Friday, April 07, 2006
Notes for Tuesday, Apr. 11
Read to p. 375. Sartre
Jean-Paul Sarte (1905-80)
In addition to being a philosopher, Sartre was a novelist, essayist and playwright. (He also wrote one screenplay, Les Jeux sont faits, or, The Die is Cast.) His most important philosophical work was written during WWII: Being and Nothingness. Sartre distinguishes between reflective and unreflected consciousness. The latter loses itself in its object, while the former is aware of itself. The phenomenological analysis (reduction) of consciousness reveals it to be a field of frightening freedom. A monstrous spontaneity. The experience of freedom as dread.
Sartre's novel Nausea describes the experience of vain excess ("de trop") of existence, its absurdity. And in Being and Nothingness Sartre explores the notion of a nothingness in being, a sort of hole in being, that is consciousness. Consciousness, i.e. freedom, is that necessary distance or space that allows for conscious being. Sartre's view of freedom is not entirely positive, in the sense that it constitutes the inescapable human condition. Inescapable? Well, not quite, because we can deny our freedom, fool ourselves and others into believing we are not free. This relieves us of much responsibility; hence Sartre accuses such people of being "in bad faith." A belief in fate or destiny would be, in Sartre's view, a way of trying to escape from freedom. But in fact we are "condemned to be free." That is not to say that there are not fixed elements in our experience, or what Sartre calls "facticity." But it is the way in which we choose to interpret facticity that determines our "situation." We must choose how to interpret facticity; not to choose is also a choice (but one of bad faith).
A friend-enemy of Sartre's, Albert Camus, also gave philosophical significance to the story of Sisyphus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. That mythic hero had displeased the Zeus,; his punishment was to have to push a rock up a hill; when it was almost resting at the top it would roll back, and Sisyphus would have to go back to his rock and begin again. But what is somewhat different in Sartre's treatment of the story is that Sartre claims the rock to be not our fate but our creation. So great a role does freedom play in Sartre's thought that Merleau-Ponty, another French existentialist, called him the philosopher of freedom. For a somewhat different view of freedom, one might consult Emmanuel Levinas's Difficult Freedom and his Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, which distinguish between an empty or facile freedom and a freedom that is to be attained through an ethical vision of the face of the other. While for Sartre the look of the other is threatening, causing me to be transformed into an object (just as my look tends to transform the other into an object), for Levinas the look of the other summons me to full humanness through a direct experience of the command "Thou shalt not kill." The look of the other is that of a weakness that coerces me and admonishes me toward infinite responsibility.
Jean-Paul Sarte (1905-80)
In addition to being a philosopher, Sartre was a novelist, essayist and playwright. (He also wrote one screenplay, Les Jeux sont faits, or, The Die is Cast.) His most important philosophical work was written during WWII: Being and Nothingness. Sartre distinguishes between reflective and unreflected consciousness. The latter loses itself in its object, while the former is aware of itself. The phenomenological analysis (reduction) of consciousness reveals it to be a field of frightening freedom. A monstrous spontaneity. The experience of freedom as dread.
Sartre's novel Nausea describes the experience of vain excess ("de trop") of existence, its absurdity. And in Being and Nothingness Sartre explores the notion of a nothingness in being, a sort of hole in being, that is consciousness. Consciousness, i.e. freedom, is that necessary distance or space that allows for conscious being. Sartre's view of freedom is not entirely positive, in the sense that it constitutes the inescapable human condition. Inescapable? Well, not quite, because we can deny our freedom, fool ourselves and others into believing we are not free. This relieves us of much responsibility; hence Sartre accuses such people of being "in bad faith." A belief in fate or destiny would be, in Sartre's view, a way of trying to escape from freedom. But in fact we are "condemned to be free." That is not to say that there are not fixed elements in our experience, or what Sartre calls "facticity." But it is the way in which we choose to interpret facticity that determines our "situation." We must choose how to interpret facticity; not to choose is also a choice (but one of bad faith).
A friend-enemy of Sartre's, Albert Camus, also gave philosophical significance to the story of Sisyphus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. That mythic hero had displeased the Zeus,; his punishment was to have to push a rock up a hill; when it was almost resting at the top it would roll back, and Sisyphus would have to go back to his rock and begin again. But what is somewhat different in Sartre's treatment of the story is that Sartre claims the rock to be not our fate but our creation. So great a role does freedom play in Sartre's thought that Merleau-Ponty, another French existentialist, called him the philosopher of freedom. For a somewhat different view of freedom, one might consult Emmanuel Levinas's Difficult Freedom and his Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, which distinguish between an empty or facile freedom and a freedom that is to be attained through an ethical vision of the face of the other. While for Sartre the look of the other is threatening, causing me to be transformed into an object (just as my look tends to transform the other into an object), for Levinas the look of the other summons me to full humanness through a direct experience of the command "Thou shalt not kill." The look of the other is that of a weakness that coerces me and admonishes me toward infinite responsibility.
# posted by Michael @ 3:41 PM 
