Reflection for November 25 - Sartre

Under examination for this week was Jean-Paul Sartre, a notable philosopher of the twentieth century. Of the particular themes that Sartre has worked upon, the discussion here emphasizes the roles of freedom and responsibility as well as his work to understand and explain the role of emotions and how they interact with the former. To begin at a logical starting point, I want to first put forth the notion within Sartre’s work that you as an individual are ultimately responsible for the decisions that you make, regardless of extenuating circumstances. This notion feeds off of the explanation that everyone should act how they feel that society as a whole should act. In other words, Sartre wants to persuade that one should make actions in accordance to how they feel everyone should. This stems from the idea that one should question what would happen if every member of society acted in a similar fashion. Furthermore, this subsequently accentuates the idea that you do not just make decisions for yourself, but that you make decisions for all of mankind.

            From here, it would also be a logical counter for an individual to point that their actions should not be accepted or interpreted as that of a model. That is, when questioning what would happen if everyone acted in a similar fashion to you, it surely seems plausible to point to the more likely fact that not everyone does so. However, according to Sartre, “but in truth, one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception. The man who lies in self-excuse, by saying ‘Everyone will not do it,’ must be ill at ease in his conscience, for the act of lying implies the universal value which it denies. By its very disguise his anguish reveals itself” (Sartre in Solomon, 209). From this, Sartre is trying to emphasize that responsibility for one’s actions in this instance is attempted to be shifted away, due to a crushing realization of one’s responsibility once accepting that your actions go beyond simply yourself.

            Responsibility to Sartre is a very important thing. The notion of good faith hinges on the idea that one needs to take responsibility for their actions, and there are ultimately no excuses for not being able to claim responsibility for your actions.  To be sure, it becomes more understandable why Sartre might want to write in emphasis of responsibility when you consider the time period in which he is writing – that is, the horrible events around World War II. When referencing responsibility in this period, he writes “when, for instance, a military leader takes upon himself the responsibility for an attack and sends a number of men to their death, he chooses to do it and at bottom he alone chooses. No doubt he acts under a higher command, but its orders, which are more general, require interpretation by him and upon that interpretation depends the life of ten, fourteen or twenty men” (Sartre in Solomon, 210).

            So at the bottom of this, I feel that Sartre wants to point out that the majority of the deaths that can be accounted for during this horrible time period should not fall on the responsibility of just a few individuals at the top of the hierarchical command structure. Rather, every individual agent that decided to take action and participate within the war structure was responsible for their own actions. This is simply to say that responsibility cannot be exempted because of coercion. As much as I may want to say that I am unhappy due to the circumstances that I am placed in, which has left me no choice, I cannot. More specifically, I may want to say that I am unhappy because society has dictated that I must go to college, get an education, start a family, and work a 9-5. I may want to say that I had no choice but to comply with these societal norms. Yet, I would be wrong. Sartre shows that in this instance, my unhappiness cannot be blamed on these circumstances. To blame these circumstances is to attempt to alleviate myself of the anguish in the realization that my own sadness is my own responsibility.

            From here I want to transition to Sartre’s works concerning emotions. Even here, however, the idea of responsibility is echoed in Sartre’s writings. To illustrate how emotions are interrelated to the way in which you perceive the world, he uses a story of grapes. This story tells of an agent who reaches to pick some grapes, however after doing so, finds that they are out of reach. To cope with the responding event, the agent simply shrugs it off justifying that they were too green anyways. When writing of this Sartre shows that “at first, they presented themselves as ‘having to be picked.’ But this urgent quality very soon becomes unbearable because the potentiality cannot be realized. This unbearable tension becomes, in turn, a motive for foisting upon the grapes the new quality ‘too green,’ which will resolve the conflict and eliminate the tension… I magically confer upon the grapes the quality I desire” (Sartre in Calhoun and Solomon, 4).

            Furthermore, responsibility and obligations are important themes in instances with identifiable emotions. To show this, he writes “for example, if I have learned I am ruined, I no longer have the same means at my disposal (private auto, etc.) to carry them out. I have to substitute new media for them (to take the bus, etc.); that is precisely what I do not want. Sadness aims at eliminating the obligation to seek new ways, to transform the structure of the world by a totally undifferentiated structure” (Sartre in Calhoun and Solomon, 4). In the first instance, Sartre wants to show us that we are thoroughly convinced that the substance of the grapes has changed. However, we “magically” confer this quality upon them. In reality, nothing about the grapes has changed; our convincing ourselves of such an occurrence is simply to relieve ourselves of our obligation to pick the grapes in the circumstance of us not being able to. 

