>jean-paul sartre was a french philosopher born in 1905 in paris, who became the defining figure of existentialism in the 20th century.>his core philosophical contribution is the inversion of the classical relationship between essence and existence. where traditional philosophy, and most common sense, assumes that things have a nature that precedes and determines what they do, sartre argues that for human beings existence precedes essence. you are not born with a fixed nature that unfolds over time. you exist first, and then you create what you are through your choices. there is no human nature to fall back on, no god who designed you for a purpose, no predetermined role you were meant to fill. you are radically and inescapably free, which sounds liberating but is actually terrifying, because it means you are also radically and inescapably responsible for everything you are and do.>"bad faith" is his term for the various strategies people use to escape that responsibility. you can pretend you had no choice, that circumstances forced your hand, that your nature determined your behavior, that society made you this way. all of these are bad faith because they involve lying to yourself about the freedom you actually have. the waiter who performs being a waiter so completely that he seems to have no existence outside the role is sartre's famous example, someone who has fled the anxiety of freedom into the comfort of a fixed identity.(cont.)
>>85142767 (cont.)>"i am responsible for everything, except for my very responsibility, for i am not the foundation of my being. therefore everything takes place as if i were compelled to be responsible. i am abandoned in the world in the sense that i find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which i bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever i do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.">"there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art."thoughts on sartre?
>>85142771>thoughts on sartre?dirty old coot
>you exist first, and then you create what you are through your choices. there is no human nature to fall back on, I mean this just seems blatantly wrong. Obviously humans have a nature -> we all hunger, we all age, and we are all going to die. I think we are barely free at all and are utterly constrained by the fixed nature of our human bodies. Despite anything I think or will or choose, I will get hungry and I will starve to death if I don't get food.
I liked what I read from Existentialism is an Humanism and I found interesting how responsibility is tied to our actions according to his view, which is also why I don't like that part of his theory: I don't like to be responsible. I'm interest in his theory of the gaze, but I'd have to read 200 pages of Being and Nothing and have all that foundation in order to be able to understand it...
Didn't read but I have always loved how his name reminds me of that Tora Dora songBANIRA SORUTO DE BANIRA SARUTOREBANIRA SARTREBURNING LOVE
>>85142771>thoughts on sartre?Thoroughly debunked by increased understanding of genetics. You're shaped almost entirely by genetics, your own choices put on finishing touches at best.Also essence/existence is a false dichotomy.
>>85142790Yeah most 1900's philosophy is the academic equivalent to putting your fingers in your ears and pretending reality can't hurt you if you ignore it.
are all philosophers the same edgy teen?
>>85142767>there is no human nature to fall back on, no god who designed you for a purpose, no predetermined role you were meant to fill. you are radically and inescapably freeThat's not really true. This just sounds like a naive Nietzschean dream rather than how humans actually work. Human beings aren't a blank slate. It's been proven that many aspects of personality and thought processes are largely determined by your genetics and how you were treated as a baby. Sure you're responsible for your own actions, but things were decided for you before you could consciously make decisions yourself. These things influence your decision making later in life and bad decisions compound to a point that you can't escape the pit you and others have dug for yourself.
>>85142981>This just sounds like a naive Nietzschean dream rather than how humans actually work.Welcome to academic philosophy
>>85142928don't think either you or sartre are 100% right. heritability estimates for most psychological traits do cluster in the 40-60% range, which is significant but also means environment and gene-environment interaction are accounting for roughly half the variance. more importantly, heritability is a population-level statistic that tells you how much of the variation between people in a specific environment is explained by genetic differences, but doesn't tell you how much of any individual's traits are determined by genes versus experience. those are different questions and the first one gets routinely misread as answering the second.genes also express differently in different environments, which means the same genetic profile produces meaningfully different outcomes depending on developmental context. epigenetics shows that environmental factors can alter gene expression in ways that are sometimes heritable. so even the genes aren't just genes in the simple deterministic sense you're implying.sartre was specifically responding to aristotelian essentialism and thomistic theology, so the dichotomy does have a specific historical target rather than being a universal claim about all possible ontologies. you can reasonably argue he overcorrected toward radical freedom in ways that underweight biological constraint. but "it's a false dichotomy" requires a third option, and "you're almost entirely determined by genetics" just reasserts the essence side of the dichotomy rather arguing against it.
>>85142790sartre actually anticipated this objection. he didn't deny that humans have a "facticity," his term for the fixed conditions of existence: the body, its needs, its mortality, the situation you were born into. hunger, aging, death. and he never claimed otherwise. what he argued is that facticity alone doesn't determine meaning or response. two people facing the same hunger, the same mortal body, the same material constraints, can relate to those facts in radically different ways, and that relationship, the how of existing within constraints, is where freedom lives in sartre. freedom isn't the absence of constraint, it's what you do within and toward constraint.even a prisoner is free in the sense that matters, not to leave the cell, but to relate to imprisonment in different ways. to resist it, accept it, be destroyed by it, find meaning within it. the cell is real. the facticity is real. but it doesn't determine the for-itself, his term for conscious human existence, because consciousness is always already beyond its situation by virtue of being able to negate it, imagine alternatives, project toward possibilities.that said, he probably does overcorrect toward radical freedom in ways that underweight how much biological and psychological constraint shapes, not just our situation, but our capacity to reflect on it. the embodied and embedded nature of consciousness is something later phenomenologists like merleau-ponty pushed back on. he argued that sartre's account is too disembodied and that the lived body shapes perception and possibility in ways that can't be cleanly separated from the freedom he's describing. i think that there is at least some truth in what sartre is talking about, even if he tends to overstate it.
