Existentialism

Answer : Sartre and Heidegger are existentialist where as Husserl is a phenomenologist. Sartre’s view diverges from Husserl’s on the important issue of the ego. For Sartre, Husserl adopted the view that the subject is a substance with attributes, as a result of his interpretation of Kant’s unity of apperception. Husserl endorsed the Kantian claim that the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany any representation of which I am conscious, but reified this ‘I’ into a transcendental ego. Such a move is not warranted for Sartre and Heidegger, as they explain in The Transcendence of the Ego. Moreover, it leads to the following problems for our phenomenological analysis of consciousness. The ego would have to feature as an object in all states of consciousness. This would result in its obstructing our conscious access to the world. But this would conflict with the direct nature of this conscious access. Correlatively, consciousness would be divided into consciousness of ego and consciousness of the world. This would however be at odds with the simple, and thus undivided, nature of our access to the world through conscious experience. In other words, when we are conscious of a tree, weare directly conscious of it, and are not ourselves an object of consciousness. Sartre proposes therefore to view the ego as a unity produced by consciousness. In other words, he adds to the Hume’s picture of the self as a bundle of perceptions, an account of its unity. This unity of the ego is a product of conscious activity. As a result, the traditional Cartesian view that self-consciousness is the consciousness the ego has of itself no longer holds, since the ego is not given but created by consciousness. What model does Sartre propose for our understanding of self-consciousness and the production of the ego through conscious activity? The key to answering the first part of the question lies in Sartre’s introduction of a pre-reflective level, while the second can then be addressed by examining conscious activity at the other level, i.e. that of reflection. An example of pre-reflective consciousness is the seeing of a house. This type of consciousness is directed to a transcendent object, but this does not involve my focusing upon it, i.e. it does not require that an ego be involved in a conscious relation to the object. For Sartre, this pre-reflective consciousness is thus impersonal: there is no place for an ‘I’ at this level. Importantly, Sartre insists that self-consciousness is involved in any such state of consciousness: it is the consciousness this state has of itself. This accounts for the phenomenology of ‘seeing’, which is such that the subject is clearly aware of her pre-reflective consciousness of the house. This awareness does not have an ego as its object, but it is rather the awareness that there is an act of ‘seeing’. Reflective consciousness is the type of state of consciousness involved in my looking at a house. For Sartre, the cogito emerges as a result of consciousness’s being directed upon the pre-reflectively conscious. In so doing, reflective consciousness takes the pre-reflectively conscious as being mine. It thus reveals an ego insofar as an ‘I’ is brought into focus: the pre-reflective consciousness which is objectified is viewed as mine. This ‘I’ is the correlate of the unity that I impose upon the pre-reflective states of consciousness through my reflection upon them. To

Answer : The proposition that existence precedes essence is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence or nature of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence. To existentialists, the human being - through his consciousness - creates his own values and determines a meaning to his life, for in the beginning the human being does not possess any identity or value. By posing the acts that constitute him, he makes his existence more significant. The idea can be found in the works of Averroes in the 12th century, Mulla Sadra in the 17th century, Soren Kierkegaard in the 19th century, and was later more explicitly formulated by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century. Simone de Beauvoir also uses this concept in her feminist existentialism to develop the idea that “one is not born a woman, but becomes one”. In western philosophy Sartre flips this around arguing that for humans, existence precedes essence. The three-word formula originates with Sartre in his 1945 lecture “Existentialism Is Humanism” (though antecedent notions can be found in Heidegger’s Being and Time).

The Sartrean claim is best understood in contrast to an established principle of metaphysics that essence precedes existence, i.e. that there is such a thing as human nature, determined by the cosmic order (or a god), laid down by religious tradition, or legislated by political or social authority. A typical claim for this traditional thesis would be that man is essentially selfish, or that he is a rational being. To Sartre, the idea that “existence precedes essence” means that a personality is not build over a previous designed model or a precise purpose, because that’s the human being who chooses to engage in such enterprise. When it is said that man defines himself, it is often perceived as stating that man can “wish” to be something - anything, a bird, for instance - and then be it. According to Sartre’s account, however, this would be a kind of bad faith. What is meant by the statement is that man is (1) defined only insofar as he acts and (2) that he is responsible for his actions. To clarify, it can be said that a man who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel man and in that same instance, he (as opposed to his genes, for instance) is defined as being responsible for being this cruel man. Of course, the more positive therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: You can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially.