Reflection for November 18 - Heidegger

      Continuing from last week’s discussion of Heidegger, this discussion will primarily function from Heidegger’s position concerning how Da-sein relates to the concept of death. We have already covered this conceptualization of Da-sein and how it closely resembles the idea that an individual is aware, and open to the world in a sort of liquid-like state. That is, Da-sein is something that we strive for in our everyday lives. Interestingly enough, Heidegger and Nietzsche are similar in this sense. Whereas the elements of Da-sein are something to strive for, the ubermensch described by Nietzsche is similarly relevant. Heidegger claims that philosophy is for the few, that is, it is an extremely complicated way of approaching ideas which has the tendency to break down societal norms. I may return to this more later, however, for now I simply want to make the point that Da-sein is an extremely complicated concept in which death, consequently, plays a large role.
  Generally speaking, death is the totality of being. That is, it is the completion of the experience of Da-sein. Heidegger writes that “the transition to no-longer-being-there lifts Da-sein right out of the possibility of experiencing this transition and of understanding it as something experienced. This kind of thing is denied to actual Da-sein in relation to itself” (Heidegger in Solomon, 139). This is an extremely interesting point in the sense that Heidegger wants to show that although death is your own, you cannot and do not experience your own death. Rather, people interact with the concept of death through the loss of a life that is around them. According to Heidegger, “death does not reveal itself as a loss, but as a loss experienced by those remaining behind. However, in suffering the loss, the loss of being as such which the dying person ‘suffers’ does not become accessible. We do not experience the dying of others in a genuine sense; we are at best always just ‘there’ too” (Heidegger in Solomon, 140).
  This, however, creates the issue how we should feel about our lives in the face of death. Class discussion was quite heated around this topic as one classmate pointed to the fact that we can ultimately never grasp death until we are essentially faced with it. I believe that I would agree with this idea in the sense that I do not feel as if I can truly understand how I would consider my life in its totality in the face of death. In other words, while I may have a certain idea of how I would feel about my life in such a circumstance (more than likely overwhelmed with anxiety that everything that I have done or learned in my life was not put to a more practical use), I cannot be certain that this is actually how I would feel when genuinely facing the ultimate end of my being.
Rather than having a complete conceptualization of death, I believe that the authenticity which relates to death in Heidegger’s writing is more concerned with being aware of the “indefinite certainty of death.” This certainty and how it relates to Da-sein is explained that by “anticipating the indefinite certainty of death, Da-sein opens itself to a constant threat arising from its own there. Being-towards-the-end must hold itself in this very threat, and can so little phase it out that it rather has to cultivate the indefiniteness of the certainty” (Heidegger in Solomon, 144). Therefore, I would argue that authenticity relating to death in the way that Heidegger explains it does not necessarily require the individual to have an ultimate grasp of how we would consider our lives in the face of death, nor does it require us to have a grasp of the experience of our own death. Rather, we should have an understanding of our indefinite certainty of death, which is the totality of our Da-sein and how this produces authenticity.
From here, I wanted to briefly discuss the idea that philosophy is useless in a certain degree. Heidegger grants this idea, but goes on to point out that what is useless can still be a force. When speaking of this, he asserts that “philosophy can never directly supply the energies and create the opportunities and methods that bring about historical change… It spreads only indirectly, by devious paths that can never be laid out in advance, until at last, at some future date, it sinks to the level of a commonplace” (Heidegger in Solomon, 148-149). However, when speaking of this, I do not believe that Heidegger desires to establish philosophy as a completely unnecessary practice.
      Science and mathematics are practices which are objective and can “do” things. In other words, Heidegger wants to point out that you cannot necessarily do anything with philosophy as you can with objective sciences, but this is not important. What is important is what philosophy can do with the individual. Philosophers can indirectly promote society by inquiring into the “extra-ordinary.” As I discussed at the beginning of this essay, philosophers in this sense are similar to the madman depicted in the parable by Nietzsche. Heidegger makes many references to timing when speaking of philosophy, and in this sense, it is similar because philosophers will always be too early. So, even though philosophy has a tendency to make things more difficult and can be considered useless on a rudimentary level, we can still conclude that it is worth doing.

