**THIS SHOW IS A GOOD PRIMER FOR SARTRE:

anderson-sartre.mp3

Full chapter on "The Look" and the existence of Others from Being and Nothingness:

sartre_bn_others_full.pdf

Abridged chapter on "The Look":

sartre_bn.pdf

Excellent lecture to accompany "The Look," by Jeremy Sabol, Sp '10, Stanford University.

SLE_Sartre.mp3

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Essay, "EXISTENTIALISM IS A HUMANISM," in the Reader.

I'm posting this letter from a colleague as a directive to help us in our final week of class. I think it was really helpful. It also furnishes the occasion for a proposal I have for the material we might consider for our last class -- Kubrick's "2001." Please read and think about this. For the reference to "eternal recurrence," please re-read THE GAY SCIENCE, passage 341.

Hi David,

I think that the problem of the status of the “thing” needs to be related to the problems of relativism in epistemology and psychology (or, as I have put it, the lack of the possibility of transcendental knowledge). This will take you on the path to Freud and Heidegger. There is no “thing” without a perceiving mind and that mind has many states. This is the meaning of the death of God.  There are no absolute values.

What follows, of course, is existentialism on one side and Nazism on the other. Maybe you want to have your students watch “2001” and comment on the subjects of absolute rules (Hal’s dilemma) and of eternal recurrence.

***

Here is a link to information about Sartre and his philosophy:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

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Jack

I read the Sartre lecture, and then I read this Montaigne essay for another class, and I must share:

Perhaps they [who criticize Montaigne's whole project of "painting the 'moi'" in his Essays] mean that I should testify about myself by works and deeds, not by bare words. What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions. It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words. Some of the wisest and most devout men have lived avoiding all noticeable actions. My actions would tell more about fortune than about me. They bear witness to their own part, not to mine, unless it be by conjecture and without certainty: they are samples which display only details. I expose myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place. One part of what I am was produced by a cough, another by a pallor or a palpitation of the heart--in any case dubiously. It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.

-Of Practice

Ce ne sont mes gestes que j'escris, c'est moy, c'est mon essence. Sartre almost had me convinced for a minute that I should judge people only by their actions, but now my "bourgeois" (according to Sartre) liking for leisure is vindicated and restored. Thank you Michel.

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K.A.

On 'Existentialism is a Humanism'

“Man simply is,” says Sartre. At this point in his essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” Sartre has already drawn out a faint sketch of previous kinds of ‘men’: he has alluded to Kant’s End-Man, to Descartes’ cogito-man, to late 19^th century secular moralistic man, and has himself begun to negatively describe man as not the product of a deterministic set of historical conditions that led to the accident of his birth nor the product of God. So far man is simply there. He is a nothing, for the time being we will call him ‘man’. Sartre does not stop there, though; it is at this point that the existentialist’s man begins.

            Where other writers might stop short of defining man after they have agreed upon what man is not (i.e. a fish, a god, a free agent), for Sartre and existentialism, since man is always-already the ultimate nothing, just existing, he must search, he must ‘surpass himself, and immediately find the first absolute truth of existentialism: one’s immediate sense of one’s self. This, which is further defined, is what Sartre means whenever he uses the words existence and subjectivity. No matter what that sense of self imparts to one’s judgment, to what kind of thing it is or does, one’s sense of their own subjectivity is the single absolute truth from which proceeds all other modes of thought, action, and ways of being. Hence the existentialist’s quick hand definition of existentialism, “existence precedes essence”.

            There are, says Sartre, no signs vouchsafed in this world, neither are there ready-to-hand interpretations of any signs there may seem to be. Existentialism is at its heart a philosophy of interpretation and begins with a choice: do we accept the conditions of our existence and our sense of this existence- or, do we deny these? Thus, existentialism posits, in one stroke, our being as an act of interpretation which is also and in equal measure an act of ‘invention’ (because, there being no standard of values, no God, nothing to begin with a priori) as well as a way of being brought to life by free action bereft of any given meaning/value whatsoever until the deed is done. I won’t go into it, but three aspects define this freedom: anguish, abandonment, and despair. These are contours and definitions of our subjectivity and of our being in the world as the kinds of beings that existentialism does in fact posit we are, a priori. And it is here that I would like to break off my summarizing of Sartre’s main points and stretch one of them to its limit.

            I want to ask if one’s immediate sense of one’s self as existing is not in itself an a priori assumption. I want to ask if the way we then proceed from this sense of self and existence is not then predicated on an a priori assumption which claims that we feel ourselves as feeling and thinking selves. Are these presuppositions not themselves ready-made? In short, what gives me the right to, as Descartes does, begin construction of the postulates of my existence on the unverifiable dictate that I am aware of myself? Even if I personally have a sense of self, does this mean that a sense of self is somehow necessary and in the general way that one usually conceives of it? I believe that Sartre answers this challenge in his essay by assuming its opposite, as does Descartes; assuming that we are without choice, controlled by a deceiving demon, or that given the choice we choose to live a fantasy. Commitment to a philosophy of existence whose limits are the conditions of man’s existence in the world, as Sartre powerfully claims, is a commitment to human existence read in terms of human deeds. This is how my single petty action can become relevant to the rest of humanity, and not simply indirectly, but as a choice I make on the part of everyone. Because signs are not vouchsafed and because their interpretations are suspended, human acts themselves are the definitive criterion of human meaning, human values, and human life. If human existence is the sum of human deeds, and a human life is the sum of its deeds, then human existence can only be as something which is read and lived and created within and among a human project of establishing “…the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world,” and is such that existence only has meaning for us humans. This is the meaning that Sartre gives to Humanism. Our real responsibility as humans is to commit ourselves to never losing sight of our fellows; even if no God can punish one for doing harm to one’s self or another; even if no Law can establish a priori any reason why doing so should not be done; even if it is in your power to do so and even if in ‘the grand scheme of things’ it is only a miniscule human matter destined for nothingness in the memory of no one; even if all this is so, and existentialism as posited by Sartre here does not refute this, one is the definition of a subjectivity of their own making and the freedom of choice lies squarely on one’s shoulders.