Answer : For Sartre, each agent is endowed with unlimited freedom. Freedom is rather to be understood as characteristic of the nature of consciousness, i.e. as spontaneity. But there is more to freedom. Sartre presents his notion of freedom as amounting to making choices, and indeed not being able to avoid making choices. Sartre’s conception of choice can best be understood by reference to an individual’s original choice, as we saw above. Sartre views the whole life of an individual as expressing an original project that unfolds throughout time. This is not a project which the individual has proper knowledge of, but rather one which she may interpret (an interpretation constantly open to revision). Specific choices are therefore always components in time of this time-spanning original choice of project. How can freedom exist in Spinoza’s “deterministic” universe?

According to Spinoza’s definition of freedom, a thing is said to be free which exists by the mere necessity of its own nature and is determined in its actions by itself alone. Like Aristotle, Spinoza values something as terms to the extent to which it realizes its nature. Real freedom, for Spinoza, means acting according to the necessary nature of man. Freedom means to follow the determined conatus which is man striving to persist in his own being. When applied to human beings, the general law of self-preservation has distinctive importance to Spinoza’s concept of freedom. Spinoza’s ethics is based on ontology of man whose moral condition can only be accounted for by his own existential condition. Spinoza’s moral philosophy has a definite naturalistic character. He sees the foundation of virtue as the endeavor a person makes to preserve his own being. It follows that the basic unit of Spinozist ethics is the individual human person. The attainment of virtuous beliefs is a legitimate end the acquisition of which is something for each individual to achieve if he can. It is in a person’s interest to be moral and virtuous. For Spinoza, virtue involves the fuller development of one’s individuality.

According to Spinoza, man’s necessary nature (i.e., to persist in his own being) is not absolutely necessary. Instead, it is possible, contingent, and voluntarily acquired depending upon an effective person’s chosen activities. For Spinoza, freedom means the existence of options and the ability to make value judgments and decisions. He says that a human being has the power to act and is the origin of the impulse to act. He views freedom as the positive intellectual capacity to act in order to attain our own ends with the knowledge that our actions are always limited by natural law. ForSpinoza, power is the knowledge of necessity. He explains that powerful (i.e., virtuous) persons act because they understand why they must act. To be free is to be guided by the law of one’s own nature which, according to Spinoza, is never inconsistent with the law of another’s nature. He explains that a person’s interactions with the rest of nature can either increase his ability or power to preserve in his existence or decrease his ability to do so. It follows that we should pursue what we believe will benefit us by increasing our power to act.

Answer : Heidegger has provided the most concise definition of Dasein. To exist as Da-sein means to hold open a domain through its capacity to receive-perceive the significance of things that are given to it and that address virtue of its own “clearing”. To hold open a domain refers to Dasein, as being-in-the-world, is always already holding open a world. In other words at each moment our ideas express not only the truth but also our capacity to attain.

To be able to think implies the opening up of a particular world wherein that thought is meaningful and, hence, possible; to be able to speak meaningfully, then, is to remain in (or sustain) an opened domain at the time one is thus thinking. We see the tight relation between ideas and the opened world in various phenomena: when someone says something in one domain that we are not presently open to, what they say is alien, enigmatic, or perhaps humorous when situated within our current domain. So it is a matter of remaining within an open domain and, indeed, having a grasp of when particular domains are relevant and/or appropriate for our context. Either way, to be Da-sein is to actively “hold open a domain. Through its capacity to receive-perceive refers to as the being that is in-the-world and that dwells in its openness, Da-sein has a capacity to “receive-perceive” things. Heidegger uses this term to differentiate it from the psychological approach of “seeing (things) in a sensory fashion with the eyes”.

