Jean-Paul Satre

A detailed Summary of Jean-Paul Satre

Early Sartrean philosophy is one of a pursuit of being. It is an attempt to grasp being through an investigation of the way being presents to consciousness - phenomenological ontology. Phenomenological ontology refers to the study of being through its appearances. This simplistic definition needs further clarification. First, by phenomenon Sartre refers to the totality of appearances of a thing and not simply a particular appearance. As Wilfrid Desan writes, phenomenology is "a method which wants to describe all that manifests itself as it manifests itself." Moreover, H.J. Blackham observes that in Sartre, "the objects of consciousness, the phenomena, the appearances of things, disclose what is really there as it really is, though never exhaustively." This position is better understood when we come to discuss Sartre's twofold division of being. There we shall find that the in-itself presented to the reflective consciousness in phenomena is a totalized being, being in its plenitude. Blackham continues:

Consciousness implies and refers to an existence other than its own and to its own existence as a question. It is this relation of the pour-soi to the en-soi which is the foundation (and the only condition) of knowledge and action.

When we speak of "forlornness," a term Heidegger was fond of, we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face all the consequences of this.

Knowledge is necessarily intuition, the presence of consciousness to the object which it is not. This is the original condition of all experience. Before the object is defined and interpreted, consciousness constitutes itself by separating itself from it.

Finally, despair means that "we shall confine ourselves to reckoning only with what depends upon our will, or on the ensemble of probabilities which make our action possible."

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is. Sartre thus defines being. Being, as all embracing and objective, is not existence, which is individual and subjective. Sartre was quick to add that the being of phenomenon is radically different from the being of consciousness. The latter he discusses in his discussion of being-for-itself as contrasted against being-in-itself. Sartre did not dwell so much on what being is but in his twofold division of being into the in-itself and the for-itself.

Freedom then is limited by facticity. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre considered one's place, body, past, position, and fundamental relationship to the Other as among the facticities of freedom.

Finally, consciousness is a nothingness. It is a nothingness in the sense that it is always not that thing. It is always in the making, and to try to view it as permanent is to do injustice to its very definition. From this arises the assertion that there is no set of permanent entity which is the human self.

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Approximate Word count = 1537
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People