Re-watching these, partly to remember the content, but mostly to be in your company Dr D. Hope you’re smiling wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.
Really enjoyed this. "Suppose you're way more powerful than you even want to be". Assuming the responsibility that such freedom entails suddenly makes our choices so much more consequential
You expose and criticize the victimhood mentality of our social milieu with such finesse, and without viciousness. I gotta acquire that skill, and I have to watch this video twice. Victimhood mentality = Bad faith.
Well, I think that it becomes a lot easier when you can ground what you're saying in the vocabulary and analyses of a famous, more-or-less respected thinker like Sartre. But yeah, I think that Sartre's analysis of Bad Faith has a lot to offer our world these days. Eric D.
@@EricDodsonLectures 18:10. "The world will continue to be the world whether we like it or not, if we make the world and what the world does the source of our happiness, odds are we're not going to be very happy." What an Epicurean thing to say! Second, some people might interpret this as nihilism, or an excuse to "sit it out," but I see it as a call to do what you can, and not be upset with that which is not in your purview.
@@pendejo6466 Yeah, well... I see it as a way of locating the source of true empowerment in our lives... which is the power to change our own lives, our own experience... not to change the world, which will be what it will be irrespective of our desires.
Well the victim mentality that you’re likely alluding to is the narrow one. Whereby it’s exclusively applied to a certain group (sjws, liberals, people with empathy etc.) by another group in an intensely and irrational manner solely because they dislike those people. The so called victim mentality of bad faith could almost be applied to anyone. Anyone who seeks external sources to impose meaning onto their life. Religion, mythology, spirituality, culture, ethnicity, race, country, sex/gender,history etc. Anyone who tries to escape defining their own existence is committing bad faith. Which again, is almost anyone. So it ain’t this superficial modern phenomenon belonging to our social milieu. That’s the problem with using more sophisticated thinkers and concepts and reducing them down to reactionary thoughtless terminology that is used to whine about how much one hates modernity.
This way of thinking, that we have infinite choices and possibilities puts a heavy burden on people for their life path. It shifts responsibility from a deity, society, parents, onto the individual. And yet since Sartre's time we are learning more about the role of genes and the interplay between them and the environment in a person's psychological make-up. The pendulum swings from being a victim to being one's own tyrant, god or parent. Neither is satisfactory because neither rings true. Some of us will strike out and struggle and some will not. I am old and I tend to think people move within a limited scope for the most part I see now why Camus and Sartre fell out and why I side with Camus, who was more poet than philosopher. He was a humanist with tolerance and empathy who understood the human condition and like Kierkagard was forgiving and understanding of the difficulty in knowing too much while having limited power.
Love the Fallout shirt! "War? War... War never changes." -The years may change us, but the fundamental issues remain the same. The self-destructive nature of man.
But who here hasn't thought that how we fare in life is in a large part luck. A simple roll of the dice. Someone with a promising career gets run down, receives a terminal diagnosis. You may choose what to do with your diagnosis but you have no choice on having your life ended by an out of control car or a stray bullet. Of course philosophy comes from the privilege of having time to think and access to books and education., luck. Neither berate yourself or congratulate yourself most of it is random and sheer luck.
The determinists would say choice is an illusion. Also not having to think about the trivial things, doing them automatically makes life smoother and frees you to think of things more interesting and granular .
Hi Professor Dodson, I accidentally came acrossed your channel, because I am very unhappy since my beloved husband had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS on 12/30/19. 1 out of 30,000 contracted with ALS, I am asking God, why him, why me, and why us. My husband is indeed a very good man, he always very helpful to family and friends at home and at work. He's a family man, he does not smoke nor drink, nor gamble. Since my husband's medical diagnosis, I am constantly feeling sad, angry, fearful, and worried of his health. It's heart broken and very difficult to watch my hubhy's health is slowly declining. He's weaker today than yesterday, and tomorrow he'll be weaker than today. He's in wheel chair now. I do not understand why bad things happened to good people. I tried very hard to try to make sense with all of these---my husband's serious illness. I enjoyed your lectures. Thank you so muchl
The anecdotes seem to conflate increased critique of harm caused by systems with an assumed personal response of those affected by said systems. It is of course possible to levy critique why still taking personal responsibility for ones attitude and outlook on life within the facticity of those systems.