In relation to perception, Heidegger has been quite clear: first and foremost we see beings, things, not bare sensations. The dominant psychological theory of perception requires a distinction between sensation, understood as bare sensory stimulation, and perception, understood as the cognitive ordering of sensations into meaningful objects. Whatever may be said of the physics and physiology behind this understanding of perception, it is not primarily where human beings dwell and insofar as psychology is the study of human beings it must be grounded in an understanding of the human mode of being if it is to be relevant. The capacity to “receive” speaks of the relation between Da-sein as the opening and beings as that which comes into the open. The metaphor of the open can be easily misunderstood refers to Da-sein’s openness is not merely present-at-hand such that it passively sits and waits for things to be deposited in it, like an empty box that we use to store things. Rather, Da-sein’s openness, as constituted by practices, attunements, and a totality of inter-involved beings, is more like a filter that polarizes the world such that beings that are relevant to my current projects may appear if present. Heidegger is of opinion that man does not unilaterally decide how beings appear, but it is always a question of man creating and sustaining an opening appropriate to the kind of beings that man is concerned with.

Heidegger claims that we first see the significance of things for our projects, according to our world, not the thing itself with its present-at-hand properties. We are ecstatically open to beings because we care about things, thus they can appear in a significant and meaningful way (in the least as either relevant or irrelevant for our concerns). Rather than increasing the universal and uniform availability of everything, we need instead to learn how to let things be things rather than resources, and develop practices attuned to the things that are peculiar to our local world with their own particular earth, sky, mortal practices and divinities.

Answer : The Sartrean claim is best understood in contrast to an established principle essence precedes existence, laid down by religious tradition, or legislated by political or social authority. A typical claim for this traditional thesis would be that man is essentially selfish, or that he is a rational being. When it is said that man defines himself, it is often perceived as stating that man can "wish" to be something - anything, a bird, for instance - and then be it. According to Sartre's account, however, this is not true. What is meant by the statement is that man is (1) defined only insofar as he acts and (2) that he is responsible for his actions. To clarify, it can be said that a man who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel man and in that same instance, he (as opposed to his genes, for instance) is defined as being responsible for being this cruel man.

Of course, the more positive therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: You can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially. To claim that existence precedes essence is to assert that there is no such predetermined essence to be found in man, and that an individual's essence is defined by him or her through how he or she creates and lives his or her life. As Sartre puts it, man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards." Existentialism tends to focus on the question of human existence and the conditions of this existence.

What is meant by existence is the concrete life of each individual, and his concrete ways of being in the world. Even though this concrete individual existence must be the primary source of information in the study of man, certain conditions are commonly held to be "endemic" to human existence. These conditions are usually in some way related to the inherent meaninglessness or absurdity of the earth and its apparent contrast with our pre-reflexive lived lives which normally present themselves to us as meaningful. A central theme is that since the world "in-itself" is absurd, that is, not "fair," then a meaningful life can at any point suddenly lose all its meaning.

Answer : Early Sartrean philosophy is one of a pursuit of being. It is an attempt to grasp being through an investigation of the way being presents to consciousness - phenomenological ontology. Phenomenological ontology refers to the study of being through its appearances. This simplistic definition needs further clarification. First, by phenomenon Sartre refers to the totality of appearances of a thing and not simply a particular appearance. Sartre claims that the basic distinction of Existentialism from other systems of thought is its claim of the precedence of existence over essence and the negation of a primordial human nature. Man first is, and then he makes his essence through the choices he makes. It would thus be inappropriate to use the term metaphysics since it jeopardizes this very distinction.

Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself. We can never have consciousness which is stable; the basic characteristic of consciousness is its dynamicity, spontaneity, and freedom. He follows Husserl's principle of the intentionality of consciousness. Consciousness is first and foremost a consciousness of something. To say that consciousness is consciousness of something means that for consciousness there is no being outside of that precise obligation to be revealing intuition of something - i.e. of a transcendent being. All forms of consciousness are likewise intentional. Imagination, as a form of consciousness, is intentional. One cannot just imagine, he must always be imagining something.