Reflection for November 4 - Unamuno and Heidegger

Class discussion this week was dictated by Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Beginning with Unamuno’s philosophical struggle between logic and passion, we are presented with the notion that strife in living is inevitable. That is, everyone at some point is going to encounter struggles within their everyday lives; however, certain conditions can produce more or less strife. For example, Unamuno wants to point out that “but whoever is convinced that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on an unstable or sinkable craft, will not be daunted if he finds the deck giving way beneath his feet and threatening to sink” (Unamuno in Solomon, 158). Yet, I would stress the point that this does not necessarily entail that the individual without a set course in his life is without any worries. This type of person still experiences pain and strife within his or her life that is certainly complex and confusing, but I feel that Unamuno wants it to be understood that this pain will be substantially less than that of the fanatics. But who are the fanatics?

            Unamuno wants to express that individuals tend to get their motivations and morals from a sort of pre-packaged set. We can identify these as “dogmas” which people tend to give in and identify with. However, to Unamuno, this is not something that should be praised with approval. Rather, “virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith which creates martyrs but rather martyrs who create faith” Unamuno in Solomon, 159). That is, the doctrines by which each and every one of us use to describe ourselves is nothing more than an attempt to justify our actions to others. Unamuno describes how this is so when describing how a man may justify his morals in fear of being damned into eternal hellfire. However, Unamuno wants to show that even in the absence of believing in hellfire, or the idea that he may experience such a place, this man will simply come up with another alternative for explaining and justifying his actions or morals.

            From here I still want to return to this notion of the fanatics. Unamuno states that “whoever bases or thinks he bases his conduct – his inner or outward conduct, his feeling or his action – on  a dogma or theoretical principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of being a fanatic” Unamuno in Solomon, 158). Even so, why would a fanatic experience more pain? To Unamuno, the amount of pain can be associated with life can be identified with the groundwork for which one justifies their actions. A fanatic subscribes to a dogma to justify the way in which they live, however if she finds the groundwork for her morals to begin to shake, the fall appears to be much more tremendous than someone who is not a fanatic. Therefore, it would appear as if the idea of the fanatic is to be associated with more pain than someone who believes that “by acting thus he will make it true, prove it true, and that by thus acting he will create his spiritual world” (Unamuno in Solomon, 158).

            Turning to Heidegger, we understand that there is a sense of a similarity to that of the philosophical approach of Unamuno. To be quite honest, I found Heidegger’s writing style to be more than a bit confusing and difficult to read. Nevertheless, I still want to return to one of the very first class discussion questions from group 16, that being whether or not we should believe that a dog has da-sein. To answer this, I found it odd that no one appeared to desire to return to Kierkegaard’s examples of the ethical and aesthetic life. I would indeed agree that one of the greatest determinants of da-sein would be the capability of understanding mortality. Along with this, since human beings appear to be the only creatures that know that we are going to die, I would argue that only humans can have da-sein. Yet, I feel that this does not go far enough.

            I feel that another determinant for da-sein should be the ability to contemplate life. Interestingly enough, this appears to be the kind of determinant that we saw from the ethical life portrayed by Kierkegaard. Compared to the aesthetic life that can most easily be explained within the life of an animal such as a dog, I would argue that many of the same qualities of the ethical life are indeed contained within da-sein. To counter what an individual during class discussion stated about dogs fearing for their life when they retreat: why would you have any reason to believe that the dog understands mortality? Wouldn’t it be more likely that the dog fears the experience of pain, rather than the extremely complicated and philosophical notion of life and the desire to preserve it?

            I believe that da-sein has an extremely important impact on the further examination of authentic and inauthentic life. While I want to return to this in more detail on next week’s blog, I feel that it is important to bring up the point that Heidegger more than likely would feel that modernization has created the circumstances in which people are thrown into a particular society that has created certain social standards. These standards tell us how to live, and how to shape our morals. To Heidegger, this would be the creation of an inauthentic life; a life that should be compared to one which can be won. By winning, it is meant that we have chosen our own value in absence of external influence. But more on this later.