I largely agree with the personal responsibility, as it relates to ethics. Though I do believe it takes a village and sometimes we must depend on the bounds of socioeconomic factors.
Or just having a lot of lucky breaks. It depends on the risks we are willing to take, as well. I suppose wisdom and intellect must be filtered in to an extent, too. Or to be the very best at something in the whole world. See takecourage. Excellent question. Is it equally valid to be a saint or a serial killer?
So long as you take responsibility for your choices? In my opinion this is where existentialism breaks down. Even if it is unprovable, there seems to be a moral structure to existence that most cultures and religions agree on, at least broadly. Thinking that the serial killer is living virtuously because he is following a path of his own making is absurd. Ethics in your inbox. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.
Article Being Human Free speech has failed us. BY The Ethics Centre The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Join the conversation Have you ever questioned your purpose in life? The Ethics Centre. Dee Ann Miller. You may also be interested in It was not just talk: they campaigned for many causes, notably on the side of independence fighters during the Algerian war of to This made them many enemies. On 7 January , someone planted a bomb in the apartment above the one Sartre shared with his mother.
By sheer luck, no one was hurt, though both flats were damaged. He and his mother moved out, but he did not let the attack stop his activism. The belief in the importance of commitment had roots in an idea borrowed from the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant : that even small decisions should be made as though we were deciding for all humanity, not just for our paltry selves.
This belief in the mattering of everything made the Parisian existentialists passionate debaters: it seemed so important to get everything right. They stayed up all hours arguing with friends — who were not always friends any more by the time morning came. What principles could be worth losing friends over?
Well, some decisions really do matter in that life-or-death way. After the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in , Sartre wrote an essay pointing out how this changed everything.
From now on, he said, we know we can destroy ourselves, so we must decide every day whether we want to keep living. They are still right about this. Contrary to general belief, Sartre and De Beauvoir did not generally toe a party line, although they kicked a few around. Sartre briefly considered himself a communist convert in the early s, especially after a bizarre incident in which the French Communist party leader, Jacques Duclos, was arrested and held for a month after being caught in a car containing two dead pigeons.
The authorities thought the birds had been intended for taking messages to Moscow; Duclos said he was taking them home to cook for dinner. He defended the party by writing articles, but even now he did not sign up. On their side, the communists never accepted existentialism.
They disliked its insistence on freedom: how could a load of haywire existentialists ever contribute to a properly organised collective revolution? They feared that reading atheist existentialists would lead people to doubt their faith and church authority — which it did. Existentialism inclines people to doubt and challenge almost everything — even if its own practitioners sometimes took a while to see this.
A rarely noted fact about existentialists and their allies is that they wrote some wonderful books — along with some dreadful ones. Camus is famously readable: he deliberately modelled his novel The Outsider on jagged American crime stories, rather than on the poised elegance of high French literature.
De Beauvoir created gripping psychological fiction out of the real-life dramas and discussions raging among her friends, and she encouraged Sartre to make his Nausea more like a whodunnit than a treatise. Actually, even his treatises had novelistic qualities. He incorporated many personal experiences into his masterwork Being and Nothingness , often to startling effect, since his perspective included peculiar hangups about trees, ski tracks, honey and slimy things, and terrifying post-mescaline flashbacks in which he was pursued by imaginary lobsters.
As for Heidegger, his writing affords different kind of pleasure — although that word is not often mentioned in relation to his books. He wrote them in a style filled with idiosyncratic coinages. The idea is to keep us from slipping lazily into traditional habits and errors of thought. They and their phenomenological friends often took topics previously considered on the fringes of philosophy, such as the body, gender, sexuality, social life, child development and our relationship with technology, and brought them into the very centre of their thought.
Take technology. Heidegger was a pioneer in noticing how much it has changed the very nature of human experience. That is, it has nothing to do with making machines more user-friendly or efficient or productive. The real question is about our own way of being: investigating technology takes us into deep questions about how we work, how we occupy the Earth and who we are.
He also warned against our endless desire to make everything on the planet more exploitable and storable. Fifteen years after these words were published, many of us are already so immersed in that network that we can hardly find a separate vantage point from which to think critically about it. Heidegger is there to remind us not just to question the technology itself, but to question ourselves. Unlike some later continental philosophers, besotted with the play of meanings in texts and uninterested in real people, the existentialists went directly for the biggest and most personal questions.
What are we? I think this is a lot better than doing what most laypeople do now, which is look for villains to blame for things that happen without addressing underlying causes, and then to use retributive justice to hurt these poor, blameless individuals. Does that make any sense? I believe Sartre was going for this, which was why i feel has has his finger on something — NOT because i want to uphold the notion that a person exists in a self-sufficient vacuum. He cannot achieve it alone.
Generally, I agree with your critique. If I am not mistaken Existentialism also denounces identification or adoption of any system. If so, and correct me if I am wrong:. I find it interesting that existentialism is a system of thought which aggressively criticizes the notion of a adopting any..
Which leads me to my next point. I think critique of traditional systems furthers philosophical discussion and our search for meaning, value, and truth. But, to dissolve these political, legal, economic etc systems is completely absurd. Sure these systems seek to control and contain human behavior, but the identification and implementation of these boundaries allow for order.
