Category Archives: Existentialism

Sartre: Criticism of Existence Precedes Essence and of Choice

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I’d been listening to a popular Philosophy podcast recently called Partially Examined Life. It’s quite good and I’d recommend for all who read this!

When listening to one of their podcasts on Sartre, some criticisms against him I found quite off base.

Choice

A main theme in Sartre’s body of works is that of radical freedom, that one always has a choice so to speak. It does get complicated, given Sartre also acknowledges facticity, or the factual components of a human being.

A criticism that came up was on considering a person drowning with no way to survive. Is it true that this person has no choice but to drown? Yes (lets assume that’s true in any case). Does that then provide criticism of Sartre’s conception of choice? No. That does not mean that you do not have a choice. What you may have is nothing but bad choices. That does not leave you without choice though, nothing about the idea of radical freedom suggests that you have good and bad choices, it simply means that your actions are your own, regardless of what those actions may be.

You could be completely incapacitated and have no ability to move your body except for your eyelids, and you still have a choice between blinking and not blinking. It may not be meaningful choice, but it’s still choice.

Existence Precedes Essence

Sartre’s argument is that if there was a god, humans essence would be pre-ordained. When we examine our lives however we find that we are ultimately free in our actions, we have no ‘likeness’ to anything in particular, no innate or inbuilt purpose or nature that we must pursue, unless we will it ourselves. Because we have no predetermined essence, we exist first, encounter ourselves, and are then free to define ourselves however we like, and pursue what ever projects we see fit.

Sartre’s example of something whose essence does actually precede its existence is that of a knife. A knife was a concept first, it’s project defined by our need to cut things. In realising that concept we create the object second. A knife does not come into existence without its essence being first created in our minds, in the same way a god would create us for a specific purpose (or to create us in his image).

In any case, the major criticism against this position is pretty clear. It’s clear that Sartre’s task here is merely to establish human freedom, and not actually provide a metaphysical account of the nature of things, because if we take this reasoning further, we find that there really isn’t anything whose essence precedes existence except for human artefacts.

If it is true that humans are free because our existence precedes our essence, why is that not then true of plants? It would seem to us that plants and rocks and other natural things are incapable of making action, but for Sartre’s theory there is no accounting for this.

I think Sartre’s position is redeemable (though not a particularly strong position) by assuming Sartre means that it is true only for humans that if our existence precedes our essence then we are free. That it is not necessarily true that this means other things are free, and because Sartre’s task is an existential one, he simply disregards theorising about the nature of other things, because he simply doesn’t care. It might not impact his theory at all…

Existentialism is among my favourite topics, though Sartre’s arguments are perhaps the weakest at the best of times, and the most infuriatingly unclear arguments at the worst. Let me know what you think in the comments down below!

Existentialism: The Other and The Look

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The concept of the Other can be found in various other disciplines, most notably sociology and psychology, but in existentialism (and phenomenology, where the concept originates for the existentialists), the concept is utilized somewhat differently. In this article, I will talk about the concept of the Other within the frameworks of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism, and the Look.

What is the ‘Other’?

The Other is the concept of another person like yourself, in no way other than they are just another person. It sounds pretty simple, but the idea needs to be expanded on and detailed quite a bit if we are to provide any reasonable metaphysical or phenomenological account of the world.

So what exactly is the big deal, let’s say there are two people in the room, one is me, and one is not. What’s the difference? What makes one the Other and one me?

Intersubjectivity

For one, we share an objective world. We both experience the world in the exact same way, because we are both human. We both strive toward things (in existentialism this is referred to as projects, or projections), we have the same needs and desires, even if the content is different, the format and structure of life and reality is the same.

This concept is referred to as inter-subjectivity in phenomenology and is the cornerstone of the philosophy. We have different subjective experiences of the same objective thing. We both see the same thing, but they see it from ‘over there’.

The difficulty comes down to the internal aspects of the Other. Unlike myself, I do not have access to the inner workings of that other person. I do have that access to myself, I can think and feel my own thoughts and feelings, not someone elses, and nobody else has access to it. From my perpective, I am subjective first, I am that inner content, and in my perception is the Other, an objective thing first. It is in this moment that one recognizes that though I do not have access to their inner content, they are a person like me and must therefore have it (This is an oversimplification of the existentialism argument, but to elaborate would take up too much time).