My first question centers around the definition of the unconscious action and how it represents choice. How is the random pre reflective choices made traveling home different from the random paths of balls in a Pachinko machine and representative of agency. My assumption at this point is that allowing oneself to make pre reflective choices is living in bad faith, not confronting the full vertiginous quality of freedom. Another possibility is that the availability of multiple choices, potentially limited by facticity, don't really illustrate more than a mathematical representation of alternatives, i.e. the results of different choices are not qualitatively different.
Great stuff.....as relates to post modern thoughts on "objective observation" and the discounting of scientific inquiry, it would seem that Sartre would count this as "bad faith" in the sense that it is rejecting our obligation and responsibility to make a conclusion based on our experience of the world even though "biased" by our subjective experience.........this is a terrible sentence but does this make logical/factual sense??....DEJ
26mins in you discuss most of our choices being made on auto- pilot, as it were. Unconsciously. But how can I be responsible for something of which I am unconscious? This seems incoherent to me. This seems to mean that my 'being' is choosing, and only later do 'I', as a conscious entity, become aware of that. But if my 'being' is choosing, not I, then I am determined by my being and am not free. I don't understand what Sartre means by 'I'. It seems to me that choosing is happening and 'I' am observing the choices.This view accords with Eastern traditions such as Hinduism and Advaita Vedanta, as far as I understand them.
Well, Sartre's phenomenology circulates around *pre-reflective consciousness,* which is very different from something like a Freudian unconscious. The difference has to do with the element of active repression (or lack thereof). Pre-reflective consciousness has to do with what we *could* train our attention upon, if we were to decide to do so. For instance, let's say we're looking at a landscape, and the first thing we notice is the trees. At any and all points, what's keeping us from training our attention on the flowers, or the clouds in the sky, etc.? Well, from Sartre's perspective, only we ourselves are. And the fact is that at any and all points, we could decide to focus our awareness on any of those things. In contrast, the Freudian unconscious sounds more like what you're describing... basically, what we *won't* perceive (because of the dynamisms of repression), no matter how hard we try. Obviously, the former is a function of our ongoing practice of freedom, whereas the latter is not (or least not nearly as much). So... since pre-reflective consciousness is a function of our choices, then it's also a function of our freedom, and we're also responsible for it. I suppose that the parallel in jurisprudence (at least here in the U.S.) would be the maxim: "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." The reason is that our knowledge of the law is a function of our freedom... much as it is in the realm of simple perception. As for what the "I" is... well, the Sartrean response to a question like that would probably be: What do you want it to be? Yeah, that probably sounds a bit flippant. But I think it's actually fairly congruent with reality as we know it. For instance, some people conceive of the "I" in terms of something like Atman. Others (like Buddhists) think of it more in terms of An-Atman... basically a locus of ongoing slippage and metamorphosis (hence not an "I" in the usual sense at all). Here in the more materialistic West, we probably think of it mostly in terms of a Territorial Personality... basically, what we own and think of as "ours." The point, of course, is that the "I" is itself shaped by our choices, especially with respect to the immense number of ways of thinking about it, along with related constructs, like the "Self," the "Soul," etc. Anyhow, I hope this helps, or is at least disorienting in an interesting way. It's good to "hear" your "voice" again. Sorry about the possible TL;DR response. Eric D.
The lecture is amazing, thank you, but I would call Sartre's position on freedom in general and free will in particular ridiculously shallow and inconsistent. He denies the existence of god but at the same time believes in free will. If only his teaching is not what is called 'Upaya' in Buddhism. I would say that belief in free will is like a second-order religion, he only doesn't say it aloud. The first-order religion is when you believe in someone who is guiding your actions, and the second-order religion is when you believe in someone who guides the guidance of your actions (thus making you free). To me the absence of free will has never been such obvious as now, because there are many machine learning models which are capable at behaving just like humans. But would we say that they have free will? I don't think so. And if we don't say that machines have free will why would we say that people have free will? It is like saying that Earth is in the center of the universe just because we live here. But at the same time I wouldn't say that we should be sad that there is no free will, in my opinion the whole discussion about free will is pointless, and we should accept the most reasonable position - that there is no free will, and just live the way we live. The works of Camus are actually closer to me with accent on the absurd and inability to know anything in advance.
