Existentialism

Didn't I tell you that Sartre influenced me? I am not ashamed to admit that. I am not that deep a thinker. I learned and borrowed from others who are smarter than me. The key thing is the digestion of ideas, the thorough examination of concepts that I understand and find useful in my effort to make sense of the world I live in. I told you I have only probably two ideas which I think are of my own. They may turn out they are influenced by other ideas that I have read. These two are the tools I employ, among many tools, in understanding what is going on around me:

The first one is the 90/10 rule theorem of Wissai which states that of the 100 people you happen to meet, 10 would be likely to be exceptional either in goodness or evil, in intelligence or stupidity, or left-handed or gay. In other words, 10% is the exception. To extrapolate this "theorem", we would have to ask ourselves a question if we are part of the 10% in goodness or in talent or in intelligence (the gay and the left-handed exceptions are not that interesting) or we are just part of the humdrum, run of the mill 90%. I regard myself as part of the 10% in sensitivity, artistic sensibilities, and philosophy and part of the 90% in intelligence.

The other idea I fancy that it is my own is that most people have a tendency to think that they are "better" than they actually are. In other words, most people are not objective in self-evaluation. This very second idea of mine could invalidate my own self-conception that I am part of the 10% in terms of sensitivity, artistic sensibilities, and philosophy. Do you see fucking see that I am capable of thinking to the ultimate, to the core, the marrow of the matter? Still, until new facts emerge that tell me I am wrong about these two ideas, they are the ones I claim that I arrived at by myself. It occurs to me each thinker only has one or two basic ideas that they bequeath to posterity. Here are the ideas of thinkers on top of my head as I understand them

Buddha: you are what you think. Four noble truths and eight-way path.
Socrates: question and answer method. An unexamined life is not worth living.
Plato: ideal form. Reality does not lie in appearances.
Democritus: matter made of atoms.
Heraclitus: everything changes
Descartes: mind and body dualism.
Spinoza: pantheism
Locke: blank slate of mind at birth
Voltaire: respect of the right of others to disagree with us
Rousseau: noble savage
Montesqieu: democracy
Hume: empiricism
Schopenhauer: will: life force
Nietzsche: will to power, transvaluation of values, God is dead. One must have chaos within oneself in order to be able to have a rendez-vous with a dancing star.
Hegel: dialectics
Marx: dialectical materialism
Darwin: evolution
Russell: mathematical logic
Freud: death wish, subsconscious, transference
Heidegger: Mean are thrown into the absurd. Being and Time
Sartre: existence precedes essence
Camus: absurdity of life. Myth of Sissyphus. Suicide is the only philosophical question. Rebellion.
Einstein: E=MC2. Space and Time are one.
Foucault: power in society.
Adler: power relationship, not sex.
Victor Frankel: meaning for existence
Jung: archetypes.
Saussure: deep structure, Signifier and Signified.
Levi-Strauss: primitive society is complex. Totemism is a language.
Derrida: deconstruction
Ba Ngo: 90/10 theorem. Human's self-deception: tendency to think we are better than we really are. Some humans will do anything to survive, even selling out their parents, their children, their country, let alone selling their own bodies and souls; to them, survival is everything, fuck honor, fuck dignity, fuck responsibility, fuck everything, just me and me and me.

Those are just the ones I can recall on top of my head. There may be others. I will add them on as time goes by and when I remember. Just as I said, I am racing against time before the lights go out.

Now let me focus on existentialism. The following is copied from an essay (Existentialism and Human Emotions) by Sartre. In fact, it is the only thing I read directly from him, apart from a few stories and plays and novels. I cannot tackle Being and Nothingness and other more serious books.

Existence precedes essence: man is indefinable because he is at first nothing. There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.

When we speak of forlornness, a term Heidegger was fond of, we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face all the consequences of it. We cannot start making excuses for ourselves. We are alone, with no excuses.

Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsbile for everything he does. The existentialist deos not believe in th power of passion. He will neveer agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging rorret which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

Forlornness implies that we ourselves choose our being. Forlornness and aguish go together.

There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan. He exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself. He is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.

There can be no other truth than cogito, ergo sum. While materialism treats all men, including the one philosophizing, as objects, as an ensemble of determined reactions in no way different distinguished from the ensemble of qualities which constitute a table or a chair or a stone, the man who becomes aware of himself throught the cogito also perceives all others, and he perceives them as the condition of his own existence. He realizes that he cannot be anything (in the sense tha we say that someone is witty or nasty) unless ohers recognize it as such. In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. We discovers that we inhabit a world of intersubjectivity where man decides what he is and what others are.

Man makes himself. In choosing his ethics, he makes himself, and force of circumstances is such that he cannot abstain from choosing one. We define man only in relationship to involvement.

It is often said we are unable to pass judgment on others. In a way it is true, and in another false.

It is true in the sense that whenever a man sincerely involves himself and chooses his configuration, it is impossible for him to prefer another configuration, regardless of what his own may be in other respects. So, we don't believe in progress since progress implies betterment. Man is always the same. Choice always remains a choice in a situation. The problem has not changed since the time one could choose between those for and those againsgt slavery and the present time when we can side with the Democrats or the Republicans.

But one can still pass judgment for one makes a choie in relationship to others. First, one can jude (and this is not a judgment of value, but a logical judgment) that certain choices are based on errorand others on truth. If we have defined man's situation as a free choice, with no excuses and no recourse, every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, every man who sets up a determinism, is a dishonest man.

The objection may be raised, "but why may he not choose himself dishonestly?" I reply taht I am not obliged to pass moral judgment on him , but that I do define his dishonesty as an error. Dishonesty is a falsehood because it belies th complete freedom of involvement. On the same frounds, I maintain that there is also dishonesty if I choose to state that certain values exist prior to me, it is self-contradictory for me to want them and at the same state that they are imposed on me. Suppose someone says to me. "What if I want to be dishonest?" I'll answer, " There's no reason for you not to be, but I'm saying that what's you are, and that the strictly coherent attitude is that of honesty."

Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. We declare that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.


(cont.)