Are any of you fans of Satre? Do you think he came to some conclusions that strike you as being true? I’ve heard people say he completely misunderstood Heidegger. Do you think that is so? Have there been any people who can be considered as Sartre’s heirs?
Homework or personal interest?
I’m a fan.
His positions are interesting.
The ‘free-will’ thing…I am not entirely convinced about.
I have read some of his stuff. I like some of his positions, such as the whole your free, but responsible for your actions liberating, but I believe out of all the French exsistienalist, the best was not even an exsistenalist. I am refering to Camus.
Just for personal interest. I really like his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. I’m reading Being and Nothingness right now, and I must say that I’m not really getting much of it. It’s been the toughest philosophy book I’ve ever read, but I also am not really giving it the attention it needs. I plan on reading it again after I read some of his predecessors works. I just bought Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit yesterday. I’ve been wanting to read it for years now. I hear that it will drive me crazy.
I’ve been wanting to ask you who are your influences?
Heraclitus - Socrates - Plato - Schopenhauer – Dostoyevsky - Nietzsche - Heidegger – Freud - Sartre – Russell – Baudrillard ….and everyone I’ve ever read has added something to my understanding:
I plan to read much, much more, like:
Spinoza, Hegel, Hume, Deleuze, Jung, Adler, Foucault, Voltaire … etc.
Camus was the best, but just cause he whined not to be labeled as an Existentialist doesn’t mean he wasn’t one. (at least to me)
Love the quote: “HELL IS–OTHER PEOPLE.”
Camus was the best, but just cause he whined not to be labeled as an Existentialist doesn’t mean he wasn’t one. (at least to me)
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He is considered an Absurdist. Read the Myth of Sisyphus to see his intial position on the absurd. I disagree with the Myth of Sisyphus, it’s too nihilistic. The Rebel is by far his best philosophilcal position.
awesome
Good, good.
It all made more sense when I started to read Husserl. But yes, Being and Nothingness is a long, difficult text that doesn’t offer that much for the effort it requires of you. I’m not a big fan of Sartre’s writing style.
Probably will.
Yes and no. He’s interesting, but wrong about almost everything.
In truth, no. Sartre spun a lengthy story about how being-for-itself is the means to freedom and how being-for-itself can view itself as being-in-itself and this is bad faith (put more simply, choosing to not be free). What Sartre never explains is how any given choice is more or less free than any other given choice, without useing this metaphysical phenomenology as a crutch. Again, put simply, regardless of what I choose, if I choose, then I’m as free as the next person.
So no I’m not sure about the ‘free will thing’ either…
Particularly coming from a man who claimed to be a communist. Of course, there are a lot of people who claimed to be communists but were individualists and don’t realise how both are myth and propaganda.
Indeed, my main problem with Sartre is that he seems to have been taken in by the decadent ideological confidence trick of individual freedom of the will, i.e. he hasn’t read his Nietzsche properly (despite openly referencing him). The notion is so tempting, mainly because if someone disagrees you can just resort to smart-alec quips like ‘That’s because you freely chose, as an individual, to disagree with me’, which is a roundabout way of insulting them and asserting that you are right, without arguing for it.
Indeed, about 90% of all individualist philosophers pull this trick, intentionally or otherwise. It’s really sad, given that they invariably claim to be also be ‘sceptical’ and ‘wise’ and ‘open minded’ and ‘woken up from the dream’ and a million other morose and moronic metaphors.
Yes, everyone misunderstands Heidegger.
Merleau-Ponty certainly got famous off the back of Sartre’s fame.
In my view, and this is one that some critics and historians agree with, French philosophy circa 1940 was divided between the Existentialists and the Structuralists, and I think we all know which discourse is still running and which one is conceived of as a literary-cultural fad.
Then there’s Althusser, who bridges the two (he was a sort of Marxist-structuralist-phenomenologist). But there’s usually someone who resists the definitions…
Someone the avatar - come on man “hard” on the eyes like plus some of us acess the board thro work - I know sooo bold.
(I disagree strongly on Being And Nothingness - btw - think its excellent and reasonably easy to read.
Further it was ACTUALLY Sartre who first attacked “transcendental subjectivity” and is RIGHTLY bigged up by Deleuze (of all people for doing so) - I think many “existentialists” (if such exist any more) are often quite leary of the “I” and realise that it is constructed and contested by language, others etc -
I WISH people would bloody read Satre!)
Anyways - Here’s a difficulty I had with the big man previously
(recycling from ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=150277)
(btw i have read some interesting psychological explanations for the apparent switch - most stress that it was after the war and he was trying to poularize existentialism so he “kantised” it up to allow for the collective euphoria at the successful defeat of facism)
This is the second board on which I’ve used that avatar and it’s the second board on which I’ve been asked to remove it. I don’t get why being at work would be a problem - it’s hardly explicit.