How would Sartre view suicide? I'm a little confused as to what he means by "The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future...
Isn't it funny that the horrors of freedom then are worst than the horror of facticity? Though it's so odd to say that that's true because humans detest hard determinism so much I don't think I ever met another and all who've I've told dismiss it in a minute and try to never think about it again. To them it's fatalism. But sure lets say people are in angst by the sheer overwhelming amount of choices whenever one is thrown into prison. If you started talking about Bieber before you knew you were going to; how is that a choice? A unconscious choice is a choice? I feel like it's so close to saying heart attacks are choices. Why can't I choose not to breathe or to have a heart attack? Though the unconscious is still considered the self in a way. My unconscious I always thought is all from the universe which is hard deterministic. Which you said is cowardice and I suppose I accept. Nietzche points out how all humanity first acts then makes up a story why they acted that way. Even before we could think we acted as animals. The alpha wolf spares the omega. And why? Because even the weakest wolf can help bring down a caribou and the alpha wolf couldn't tell you that that's what it's doing, it has no idea in all it's wisdom but the story is already set there and waiting. The monkey and the ants. The stories already there waiting for them to develop voice boxes to tell the tale. We need more people to accept hard determinism into their hearts. What can be the harm in gobbling the truth like a cold hard black insatiable pit of perseverance. Are there more truths for me to suffer? I want them HERE!
It's worrisome that this presentation of Sartre will appeal to a conservative masculine audience. This comes close to sounding like Jordan Peterson which needs to be addressed because they are not the same. Sartre's freedom is radical freedom in that unlike Peterson, not even biological conditions like being a woman or being a man can determine what is possible. Peterson is always trying to restrict people to innate biological attributes. Sartre would reject that position and thus becomes a great place to do gender studies. Peterson's whole philosophy is built on some formulation of innate structure. So please be careful with the type of audience this material might attract by rejecting social conditions, it's not that those social conditions aren't real, but it is our attitude toward them. They still exist, even possibly as "barriers" but what is a barrier can, as a physical object, be framed. Even the slaves found little forms of resistance, which had their consequences if caught, but certain possibilities remained out of sight for the time periods.
Well, my target audience for these presentations reflects the demographic composition of the classes for which I made them. That means that my target audience is about 60% female and around 25% black, with an average age of around 20 or 21 years. Of course, that means that 40% of my intended audience is male. And since I teach in Georgia, I'm pretty sure that many of those males (and females, too) favor political conservatism. And while perhaps only 20% or so of my classes consist of conservative males, I'm not sure why I *wouldn't* want my presentations to appeal to them. After all, doesn't the spirit of inclusion involve appealing to as many people as possible? Anyhow, as for Jordan Peterson... I have only a rough and approximate familiarity with his work. However, I know of no place where he waxes poetic about Sartre's work. In fact, he seems to pass over most of the corpus of 20th century Existentialism, in favor of 19th century thinkers, like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski and Nietzsche. Perhaps that's because, as you note, Sartre's philosophy isn't compatible with a thoroughgoing biological essentialism (or any other essentialism, for that matter). Or maybe Peterson thinks of people like Sartre as proto-postmodernists, whom he obviously detests. Anyhow, do *you* know of a place where Peterson speaks glowingly of Sartre's work? If so, could share a link to that? I'd personally be interested in it. But in any case, thanks for watching & commenting. Eric D.
It is antiquated language in the sense that we no longer use "man" as a synonym to "people", "humanity", "mankind" and so on, not in the sense that "gender is a social construct" or that "we live in a patriarchal society". It is just archaic to use "man" in the way Sartre uses it. People, in general, will use "people" to refer to people.
