Existentialism 2 : self-consciousness

• Conscious awareness always has intentionality

• The phenomenological approach ‘brackets off’ any independent existence of mental objects

• Subject-object dichotomy is wrong

• Self-consciousness is one (and science two) steps from reality

• ‘Dasein’: the fundamental position of the individual

How to live

• Be ‘authentic’

• Existential ‘angst’ (anxiety)

• ‘Nihilism’ - there is no authority: values and so on must be created by individuals for themselves

‘Radical freedom’

• Being and nothingness

• Nothingness as the ‘subject’ of conscious thought

• At root, self-conscious beings are radically free

‘Hell is other people’

• The battle stemming from individuals exercising their will

• The requirement for authenticity; the ‘sin’ of bad faith

• Will to being leads to the will to freedom of all (ethics is possible)

The will to power

• ‘God is dead’• The will strives for

power – ultimately this is self-mastery

• Superman and slave moralities