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the human mind deal with the idea of an absurd universe? Sartre believes that only the cowardly mind cannot do so, and he believes that such a mind posits God to relieve the anxiety provoked by the thought of a meaningless universe. But this belief is posited in “bad faith,” according to Sartre.
Sartre’s existentialism tries to reveal to human consciousness its strength and courage to accept the absurdity of existence, and its capacity for creating meaning in a meaningless world. Sartre develops these ideas in his massive work of 1943...
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS.
When I sit on a chair, I am asking, “Will I be supported?” When reality answers “Yes,” it reveals its “being” to us.
When it answers “No,” it reveals its “non-being,” its “nothingness.” (Remember, the title of Sartre’s main work is Being and Nothingness.)
artre explicates this idea by giving us a phenomenological account of arriving late at a café, where he has agreed to meet his friend, Pierre.
He describes the café as he enters:
There is an important distinction in phenomenology between FIGURE and GROUND.
“Figure” is that feature of the field of perception on which you focus your attention.
“Ground” is the backdrop or foreground to “figure.”
Nothing is naturally either figure or ground. You create something (for example, a glass on the table) as “figure” by bestowing your attention upon it, and thereby you create the table as “ground.” Then, as you move your attention from the glass to a napkin, the napkin “leaps forward” as figure, and the glass slips into the ground.
Now, as Sartre scans the café for Pierre, different people and objects offer themselves up as “figure,” but each proves not to be Pierre, so they slide back into the “ground” as Sartre moves his attention to another part of the café.
inally his fear is confirmed: “PIERRE IS NOT HERE.”
Without these discontinuities there would only be universal DETERMINISM (every event would be rigidly caused by an earlier event, in turn caused by an earlier event, and so on to infinity), and no true action could exist, only reflexes, only effects.
eep in mind that for the
determinist there is a continuity of strict causality between the past and the present and between the present and the future. The past necessarilly causes the present, which in turn necessarily causes the future. Therefore, for the determinist, freedom is impossible.
For example, for Freud, an event in my childhood, whose memory is locked in my unconscious, can cause my neurotic behavior as an adult. Or for Skinner, all of our present acts are the effects of past conditioning.
Sartre denies all of this. Being-for-itself is separated from its past by a nothingness. It is true that the past has “FACTICITY” That is, there are certain facts in the past that one cannot change. (I, for example, was born in San Jose, California, and I can’t do anything to change that fact—a heavy burden!) But nothing in the past can CAUSE me to do anything now. There is nothing that can be considered a human action (as opposed to reflexes or bodily functions) that follows necessarily from the past.
o understand the sense in which FACTICITY cannot be the
cause of any action, consider this Sartrean kind of example: A group of friends on vacation go for a day hike in the Alps. Halfway to the mountain top which is their goal, they turn a bend in the path and find their way blocked by a huge boulder that has fallen in such a manner that it cannot be dislodged and cannot be circumvented. The first hiker’s stomach sinks in disappointment. “That’s it,” he says, “The hike’s over!” From Sartre’s point of view, this person has
chosen the facticity of the boulder as an insurmountable obstacle and chosen himself as defeated. A second hiker begins photographing the rock, excited by its sublime power and by the beauty of the landscape framing it. She has chosen the boulder as aesthetic object and chosen herself as a recorder of beauty—that is, as an artist. A third hiker examines the boulder scientifically, noting its mineral composition and the impact of its recent fall on the path. For her, this boulder is a motive for scientific study and is the occasion for her to act as a scientist. The fourth hiker says, “There’s got to be a way around this thing,” and begins a series of experiments to overcome the obstacle.
The determinist argues that there must be something in the past of each of these hikers that determined their response. Sartre denies this. There is nothing in the facticity of the past of any of the hikers, nor in the facticity of the boulder, that necessitates any particular response to the boulder’s presence. For Sartre, the facticity of the rock is undeniable, but each person chooses the MEANING of that facticity for him or herself. Because facticity in itself is meaningless, the source of the meaning is a decision on the part of the individual. There are always alternative interpretations of meaning available; we are never confronted with only one possible choice. There is alw...