What is the ‘Look’?

Also called the Gaze, is the action of you literally being looked at by the Other. This has the effect of objectifying what ever the Other sees. Consider the following example that Sartre gives.

Imagine attempting to peer through the lock of a door, on the other side, something you know you probably shouldn’t be looking at. While you’re attempting to look through, you hear footsteps behind you.

Your mind is immediately drawn to yourself as an object. You are aware of yourself kneeling down, about to be caught in a position that you would rather like not to be caught in. You can literally see yourself in your mind as well as you start to think how another may see you metaphorically, as in what they may or may not think about you if they discover you.

The interesting part about the Look is it doesn’t actually require an Other. In the example nobody ever actually shows up, you just think they will. You could easily have been mistaken. The effect however is the same, the Look draws you to yourself objectively, in a literal sense because you start to contemplate your objective parts (being in the world, kneeling down, all of the parts an Other can comprehend about you through perception).

For those familiar with Sartre’s philosophy, you may notice that the Look has a secondary affect of forcing oneself to see yourself as something, instead of the ‘blank slate’ that Sartre proposes.

Sartre’s Facticity and Authenticity

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Facticity as it is found in the Existentialist tradition, particularly in Sartre’s works, embodies the limitations of freedom. Facticity refers to the factual components of a human being, things we cannot choose that are necessarily a part of us. Some of these things are completely concrete. Your birth and where you grow up are two examples that are completely concrete in nature, they are essentially unchangeable by you, in yet are factors in your life that will influence who you are and how you see the world. Other things that are not exactly concrete include your history or past actions. They are still yours, and are made objective through your actions.

The main importance of facticity in Sartre’s works is in recognising the factual influences that a person must deal with in their lives that provide a limit to freedom. As those of you familiar with Sartre’s work, a person is fundamentally free to choose to be whomever they wish. Your identity is always your choice. You however obviously cannot choose to fly, as you don’t have any means to do so. Recognising these limitations to your freedom is critically important. It shows you the boundaries of your choices and actions, and that if you come to understand those boundaries, you can maximise the effect of your choices and actions.

The major virtue in Existentialism is authenticity. To be true to ones self. To fully, and radically embrace the freedom that comes with existing, and recognise that meaning has no inherent value outside of what you choose things to mean. Recognising and understanding facticity is critical to achieving authenticity.

Two important aspects of facticity as it relates to authenticity are, 1) you recognise and embrace the objective, concrete parts of yourself, and 2) you recognise that they do not define you.

In regards to your own history, to be fully authentic one has to embrace the factual matter that you have done things, perhaps things you disagree with and are ashamed of. To reject that would be inauthentic, and essentially pretending that we as human beings do not have histories. The critical part is, any persons history does not define you. You define yourself, you have to determine what your history means to you. Even if you’ve done things you think are downright terrible, it is still on you not to be those things in the future, and by embracing your past, accepting that it is a part of you, but refusing to be that person and instead changing is to be fully authentic, to be driven by your own choices, and not by facticitious things.

If that sounds appealing, I’d recommend checking out the following links.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) is a beginner friendly / intermediate level resource in Philosophy.

Chapters 3 and 4 are relevant and briefly outline Facticity (Sometimes referred to as Being-in-itself)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

The chapter on Sartre’s Ontology is the relevant starting point.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is for advanced readers only. These consist of published, peer reviewed articles by professionals in the relevant fields. If you’re not familiar with existentialism and haven’t read any of the relevant literature definitely steer clear of this one for now.

Existentialism is a Humanism: Thoughts

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After finishing the book, I had intended to write a series of blog posts regarding the various ideas contained within, in the way that they are presented. Having read Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s main work, I thought it could be interesting to have a look at the ideas and how they are different in Existentialism is a Humanism.

I decided to scrap that. I posted instead about Sartre’s ethics presented therein, something that has interested me for a long time.

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Existentialism is a Humanism: Sartre and Ethics

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As those of you who have been following will probably know, I’ve been reading through Existentialism is a Humanism, an impromptu lecture called by Jean-Paul Sartre to defend his philosophical approach against what he saw as public ignorance and profound misunderstanding, borderline hatred, of his Philosophical works.

