Third was the mind-body (or subject-matter) dualism of Descartes. Bacon’s new science, however, created a functional dualism in separating man from nature: man vs. Francis Bacon was a monistic materialist man was but a mass of matter in the world which Thomas Hobbes, one of Bacon’s great disciples, explained more thoroughly in Leviathan. Second is the functional dualism of the materialist monists of the new science. Although Christianity properly rejects dualism as a heresy, and its teachings are unitive, Sartre nevertheless sees a certain dualism within Christianity as “embarrassing” to modern philosophy. The separation of man into Elect and damned, heaven and hell, soul and body, etc., was a problem that modern philosophy had to overcome. What was Sartre’s concern? First was the implied dualism and “bad faith” of Christianity. Likewise, many figures associated with the monist movement operated from a practical dualism: Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke (who was actually a dualist but functional monist). Augustine, Georg Hegel, and Martin Heidegger, aren’t really “monists” as he said – they were rather unitive thinkers in which pluralism was tied together in unity giving the impression of monism. However, Sartre’s opening statement is somewhat misleading since many prominent phenomenologists before him, especially St. 3)? Sartre’s famous opening addresses the problem of the dualisms that “monism” have attempted to resolve. Its aim was to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon. The opening paragraph of Sartre’s great work begins, “ Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. In typical French fashion, the text is weighty, dense, and draws heavily from the history of philosophy, especially Christianity, Bacon, Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Sartre’s great text of fame was his “essay on ontology,” Being and Nothingness.

Jean Paul Sartre was among the most famous of the modern existentialists and phenomenologists, perhaps second only to Martin Heidegger.

Being and nothingness book