Jean-Paul Sartre(1905-1980)

• Sartre is a phenomenologist who represents existentialism in the strict sense• Novelist, dramatist, and social critic

Existential Phenomenology

To understand the world is not to understand it merely in terms of material objects around us. Our “there” is more than our physical there. It includes the constellation of roles, expectations, hopes, desires, fears, emotions, relations to others,etc. which shape the character of each experience from moment to moment.A hammer is not just an object in the world. What is important is how it fits into Dasein’s world. It is a tool. It has a use.

Sartre’s Phenomenology

It is phenomenological because it holds to the subject matter of experience and the first-person standpoint. He follows the Cartesian distinction:

• Being-in-itself (être-en-soi) = the existence of things

• Being-for-itself (être-pour-soi) = the being of consciousness (Being-for-others = one’s essential relationships with other people).

Works:

Nausea (novel) – 1938

The Wall (stories) – 1939

The Flies (play) – 1943

Being and Nothingness – 1943

No Exit (play) – 1944

Roads to Liberty (novel trilogy) – 1945-49

Existentialism is a Humanism – 1946

What is Literature? (essay) – 1947

Notebooks for an Ethics (posthum.) – 1948

Search for a Method – 1957

The Condemned of Altona (play) – 1959

Critique of Dialectical Reason – 1960

Nausea It is not an ordinary illness.

It is the recognition that things, phenomena, do not come in ready-made categories, nor do they have, as a result, any intrinsic meaning.

What is revealed is the bare existence of things, their brute “facticity”

Existentialism: An Ontology Being and Nothingness: An Essay on

Phenomenological Ontology

• It is an effort to describe the most fundamental aspects of being:• The being of consciousness• The being of phenomena—or that

which appears to consciousness

Consciousness “Consciousness is a being for which it is essentially a question of

its being in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.”

“Consciousness is a being for which it is essentially a consciousness of the nothingness of its own being.”

It is on this regard that Sartre is much closer to Husserl than to Heidegger.

Husserl and Sartre: Differences

1. For Sartre, what is made manifest in consciousness is not the essence or nature of the object but the fact of its brute existence (facticity), not the nature of object but the being of object.

2. Transcendental ego = for Sartre, the ego is transcendent. But it is an object of consciousness, not a part of consciousness.

“Being and Nothingness”

1. Being-in-itself = the brute existence of things. Being is what it is.

2. Being-for-itself = consciousness

◦ Consciousness is the “for-itself”

◦ It introduces nothingness (which is something) into being

◦ Every consciousness is a ”consciousness-of”, every consciousness is a consciousness of the “not-me”

Nothingness

1. Consciousness has a “nihilating” action2. There is essentially a cleavage between between

consciousness and its object.3. We do not discover, we decide (act of free choice)

Bad Faith1. Mauvaise foi is an example of the “nihilating” activity of

consciousness2. Also referred to as “self-deception” or being “in denial”3. Bad faith arises in Sartre’s conception of the “for-itself”

as a being who is what it is not and is not what it is.

◦ Human existence is a mixture of facticity and transcendence. To confuse these two is bad faith

◦ E.g. An alcoholic who thinks that we is really an alcoholic (facticity) or who thinks that he can stop anytime he wants (transcendence)

Good Faith

“Good faith seeks to flee the inner disintegration of my being in the direction of the in-itself which it should be and is not. Bad faith seeks to flee the in-itself by means of the inner disintegration of my being. But it denies the very disintegration as it denies that is is itself bad faith.”

Freedom

1. One is only in so far as one chooses and acts.2. We are “a choice in the making.”3. I create my world.4. Our freedom and responsibility is absolute, and because

of this, some people flee towards bad faith.

Existentialism: An Ethics of Freedom

Existence precedes essence

Man is what he makes of himself

Man is freedom and responsibility

Man must choose himself(what he concretely doesin a situation)

abandonment, anguish

Is Sartre right?

Are we entirely responsible

for ourselves?

What about nature vs.

nurture?

Is there any inherent

meaning in life?

Does our freedom to choose

really induce us to take

responsibility for ourselves?

If I know I’m going to die in

the end, why should I bother

to worry about the effects of

my actions?