Alright.
What do you mean by transcendental subjectivity?
If you mean what I think you mean, then Heraclitus attacked it. And Nietzsche.
Many are. Sartre uses it endlessly and makes a huge issue out of individual freedom and how to conceive of yourself otherwise is bad faith.
Attacking one version of an idea only to replace it with another isn’t a particularly impressive move, for me. It was also at odds with professed (and, in all fairness, acted-upon) political beliefs.
Whereas I wish they wouldn’t. There are better writers out there.
You mean that his work wasn’t his realisation of his own condition in the pure evanescence of consciousness? He was just a man, in the world, affected by it, having to yield to it? I don’t mean this as sardonically as it probably sounds, I’m genuinely interested in why you’re applying a Marxist historicism to an existentialist individualist. ist.
Hey I’m not asking ya to remove it - just saying I don’t like it - this Hoff stuff I just never got personally…
Sartre wrote a book called the critique of transcendental subjectivity (early 1930s i believe) - which takes positions some what like Lacan etc where later to elaborate - eg he’s actually quite hard on the idea of a complete solipsistic I
(I presume that’s what he means by transcendental subjectivity) and acknowledges its constructed nature.
Now, in fairness, no existentialist would ever deny “facticity” and that many things have a bearing on what you are - just that you are free to construct yourself within limits - that the limits aren’t “an excuse” I’d be the first to admit that a starving African can’t wish himself the ruler of the world
- so you may some times only get to choose your attitude…!
I always understood that bad faith and self deception were one and the same thing for him (in fact it just depends on translation of muavias faux? - sorry I’ve no French) and that they were to do with the self - I’m pretty sure he absolutely does say its within a person and that, further, its constitutive of being a person and this is what all the examples - the waiter, the girl etc are to do with (and I’ve actually read it pretty recently)
In this way Sartre may be a lot closer to later French philosophy/psychology then imagined.
- The glance of another may “activate” it (or even the imagined glance of another) but its exists in every person as an individual - so individuality is far from a boring Cartesian version.
He actually goes to great lengths on how the self “conceals” info that it knows at one level from itself at another level.
This is how it works and what makes it so weird - you have to “know” at one level what you conceal from yourself at another.
He specifically rules out the Freudian sub consciousness as a potential “escape route” where the “deceiving half†might hide - devotes a whole chapter almost to it.
Portrait of an anti Semite is also good - he develops it there in a less technical way
He argues strongly that this duality is within one consciousness - in fact that was the whole point as far as I could make out.
And here I am once again in a big empty room
room room…
Anyhow just grabbed the relevant quote:
I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as deceived
(chapter of self deception from being and nothingness)
and later after the waiter etc…
But we definitely establish that the original structure of “not being what one is” renders impossible in advance all movement towards being in itself or “being what one is” And this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the contrary it is the very stuff of consciousness"…“what is sincerity then except precisely a phenomenon of self deception”…“total and constant sincerity is by nature a constant effort to dissociate oneself from oneself” and so on
I’m pretty sure Nietzsche’s will to power can’t really be dissociated from some sort of “I” (though OK he sees it as in nature and all around etc) but then again fundamentally Nietzsche is fashionable and Sartre hasn’t been for quite a while.
All I would say is that though existentialism is a humanism is a good read but it is very uncharacteristic of his deeper philosophy and I still don’t get the turn to almost the Kantian turn were bad faith is “to be bad” or “morally wrong” per sae.
This I think is very much not in Sartres worked out philosophical/psychological view of the world which sees bad faith as being simply part of what we are as humans.
Mauvaise fois is the word any how which literally is “bad faith†but is rendered as “self deception†by most translators
Sartre called the “ontological proof” for consciousness the fact that if it exists there must be a freedom-from-being-something, in so far as to be conscious is to be in a position to comprehend knowledge of something that is not itself.
Epistemology necessarily involves choices, it is dialectical (and caught up in a web where there is no beginning), and where there are choices there is contingency. What is not necessary is what I choose to believe, but it is necessary that I believe something, if it is nothing other than this possibility itself. This necessary feature of consciousness is what gives it its being-- it is a being that is supported by a being other than itself.
Descartes wasn’t completely right…the cogito is pre-reflective and the “ego” is in the world, as a choice, a thing of knowledge. There is not a “doubting self,” but consciousness of a “doubting self.”
And consciousness is directional. There is no “sub-conscious.” If I am aware I have also already chosen to believe, and am in the process if intending a future by defining, backwards, what I concieve in language.
[The extent of knowable determination, the counter to freewill (which Sartre doesn’t use because there is no “will.” He explicitly calls it a freedom), is nothing more than the spontaneous project I have in mind when I am aware of myself choosing to believe something. This project is the context and it supercedes the being of language and the empirical determination of logic. There is no epistemological foundation for consciousness. It is a matter of ontology.]