I, for one, do not think the world would be a better place if everyone was left to their own devices, free to define themselves as they wish without regard for the rational. Consider the birth-time of existentialism. But, genetic conditions or even lobotomies, as an extreme example set boundaries for our behaviors; they make it predictable to a point. Within these boundaries there is an entire spectrum of emotions, feelings, and perceptions that we can experience. Initial conditions cannot perfectly predict outcomes: they only serve as a general guideline with a margin of error.
Within this margin of error, our individualism remains. Sorry, but I have an additional comment. We do, in fact, live in vacuum governed by these constants, and, are completely puppets on a string controlled by the chemical interactions which the system controls. Sure, you can introduce chaos theory into the equation, but just because we do not fully understand the system does not mean the system is not predictable.
All of our behaviors, including the seemingly entropic regress of cause-and-effect, can be seen as written far before humans even came into existence. Again, this is too easy; we need ways to validate our search for meaning and value, which is why thought-systems like Existentialism, as flawed as they are, need to exist.
Again, sorry, I promise this is my final thought. To support the above, here is what I mean by this deterministic system:. Social Behavior is governed by Psychology, which is governed by Biology, which is governed by Chemistry, which is governed by Physics, which is a constant and yes, can collapse at any minute lol.
Existentialism is not an exact philosophy it is more of a significant-ethos. The poor existentialists who wanted to spread the word had a load of objective philosophers to deal with and slipped too far into their ontology, whilst trying to establish their own position. Existentialism is a tool for dealing with life and you have to be able to operate the tool skilfully before it starts working for you. It is an imperfect humanist position with a history.
We should be developing it, just as it says, by taking responsibility for itself. Wanting to be a certain way has the benefit of being a self-fulfilling prophecy, for a mostly emotional creature with a curious mind; trying to make safe sense out of chaos. You may call that description human. Remember that old hippy saying, what if they gave a war and nobody came.
People do not do that which what they do not want to do, if they can. Existentialism is a way of generating civilised doing, because you want to be and do civilised living. A part of your emotional makeup, previously called human nature. The difficulty is the journey from here to there. You do not know what to do better if you do not know what you are doing now, is not better. You do not want to do better if you do not know that what you are doing now is not good enough.
Sartre might say that you were more inclined to be rowing the boat rather than rocking it. You might even do it with a god thing, but it seems that has turned out to be too sticky by half.
I would say to other philosophers:- relax and try to understand the meaning and use, rather than finding the inconsistencies. Luck and happiness. I enjoyed reading your criticism of Sartre and existentialism. Because of the reasons you listed. I mean, if we do have free will. It only exists to an extent. That and were animals. Besides reproduction, their purpose is to pollinate plants. Very nice. Though free will to judge anything true or false freely indicates something immaterial at least in part, no?
Sartre is by no means talking about a metaphysical free will. Sartre is on the level of phenomenology, not metaphysics. Freedom is simply the experienced ability to transcend facticity at any given moment. This results from his understanding of consciousness itself as inherently split. There is consciousness of this computer, but there is also a non-positional consciousness of this consciousness of this computer.
Consciousness is thus already beyond the intentional contents of which it is aware through what Sartre calls the pre-reflective cogito or self -consciousness as opposed to the reflective cogito or self-consciousness of Descartes. The being of consciousness as discovered through phenomenology would not change simply because we know it emerges from the perhaps mechanistic brain.
Thus, freedom and responsibility are reconcilable with metaphysical determinism. Facticity can be created by our freedom, but our facticity reciprocally orients that very free consciousness as well. Thus, the later Sartre is able to make the claim that existentialism and marxism go together and human freedom is limited by economic scarcity.
I can see we are born as different things, I see my children and I see one like me, existential in core, but I know it will fade. I can see that life if different brains. They will change and adapt. But from the first breath, some see and feel and hear in different ways to other people. Only social systems give voice to titles of what is. Life is whole by both types.
They exist to provide a full picture. We are different species. We are a compliment to each other. No point arguing. The ones that feel will give up talking. No one will ever be able to see through the others eyes. I only know this by seeing the children. Conditioning comes later. When one abandons naive realism, all contradictions fall. Too simple to be accepted, but irrefutable. The arguments against it can only appeal to some coincidental weirdness stemming from the consistency of scientific law, or perhaps the correspondence of sense to physicality which is then extrapolated all the way to the cause of consciousness.
Both of these arguments assume inherent traits of consciousness namely, complete consistency or an inherent sense of probability , which are necessary when one assumes naive realism, and completely unnecessary otherwise. Science is consistent?
Entirely, but only as a set of related predictions. The bias that tells me this needs further explanation or a cause is only a result of scientific training which hilariously turns out to be a bias when extrapolated past its point of validity.
Had I been capable of doing so, I might have even abandoned naive realism for the sake of utility alone before I came to understand that it is thoroughly sensible. When Sartre speaks of essence he basicaly meens the porpose for the creation of somethimg and not that somethings ability to feel or umderstand its existance thus his example with the knife.
A knife according to Sartre has an essence but no consciousness that comes before its existance.. The essence is given to the knife by a creator but since humans have no creator they have no esence preexisting themselves they have to chose one. No one said that the consciousness of a person is not linked to the their brains or their physical body but the existance of that body itself serves no purpose more than existing thus having completed that goal has no goal whatsoever..
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