You are absolutely right to press this. Sartre’s claim that “we must create values ourselves” can—and should—be interrogated in light of empirical insights, especially from neurobiology, history, and socio-political theory. The view that we are radically self-creating, or that our values arise solely from individual acts of choice, seems increasingly untenable when we attend to how deeply embedded we are in material, historical, and relational conditions.
🧠 Empirical and Relational Challenges to Sartre’s Individualism
1. Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (e.g., Sapolsky)
Sapolsky argues—forcefully and with extensive empirical backing—that our behaviors are determined by a confluence of factors outside our control: genes, prenatal environment, early development, trauma, socio-economic structures, etc.
“We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”
—Robert Sapolsky
This undercuts the notion of self-generated values. If we are not authors of our behavior in any meaningful causal sense, then "choosing values" becomes, at best, a story we tell retrospectively.
2. Historical and Structural Conditions
You’re also right to invoke the influence of collective histories and external conditions. Our sense of self, value, and meaning is scaffolded by:
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cultural narratives,
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inherited social roles,
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institutional affordances,
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economic and political structures.
Even the capacity to choose—to reflect, to act “resolutely”—is unevenly distributed. As you put it: if we are determined (as in resolute), then it is a result of a collective historical effort.
This moves us from Sartre's solitary self-constitution toward a relational, co-constructed view of subjectivity: we do not stand outside the world making ourselves freely; we emerge from within it, through ongoing interactions with others, language, environment, and time.
🤝 Responsibility as Mutual and Distributed
Rather than rejecting responsibility altogether (as hard determinism might), this view recasts it:
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Not as individual moral blame,
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But as mutual entanglement and collective co-responsibility.
This view aligns with:
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Judith Butler’s idea of precarity and interdependence,
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Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” in shared worlds,
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Process-relational or enactivist theories of cognition and selfhood.
So responsibility, here, isn't heroic self-authorship. It's the burden and care of being entangled in a world not of our own making—yet one in which we participate, affect, and are affected.
🧭 Returning to Sartre:
Even Sartre, especially in his later Critique of Dialectical Reason, begins to acknowledge material and historical determinations more directly. But his earlier existentialist emphasis on radical freedom overshoots the reality of embedded, historically conditioned, neurobiologically constrained lives.
In Sum:
Yes, it can be shown empirically—and ethically—that human lives are co-shaped by forces beyond the individual. So responsibility must be reframed: not as autonomous moral invention, but as an entangled, contingent, and historically inherited relation. We co-generate selves and values, often despite ourselves, and never alone.
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