I think your commentary on victims and the victim mentality is off, you failed to apply a relevant example. In some way, Sartre's philosophy is illustrating how people consider themselves victims of their own fate; thats very different from the way you framed it and that's the only reasonable interpretation of these concepts. You sound out of touch when you imply that certain aspects of society and as you put it the world at large are just the way they are, you and other people sharing this perception of things are not being very considerate in your judgement or charitable with your understanding of things, certain realities of life can make you a victim, that's not something you can just transcend. So stop pretending like it is, and quit implying that in your odd examples. You're personal background as a conservative should not influence your discussion of the topic.
Well, first and mostly obviously, I'm not a conservative. But beyond that, a better way of expressing your complaints about this video would be to make *your own* video on the same topic... one that rectifies the various problems that you think exist in this video. Please share a link when you're done, because I'm eager to learn from your superior perspective.
Re-watching these, partly to remember the content, but mostly to be in your company Dr D. Hope you’re smiling wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.
Really enjoyed this. "Suppose you're way more powerful than you even want to be".
Assuming the responsibility that such freedom entails suddenly makes our choices so much more consequential
Thanks for making these videos. It's like you're my new Dad.
You expose and criticize the victimhood mentality of our social milieu with such finesse, and without viciousness. I gotta acquire that skill, and I have to watch this video twice. Victimhood mentality = Bad faith.
Well, I think that it becomes a lot easier when you can ground what you're saying in the vocabulary and analyses of a famous, more-or-less respected thinker like Sartre. But yeah, I think that Sartre's analysis of Bad Faith has a lot to offer our world these days. Eric D.
@@EricDodsonLectures
18:10. "The world will continue to be the world whether we like it or not, if we make the world and what the world does the source of our happiness, odds are we're not going to be very happy." What an Epicurean thing to say! Second, some people might interpret this as nihilism, or an excuse to "sit it out," but I see it as a call to do what you can, and not be upset with that which is not in your purview.
@@pendejo6466 Yeah, well... I see it as a way of locating the source of true empowerment in our lives... which is the power to change our own lives, our own experience... not to change the world, which will be what it will be irrespective of our desires.
Eric Dodson Lectures yeah, that last statement is hugely important: ...the world will be what it will be irrespective of our desires.
Well the victim mentality that you’re likely alluding to is the narrow one. Whereby it’s exclusively applied to a certain group (sjws, liberals, people with empathy etc.) by another group in an intensely and irrational manner solely because they dislike those people.
The so called victim mentality of bad faith could almost be applied to anyone. Anyone who seeks external sources to impose meaning onto their life. Religion, mythology, spirituality, culture, ethnicity, race, country, sex/gender,history etc. Anyone who tries to escape defining their own existence is committing bad faith. Which again, is almost anyone.
So it ain’t this superficial modern phenomenon belonging to our social milieu. That’s the problem with using more sophisticated thinkers and concepts and reducing them down to reactionary thoughtless terminology that is used to whine about how much one hates modernity.
This way of thinking, that we have infinite choices and possibilities puts a heavy burden on people for their life path. It shifts responsibility from a deity, society, parents, onto the individual. And yet since Sartre's time we are learning more about the role of genes and the interplay between them and the environment in a person's psychological make-up. The pendulum swings from being a victim to being one's own tyrant, god or parent. Neither is satisfactory because neither rings true. Some of us will strike out and struggle and some will not. I am old and I tend to think people move within a limited scope for the most part I see now why Camus and Sartre fell out and why I side with Camus, who was more poet than philosopher. He was a humanist with tolerance and empathy who understood the human condition and like Kierkagard was forgiving and understanding of the difficulty in knowing too much while having limited power.
Thank you Dr. Dodson.
Thank you for producing this video. I have listened to a few of your lectures and enjoyed them. They give me perspective and a sense of hope.
Excellent. Thank you. Well done.
Love the Fallout shirt!
"War? War... War never changes." -The years may change us, but the fundamental issues remain the same. The self-destructive nature of man.
Oh, c'est génial! :-)
Thank you for making these videos.
