Firstly, Nietzsche was not a fascist. He was strongly for individualism, he was anti-nationalism, and he criticized antisemitism—the converse of last two were key aspects of Nazism. He would more accurately be described politically as a libertarian or an anarchist. Nietzsche is commonly referred to as—and I would argue he is more accurately described as—the first existential nihilist. Additionally, if you want a real fascist existentialist, one need not look any further than Martin Heidegger.
As I am sure you already know, Heidegger was a member of Nazi party. While Nietzsche himself may very well have rejected the Nazi Party had he lived in Germany during that epoch, his ideas played a role in generating those ideas. Legalising gay marriage would seem to me to do the precise opposite—by bringing gay people into marriage, gay people are brought into a traditional family structure, strengthening the family rather than eroding it.
The real trouble in gay marriage for the pope has nothing to do with negative consequences resulting from gay marriage because, from a traditional family point of view, there are none.
Gay marriage brings gays into the family and into the tradition from which they were previously excluded. It does not kill the family or kill tradition. It is not a form of radical feminism, as the pope asserts when he attacks a straw man and claims that the supporters of gay marriage share the radical views of Simone de Beauvoir, an existentialist who genuinely believed that there is no human nature and that existence proceeds essence, a claim I myself, a supporter of gay marriage, have vehemently attacked.
What definition do you propose they are using instead? Does that not contradict Sartre? I concur. His maxim is a direct inversion of philosophy prior to that point: Essence precedes existence. A thief steals because he is a thief. A cat behaves and looks like a cat because it is a cat. Sartre says that this is backward. The motivations for theft vary widely and you can steal everything from an apple to a car. You can be anything from a burglar, to a mugger to a shoplifter. The thieving is a description of what already has been demonstrated to exist, whatever the causes of that behavior might be.
But why does a person steal? Because the person is of an essence X that causes the person to steal under conditions Y. The act of stealing reveals the essence to a third party, but it does not create anything new.
Therefore all those things like personality and biology fall in after the fact to conform. You are still trying to use a definition of essence that was not used in that philosophical discussion. That this Ideal sits at the top of a hierarchy and therefore imbues cattiness to cats. Everything is a cheap knock off of the Idea. Essence refers to the idea that once a thief, always a thief. A king was a king. A peasant was a peasant.
This is a straw man account of the philosophical beliefs held by Platonists and others in the western tradition prior to existentialism. Philosophers have tried to explain these changes in the past.
The difference between the traditional view and the existentialist view is the mechanism by which a person stops being a thief. For the existentialist, a person stops being a thief through an act of transcendence, in which the person chooses through an act of will to view his facticity the environmental and genetic circumstances that limit their behavior differently.
This change in view enables a corresponding behavioral change. This is what is radical and different about the existentialist view—because a person comes into existence prior to receiving facticity, the person maintains a will that is independent of that facticity and can influence the way the facticity is interpreted. For existentialists, people are self-authoring. The traditional essentialist view holds that when a person changes behavior, it is not because he is willing himself to transcend his facticity, but because some aspect of his facticity has interacted with new experiences to yield different behavior.
Many historical philosophers have believed that people are capable of having their behavior changed, but not of changing their behavior e. Marx, Durkheim, etc. These traits interact with the environment to produce new outcomes, but there is nothing the individual can do to transcend these forces, because all wills are comprised of them and cannot exist independently of them.
The forces can be observed, but not transcended. It matters which view you have, because if you take the existentialist view, it follows that you expect people to self-modify. If you take the view of someone like Durkheim or Marx, additional social or biological forces are required to induce the change. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for.
Let us say, then, of the paperknife that its essence — that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible — precedes its existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes.
Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibnitz himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula.
Thus each individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards.
If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. A deterministic causality does not conflict with the understanding that we define ourselves by our actions.
Thought it sounded familiar and then recognized my comment from four years ago, heh. You can have facticity that is not absolutely insurmountable. The fact that there is even a concept of facticity sort of damages the assertion existentialists deny.
Again, I cite my example of a king. Even the cat, with a hard genetic code, is existentially a cat, not essentially a cat. The facticity is less insurmountable in one case than the other. It essentially does boil down into the concept of some kind of metaphysical hierarchy where all things must conform to Ideal Forms which can never be proven to exist in the first place.