Furthermore, even emotional consciousness is intentional. When Sartre defined emotion as a certain way of apprehending the world, it implies that emotion is a way of relating to the world. In this relation consists the intentionality of emotions? When one loves, he always loves something or somebody. Second, subjectivity is the consciousness of consciousness. Sartre says that consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of its being. When applied to man, Sartre further claims that man is, for the reason that man thinks. Finally, consciousness is a nothingness. It is a nothingness in the sense that it is always not that thing. It is always in the making, and to try to view it as permanent is to do injustice to its very definition. From this arises the assertion that there is no set of permanent entity which is the human self. Consciousness is either pre-reflexive or reflexive.

Answer : As part of his ontological project Heidegger aimed to shatter the established subject/object mode of acquiring knowledge held by the majority of philosophers heretofore, and abrogates their detached, disinterested inquiry. What Heidegger sought was a reinterpretation of philosophical beliefs, Heidegger desired to explain why and how theoretical knowledge had come to seem like the most fundamental relation to being. Heidegger's writings would so dramatically call into question the established traditions, that of phenomenology, that he would render a return to their teachings almost impossible. At the core of Heidegger's work, and subsequently his own personal philosophy, was the resolute belief that there existed a theoretical shroud in the metaphysics of presence that had veiled the reality of being. He sought to dissolve the abstractive Aristotelian ideal of an objects essence and show that man's, or any object's, existence predicates its theoretical knowledge, that existence is a process of becoming.

To illustrate Heidegger's idea, he employed various neologistic distinctions, none more important than his notion of a ready-to-hand present-at hand differentiation. This distinction provides a fundamental and invaluable insight into the understanding of the human mind and it is this notion that provides the motivation and stimulus for this literature. Most fundamentally Heidegger sought to show that practical actions demonstrate that man is forever being pulled into the future. Not to say that practical actions are primary, but to show that contemplative knowing is not our primary concern, as he qualified, "Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former Being be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter time be addressed as a being." Man's purposes or intentions allow the human being to be pulled ahead of himself and that the ahead' is where one truly exists.

Thus, Heidegger demonstrates that man's inherent logic is always being extended or projected into the future and this notion provides the basis for the idea that an instance exists as the predicate for the theoretical knowledge of the instance, which is opposed to his teacher Edmund Husserl's intentional theory of mind.

Answer : Existentialism may be difficult to explain, but it is possible to communicate some basic principles and concepts, both regarding what existentialism is and what it is not. On the one hand, there are certain ideas and principles which most existentialists agree on in some fashion; on the other hand, there are ideas and principles which most existentialists reject - even if they don't then agree on what to argue for in their place. It can also help to better understand existentialism by looking at how the various trends developed long before anything like a self-conscious existentialist philosophy was promoted.

Existentialism existed before existentialists, but not in a single and coherent form; instead, it existed more as a critical attitude towards common assumptions and positions in traditional theology and philosophy. Although often treated like a philosophical school of thought, it would be more accurate to describe existentialism as a trend or tendency that can be found throughout the history of philosophy. If existentialism were a theory, it would be unusual in that it would be a theory that is generally opposed to philosophical theories.Because existentialism encompasses so many different trends and ideas that have appeared over the history of Western philosophy, it can be difficult to distinguish it from other movements and philosophical systems. Because of this, another way to look at existentialism is to examine what it isn't.

Because existentialism is a trend or mood involving philosophical themes rather than a coherent system of philosophy, it is possible to trace through the past a number of precursors to the self-aware existentialism that developed in Europe during the early twentieth century. These precursors involved philosophers who may not have been existentialists themselves, but did explore existentialist themes and thereby paved the way for the creation of existentialism in the 20th century. Existentialists focus primarily on matters such as choice, individuality, subjectivity, freedom, and the nature of existence itself. The issues addressed in existentialist philosophy involve the problems of making free choices, of taking responsibility for what we choose, of overcoming alienation from our lives, and so forth.

