I Always Preferred

Responses

1. 

   Lynne Attardi

   October 16, 2016

   Again, thank you my dear friend Gina Hobaugh for your wonderful philosophy lectures in all your courses. I remember Sartre being one of the hardest to grasp, and I can’t say I’ve got a handle on him yet. But considering the quote above, of course he would say just that. Here is a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy. I just had to do some research to back up some of my little remembrance of Jean-Paul: “The person who gets ‘worked up’ when failing to hit the golf ball or to open the jar lid, is, on Sartre’s reading, ‘intending’ a world where physiological changes ‘conjure up’ solutions in the problematic world. The person who literally ‘jumps for joy,’ to cite another of his examples, is trying by a kind of incantation to possess a good ‘all at once’ that can be realized only across a temporal spread. If emotion is a joke, he warns, it is a joke we believe in. These are all spontaneous, prereflective relations. They are not the products of reflective decision. Yet insofar as they are even prereflectively conscious, we are responsible for them. And this raises the question of freedom, a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility and the heart of his philosophy.
   “The basis of Sartrean freedom is ontological: we are free because we are not a self (an in-itself) but a presence-to-self (the transcendence or ‘nihilation’ of our self). This implies that we are ‘other’ to our selves, that whatever we are or whatever others may ascribe to us, we are ‘in the manner of not being it,’ that is, in the manner of being able to assume a perspective in its regard. This inner distance reflects not only the nonself-identity of the for-itself and the ekstatic temporality that it generates but forms the site of what Sartre calls ‘freedom as the definition of man.’ To that freedom corresponds a coextensive responsibility. We are responsible for our ‘world’ as the horizon of meaning in which we operate and thus for everything in it insofar as their meaning and value are assigned by virtue of our life-orienting fundamental ‘choice.’ At this point the ontological and the psychological overlap while remaining distinct as occurs so often in phenomenology.”

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