We can spend all day talking about Ideal Cats and Unicorns, but those are indistinguishable from fiction. Nor am I asserting that existentialism flatly denies biology or culture—it merely claims that these factors are not insurmountable. The trouble is, if your facticity is not insurmountable, this necessarily implies that there is something that is doing the surmounting.
What exists independently of facticity? Existentialism provides no adequate response to this question, it necessarily takes free will as an assumption.
Then really, Being and Nothingness is worth reading too. You might like it. One more thing — I was going to let this go too, but developed something akin to an allergic reaction and must say something. Why the outdated language? I would start there. Sure, of course.
What existentialism does, however, is give us a language in which we can speak of at least some kind of ethical autonomy, which you presuppose by arguing we can help ourselves by looking at hard facts, causes and limitations, but you preclude if you embrace a purely deterministic apodictic and scientistic view. How would you, for example, account for any ability to make any real choice, ever?
Yet you presuppose it by even imagining that you are thinking for yourself here. As an aside, I do think the point you raise about personalities is interesting. It does seem that we certainly are born with inclinations toward certain behaviors. Exploring this would be worthwhile.
You need more background, and it takes a lot of time and persistence to do all that reading — years and years. Of all the professions, I do think doing philosophy well and responsibly is among the most difficult because of the sheer amount of material one needs to have absorbed. One approaches sophistication by degrees and by lots of effort. And what about the language? This does not necessarily mean our behavior is mechanistically determined there could be a random component , but it does mean that it is not possible for people to act independently of their facticity.
This is significantly different from the view Sartre expresses. He claims that while facticity limits freedom, beings still freely ascribe values to it and are consequently personally responsible for these values. I deny this on the grounds that I believe moral responsibility requires that beings be causa sui, self-determining uncaused causes of their beliefs and actions, and this is not logically possible.
Because for a being to be causa sui, it must not only be the cause of its decisions, it must also be the cause of the principles and procedures it uses to make its decisions. And if a being is the cause of those principles and procedures, how did it decide which principles and procedures to act on? It would need to be the cause of that decision, and of the principles and procedures behind it, and so on, in an infinite regress.
Surely not. When I use it in this context, it refers to people in general, not males specifically. Thought the article was great.
Have some differences in opinion, but definitely need to read more in depth on the subject matter. Definitely thought provoking though. I posted my comment here because I wanted to draw attention to the fact, that this article and the responses were so great, I read all the way to when Sarah started posting responses.
Sarah, I wish you had never accidentally stumbled across this article. You object, saying that this excludes you. Enter phenomenology, and Wittgenstein too.
Sartre never discounts the situation but admonishes us to pay attention precisely to that, the ways in which our freedom is circumscribed by it. Ideology, false consciousness, and so forth.
The interesting question, of course, as you say, is, how can we EVER speak in a way that makes sense of having any ethical autonomy, at all? How are we EVER thinking independently, for ourselves, if you will? How are we ever anything more than mechanistic, fully determined cogs in causal wheels? What do you propose? We contradict ourselves as soon as we begin to reflect. My trouble with Sartre is, as you go on to say, that he does not explicitly propose a persuasive conception of freedom yet maintains that freedom exists.
I would explicitly say that freedom is logically impossible and that personal responsibility is also logically impossible. By regarding ourselves as completely part of these systems in every respect rather than as external agents acting upon them via freedom even in circumscribed ways , we can see that our systems change themselves through their own parts, they are always self-deconstructing and self-reconstructing.
So when we try to persuade one another to change moral views, we are performing our systemic roles, we are parts talking to other parts. As Parfit would say, we are the beings that respond to reasons.
We cannot choose not to respond to them or choose which to respond to—the ones that we take to be more persuasive because of our heredity and environment and any random component that may be involved will inevitably move us to action. Instead of a plurality of free beings, I see a unitary whole guided by the same essential objective moral imperatives—the experience of benefit and the avoidance of harm, both broadly conceived.
The words we use are the symptoms of injustices and inequalities, not the causes of them. I maintain that it is a matter of taste, provided that the content does not constitute a substantive endorsement of the system that brought it about.
