Late
Sunday afternoon, almost dusk, you are feeling better, have been downstairs and
have even gone out for a Graeter’s, but you did not drive. – Amorella
You had leftovers of
homemade turkey soup and meatloaf, a quite good supper anytime. You wondered
aloud to Doug on an email concerning your recent health that if you took my
perspective during the initial ‘spinning orbs’ event last Friday. You said this
because from your perspective you were looking at your eyes outside themselves
spinning like the lumbering props on an old DC-3. The spinning was within the
eyes as there was nothing outside the eyes seen spinning. You assumed, rightly
so, from this that the ‘visual spin’ was caused from within. Later, Dr. Cutter
at Bethesda North said he felt the disturbance was caused by an inner ear
problem. This was a deduction on your part based on the observation at the
time. Your immediate focus though was on whether this was from an ongoing heart
attack or a stroke. This is when you took the baby aspirin you had asked Carol
to bring you. After, she called 911 as you directed. Once the medical team
arrived you felt you were in good hands and your concerns pretty much vanished
as you felt there was nothing more you could do so your life was in their
ballpark, so to speak. – Amorella
1844 hours. I remember my
life was secondary at that point. I really did not have, or could not afford to
have that much interest in the outcome. There was no sense of “I want to live”
or “I want to die”. Basically, it was secondary to the immediate event. Looking
back this appears somewhat odd; however, also looking back, that was pretty
much my thought on the subject. I suppose that is why I was thinking that this
was your perspective not my own. It was my own. I don’t know what your
perspective was Amorella, or even if you had a perspective coming from my
imagination or not. – rho
You
were in a dream stage. You turned on to your right side attempting to
disconnect from this “event”. I watched you literally attempt to ‘disconnect’
your eyes as in a hypnotic trance the moved out of your head and quickly the
optic nerve cord from both eyes severed or snapped leaving both ends flapping
in reaction. You were aware and concerned what the problem was. I did not have
such a sensation. You had no passion for leaving or staying and neither did I.
Your internal order was completely restored up climbing into the medical
emergency vehicle. – Amorella
1901 hours. This is an
interesting perspective by both of us.
I
agree. It is as though you thought – “Life is not nearly so important than it
seems at the time.” – Amorella
1903 hours. In such a
situation, then what is important if it is not living or dying?
Being.
Post. – Amorella
1904
hours. Do you mean like there would be a sense of ‘being’ either way?
That is evidently
your belief or was your belief at the time. Your reasoning was tied up in ‘How
are the medics going to allow me [yourself] to survive or not? (I want to
observe this.)’ – Amorella
Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness comes to mind. Here is a selection from Wikipedia.
** **
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique),
sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a
1943 book by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's main purpose is to assert
the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence. His overriding
concern in writing the book was to demonstrate that free will exists.
While a
prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, an ontological
investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology . . .
Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own enquiry leading to the
publication in 1943 of Being and Nothingness whose subtitle is "A
Phenomenological Essay on Ontology". Sartre's essay is clearly influenced
by Heidegger though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which
humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to
the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being.
In Sartre's much gloomier account
in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of
"completion", what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, literally "a being that causes itself",
which many religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material
reality of one's body, in a material universe, one finds oneself inserted into
being. Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to
make them appear, or to annihilate them.
Overview
In the
introduction, Sartre sketches his own theory of consciousness, being, and
phenomena through criticism of both earlier phenomenologists (most notably
Husserl and Heidegger) as well as idealists, rationalists, and empiricists.
According to him, one of the major achievements of modern philosophy is
phenomenology because it disproved the kinds of dualism that set the existent
up as having a "hidden" nature; Phenomenology has removed "the
illusion of worlds behind the scene"
Based on
an examination of the nature of phenomena, he describes the nature of two types
of being, being-in-itself and being-for-itself. While
being-in-itself is something that can only be approximated by human being,
being-for-itself is the being of consciousness.
Part 1,
Chapter 1: The origin of negation
When we
go about the world, we have expectations, which are often not fulfilled. For
example, Pierre is not at the café where we thought we would meet him, so there
is a negation, a void, a nothingness, in the place of Pierre. When
looking for Pierre his lack of being there becomes a negation; everything he
sees as he searches the people and objects about him are "not
Pierre". So Sartre claims, "It is evident that non-being always
appears within the limits of a human expectation."
