ABSTRACT
In Marcel’s eyes, Sartre’s was a philosophy wholly antithetical to his own. The product of a graceless atheism, it was no more than a distorted picture of ‘an atrophied and contradictory world where the better part of ourselves is finally unable to recognise itself’ (HV 183). The comment adequately captures some of the fundamental divergences between the two thinkers. For Marcel, despite the ills of modern society, God’s grace is still the guarantee that the world is not inherently senseless. For Sartre, on the other hand, there is no meaning in the world except what we bring to it – and there is no assurance that each of us brings to it compatible meanings. On the contrary, our relations with each other are, according to Sartre, fundamentally conflictual.