A self-conscious existentialist movement developed first in early twentieth century Europe. After so many wars and so much devastation throughout European history, intellectual life had become rather drained and tired, so it should not have been unexpected that people would have turned from abstract systems back to individual human lives - the sorts of lives that had been dehumanized in the wars themselves. Whatever "existence" is supposed to be, it isn't something that a person will come to understand through intellectual posturing; no, the irreducible and undefinable existence is something that we must encounter and engage through actually living. After all, we humans do define who we are through living our lives - our natures are not defined and fixed at the moment of conception or birth. Just what constitutes an "actual" and "authentic" mode of living, though, is what many existentialist philosophers tried to describe and debated about with each other. Existentialism encompasses so many different trends and ideas that have appeared over the history of Western philosophy, thus making it difficult to distinguish it from other movements and philosophical systems. Due to this, one useful means of understanding existentialism is to examine what it isn't.

For one thing, existentialism doesn't argue that the "good life" is a function of things like wealth, power, pleasure, or even happiness. This is not to say that existentialists reject happiness - existentialism is not a philosophy of masochism, after all. However, existentialists will not argue that a person's life is good simply because they are happy - a happy person might be living a bad life while an unhappy person might be living a good life. The reason for this is that a life is "good" for existentialists insofar as it is "authentic." Existentialists may differ somewhat on just what is needed for a life to be authentic, but for the most part this will involve being conscious of the choices one makes, taking full responsibility for those choices, and understanding that nothing about one's life or the world is fixed and given. Hopefully such a person will end up happier because of this, but that isn't a necessary consequence of authenticity - at least not in the short term.

Existentialism is also not caught up in the idea that everything in life can be made better by science. That doesn't mean that existentialists are automatically anti-science or anti-technology; rather, they judge the value of any science or technology based upon how it might affect a person's ability to live an authentic life. If science and technology help people avoid taking responsibility for their choices and help them pretend that they are not really free, then existentialists will argue that there is a serious problem here. Existentialists also reject both the arguments that people are good by nature but are ruined by society or culture, and that people are sinful by nature but can be helped to overcome sin through proper religious beliefs. Yes, even Christian existentialists tend to reject the latter proposition, despite the fact that it fits with traditional Christian doctrine.

The reason is that existentialists, especially atheist existentialists, reject the idea that there is any fixed human nature to begin with, whether good or evil. Now, Christian existentialists aren't going to completely reject the idea of any fixed human nature; this means that they could accept the idea that people are born sinful. Nevertheless, the sinful nature of humanity simply isn't the point for Christian existentialists. What they are concerned with is not so much the sins of the past but a person's actions here and now along with the possibility of their accepting God and uniting with God in the future. The primary focus of Christian existentialists is on recognizing the moment of existential crisis in which a person can make a "leap of faith" where they can completely and without reservation commit themselves to God, even if it seems irrational to do so. In such a context, being born sinful just isn't particularly relevant. For atheistic existentialists, obviously enough, the whole notion of "sin" will play no role at all, except perhaps in metaphorical ways.

Answer : The concept of freedom, central to Sartre's system as a whole, is a dominant theme in his political works. Sartre's view of freedom changed substantially throughout his lifetime. Scholars disagree whether there is a fundamental continuity or a radical break between Sartre's early view of freedom and his late view of freedom. There is a strong consensus, though, that after World War II Sartre shifted to a material view of freedom, in contrast to the ontological view of his early period. According to the arguments of Being and Nothingness human freedom consists in the ability of consciousness to transcend its material situation. Later, especially in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre shifts to the view that humans are only free if their basic needs as practical organisms are met. Let us look at these two different notions of freedom in more depth.

Early Sartre views freedom as synonymous with human consciousness. Consciousness ("being-for-itself") is marked by its non-coincidence with itself. In simple terms, consciousness escapes itself both because it is intentional (consciousness always targets an object other than itself) and temporal (consciousness is necessarily future oriented). Sartre's view that human freedom consists in consciousness' ability to escape the present is "ontological" in the sense that no normal human being can fail to be free. The subtitle of Being and Nothingness, "An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology," reveals Sartre's aim of describing the fundamental structures of human existence and answering the question "What does it mean to be human?" His answer is that humans, unlike inert matter, are conscious and therefore free. The notion of ontological freedom is controversial and has often been rejected because it implies that humans are free in all situations. In his early work Sartre embraced this implication unflinchingly.