Part 1,
Chapter 2: Bad faith
Bad faith (or
"self-deception") can be understood as the guise of existing as a
character, individual, or person who defines himself through the social
categorization of his formal identity. This essentially means that in being a
waiter, grocer, etc., one must believe that their social role is equivalent to
their human existence. Living a life defined by one's occupation, social,
racial, or economic class, is the very essence of "bad faith", the
condition in which people cannot transcend their situations in order to
realize what they must be (human) and what they are not (waiter, grocer, etc.).
It is also essential for an existent to understand that negation allows the
self to enter what Sartre calls the "great human stream". The great
human stream arises from a singular realization that nothingness is a state of
mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we
desire.
The
difference between existence and identity projection remains at the heart of
human subjects who are swept up by their own condition, their "bad
faith". An example of projection that Sartre uses is the café waiter who
performs the duties, traditions, functions, and expectations of a café waiter:
[W]hat are
we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are
if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are? Let us
consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little
too precise, a little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his
voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of
the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the
inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the
recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable,
perpetually broken equilibrium, which he perpetually re-establishes by a light
movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies
himself to changing his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one
regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seems to be mechanisms;
he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing,
he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we
can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is
nothing there to surprise us.
Sartre
consistently mentions that in order to get out of bad faith, one must realize
that their existence and their formal projection of a self are distinctly
separate and within the means of human control. This separation is a form of nothingness.
Nothingness, in terms of bad faith, is characterized by Sartre as the internal
negation which separates pure existence and identity, and thus we are subject
to playing our lives out in a similar manner. An example is something that
is what it is (existence) and something that is what it is not (a
waiter defined by his occupation).
However,
Sartre takes a stance against characterizing bad faith in terms of "mere
social positions". Says Sartre, "I am never any one of my attitudes,
any one of my actions." The good speaker is the one who plays at
speaking because he cannot be speaking. This literally means that, like
the café waiter, the speaker is not his condition or social categorization, but
is a speaker consumed by bad faith. Thus, we must realize what we are (beings
who exist) and what we are not (a social/historical preoccupation) in order to
step out of bad faith. Yet, existents (human beings) must maintain a balance
between existence, their roles, and nothingness to become authentic beings.
Additionally,
an important tenet of bad faith is that we must enact a bit of "good
faith" in order to take advantage of our role to reach an authentic
existence. The authentic domain of bad faith is realizing that the role we are
playing is the lie. To live and project into the future as a project of a self,
while keeping out of bad faith and living by the will of the self is living
life authentically.
One of
the most important implications of bad faith is the abolition of traditional
ethics. Being a "moral person" requires one to deny authentic
impulses (everything that makes us human) and allow the will of another person
to change one's actions. Being "a moral person" is one of the most severe
forms of bad faith. Sartre essentially characterizes this as "the faith of
bad faith" which is and should not be, in Sartre's opinion, at the heart
of one's existence. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional ethics,
condemning it as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses.
Bad
faith also results when individuals begin to view their life as made up of
distinct past events. By viewing one's ego as it once was rather than as it
currently is, one ends up negating the current self and replacing it with a
past self that no longer exists.
Part 3,
Chapter 1: The look
The mere
possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object
and see one's world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a
specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition
of the subjectivity in others.
This
transformation is most clear when one sees a mannequin that one confuses for a
real person for a moment.
While they believe it is a
person, their world is transformed. Objects now partly escape them; they have
aspects that belong to the other person, and that are thus unknowable to them.
During this time one can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now
the other person's world, a foreign world that no longer comes from the self,
but from the other. The other person is a "threat to the order and
arrangement of your whole world...Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's
values, over which you have no control"
When they realise it is a
mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they
are again in the center of a universe. This is back to the pre-reflective mode
of being, it is "the eye of the camera that is always present but is never
seen". The person is occupied and too busy for self-reflection. This
process is continual, unavoidable, and ineluctable.
Being
for Others
Sartre
states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to
another person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by
how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person
avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the
look" of the other. The consequence is conflict. In order to maintain the
person's own being, the person must control the other, but must also control
the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a
profound manifestation of "bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced
with the other's freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist,
but to maintain the other participant's looking at them. This system is often
mistakenly called "love", but it is, in fact, nothing more than
emotional alienation and denial of freedom through conflict with the other.
Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable
anguish of a person's relationship to their “facticity” (all of the concrete
details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited,
such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme, the alienation can
become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by
"the look" and therefore radically missing their own freedoms, the
participants can experience masochistic and sadistic attitudes. This happens
when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their
control over the other's look, which they cannot escape because they believe
themselves to be so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own
subjectivity would be equally unbearable.
Sex
Sartre
explains that "the look" is the basis for sexual desire, declaring
that a biological motivation for sex does not exist. Instead, "double reciprocal incarnation" is a form of
mutual awareness, which Sartre takes to be at the heart of the sexual
experience. This involves the mutual recognition of subjectivity of some sort,
as Sartre describes: "I make myself flesh in order to impel the Other to
realize for herself and for me her own flesh. My caress causes my flesh to be
born for me insofar as it is for the Other flesh causing her to be born as
flesh."
Even in
sex (perhaps especially in sex), men and women are haunted by a state in which
consciousness and bodily being would be in perfect harmony, with desire
satisfied. Such a state, however, can never be. We try to bring the beloved's
consciousness to the surface of their body by use of magical acts performed,
gestures (kisses, desires, etc.). But at the moment of organsm the illusion is
ended and we return to ourselves, just as it is ended when the skier comes to
the foot of the mountain or when the commodity that once we desired loses its
glow upon our purchase of it. There will be, for Sartre, no such moment of
completion because "man is a useless passion" to be the ens causa sui, the God of the
ontological proof.
Nothingness
Sartre
contends that human existence is a conundrum whereby each of us exists, for as
long as we live, within an overall condition of nothingness (no thing-ness)—that
ultimately allows for free consciousness. But simultaneously, within our being
(in the physical world), we are constrained to make continuous, conscious
choices.
It is
this dichotomy that causes anguish, because choice (subjectivity) represents a
limit on freedom within an otherwise unbridled range of thoughts. Subsequently,
humans seek to flee our anguish through action-oriented constructs such as
escapes, visualizations, or visions (such as dreams) designed to lead us toward
some meaningful end, such as necessity, destiny, determinism (God), etc. Thus,
in living our lives, we often become unconscious actors—Bourgeois,
Feminist, Worker, Party Member, Frenchman, Canadian or American—each doing as
we must to fulfill our chosen characters' destinies.
However,
Sartre contends our conscious choices (leading to often unconscious actions)
run counter to our intellectual freedom. Yet we are bound to the conditioned
and physical world—in which some form of action is always required. This leads
to failed dreams of completion, as Sartre described them, because
inevitably we are unable to bridge the void between the purity and spontaneity
of thought and all-too constraining action; between the being and the nothingness
that inherently coincide in our self.
Sartre's
recipe for fulfillment is to escape all quests by completing
them. This is accomplished by rigorously forcing order onto nothingness,
employing the "spirit (or consciousness of mind) of seriousness" and
describing the failure to do so in terms such as "bad faith" and
"false consciousness". Though Sartre's conclusion seems to be that
being diminishes before nothingness since consciousness is probably based more
on spontaneity than on stable seriousness, he contends that any person of a
serious nature is obliged to continuous struggle between:
a) the
conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfillment through physical actions and
social roles—as if living within a portrait that one actively paints of
oneself.
and
b) the
more pure and raging spontaneity of no thing consciousness, of being
instantaneously free to overturn one's roles, pull up stakes, and strike out on
new paths.
Phenomenological
ontology
In
Sartre's opinion, consciousness does not make sense by itself: it arises only
as an awareness of objects. Consciousness is therefore always and essentially
consciousness of something, whether this "something" is a
thing, a person, an imaginary object, etc. Phenomenologists often refer to this
quality of consciousness as “ intentionality”. Sartre's contribution, then, is
that in addition to always being consciousness of something,
consciousness is always consciousness of itself. In other words, all
consciousness is, by definition, self-consciousness. By
"self-consciousness", Sartre does not mean being aware of oneself
thought of as an object (e.g., one's "ego"), but rather that, as a
phenomenon in the world, consciousness both appears and appears to itself
at the same time. By appearing to itself, Sartre argues that consciousness is
fully transparent; unlike an ordinary "object" (a house, for
instance, of which it is impossible to perceive all of the sides at the same
time), consciousness "sees" all aspects of itself at once. This
non-positional quality of consciousness is what makes it a unique type of
being, a being that exists for itself.
In this
sense, Sartre uses phenomenology to describe ontology.
