, “Well, if that’s the
identity that you claim, sure.” Then the last question,
which did give them some pause, was, “What if I claim
that I was a six foot five, Asian woman?” And they
hesitated a little bit, but at the end of the day, most
of them said, “Yeah, if that’s what you claim to be,
that’s who you are.” That is Sartrean existentialism run
amuck, the victory of existence over essence. That is
on the scene today.

19
Finally, what can we learn from Michel Foucault,
who sums up the three previous figures? I think this
viewpoint today gets its deep preoccupation with
language and the policing thereof. In a way, Foucault
combines the antagonistic social theory of Marx with
Nietzsche’s great stress on power. So he sees the play of
wills, of the play of oppressor and oppressed, with the
oppressor using language as a prime weapon. And there
is an extraordinary interest today in the way we talk
and how groups perceived to be powerful use language
to keep other people at bay or under control. All the
talk about microaggressions and triggers and disguised
sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, most of it
carried by language, is right out of the Michel Foucault
playbook.

Mind you, each of the four thinkers has very


interesting and fascinating things to say. I’m not in a
one-sided way just trying to dismiss all these thinkers,
but it is clear that, generally speaking, the Church
stands athwart almost all of this. How come? First of
all, because we speak of God. What is one thing that
all four of these thinkers, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre,
Foucault, have in common? The denial of God. If God
exists as the supreme truth and value, then there is
an objective ground for these things. Key to all four
of these systems is a dismantling of the objectivity of
truth and value. Therefore, the institution that speaks
most clearly of God is going to stand athwart this point

20
of view and then by extension speak of objective truth
and moral value. That is going to be problematic.

Marx and Foucault as well, Sartre too in his own


way, have an antagonistic social theory. There is an
essential struggle involved in the social order. The
whole point of the Marxist revolution is to foment
this class struggle. The Church proposes in its social
teaching a cooperative social theory, not an antagonistic
one. It doesn’t see violence as the means of affecting
social change but rather cooperation. Maybe most
profoundly, the Church, as Sartre correctly saw, is the
supreme representative of the precedence of essence
over existence.

The drama, the adventure, is not finding my


freedom and asserting it. No, the glory, the fun of life
is bringing my freedom in line with these great and
beautiful and compelling intellectual and moral values
that stand outside of me, that draw me to themselves.
I have always found Sartrean existentialism with its
roots in these earlier thinkers as a deeply dull system
because it takes away the compelling power of these
great objective values. All I am left with is the boring
little space of my self-assertive ego. No, I am much
more interested, to use von Baltazar’s language, in the
theo-drama. Not the boring little ego-drama that I am
in charge of, but the theo-drama where this world of
objective value is drawing me to itself, and behind that

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realm of objective value is the supreme truth and value
of God.

That is not oppressive to my freedom; it awakens


and invites and lifts me up in my freedom! Sartre knew
that the Church stood athwart that system. We still
do. Why do so many of the forces influenced by these
thinkers not like us? Not because we have some little
cultural hang-up. They know that Catholicism above
all stands athwart these philosophical assumptions. So
it is good for us to know where a lot of this ideation
today comes from, to step back and look at these
philosophical sources but also to claim our own great
tradition as the best way to stand against it.

Subscribe to Bishop Barron’s YouTube Channel at


https://www.wordonfire.org/youtube.

You’ll love his weekly Sunday Sermon, the Word


on Fire Show, and insightful discussions and
commentaries!

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