Existentialism of Sartre - Essay Example

192124 Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, much revered and sometimes criticised bitterly, has left an inerasable and enduring imprint on the human mind and philosophy. The language he spoke about Being was almost Heideggarian, but for the stress on consciousness, which Heideggar avoided. Both were equally interested in humans and their state of Being or non-being. Sartre's exististentialism talks about absolute individuality and utter freedom. He said people are ultimately alone, 'isolated islands of subjectivity in an objective world'. Human beings have absolute control over the internal nature and all value sources of the individual are internal, and this means, he owns them, and along with it, his destiny. His main saying was "Existence precedes Essence". According to Sartre, humans do not have any predetermined nature or course that they should follow. They can decide to do anything that is valuable to them. They have free choice and independent action. The human nature is shaped through these free choices and values. According to the Existentialist view, we create our own nature through our actions, desires, decisions, plans and ambitions. His above slogan negates the traditional view where essence comes before existence and this is the centre of the conventional argument that human beings are born pre-endowed with a nature of their own. According to the pre-determined nature, the individual's chances, opportunities, values, concept in life and achievements are all pre-determined and he will accept life according to the predetermined nature guided by his characters and nature. There is very little he can do about it and alter neither the own nature nor the course it is taking. But Sartre argues against all of it. So, according to his Existentialism it is all in the hands of Man and his likes and dislikes that makes life's rulings. His arguments on being-in-itself and being-for-itself are grounded on this basic assumption. "I suppose that it is accurate to say loosely that being in itself is nonconscious being and that being-for-itself is conscious being. And, at least pragmatically, we may as well restrict being-for-itself to human being," says Howells (1992, p.49). He says that the external world is connected to the state of being-in-itself and it is a way of existence, an unconscious one, neither passive, nor active, and has no capacity of transcendence. According to Sartre humans like to play God and have a compulsive desire to reach the status of being-in-itself, which means, an ardent longing to be the master of one's own destiny, to be identified in a gratifying way, and attain complete control over his own and other's existence. The difference between the two states is shown in the most simplistic way possible by Sartre. His famous example of a waiter is very interesting. A waiter in the caf thinks that he is a born waiter and nothing else. He thinks that the caf cannot work without him and he is the epitome of perfection in his job. But Sartre says that this cannot be so. He says a man cannot be a complete waiter the way an inkwell is an inkwell. This means, inkwell cannot be anything else other than inkwell, while the man can be many more things other than being a waiter. If he loses the job, or if he gets some other opportunity, he will be come a policeman, or a shopkeeper or a lawyer, or anything else. He could get into any other identity, many of them, one of which is being a waiter because a human being is constantly creating and recreating himself and adapting himself to any role that becomes a necessity of the moment. As inkwell is inkwell, the man is a man. The difference is man can adapt himself to many more identities; but he still continues to be a man which is the state of being-for-itself. In the state of being for itself, he does not have any fixed nature or essence. Actually he should focus more on being for itself instead of being in itself, and he commits this error constantly. While doing so, he becomes a man-for-others and according to Sartre, man commits a mistake here by not being true to his individualistic freedom and values, and instead, he ventures into role play for others. Sartre calls it bad faith. "Being is seen in all human activity, even in trivial, superficial or seemingly insignificant behaviours. Sartre's contention is that all human behaviour and mannerisms reveal something about existence. Existential psychoanalysis is concerned with deciphering behaviours and so opens them up to understanding allowing conceptual attributes to be made" Jones (2001, p.369). He explores the study of Being like the study of a phenomenon. He made it twofold division separating in-itself and for-itself. The being in itself (l'en-soi) is a state in which the person is totally unrelated and uncharacterized related only to what Sartre called 'transphenomenal realm'. But the being-for-itself (l'pour-soi) is characterized and related fully with the fully available freedom of choice and it is the state of a transcendent being of a person, who defines himself in his own essence according to his own choice and tries fully to adapt himself to the chosen role. This state has everything that the first one lacks. The second state tries to derive meaning to the existence of the individual. "By nurturing his own meaning, man gives his own existence" http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/sartre/section2.rhtml Second state also tests the limits of the particular human being, his creativity, imagination, ambition and the capability of reaching different heights. It takes him to various realms of conscious life where he tries to derive meanings from diverse situations. He nourishes various meanings to his own existence and without this connectivity, his life will not have any meaning. Only this state completes the consciousness of his being. Being for itself is defined by him "as being what it is not and not being what it is" (Sartre, 1956, lxv). Sartre allows himself to attempt to explore the relation between being and nothingness as part of his venture to understand the Being. According to him is the subsequent to being and it is the contradiction and not the opposite. "Nothingness is a state of non-being. Nothingness does not itself have Being, but is sustained by Being. Sartre disagrees with Hegel that Being and Nothingness are opposite, or are opposed as thesis and antithesis respectively. Sartre says that Nothingness is the contradiction, and not the opposite, of Being. Nothingness is logically subsequent to Being." http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/sartre.html