I absolutely agree that biases within philosophy are terrible and need to be challenged, but the words themselves are not doing the biasing, they reflect historical biases but do not necessarily embody them.
By all means language should evolve to reflect new paradigms and values, but this should happen of its own accord, it does not require that we try to force the adoption of awkward terminology, and to the extent that philosophers have done this, it has harmed the readability of their work for a general audience and done nothing at all to diminish the biases that remain.
I may be able to imagine myself as a serial killer, but this does not in any way establish that I am one or could be one. Subjective self-knowledge is not a prerequisite for objective state of being. The fact that I can imagine myself as something I am not does not establish I have the freedom to be that thing by choice.
If I can be that thing, it is due to hereditary, environmental, and random factors. Indeed, the fact that I can imagine myself as that thing is due to those same factors.
Oh, language matters—good writing needs to be clear, and it needs to make its point without generating distractions.
How is one to know in which sense you mean it? Those are two very different senses of the term freedom. Metaphysically unfree beings can certainly nonetheless have political freedom. Political freedom can be either positive or negative.
Negative freedom is freedom from coercion from other beings, positive freedom is freedom to do or have access to something specific like healthcare, education, etc. These two kinds of freedom are not related. Political freedom is about the extent to which our choices are limited or widened by other people, metaphysical freedom is about the extent to which our choices are limited or widened by the nature of existence in itself. I do not believe that beings can be self-determining.
I think personal responsibility requires freedom and that freedom requires self-determination. So even supposing all my behavior is caused, which is just another way of saying there is an explanation for it, it can be an open question what the cause might be. I am not at all claiming that everything is caused, I am only claiming that no being can be self-caused or self-causing.
The free will question is a descriptive question—how is it that beings come to act the way that they act. The question of what our values should be is a normative question of moral theory, not a metaphysical question about what is.
Yes, but this is not the aim, the aim of descriptive investigation is to get at something like objective truth. To the extent that the normative comes into play, this is a defect of descriptive research methods, not a virtue.
I firmly disagree with the claim that when we choose our values we act freely in any morally important sense, because our choices are based on principles, desires, and beliefs that we do not choose.
We can only choose our values freely if we can also choose the process by which we choose our values freely, and we can only choose that process freely if we can choose the process by which we choose that process freely, and so on in the aforementioned infinite regress. Moral responsibility requires that we are truly self-causing, self-determining beings, and this conception of freedom does not satisfy that criteria. It seems to me that teleological causes ideas about purposes, goals, values influence behavior, and that these different kinds of causes do not rule each other out.
For instance, I might be predisposed genetically to be stubborn indeed , but the specific action I take can be different, depending on my values and beliefs. If, however, the categorical imperative fall through if it is shown not to accomplish what it is purported to accomplish, philosophically , then we cannot use it as a basis for moral freedom.
Correct me if you disagree. Let me call your attention to the title of your blog: making the world better by writing things. The presupposition here is not only that you can make the world different by writing reasoning , but that you can make it better in a qualitatively positive way.
Is that not your presupposition? Why otherwise would you bother? As Hume argued in his Enquiry Concerning Human Nature, patterns in the past are only just that, and never determine with certainty what will happen in the future.
The leaves the future open. In fact, we must choose: the only thing we are not free to do is not to be free. Other entities have some predefined nature: a rock, a penknife or even a beetle just is what it is. But as a human, there is no blueprint for producing me. I may be influenced by biology, culture and personal background, but at each moment I am making myself up as I go along, depending on what I choose to do next.
But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him. What would it mean for us today, if we truly believed this idea?
For a start, we might be more sceptical about the simplified popular-science arguments suggesting that we are out of control of ourselves — that, when we speak, click on a button, or vote, we are only following unconscious and statistically predictable forces rather than deciding freely.
What intrigues me is the eagerness with which we seem to seize on this idea; it is as though we find it more comforting than disturbing. It lets us off the hook, taking away the existential anxiety that comes with making a genuine choice. It may be dangerous: other research suggests that people who have been convinced that they are not free tend to make less ethical choices. Then there is the question of social freedom.
After the s, the battle for personal liberty seemed to be mostly won. The achievements have been great — and yet, in the 21st century, we find ourselves less sure than ever about how far our freedom includes the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we want to compromise in return for convenience, entertainment or an illusion of total security.
