The existentialism of Sarte:
Sartre’s first forays into philosophical thought in academia found expression in two pre-war essays published in 1936 called The Transcendence of the Ego and Imagination: A Psychological Critique. Like Heidegger, Sartre complained that Husserl hadn’t taken phenomenological reduction far enough.
In his essay Imagination: A Psychological Critique Sartre attacks the idea that imagination is the surveying of contents of an interior mental world. Sartre argued that imagining relates us to extra-mental objects rather than internal images and does so no less than perception albeit differently.
Sartre argues that emotions are not passive internal sensations, that instead they are a way of apprehending the world. That is to say emotions help us to understand the world around us thus act in active way to interact with and help with our interpretation of the world as we experience it. Apparently not one for technical explanations Sartre describes emotions as ‘a magical transformation’ of situations we find ourselves in. By this he means that our emotions, due to their active subjective nature affect our perception of the world. So for example depression makes one’s actions feel like the epitome of futility.
The shift in Sartre’s work was apparent with the publishing magnum opus, Being and Nothingness in 1943, which in contrast to his earlier Husserlian work took inspiration from Heidegger instead.
‘Being’ for Sartre is the precursor to and reason behind all different things that can be found in the consciousness. Things themselves are sorted into categories based on the will of the mindm however if one were to strip off such distinctions we have (pure) being. Being is everything of the mind, without cause except that of its own if it so desires. This he refers to as en-soi.
Pour-soi is the ‘for-itself’ aspect of the human consciousness – in simplisitic terms perhaps the id.
En-soi and pour-soi are the two key concepts of Being and Nothingness. The only difference between the two is negation, that En-soi is of no cause but pour-soi is for itself. In terms of the consciousness negation is when in articulating the world, there is a distinction between what is and what is not, the latter being a negation of the former. Thus Sartre prescribes importance to the objectification of nothing. It is only due to negation that nothingness comes into the world, without the process of articulation and thus negation there is no nothingness apparent.
This is not to say nothingness doesn’t exist, simply that it isn’t apparent until observed. It brings to mind the proverb; ‘if a tree fall in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a noise.’ In a sense this quote plays in the self-importance prescribed to humans in that one might mistakenly answer no because they have not heard it. But it does make a sound and in the same way nothingness would exist without humans for there exists a distinction between all things whether it be predators and prey or spoons and forks.
Sartre claimed that human life was not determined in advance by any cause natural or otherwise. Thus human beings have freedom but in the paradoxical state that through having freedom it the necessity of choice that the consciousness brings (thus negation and nothingness). People try and hide because absolute freedom is scary, thus we hide by adopting roles offered by morality, society or religion. However such methods are doomed to failure (according to Sartre) for man exists in the paradoxical state that he is both aware of his freedom whilst striving to reduce it in the knowledge this cannot occur. Sartre calls this condition ‘bad faith.’ Alternatively one can accept and confirm their freedom and acknowledge the inherent responsibility that accompanies it.
Jacques Derrida
Derrida attached great importance to the distinction of language though did not trouble himself with definitions. He would introduce new terms, utterly unneeded and poorly defined by Derrida himself such as defference, which combined the notions of deferring and difference. He described defference as that which is ‘conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay and differing as the actual work of difference.’ Such new terms, whilst he attempts to define them and solidify their meaning thus validating their existence in the first place remain largely open to interpretation in the fact it doesn’t fall neatly into any categories that exist.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
The Tractatus is a book consisting of one chapter, one page and 7 propositions. Every proposition is designed to be self evident, every word having a meaning and a meaning behind that meaning and so on to the degree that this miniscule piece of literature is also accompanied by pages upon pages of footnotes so that one might fully understand how much weight each of the 7 statements carries and how it is self evident. Each proposition follows on from the next ending with a final quote and no further explanation (footnotes aside).
The aim of the Tractatus was to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science through a hierarchal series of supposedly self-evident statements.
To describe the meaning of each statement in detail is an impossible task due to the gargantuan amount of work behind every word let alone the entire proposition itself.