Happy to see America was still living in authenticity during the anounced apocalyps.
Nice video 👌👌
But who here hasn't thought that how we fare in life is in a large part luck. A simple roll of the dice. Someone with a promising career gets run down, receives a terminal diagnosis. You may choose what to do with your diagnosis but you have no choice on having your life ended by an out of control car or a stray bullet. Of course philosophy comes from the privilege of having time to think and access to books and education., luck. Neither berate yourself or congratulate yourself most of it is random and sheer luck.
A little precision : Man(/Homme) with a majuscule, (at least in French), is already gender-neutral because it refer to a member of Mankind(/Humanité).
The determinists would say choice is an illusion. Also not having to think about the trivial things, doing them automatically makes life smoother and frees you to think of things more interesting and granular .
The true breath of our freedom of actions is terrifying to me sometimes yet other Times is the only feature that makes me uniquely human
It’s an ephemeral blessing, I think we must embrace it while we have it
Hi Professor Dodson, I accidentally came acrossed your channel, because I am very unhappy since my beloved husband had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS on 12/30/19. 1 out of 30,000 contracted with ALS, I am asking God, why him, why me, and why us. My husband is indeed a very good man, he always very helpful to family and friends at home and at work. He's a family man, he does not smoke nor drink, nor gamble. Since my husband's medical diagnosis, I am constantly feeling sad, angry, fearful, and worried of his health. It's heart broken and very difficult to watch my hubhy's health is slowly declining. He's weaker today than yesterday, and tomorrow he'll be weaker than today. He's in wheel chair now. I do not understand why bad things happened to good people. I tried very hard to try to make sense with all of these---my husband's serious illness.
I enjoyed your lectures. Thank you so muchl
Hope your husband's doing better now, and you too are!
Hi Suggest books on these topics
The anecdotes seem to conflate increased critique of harm caused by systems with an assumed personal response of those affected by said systems. It is of course possible to levy critique why still taking personal responsibility for ones attitude and outlook on life within the facticity of those systems.
My first question centers around the definition of the unconscious action and how it represents choice. How is the random pre reflective choices made traveling home different from the random paths of balls in a Pachinko machine and representative of agency. My assumption at this point is that allowing oneself to make pre reflective choices is living in bad faith, not confronting the full vertiginous quality of freedom. Another possibility is that the availability of multiple choices, potentially limited by facticity, don't really illustrate more than a mathematical representation of alternatives, i.e. the results of different choices are not qualitatively different.
The low view count speaks volumes about the current atmosFEAR.
Great stuff.....as relates to post modern thoughts on "objective observation" and the discounting of scientific inquiry, it would seem that Sartre would count this as "bad faith" in the sense that it is rejecting our obligation and responsibility to make a conclusion based on our experience of the world even though "biased" by our subjective experience.........this is a terrible sentence but does this make logical/factual sense??....DEJ
I like the shirt so much😂😂
Am I an idiot or genius for running this at .85 speed? Does the sun rise and set to watch my day?
Nossa, vamos olhar isso
Pre-reflective cogito as opposed to Cartesian cogito.
The concept of bad faith as developed by Sartre attacks the foundation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (i.e, the theory of subconscious)
5:41. “Have you seen me????” 🤣🙄. Had to.
26mins in you discuss most of our choices being made on auto- pilot, as it were. Unconsciously. But how can I be responsible for something of which I am unconscious? This seems incoherent to me. This seems to mean that my 'being' is choosing, and only later do 'I', as a conscious entity, become aware of that. But if my 'being' is choosing, not I, then I am determined by my being and am not free. I don't understand what Sartre means by 'I'. It seems to me that choosing is happening and 'I' am observing the choices.This view accords with Eastern traditions such as Hinduism and Advaita Vedanta, as far as I understand them.