(Note that when I refer to ‘man’, I refer to humans. I would use the word human, or humanity, but that has specific meaning in these contexts and I would rather not make it more confusing)

In it, Sartre attempts to counter the claim that Existentialism promotes subjectivity, and that subjectivity results in amorality, that ‘anything goes’. Sartre argues that it is both true and false. First lets examine a story Sartre told.

Earlier in the lecture, Sartre tells a story of a young student of his, who comes to him during the war (1943) and asks for his guidance. The student does not know what to do, his mother needs him, and implies that him being in her life is all that is keeping her going. He does not know whether to stay with her, for her sake, and out of his own emotional attachment and love for her, or to leave France and join up with the Free French Forces in Britain.

The student continues, saying that his choice to stay with his mother is far more concrete and certain, that he is quite sure that the outcome of staying with his mother will be likely positive, and a good thing. He unsure though how joining the Free French will go, whether he will arrive in Spain, looking to travel to Britain, and instead be detained and imprisoned for the rest of the war. Or perhaps succeed and end up in a desk job in Britain, with negligible or questionable impact, with no way to take back his decision.

Sartre’s guidance was short and quite direct. “You are free; So choose”.

Sartre’s response is based on two premises. Sartre believes that he cannot actually give the student moral guidance. First, he believes that you cannot derive action from any current ethical theory, no axiom or rule can actually tell you what to do. YOU must choose, even if you use a moral theory as guidance, YOU must choose so.

Second, the student has already decided what kind of guidance he would like, he already is choosing. When someone looks for guidance, one looks towards some sources and not others. Christians will turn to a priest, because they already believe that their guidance will have value. Similarly, this student had turned to Sartre, who gave him guidance in turn.

Back to Sartre’s response to the criticism that he promotes subjectivity. This is, as we can see, in some sense true. Sartre holds that mans existence precedes essence. That man is fundamentally free, to choose whatever action, there is no God, or concrete objective value that determines action. However, that does not imply the kind of subjectivity that Sartre is being criticized for.

Sartre holds that, while the actions that you take are individual, you take them on behalf of all mankind. When you choose, you choose for all. You essentially declare, this is the right action. This is contrary to a traditional relativist position in Ethics, and Sartre certainly does not advocate relativism, or nihilism. What is right for you is not somehow different than what is right for others. He gives an example of a man choosing to have a kids and family. If he then decides to reject that responsibility, he is through his actions proclaiming that this is just action, and that all men ought to do the same. Note that he is not claiming that it is just. You are free to act, but morality is not subjective, human reality is. Just because God does not exist, or objective meaning is fictitious, does not justify relativism.

A secondary criticism Sartre received was that because of this outlook, existentialists could not judge others, because by what metric or value could they? If there is no objective set of rules with which to point, they could hold people to no standards.

This criticism is perhaps the one that missed the mark by far. Sartre in Existentialism is a Humanism does not touch on whether or not he believes Existentialists should talk about moral values as they are traditionally thought of, for example, he does not actually give his personal opinion to the young student as to what decision he should make, precisely because there is no abstract guidance that can help. One must choose, that is all. It is in this choice that morality is realized, a man must make himself. There is no morality outside of choice.

Existentialists like Sartre however, will absolutely judge, not morally, but factually, others who act in bad faith. Bad faith is when one acts in any way that denies or otherwise avoids having to choose. If one blames their decision on circumstance, or bad advice, they are acting in bad faith, because they are pretending that they had not made a choice at all, when in reality the only thing that mattered was their choice, as man is “…condemned to be free”. You have no choice but to choose, so choose.

If a man put a gun to your head and told you to kill someone, or they will kill you, you may very well do what they say. But if you for a second think that it was his choice and not yours, you would most definitely be acting in bad faith. One cannot have their freedom taken away.

For the existentialists, this judgement is simply saying, your reasoning does not make sense, it is impossible for this to be the case, a man chooses, it is the human condition to have choice. You cannot pretend otherwise. This is also why he abstains from giving any moral guidance to his young student.

Sartre’s thoughts on Ethics change throughout his works. His position in Existentialism is a Humanism is quite rudimentary, and he is (quite rightfully) focused much more on explaining Existentialism, so his discussion of ethics focuses mostly on freedom, along side abandonment and anguish, which I have not discussed here.