This did lead to some unpalatable behaviour, as when De Beauvoir became involved with her own young students before apparently passing them on to Sartre. He was a serial seducer: one scurrilous journalist in chortled over rumours of him tempting women up to his bedroom by offering them a sniff of his Camembert cheese well, good cheese was hard to get in Sartre and De Beauvoir instead chose to live by their own philosophy of honesty and free choice.
She marshalled evidence to show, on an epic scale, how women grow up to be more hesitant and self-doubting than men, and less inclined to pursue the basic existentialist goal of taking responsibility for their lives. Many women, reading the book, decided to shake off their inhibitions and have a go after all. The chapter that most shocked contemporaries concerned lesbianism — and Sartre, too, was a supporter of gay rights, although he remained convinced that sexuality was a matter of existential choice rather than a given reality such as blue eyes or dark hair.
Not all existentialism is about jolly sex romps. It also confronts aspects of the human condition that we might prefer not to think about, but that will not go away. One is anxiety. Today, we often approach this as a disorder in need of treatment, but the existentialists saw it as an essential part of human experience, and one particularly revealing of our situation in the world. For Heidegger, we also run up against the horrifying realisation that, whatever I do, I will die one day.
I am mortal, and this limitation is part of what I am. Sartre and De Beauvoir wrote about death too, but for them it cannot be embraced so positively. Death is an outrage that comes to us from outside our lives and wipes them out.
What we can do, at least, is to resist the false consolations of belief in immortality. Some existentialists did have religious faith, but Sartre and De Beauvoir were radical humanist atheists; Sartre said that he had lost his faith at the age of 11 while standing at a bus stop.
They stuck to their conviction that this is the life we have, and that our task is to live it in the fullest and most honest way. They take this to mean being less self-deceiving, more decisive, more committed, and more willing to take on responsibility for the world. For Sartre, the problem is mauvaise foi , or bad faith. To avoid facing up to how free I am, I pretend not to be free at all. We all indulge in bad faith. It is sometimes even beneficial, since it makes life livable.
So I set my alarm clock, and when it goes off I roll out of bed unquestioningly as though the clock were controlling me like a marionette so said Sartre; I find my own response to alarm clocks is less predictable. A fully authentic life is probably impossible, but trying for an authentic moment now and then does us good. Authenticity has become something of a commodity now. We are sold authentic-sounding recordings on vinyl records, authentic breakfast cereal, authentic floorboards, and authentic prepackaged holiday experiences.
Think about it. Then you have forged meaning in the fires of futility and you have overcome, which is something. That we exist may be meaningless in and of itself, but there is meaning in the process of uncovering our essence under all the social and cultural detritus that clutters life.
We are each born into a set of facts, accidents of circumstance, that describe and shape our reality—class, race, gender, religion, et cetera. But beyond the boundaries and definitions set by our families and societies lies possibility. Well, not believing is your freedom. The trick to living a full life despite fundamental reluctance is to just pick something, anything, and do it. Focus on tasks at hand, and take each day and the chores and duties before you as opportunities to forget the big picture.
In doing, there is liberation. During moments of focus on even very mundane endeavors, you are free and have purpose. This purpose may be small. You are a hero of the mundane, like Sisyphus, rolling a boulder up a hill every day over and over again. By endeavoring to keep on keeping on, you become a giant, a survivor. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Within the struggle, we gain a purpose, and feel sometimes something like happiness.
And therein lies the beauty. He still thinks that something in his life can be directed. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. There is no more human need than to feel loved.
Yet the silence of the world is most deafening when it comes to love. We pursue partnerships and companionships with people who are indifferent to us and ignore those who want us most.
We roll the rock up the hill, meet, anguish, fight, break up, and are smashed by the rolling boulder on the way down.
Like Sisyphus, those who seek love must return to the beginning and continue on again, perpetually engaging in a struggle and knowing that all their best intentions and calculations are futile against the whims and unpredictability of romance. What is more Sisyphean than downloading a dating app, uploading a photo, and then perpetually swiping through face after face, engaging in an utterly mundane task over and over, in the hope of one day, perhaps, finding a connection and meaning.
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