Well, Sartre's phenomenology circulates around *pre-reflective consciousness,* which is very different from something like a Freudian unconscious. The difference has to do with the element of active repression (or lack thereof). Pre-reflective consciousness has to do with what we *could* train our attention upon, if we were to decide to do so. For instance, let's say we're looking at a landscape, and the first thing we notice is the trees. At any and all points, what's keeping us from training our attention on the flowers, or the clouds in the sky, etc.? Well, from Sartre's perspective, only we ourselves are. And the fact is that at any and all points, we could decide to focus our awareness on any of those things. In contrast, the Freudian unconscious sounds more like what you're describing... basically, what we *won't* perceive (because of the dynamisms of repression), no matter how hard we try. Obviously, the former is a function of our ongoing practice of freedom, whereas the latter is not (or least not nearly as much). So... since pre-reflective consciousness is a function of our choices, then it's also a function of our freedom, and we're also responsible for it. I suppose that the parallel in jurisprudence (at least here in the U.S.) would be the maxim: "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." The reason is that our knowledge of the law is a function of our freedom... much as it is in the realm of simple perception. As for what the "I" is... well, the Sartrean response to a question like that would probably be: What do you want it to be? Yeah, that probably sounds a bit flippant. But I think it's actually fairly congruent with reality as we know it. For instance, some people conceive of the "I" in terms of something like Atman. Others (like Buddhists) think of it more in terms of An-Atman... basically a locus of ongoing slippage and metamorphosis (hence not an "I" in the usual sense at all). Here in the more materialistic West, we probably think of it mostly in terms of a Territorial Personality... basically, what we own and think of as "ours." The point, of course, is that the "I" is itself shaped by our choices, especially with respect to the immense number of ways of thinking about it, along with related constructs, like the "Self," the "Soul," etc. Anyhow, I hope this helps, or is at least disorienting in an interesting way. It's good to "hear" your "voice" again. Sorry about the possible TL;DR response. Eric D.
So we can can use subjective experience to confirm E = Mc^2....
But not to confirm the existence of a determined human nature?
Beautiful stuff. Now why couldn't Sartre have said it like that ?
He's a philosopher 🤷♀️
24:49 - thought you was gonna go full Peterson on us there
Daddy, what's a Postmodernist philosopher?
They're one ones who, when getting photographed, couldn't be bothered to put out their cigarette.
11:50
the hell? wutt 😂😂😂
The lecture is amazing, thank you, but I would call Sartre's position on freedom in general and free will in particular ridiculously shallow and inconsistent. He denies the existence of god but at the same time believes in free will. If only his teaching is not what is called 'Upaya' in Buddhism.
I would say that belief in free will is like a second-order religion, he only doesn't say it aloud. The first-order religion is when you believe in someone who is guiding your actions, and the second-order religion is when you believe in someone who guides the guidance of your actions (thus making you free).
To me the absence of free will has never been such obvious as now, because there are many machine learning models which are capable at behaving just like humans. But would we say that they have free will? I don't think so. And if we don't say that machines have free will why would we say that people have free will? It is like saying that Earth is in the center of the universe just because we live here.
But at the same time I wouldn't say that we should be sad that there is no free will, in my opinion the whole discussion about free will is pointless, and we should accept the most reasonable position - that there is no free will, and just live the way we live. The works of Camus are actually closer to me with accent on the absurd and inability to know anything in advance.
can you be my philosophy dad 0_0 you and Alan Watts
Sartre's bad faith seems pretty close to Camus's philosophical suicide
but that happens not only by observing,but weighing, measuring 😂
How would Sartre view suicide? I'm a little confused as to what he means by "The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future...
Isn't it funny that the horrors of freedom then are worst than the horror of facticity? Though it's so odd to say that that's true because humans detest hard determinism so much I don't think I ever met another and all who've I've told dismiss it in a minute and try to never think about it again. To them it's fatalism. But sure lets say people are in angst by the sheer overwhelming amount of choices whenever one is thrown into prison.
If you started talking about Bieber before you knew you were going to; how is that a choice? A unconscious choice is a choice? I feel like it's so close to saying heart attacks are choices. Why can't I choose not to breathe or to have a heart attack? Though the unconscious is still considered the self in a way. My unconscious I always thought is all from the universe which is hard deterministic. Which you said is cowardice and I suppose I accept.