Thus,
the subtitle An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology or, alternatively, A
Phenomenological Essay on Ontology: what truly makes Sartre's a
phenomenological ontology is that consciousness's structure is the way
that it appears. Philosopher Kenneth Williford suggests that Sartre's
reasoning turns on a logic of full phenomenal transparency that might not
withstand scrutiny. In other words, Sartre implicitly argues that if
consciousness "seems" to possess a certain property, then it actually
possesses that property. But, conversely, if consciousness does not seem
to possess a certain property, Williford argues that it would be hasty to
conclude from this "seeming" that consciousness does not
actually possess that property. (For example, consciousness might not
"seem", upon reflection, to be brain process, but it is not clear
from this "seeming" that consciousness is not, in fact, a
brain process.)
Critique
of Freud
Being
and Nothingness offers a critique of
Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious, based on the claim that
consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also argues that Freud's
theory of repression is internally flawed. According to Sartre, in his clinical
work, Freud encountered patients who seemed to embody a particular kind of
paradox—they appeared to both know and not know the same thing.
In response, Freud postulated the existence of the unconscious, which contains
the "truth" of the traumas underlying the patients' behavior. This
"truth" is actively repressed, which is made evident by the patients'
resistance to its revelation during analysis. Yet what does the resisting if
the patients are unaware of what they are repressing? Sartre finds the answer
in what Freud calls the "censor". "The only level on which we
can locate the refusal of the subject," Sartre writes, "is that of
the censor."
Further:
[T]he
resistance of the patient implies on the level of the censor an awareness of
the thing repressed as such, a comprehension of the end toward which the
questions of the psychoanalyst are leading . . . These various operations in
their turn imply that the censor is conscious (of) itself. But what type of
self-consciousness can the censor have? It must be the consciousness (of) being
conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order not to be
conscious of it. What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad
faith?
In other
words, Sartre views Freud's unconscious to be a scapegoat for the paradox of
simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same information. But instead of
alleviating the paradox, Freud simply moves it to the censor, establishing
"between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous consciousness in
bad faith". Sartre thinks that the postulation of a censor within the
psychic economy is therefore redundant: at the level of the censor, we still
encounter the same problem of a consciousness that hides something from itself.
For Sartre, what Freud identifies as repression is rather indicative of the
larger structure of bad faith. Psychoanalysis thus does not yield any special
insight, since hiding something from oneself occurs at the level of
consciousness as a unified phenomenon, not as part of some intra-psychic
mechanism.
Toward
the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre attempts to adapt some of
Freud's ideas, and thereby develop an "existential psychoanalysis" in
which causal categories are replaced by teleological categories.
Special
terminology used by Sartre
Explanation
of terms based on postscript to the English edition of Being and Nothingness
by translator Hazel Barnes
Being (être): Including both
Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself (both as defined below), but the latter is
the nihilation of the former. Being is objective, not subjective or individual.
Being-in-itself (être-en-soi):
Non-conscious Being. The sort of phenomenon that is greater than the knowledge
that we have of it.
•
Being-for-itself
(être-pour-soi): The nihilation of Being-in-itself; consciousness
conceived as a lack of Being, a desire for Being, a relation of Being. The
For-itself brings Nothingness into the world and therefore can stand out from
Being and form attitudes towards other beings by seeing what it is not.
•
•
Being-for-others
(être-pour-autrui): Here a new dimension arises in which the self exists
as an object for others. Each For-itself seeks to recover its own Being by
making an object out of the other.
•
•
Consciousness:
The transcending For-itself. Sartre states that "Consciousness is a being
such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies
a being other than itself."
•
•
Existence: Concrete, individual
being-for-itself here and now.
•
•
Existence precedes essence. The subjective
existence of reality precedes and defines its nature. Who you are (your essence)
is defined by what you do (your existence).
•
•
Facticity (facticité): Broadly:
facts about the world. More precisely, the For-itself's necessary connection
with the In-itself, with the world and its own past.
•
•
Freedom: The
very being of the For-itself which is "condemned to be free". It must
forever choose for itself and therefore make itself.
•
•
Nothingness (néant):
Although not having being, it is supported by being. It comes into the world by
the For-itself.
•
•
Reflection (reflet):
The form in which the For-itself founds its own nothingness through the dyad of
"the-reflection-reflecting"
•
Reflection (réflexion):The
consciousness attempting to become its own object.
Selected and edited from
Wikipedia
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