My own view of Sartre's existentialism is positive. His idea of a Shared Condition is a rather beautiful one. My own negative view of Sartre's critics essentially revolve around the accusation that they've allowed themselves to become the hapless subjects of quasi-religious quackery, a form of wish-fullness that offers hope to the frail of mind, the wide eyed, the trustful and the bitter of heart. A group to which Sartre applied the title Bad Faith. We used to be called Cynics, and even Nihilists by the Cretin-hood of Elders who'd given up on the perchance to dream and needed a bunch of confident softies to sneer at. The central theme of such a classic human reaction is the ever present uneasiness inherent in certainty. I use the word Cretin for a positive reason. It describes the moment when certainty asks you to just start making stuff up to demonstrate your point. Oddly, the origin of that splendid word Nihilism - from the Latin Nothing - was in an adverse intellectual reaction to the approximately 47,000 words of Wilhelm Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that had shamelessly announced the end of worry because a great mind had rationally demonstrated that our fate was obviously beyond our control. The funny thing is, any respectable definition of Life, particularly the human experience of the condition, might suggest it's actually the other way around. Our fate isn't handed down, nor is it already in place when we arrive, thanks to uncertainty from beginning to end we have something to say about pretty much everything until we surrender to idea.
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