Can you please explain this quotation by Jean Paul Sartre: Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusi?

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.|||well, sartre was an atheist, so i would focus on the fact that he makes specific reference to the concept of the eternal soul as illusory, and that he is asking his readers to think about meaning. he was a writer much concerned with what it means to be human, to be free (or as he put it 'condemned to be free'), to be responsible and to make choices. we are 'free' to give meaning to life and value is arbitrary. in other words, what S酶ren says is right, once we abandon the notion of a life beyond this earthly existence, we are free to really focus on this life and to create meaning.





from having read some of his works, in my much younger days, i remember being left with the feeling that life, for sartre, was utterly devoid of meaning... almost as if there was some sort of subconscious resentment or bitterness at having arrived at the conclusion that God, to his mind (and a very fine mind it was) was an impossibility.





by the way, if this is for some sort of academic project, you may want to have a look at a couple of these sites, they may be of help:





http://www.sartre.org/





http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existe鈥?/a>





http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/





http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/sart.h鈥?/a>





edit: silly me, i just noticed your avatar (which was showing up blank when i first answered the question) is the atheist bus campaign logo!





well, there's your sartrean answer right there! you could have just looked in the mirror and spared me all this typing :)|||He was saying if you do not believe in an afterlife it really doesn't matter what you do. It's not going to save your soul, so that means all these human constructs we follow do not matter. There is no fate, it's just a lottery of chaos. It could end today, or in 50 years. When it's done, it's done. To some carpe diem, others wallow,it does not matter.|||Well I don't know much about him and I've only read Existentialism is a Humanism but I'll try.





I think it saying that live has meaning once you find out your existence is finite. When you realize you won't live forever in another life you look your meaning in this life.





I don't really agree with it at all but I believe that what he means. Too nihilistic for my tastes.