Just like his theory of consciousness, where he said "All consciousness is consciousness of something," his theory of nothingness too created flutter in the world of philosophy. Analyzers of these theories went ahead to understand the denials and affirmations, collapses and resurrections of his theories of Being. "In order not to collapse back into being, - or to be more precise, in order not to collapse into a pure non-being that left only being - the for-itself must be both an affirmation denied and a denial affirmed. The affirmation that is denied is being-in-itself; the denial that is affirmed is the for-itself's denial of denial is is denial-in-itself; that is, the denial of itself as for-itself-in-itself" Cox (2006, p.9). Sartre's ontology is dualistic and the two states are absolutely different from one another. "It is itself indefinitely and it exhausts itself in being...Consciousness absolutely can not derive from anything, either from another being, or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity." (Being and Nothingness, 1943). Most of his phraseology comes from Hegel. Sartre accorded the most important place for human freedom. The freedom envisaged by him was complete and absolute. Freedom, says Sartre "is not a quality added on or a property of my nature. It is the very stuff of my being," (Sartre, 1977, p.415). He said 'non-reflective consciousness is freedom'. "Non-reflective consciousness is absolutely rid of ego," Sartre (1981, p.11). According to him human beings have useless passions because they cannot complete their desire to be self-caused. "The being of human reality is suffering because it rises in being by perpetually haunted by a totality which it is impossible to be it, precisely because it could not attain the in-itself without losing the for-itself. Human reality therefore is by nature, an unhappy consciousness," (1977, p.66). About absolute freedom, Sartre was not totally happy, because he thought that Man's complete freedom gets shaken when he meets the other free individuals and those individuals might give 'that look' which will make him uncomfortable and that is an encroachment on his freedom. He also wanted humans to become achievers so that the choice of freedom could be exercised. Sartre said 'man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.' He argued that 'there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it'. Being an atheist, he did not believe in the existence of anything supernatural, but thought that in a way, life is absurd because it has to abruptly end with the death. But he argued that atheism is not depressing; instead it renders more freedom. He also strongly denied that it could be a despairing state, since, while being alive, Man can choose his own actions and live in absolute freedom and give life whatever meaning he chooses to give and hence, existentialism is not pessimistic; "In this sense existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, " he said. "The meaning of the being of the existent in so far as it reveals itself to consciousness is the phenomenon of being...This elucidation of the meaning of being is valid only for the being of the phenomenon....For being is the being of becoming and due to this fact it is beyond becoming. It is what it is. This means that by itself it can not even be what it is not...It is full positivity. It knows no otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being. It can support no connection with the other. (Being and Nothingness, 1943) He argued that the combination and friction between nothingness of consciousness and the various activities brought negation and imagination to this world. "It is through the nothingness of consciousness and its activities that negation comes into the world, our ability to imagine the world other than it is and the inescapable necessity of imagining ourselves other than we seem to be. And because consciousness is nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality" http://mythosandlogos.com/Sartre.html Even though Sartre's theories became known all over the world, it had its own critics both in the philosophical region and outside. There were arguments that his arguments were neither logical nor practical. They said most of his arguments needed rounded off. "It seems clear that Sartre wants to say both that the being of human consciousness is a kind of non-being and that the being of human persons is a kind of nonbeing. Commentators on Sartre have, in my opinion, failed to recognise the very great difference between these two claims," argues Acquila (1977, p.167). The arguments and counter-arguments could be many and they are still raging on. In a way, it shows that he is relevant even now as was during his life time. Interest, negative or positive, in his theories had not waned. His arguments about the human freedom are thrilling and that is where today's Man is heading for. But his other argument that another free individual could spoil the freedom of another individual by simply being there, or looking at the first individual could be a bit difficult to grasp. It has made thinkers to wonder if he really wanted all humans to live really like islands, that too, in secluded places. This concept of Sartre could clash with the popular concept of humans that after all, Man is a herd animal!! But Sartre still remains the most fascinating philosopher of the century who tried to connect being, nothingness, emotions, communications, aspirations and cover them all with a drapery of freedom and said that there could never be too much of it and there is no substitute for freedom. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Acquila, Richard E., 'Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre's Being and Nothingness', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 38, No. 2. (Dec., 1977), pp. 167-186. 2. Cox, Gary (2006), Sartre, The Guide for the Perplexed, Continuum, London. 3. Howels, Christina (1992), A Cambridge Companion to Sartre, Cambridge University Press. 4. Jones, A., 'Absurdity and being-in-itself. The third phase of phenomenology: Jean-Paul Sartre and existential psychoanalysis', Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 2001, 8, 367-372. 5. Sartre, Jean Paul (1943), Being and Nothingness, Philosophical Library, New York. 6. Sartre, Jean Paul (1977), Life Situations, Essays Written and Spoken, Pantheon, New York. 7. ONLINE SOURCES 1. http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/sartre.html 2. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/sartre/section2.rhtml 3. http://mythosandlogos.com/Sartre.html 4. Read More