I’d definitely encourage others to read this text, it’s quite short, but most definitely keep in mind its historical context. It’s an interesting introduction into the ideas, but Sartre himself eventually regretted its publication, and backtracked one some of the ideas presented. It’s particularly easy to follow, but it doesn’t replace a reading of Being and Nothingness if you’re intent is to understand Sartre’s Existentialism.

Honesty and Authenticity

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 “The high minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.” Aristotle

 

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Jean-Paul Sartre

I’ve often thought that honesty was the most pivotal virtue, along side courage. What good is any other virtue if you’re not capable of standing by it when called for and willing to present honest information to others so as not to mislead them? You cannot abide any virtue without first having the courage to do what you think is right, and the honesty not to mislead anyone or misrepresent the state of things so that others may have the chance to act virtuous, including yourself.

While I still very much agree with the place of honesty and courage within my ethical framework, it has started to become quite difficult in ascertaining where exactly the appropriate amount of honesty is. I generally hold honesty in a very high regard, and hope to only lie in extreme situations. To mislead others I believe is one of the gravest immoral actions to be had, primarily because it denies another person the opportunity to act in accordance with the world around them. By lying to somebody, I essentially condemn them to failure on their attempts to be ‘good’ if I knowingly hand them faulty information, knowing full well that if they act on that information it will lead to consequences that person has not intended. In light of this view though, I feel I’ve run into some difficult situations where it would seem like lying becomes a necessary evil, but I’m still not sure to what expense. I will attempt to detail how I think honesty works, and then attempt to highlight the issue, particularly how it relates to Sartre’s concept of authenticity.

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Sartre’s Tribute to Albert Camus

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I felt this needed sharing, it is quite amazing. Sartre and Camus had somewhat of a falling out in their later years, but after Camus’s sudden and unexpected death, Sartre had written a tribute/eulogy for Camus.

CAMUS: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS

Edited by Germaine Bree.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962.

Pages 173-175

Tribute to Albert Camus
by Jean-Paul Sartre

Six months ago, even yesterday, people wondered: “What is he going to do?” Temporarily, torn by contradictions that must be respected, he had chosen silence. But he was one of those rare men we can well afford to wait for, because they are slow to choose and remain faithful to their choice. Some day he would speak out. We could not even have dared hazard a guess as to what he might say. But we thought that he had changed with the world as we all do; that was enough for us to be aware of his presence.

He and I had quarreled. A quarrel doesn’t matter — even if those who quarrel never see each other again — just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that is allotted us. It didn’t. keep me from thinking of him, from feeling that his eyes were on the book or newspaper I was reading and wondering: “What does he think of it? What does he think of it at this moment?”

His silence, which according to events and my mood I considered sometimes too cautious and sometimes painful, was a quality of every day like heat or light, but it was human. We lived with or against his thought as it was revealed to us in his books-especially The Fall, perhaps the finest and least understood-but always in relation to it. It was an exceptional adventure of our culture, a movement of which we tried to guess the phases and the final outcome.

He represented in our time the latest example of that long line of moralistes whose works constitute perhaps the most original element in French letters. His obstinate humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged an uncertain war against the massive and formless events of the time. But on the other hand through his dogged rejections he reaffirmed, at the heart of our epoch, against the Machiavellians and against the Idol of realism, the existence of the moral issue.

In a way, he was that resolute affirmation. Anyone who read or reflected encountered the human values he held in his fist; he questioned the political act. One had to avoid him or fight him-he was indispensable to that tension which makes intellectual life what it is. His very silence, these last few years, had something positive about it: This Descartes of the Absurd refused to leave the safe ground of morality and venture on the uncertain paths of practicality. We sensed this and we also sensed the conflicts he kept hidden, for ethics, taken alone, both requires and condemns revolt.

We were waiting; we had to wait; we had to know. Whatever he did or decided subsequently, Camus would never have ceased to be one of the chief forces of our cultural activity or to represent in his way the history of France and of this century. But we should probably have known and understood his itinerary. He said so himself: “My work lies ahead.” Now it is over. The particular scandal of his death is the abolition of the human order by the inhuman.

The human order is still but a disorder: it is unjust and precarious; it involves killing, and dying of hunger; but at least it is founded, maintained, or resisted by men. In that order Camus had to live. That man on the move questioned us, was himself a question seeking its reply; he lived in the middle of a long life; for us, for him, for the men who maintain order and for those who reject it, it was important for him to break his silence, for him to decide, for him to conclude. Some die in old age while others, forever on reprieve, may die at any minute without the meaning of their life, of life itself, being changed. But for us, uncertain without a compass, our best men had to reach the end of the tunnel. Rarely have the nature of a man’s work and the conditions of the historical moment so clearly demanded that a writer go on living.