Famously, Sartre claimed the French public was as free as ever during the Nazi occupation. In Being and Nothingness, he passionately argued that even prisoners are free because they have the power of consciousness. A prisoner, though coerced, can choose how to react to his imprisonment. The prisoner is free because he controls his reaction to imprisonment: he may resist or acquiesce. Since there are no objective barriers to the will, the prison bars restrain me only if I form the will to escape. In a similar example, Sartre notes that a mountain is only a barrier if the individual wants to get on the other side but cannot. Sartre's ontological notion of freedom has been widely criticized, from both political and ontological standpoints. An important contemporary critic of Sartre's work was his colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose essay "Sartre and Ultrabolshevism" directly attacked Sartre's Cartesianism and his ontological conception of freedom.

The fact that Sartre's view in Being and Nothingness seemed to leave little room for diagnosing oppression did not stop him from articulating a forceful normative critique of Anti-Semitism. His analysis of oppression would, in fact, use the same dialectical tools as those in the section on "concrete relations with others" in Being and Nothingness. Anti-Semite and Jew argues that oppression is a master/slave relationship, where the master denies the freedom of the slave and yet becomes dependent on the slave. Sartre modified his notion of "the look" by arguing that only some, not all, interpersonal relations result in alienation and loss of freedom.

Sartre's new appreciation of oppression as a concrete loss of human freedom forced him to alter his view that humans are free in any situation. He did not explicitly discuss such alterations, though clearly abandoning the view that humans are free in all situations. "[I]t is important not to conclude that one can be free in chains," and "It would be quite wrong to interpret me as saying that man is free in all situations as the Stoics claimed".

Sartre's basic assumption in his political writings is that oppression is a loss of freedom. Since humans can never lose their ontological freedom, the loss of freedom in question must be of a different sort: oppression must compromise material freedom. Take the case of the prisoner. The prisoner is ontologically free because he controls whether to attempt escape. On this view, freedom is synonymous with choice. But there is no qualitative distinction between types of choices. If freedom is the existence of choice, then even a bad choice is freedom promoting. As he will put it later, an attacker who gives me the choice of "what sauce to be eaten in" could hardly be said to meaningfully promote my freedom. The early view is subject to the charge that if there are no qualitative distinctions between types of choices, then the phenomena of oppression and coercion cannot be recognized.

In Anti-Semite and Jew and Notebooks Sartre implicitly addresses the above criticism, arguing that oppression consists not in the absence of choice, but in being forced to choose between bad, inhumane options. Jews in anti-Semitic societies, for example, are forced to choose between self-effacement or caricatured self-identities. In the political period as a whole Sartre developed his material view of freedom by contrasting the free person with the slave. Though his notion of slavery is derived from Hegel, Sartre, unlike Hegel, diagnosed literal cases like American chattel slavery. Sartre follows Hegel in portraying slavery as a form of "non-mutual recognition" where one person dominates the other psychologically and physically. A slave, he argues, is un-free because he is dominated by a master. Material freedom requires, therefore, non-domination, or freedom from coercion. He adds that in master/slave relations, the self-conception of the victim and perpetrator are intertwined and distorted; both parties are in "bad faith"; both fail to fully understand their own freedom. Though both perpetrator and victim are in bad faith, only the slave is coerced physically.

Sartre's view of material freedom is independent of any notion of human nature. He consistently rejects the existence of a pre-social human essence or a set of natural human desires. The material view of freedom assumes a thin set of universal human goods, including positive human goods (food, water, shelter and education) and negative goods (freedom from all of the following: slavery, poverty, discrimination, domination and persecution). While Critique elaborates an economic understanding of human goods (the essential needs are those of the physical organism), elsewhere Sartre defends a wider spectrum of human needs including cultural goods and access to shared values. In sum, we can say that a person is materially free in Sartre's sense if (a) he enjoys basic material security; (b) he is un-coerced; and (c) he has access to cultural and social goods necessary for pursuing her chosen projects.