Nietzche points out how all humanity first acts then makes up a story why they acted that way. Even before we could think we acted as animals. The alpha wolf spares the omega. And why? Because even the weakest wolf can help bring down a caribou and the alpha wolf couldn't tell you that that's what it's doing, it has no idea in all it's wisdom but the story is already set there and waiting. The monkey and the ants. The stories already there waiting for them to develop voice boxes to tell the tale. We need more people to accept hard determinism into their hearts. What can be the harm in gobbling the truth like a cold hard black insatiable pit of perseverance. Are there more truths for me to suffer? I want them HERE!
He looks like an American college graduate. He’s almost as smart too.
It's worrisome that this presentation of Sartre will appeal to a conservative masculine audience. This comes close to sounding like Jordan Peterson which needs to be addressed because they are not the same. Sartre's freedom is radical freedom in that unlike Peterson, not even biological conditions like being a woman or being a man can determine what is possible. Peterson is always trying to restrict people to innate biological attributes. Sartre would reject that position and thus becomes a great place to do gender studies. Peterson's whole philosophy is built on some formulation of innate structure. So please be careful with the type of audience this material might attract by rejecting social conditions, it's not that those social conditions aren't real, but it is our attitude toward them. They still exist, even possibly as "barriers" but what is a barrier can, as a physical object, be framed. Even the slaves found little forms of resistance, which had their consequences if caught, but certain possibilities remained out of sight for the time periods.
Well, my target audience for these presentations reflects the demographic composition of the classes for which I made them. That means that my target audience is about 60% female and around 25% black, with an average age of around 20 or 21 years. Of course, that means that 40% of my intended audience is male. And since I teach in Georgia, I'm pretty sure that many of those males (and females, too) favor political conservatism. And while perhaps only 20% or so of my classes consist of conservative males, I'm not sure why I *wouldn't* want my presentations to appeal to them. After all, doesn't the spirit of inclusion involve appealing to as many people as possible? Anyhow, as for Jordan Peterson... I have only a rough and approximate familiarity with his work. However, I know of no place where he waxes poetic about Sartre's work. In fact, he seems to pass over most of the corpus of 20th century Existentialism, in favor of 19th century thinkers, like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski and Nietzsche. Perhaps that's because, as you note, Sartre's philosophy isn't compatible with a thoroughgoing biological essentialism (or any other essentialism, for that matter). Or maybe Peterson thinks of people like Sartre as proto-postmodernists, whom he obviously detests. Anyhow, do *you* know of a place where Peterson speaks glowingly of Sartre's work? If so, could share a link to that? I'd personally be interested in it. But in any case, thanks for watching & commenting. Eric D.
"Man" is antiquated language? I didn't know you were teaching Sartre through the lens of gender studies.
It is antiquated language in the sense that we no longer use "man" as a synonym to "people", "humanity", "mankind" and so on, not in the sense that "gender is a social construct" or that "we live in a patriarchal society". It is just archaic to use "man" in the way Sartre uses it. People, in general, will use "people" to refer to people.
freaks out about gender studies, forgets Simone de Beauvoir
Justin Bierber is a factical invasion of my privacy [I know, I know; I allowed it, ;)]
I think your commentary on victims and the victim mentality is off, you failed to apply a relevant example. In some way, Sartre's philosophy is illustrating how people consider themselves victims of their own fate; thats very different from the way you framed it and that's the only reasonable interpretation of these concepts. You sound out of touch when you imply that certain aspects of society and as you put it the world at large are just the way they are, you and other people sharing this perception of things are not being very considerate in your judgement or charitable with your understanding of things, certain realities of life can make you a victim, that's not something you can just transcend. So stop pretending like it is, and quit implying that in your odd examples.
You're personal background as a conservative should not influence your discussion of the topic.
Well, first and mostly obviously, I'm not a conservative. But beyond that, a better way of expressing your complaints about this video would be to make *your own* video on the same topic... one that rectifies the various problems that you think exist in this video. Please share a link when you're done, because I'm eager to learn from your superior perspective.