I call the accident that killed Camus a scandal because it suddenly projects into the center of our human world the absurdity of our most fundamental needs. At the age of twenty, Camus, suddenly afflicted with a malady that upset his whole life, discovered the Absurd-the senseless negation of man. He became accustomed to it, he thought out his unbearable condition, he came through. And yet one is tempted to think that only his first works tell the truth about his life, since that invalid once cured is annihilated by an unexpected death from the outside.

The Absurd might be that question that no one will ask him now, that he will ask no one, that silence that is not even a silence now, that is absolutely nothing now.

I don’t think so. The moment it appears, the inhuman becomes a part of the human. Every life that is cut off-even the life of so young a man -is at one and the same time a phonograph record that is broken and a complete life. For all those who loved him, there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work. Insofar as Camus’s humanism contains a human attitude toward the death that was to take him by surprise, insofar as his proud and pure quest for happiness implied and called for the inhuman necessity of dying, we shall recognize in that work and in the life that is inseparable from it the pure and victorious attempt of one man to snatch every instant of his existence from his future death.

Eternal Recurrence

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The most well known version of the concept of ‘Eternal Recurrence’, sometimes known as ‘Eternal Return’, was posited as a thought experiment by Friedrich Nietzsche. Though not the first to encounter this idea, Nietzsche struggled with the concept for a long time, he felt at that the idea of the Eternal Recurrence was the most disturbing and most puzzling of all value judgements, and seems to highlight his critique of values very well.

It is important to note that this is a Thought experiment and not a metaphysical claim. Though Nietzsche had originally intended it as a claim to truth, prior to the writing of the Gay Science he had reformulated it into a purely hypothetical concept.

The concept as put forth by Nietzsche is as follows.

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, s.341, Walter Kaufmann transl.

At first it seems difficult to understand the purpose of this thought experiment at all, though the beginning phrase, “The greatest weight” alludes to the problem Nietzsche had encountered. If we know we are to experience the same things over and over again, how would we value things? Even the slightest actions would be given almost infinite weight, as we would be forced to experience them over and over and over countless times. In the only case in which i could ever answer in the affirmative would be if i were to have lived every moment in my life to the highest…. highest what? Nietzsche had undone pretty much all values possible. I cannot say i live morally as Nietzsche had clearly undone that. How am i to solve this riddle?

One possible approach is that Nietzsche was putting this forth as a kind of ‘imperative’, similar to that of Kant. If we are to run our lives through this thought experiment, what will our reaction be to the demon? We are not borrowing any systemic approach, we are not being told how to value, we are simply being asked what we value by having this question asked of us. But at the same time it seems to be the greatest burden imaginable to have to re-live life over and over. In the perfect possible world, where i have done everything to the point that i am satisfied with life, i feel i have lived it to it’s greatest extent; this is the only situation i can conceive of in which i would rejoice. However where does that leave us? We cannot exactly use that in any meaningful way in life, even if we strive towards that goal, we will likely never reach it, and have to deal with these great burdens.

Nietzsche’s vague response to these issues are as follows:

To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain ( pain conceived as a tool, as the father of pleasure…); the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the “will”; abolition of “knowledge-in-itself.”

Greatest elevation of the consciousness of strength in man, as he creates the overman.

from The Will to Power, s. 1053,1056,1058,1060, Walter Kaufmann transl.

If we are to abolish so many of these core values that we hold, are we not just evading the problem by rendering life meaningless? Or do i contradict Nietzsche’s philosophy by taking his theory of the overman by adopting his values towards it, becoming the very thing he warns against? This mystery seems unsolvable to me, with my limited understanding of what is very clearly a complicated and radical philosophy.

It seems to understand the thought experiment, and to understand Nietzsche’s philosophy itself continually falls back on his rejection of morality and of herd mentality, which is by no means an easy task. Perhaps without a proper understanding of Nietzsche i shall never fully unravel the mystery of eternal recurrence as he saw it.

*This is just a test blog post, scrambled down in the early hours so forgive the quality!