For example the first proposition is simply: 'The World is everything that is the case'
However if one is then to look into the footnotes they will see the heirarchy of propositions that follow on from one another and often require more elaboration themselves. The further you attempt to understand the piece the deeper into his work you must go and to this end it is truly philosophical in that each reading will find you examining his points in a different light.
An example of this complexity can be seen followin on from the second proposition: 'What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.'
Facts are a state of things, and a state of things is a combination of objects. Objects themselves are simple non-composite things because they make up the substance of the world.
And an object takes form through the possibility that a state of events (structure) will occur. However cannot be both form and matter and so exist in a state of flux, both changing and unstable. Meanwhile the structure of a fact consists of the structures of states of affairs.
And so it continues like this giving true credence to the 7th propostion which simply states:
‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’
This proposition describes the limitations of language – one shouldn’t attempt to use language to clarify unfalsifiable propositions. If there are no facts then one should be silent, just because we can speak of that we do not know doesn’t mean we should and gives a semblance of authority and existence to that which deserves neither.
Other Critical Thinkers:
Edmund Husserl:
Edmund Husserl looked at the notion of intentionality, the idea that what characterises mental phenomena as distinct from the physical is that the mental is directed towards objects.
A thought is made up of two things; content and a possessor.
Content is what the thought is about, specifically what it is about i.e. you are thinking about e.g. a sheep and not a table.
The possessor is the person who is thinking of the content.
Husserl states that a thought is an act with a matter. I.e. that the thought was intentional towards an object, in this example; a sheep.
Husserl is responsible for founding the school of philosophical thought known as phenomenology which is the study of the conscious experience.
The aim of phenomenology was the study of the immediate data of the conscious.
Husserl wrote in 1901 that: ‘It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-sided polygon as of a regular thousand-faced solid.’
He is stating that the intentionality of thought does not distinguish between reality and constructs of the mind. That is to say that if one were to think about aliens and then think about a bagel, there would be no difference in the intentionality of thought. Furthermore, this means that the intentionality of thought of an object is indistinguishable from that of a hallucination of an object. Thus the experience is the same irrespective of how that experience of the subject is had whether that be in reality, hallucination or dream.
Subsequently Husserl believed that one should suspend their judgement of existence i.e. of the natural world so that a phenomenological analysis can deal with one’s subjective perception of an experience in its purest form.
Martin Heidegger:
Heidegger was a pupil of Husserl who focused on the question of being through his work in extentialism and phenomenology.
Heidegger felt that phenomenology didn’t go far enough, that before we can study experience we must study the concept of Being which precedes the link between conscious and reality.
Thus whilst Husserl based phenomenology on the study of conscious, Heidegger focused on the study of Being.
To do this, Heidegger had to invent his own terminology including the concept of ‘Dasein.’ Dasein is a being that is capable of asking philosophical questions.
It differs from Descartes’s Cartesian ego in the fact that the Cartesian ego is simply a thinking thng whilst Dasein incorporates thinking as only one of its features of being and only one way of interacting with the world.
Dasein can be defined as caring, as only through caring will a being be interested in the world enough to ask philosophical questions.
Dasein is temporal in nature, distinct from substance in the fact it represents the continuation of life. Thus in defining Being, Heidegger notes that the future has priority over past and present, that goals determine the significance of the present. Consequently the view of the past is negative in the fact it brings up guilt and anxiety. This is because one must make the distinction when examining life, between what a person is, and what they might have been.
Dasein operates within a biological, social and cultural context and according to Heidegger, Dasein has three fundamental aspects:
Attunement: Situations we are in manifest themselves at an emotional level e.g. dangerous or boring and thus we respond to them with a mood of appropriate emotional reaction.
Dasein is discursive: That Dasein operates within which discourse is conveyed through language and culture.
Understanding (in a spatial sense): That activities are directed towards goals, some of which will make sense of a life within its cultural context.
Heidegger claims there is no such thing as human nature which dictates the activities of the individual. Dasein itself is existence.
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