It cannot be said that my actions, if I am conscious and direct my effort toward action, are determined by anything other than my choice concerning my possibilites, nor are they “word results,” since I am already acting and directional before I define and complete the context of the thought I am asked to explain.
For instance if I say something to you, and you ask me what I mean, I am both in the future and in a present; the future is what-is-about-to-be and the past of what I had at my disposal in language. If a word could cause an action, I should have to be able to find a word which I would not spend time defining, or else there is a paradox.
If I then were to choose to act while thinking, I would have some intent in mind, yet at the next moment I must reconsider the end I have in mind, and decide if it should be altered or changed.
This upsurge, as Sartre liked to call it, is in fact both the motive and the end combined, and one might argue “how can one change a motive from the future?” Well, because the end of the former motive is recovered and transcended by the present, that is, the set moves again forward-- the intention/act/end is one “ensemble” and exists in a new future. Being-in-itself is disconnected, it is not an “event” or a situation. It is consciousness that directs the world through its negations, comparisons, abstractions. These states are acts of freedom.
For example, if I am engaged in thinking my way through a series of philosophical contentions, I am involved in two things; one is my presence to the words in my mind and the other is the forced meaning I am made to place upon the word as if it were in a context. I can both think a word, and have in mind a definition, but I also must have a direction or purpose…an intent…to the reason why I have chosen what to believe. I cannot be non-directionally conscious (unless I am seriously stoned) and not involved and engaged in thinking.
The determination of the thinking happens backwards and at the same time it is determined by the future, something which has not yet happened.
Say I decide “this cannot be true.” Next I am forced to begin concieving why, and this “why” is the motion toward the intentional and is not contextual, but is instead the source of the contextual. If I can concieve of something but not need to explain why I can, then I wouldn’t be conscious to knowing I concieve it.
This context is nothing more than the summary of the thoughts in mind accompanied with immediate experience. There is nothing happening where I am not choosing.
I might say “this is because of that,” and I would be expected to define what “that” is in order to make a reference to it. Therefore, there is no moment in thinking or language where the context is steadfast and determinate, since as a movement into the future, a temporal ekstases (Sartre), consciousness is present to itself as conscious of the object; this object is the total immediate thought in mind and is happening, but it is an act of freedom, it is contingent.
If I choose to believe that things are determined I attempt to suspend myself from my inescapable presence to my consciousness as it is directed in acting. Since I cannot know a future before acting, my direct conscious action must involve nothing, or if you prefer, I am ever present to myself as having-chose to believe what I find myself reflecting on and only to the point where I have exhausted my directional thinking. This would be synonomous with unconsciousness, since “sub-conciousness” is an uneccesary and even oxymoronic postulate. There is no significance in a consciousness that is not aware of itself as consciousness of something.
This is what freedom is, in a nut-shell, but not really because then it wouldn’t be free…it would be in the nut-shell.
I’m tellin you, man, all hitherto attempts at ontology before Sartre do not look in the right places for whatever a priori structures are present in experience.
Being and Nothingness is a monster, and it might seem to be a bunch of lyrical jargon. I have never read it chronologically but have, more or less, spent time in every section. Enough to get the theme and the skeleton of his idea. There is indeed a system and a method, extremely well organized, and meant for “specialists and philosophers,” as he put it. I understand his lexicon very well and am familiar with the Hegelian lineage he came from. Nonetheless he remained a direct-realist and in this sense was not close to Hegel or Husserl.
I wouldn’t like to say whether Sartre mis-understood Heidegger or whether he tried to re-situate him … but Sartre seems to be caught in the subjectivity of the ‘I’ which Heidegger wanted to take to a … ummm … ‘higher’ I’m not sure if that is an appropriate word … level … a more metaphysical level is probably more accurate word.
Regarding Bad Faith … I’ve always felt that this was more like wishful thinking … I wont bore you with my undergraduate essay on it … but the crux of it was that we all are capable of self-deception i.e. being what we are not, just because we wish that we could be what we are not.
Quick example, I plan to go on a diet, I ‘decide’ I have dieted enough to warrant buying a size smaller pair of trousers, I try them on, look in the mirror and think they look fab … the experienced shop assistent thinks they look too small … but I buy them anyway. I’ve ‘lied’ to myself … big bit of ‘bad faith’ but in the scheme of things … this is wishful thinking.
Where Sartre really scores (and I just love reading him) is that somewhere, somehow, he strikes a chord. Totally un-philosophic comment but somehow he encapsualtes the clastrophobia (spelling?) of the (or my) human condition! Read ‘Nausica’ and see if it strikes you
Detrop I scanned that and I think I like it!
I’ll print it out and have a read
nice one boss
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