Sarte Freedom PDF

HUMAN BEING Jean-Paul Sartre  EXISTENTIALISM Existentialism is not a set of concepts about the universe so much as it is a mood, an approach to philosophy and life itself. Existentialists differ greatly on their ideas about life, but they agree that the...

HUMAN BEING Jean-Paul Sartre  EXISTENTIALISM Existentialism is not a set of concepts about the universe so much as it is a mood, an approach to philosophy and life itself. Existentialists differ greatly on their ideas about life, but they agree that the key to all meaning and truth lies within the individual person. In metaphysical discussion, then, existentialists are not keen on “The Nature of Ultimate Reality”.  ESSENCE VS EXISTENCE Most of the central gures in existentialism believe that with one very important exception every artefact that exists exhibits an essence that logically preceded its actual existence. That is essence precedes existence. The exception, however, to the order of essence and existence lies in the area of human personality. Humans must rst exist and only then can they create their essence. Their existence precedes their essence. fi fi  FREEDOM, RESPONSIBILITY AND ANXIETY To exist as a human is to be trapped in a world that can provide us with no truth, no meaning, no objective values. Each one of us must invent truth, create meaning and posit value for ourselves becasue we are totally free. Freedom is the one thing we are not free to escape. This inevitably leads us to anxiety.  Being free, however, we cannot look to any source beyond ourselves for answers about what it means to be a human. Each person, then, when he is confronted with a choice, faces moral and spiritual nothingness. Sartre does say that having to choose freely is frightening, but no matter what the odds, we have it in our own power to struggle in whatever direction we choose. Although success is not guaranteed, we have the will to strive in any direction we decide upon. We can exhibit the courage to be authentic people in any circumstance and bear the anxiety that responsibility brings.  CHOICE Freedom is based on choice. Every situation is an opportunity that is made use of or neglected. Hence, such situations force us to make a choice. We are free in that we are constantly making decisions for the paths our lives will take. We are anguished because we can never shift that responsibility onto someone else.  Sartre saw choice as temporally bound "I am not distinct from the epoch in which I nd myself." You would not make the same choice regarding the current situation if you lived in a different time in which you did not have to make such a choice. "It is a waste of time to ask what I should have been..." fi FREEDOM, RESPONSIBILITY AND FACTICITY  FREEDOM Human beings are nothing but what they make of themselves. Thus, all are responsible for what they are. But each individual is also responsible for all human beings.  My essence is given subjectively through my free choices. My life is a project based on the capacity for thinking of myself as different than I am now. I must project myself into the future, see myself as something other than I am currently am in some future context in order to count myself as living. This is an important fact of consciousness for Sartre: I can think of myself as different and in doing so I negate (make nothing) the present. And so I am always more than the sum of the facts about me as they have been; I am also made up of the future I project. This negation is a condition of freedom. Free to choose—”condemned to be free”.  RESPONSIBILITY But Sartre says that I also choose for all human beings. What does this mean? a. Image of oneself is "built up" by one's project. b. Our choices constitute our values. c. What we value prescribes a way we think things ought to be. d. And to value something (in the sense of choosing it) is to think of it as good. Thus to choose, which we must, is to assert it as good, by de nition, in which case we are saying that we think this is good not just for me, but for everyone. fi  FACTICITY For Sartre human existence as comprised of ‘transcendence’ and ‘facticity’. An individual’s facticity is the set of facts true of them at a given time. Wanting things to have been otherwise, wanting them to be otherwise, and acting to make them otherwise are ways in which we all transcend our facticities all of the time. Sartre describes the ego or self as transcendent, which means that it is external to consciousness rather than contained within it. How can “I” be external to consciousness?  By the fact that consciousness awareness of “I” is consciousness thinking about an ego. That ego is the object of thought. Facticity, he says, is made up of my body and its material history and current context or the material surroundings I nd myself in, my own bodily form of existence, and my past decisions and choices that have brought me to where I am now. fi