Jean-Paul Sartre, Lecture 6: Three Complaints against Existentialism
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- Опубліковано 11 гру 2024
- A video on Sartre's treatment of three principal complaints about his vision of existentialism. Plus, some technical vocabulary from Being & Nothingness as a setup for the next video in the series.
I am watching and taking notes of the sixth lecture; I believe that what is really peculiar about your lecturing method is that you have a sense of when students have forgotten some of the essential points whose understanding is crucial for the current lecture, and hence you choose to set a reminder first. Second, you have an absolutely wonderful mind in bringing simple examples from real life to explicate complex philosophical concepts. Kudos to you professor.
Appreciate you sharing your lectures to the public
lot of thanks, you 're a great teacher.
Very accessible presentations which nevertheless remain true to the sometimes trying pith of Sartre’s philosophical project. You obviously did a tremendous amount of work just to prepare these eight digestible bits. My compliments. It was also a great “human” moment somewhere between the 20th and 24th minute where I could feel you wrestling with some of the metaphysical concepts... along with everyone else who has some familiarity with them.
I like the insistence on action of his work, thanks for posting.
Ultimately though I’m by no means free . I’m bounded by the determinism of a universe in which nests my nature to be only what I am , can and will be at any moment in time . A psychopath is not free to be a saint , a pessimist is not at Liberty to
be hopeful , and you are implacably drawn to philosophy you don’t choose it .
@@Jide-bq9yfSure, but going about life in that manner is nonetheless impractical and not trult adoptable. For example, in your day to day life you dont *just* go about your day as if you were free. You are required by virtue of your own existence to truly *believe* that you are free. So then it follows that if free will is an illusion then its an illusion that you are bound to, so then just jump into that illusion and enjoy. And hey, if it turns it out that we are free from determinism then cool, and if not then we lived as best we could.
@@gavinferguson2938 no question . I have no argument with the imperative to feel completely free even within a deterministic framework . I was merely arguing from first principles. I was never free to fall or not to fall in love with philosophy. I was bound to . That’s just my nature and I would conjecture , you are of a similar inclination too , beyond any conception of your free agency. It’s just a concept I find intriguing on occasion , im not advocating reveling in it by any means. Perish the thought .
Yet another sterling lecture .
That idea of codification of being by negation is actually pretty fun to look at through the prism of computer science - N = 2 to the power of I.
It basically means that if you are storing information with binary code, be it physical levers with 2 discrete states or computer memory and its 1s and 0s, you need **i** levers/bits per symbol to have N different symbols.
Which means that each member of the alphabet has to become "heavier" the more members you want - because each symbol has to say "I'm 1 but not 2, not 3, not 4...". You can store boolean values (true/false) in just 1 bit. But a sample point of a music file? You need 24 or even 32 bits so that the amplitude of the speakers reflects the artist's intention as close as possible (you can think of the speaker's membrane deviation from rest position as alphabet).
So it's super fun that a philosopher came up with this as well!
pop
Existentialism is just an extreme type of liberal individualism. It’s focused entirely on the abstract “individual” without any reflect for the social order at all. There’s no recognition of economic class or political power and how it impacts us in the real world. By ignoring the fact that humans are social creatures by nature and focusing entirely on “individual” choice, it’s no wonder that Sartre’s philosophy fosters a sense of darkness and despair. Basically, Sartre insists on each individual’s freedom and responsibility for his own life without acknowledging that most people lack the power to control their own lives. The freedom of Sartre is a mere abstraction. It’s the freedom of the slave to kill himself instead of living in perpetual bondage. The Marxist’s were right to condemn Sartre as a petit bourgeois intellectual who has nothing of value to impart to working people at all.
Well the Marxists don't exactly know what's good people... starving them, taking it as a fact that everyone has the same values and priorities, being ignorant to the fact that one of biggest reasons we try is in an attempt to surpass others and without that possibllity people lack motivation. That being said I can see where your coming from withholding that last sentence. The slave in chains trope is a bit insulting in light of you know, slaves in actual chains as opposed to a "wage slave".
I tend to agree with you, also it should be said that these lectures are very interesting and well done. I am not too fond of much of what Sartre believed, but I do want to know more about it
@@tangerinesarebetterthanora7060 I just noticed your comment and I’d like to respond. As for Marxism, I was referring to the French Communists who condemned Sartre as a petit bourgeois individualist despite the fact that Sartre was very much a left wing radical and frequently voiced sympathy for the Communist cause. He never joined the Communist Party of France because he didn’t want to subject himself to party discipline. So his relationship with the Communists was a bit complicated. To his everlasting shame, Sartre refused to acknowledge the terrible crimes committed by Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and he famously broke with Camus over that issue. Camus was certainly the more noble and honest man.
I think it’s a huge error to conflate Marxism with Lenin, Mao, etc. or to blame their crimes on Marx, who himself once famously declared “I am not a Marxist”. In fact, the orthodox Marxists in Europe were nearly all opposed to Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia in 1917. Lenin certainly considered himself a disciple of Marx but his seizure of power and his terror regime was not a working class revolution at all. I think Marx would’ve been absolutely horrified by what Lenin and company did in his name.
Sartre himself once wrote that even the slave is free because he can always kill himself if chooses to do so and thus he chooses to be slave because he could free himself by suicide. Such a radical insistence that all men are free, regardless of their circumstances, strikes me as completely ludicrous. I think that the freedom to choose between death and enslavement is hardly a freedom worth fighting for.
@@syourke3 Which just goes to show that even the biggest thinkers can't think of everything. It's Godel's incompleteness theorem all over again. But that doesn't mean that this philosophical movement is a "mere abstraction". It's everything about your attitude to the world, it's massively useful to everyone. And the things that it's missing can be added by other thinkers, which should be about, indeed, how complex societal systems and groups interact.
But that, I'm afraid, hasn't been achieved by Marxists either, because a diametrically opposite point of critique exists about their doctrine - they almost entirely disregard individual identity in favor of discussing the relationships of group identities. It's Godel's incompleteness theorem all over again.
I'm honestly starting to think it's some hard limit of our brain, we can't "seamlessly" envelop a sphere of reality in a piece of cloth that is our theory, if that makes sense.
People from so many different disciplines point out this flaw, specifically the inability to truly understand and study complex systems (or even codify what complex systems are). There's a very concise and science oriented video by Sabine Hossenfelder on the biggest gap in science that speaks to it.
My point is, "condemning" a "mere abstraction" is not the right way to go. This philosophy rings true in so many ways and, while failing to address group identity and that whole can of worms, it really nails identity and your fundamental loneliness in your own head, were you a slave or a slave owner.