Transcript
What is radical freedom? What is
woman? What is Being?
ExistentialismJean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,
Heidegger, Husserl
Jean Paul Sartre 1905-1980
French existentialist, philosopher, playright, novelist, social activist
“Nausea,” “No Exit,” Being and Nothingness
Atheist
“Existence precedes essence.”
Atheism:God doesn’t exist--abandoned!
No divine conception of human nature; no specific essence
You are what YOU make of yourself!
No Ultimate Reason why anything
happens.Individuals are thrown into existence
Not like inanimate objects “being-in-themselves” mere existence
Humans “being-for-itself” self-aware conscious subject
Condemned to be Free
Because there is no God and hence no divine plan...
Human beings are free-- “we are alone, without excuses.”
Big responsibility --existential overtones.
“Bad Faith”
Responsibility absolutely inescapable-Anguish!
Many people do not feel this anguish
They are hiding, fleeing from big “R”--self deception
“Authenticity”
Understandable why we avoid shouldering responsibility
Absurdity results in revulsion & boredom
Accept responsibility: Live in Authenticity
Fundamental project
Simone de Beauvoir1908-1986
French author and philosopher
Feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution
Woman as “other”--Social construct to women’s oppression
“One is not born but becomes a woman.”
“The Second Sex
-she criticized the patriarchial assumptions:
women’s “natural” inferiority justifies patriarchial domination
Sartre and de Beauvoir
met at the Sorbonne
relationship of sixty years
refused bonds of marriage and fidelity
freedom triumphed over convention
Phenomenology
interests itself in the essential structures
found within stream of conscious experiences
independent of assumptions and presumptions
Edmund Husserl
investigate phenomena while “bracketing” assumptions
phenomenological reduction
investigate phen-omena without making assumptions
Martin Heidegger1889-1976
What is being?
We can get lost in superficiality of life
Everydayness and idle chatter
Sorge - care - what is most prominent feature of humans
Later Heidegger
Shh! Quiet. We must listen to the sound of Being.
What is Being? the most fundamental question.
Silence. Poetry.
Hannah Arendt1905-1975
Student of Heidegger
Banality of Evil
The Life of the Mind
Teacher of Bennet
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