WoW....you guys have not made this easy have you.
Helen, in your piece dated 19th Feb., you have mentioned that essence is the "sum total of everyting that we have been [...] here one moment and gone the next." You then ask the question as to how much meaning can it have. I actually think that our past actions do not actually have any significant meaning at all. It is the actions that take place in each moment that have the most meaning to us. Sartre states, (1993, p.56) "She disarmed the actions of her companion by reducing them to being only what they are; that is existaing in the mode of the in-itself." Her understanding of his actions could only be that an understanding, her interpretation of what she obvserved. It will be the man in question that knows the meaning of his actions. Maybe the question is the perceived meaning of anticipated future actions that are of most important. Just as I am experiencing now as I type. I am thinking of the best words to use to convey the most accurate meaning to yourselves even before I touch each key.
I would also like to pick up on the idea of a concrete identity. I don't think the lady is trying to project a concrete identity. I think she is trying to maintain a concrete experience, to hold onto the moment in time, with a very attentive gentleman sitting opposite her. "She speaks of Life, of her life, [...] the hand rests inert between the warm hand of her companion." She is sharing the experience, not with a guy sitting opposite her, but with 'her companion'. I feel that she is so captivated by the moment, unaware as to if, 'the table is round or square.' I also find it interesting that Sartre starts the piece off with referring to the person opposite her as a man, a physical object, obviously a sexual one, whilst when we arrive at the end he is being described, suppossively by her as her companion.
Oliver, you have suggested the idea that the lady is in 'bad faith' because she is not willing to entertain the idea of events after they leave the cafe. I guess Sartre is alluding to the fact that from the guys point of view they will end up in bed together before the night is out. But even if my assumption is correct, according to Sartre it would not be inevitable as the occurance of continual flux could change any future plans either members of the party may hold. Whilst I would initially agree with the idea that we are continually being who we are, the time frame for such a manifestation is but a small one I would feel. An hour or two at the most. Hence, whatever it is that the lady may feel for the man whilst seated opposite him her feelings may not necessarly be the same a few hours later. Her feelings in the cafe are left there, locked in time, unable to be changed in that moment, but both their feelings for each other will be in a continual flux in occurdeance with their experience at the moment of feeling.
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Friday, 19 February 2010
'Flux' and Bad Faith
To begin with, I would like to briefly run over the key concepts of Sartre’s ontology, for my own sake and for yours Oli, so that you can analyse my progress on the subject. I will then work my own reflections and responses into this.
Existence for Sartre is the earthly or ‘corporeal’ being. ‘Existence’ in itself then, can be the only thing with regards to a being-for-itself (the conscious being) that is non-transient.
Our essence, everything that we have done and thought, is ephemeral or transient by its nature.
I wish to take a moment and reflect on this.
The word transient I think, assigned to Sartre's human 'essence', suggests a certain level of unimportance. As does the word ephemeral. I don’t know how much importance Sartre assigns to ones essence; or furthermore to the very idea of the conscious being-for-itself, in a state of constant flux. If our essence, the sum total of everything that we have been, is in very simple terms, here one moment and gone the next, how much meaning can it have? Has it bared no mark on our own personal conditions? Or does it have no importance, and bare no relevance to our individual identities at all? In saying that our transient essence, is not ‘who we are’, it can be further seen that one is suggesting that our past experiences and previous roles have no bearing on our identity. In later dialogue I would like to look into this a little further.
So to follow on, the being-in-itself is ‘as the table is round or square, as the wall colouring is blue or gray’ (Sartre 1993 pg 55), as this desk is flat and brown. The being-for-itself, is the conscious being, and that which sets us corporeal beings apart from others.
Now for a being-for-itself to act in Bad Faith, to my understanding, is as follows.
Very simply to begin with, Bad Faith is ones ‘bad faith’ in their own transience. It is their knowing negation of this, in whatever action or thought implied. But furthermore it is the concealment of ones knowledge of this transience say, from themselves. The deceiver is also the deceived in a single unity. As Sartre claims, ‘…in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.’ (Sartre 1993 pg 49)
Take the example of the young woman in the café. The very act of this woman, say choosing to withdraw her hand as he places his own upon hers, does not make her ‘the woman who withdrew her hand’. She will not exist in this ‘self’ as it were, as a stone will exist as a stone. Her deliberation over whether to withdraw her hand or to take his, in the thinking that either one of these actions will define her in a sense, is absurd according to Sartre. To approach the situation in this way is to deny ones transience from oneself. To do so isn’t right or wrong. Rather, to attempt to work against oneself as a transient being is not merely ridiculous for Sartre, but very impossible.
Perhaps another example of Bad Faith in this particular passage is the young woman’s perceptions of the young man’s sincerity;
‘If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behaviour of the speaker, the immediate meanings…’ (Sartre 1993 pg 55)
The ‘qualities’ she then assigns to the young man are somewhat permanent and fixed. Is she acting in Bad Faith in this instance also? In doing so perhaps she is not only attempting to deny him his transience through her own perceptions, but also perhaps her own.
In attaching these permanent qualities, to both herself and the young man, she is being sincere to ‘herself’: perhaps in a way protecting herself from her own transience, because in some way the notion of her as a 'being of transience', questions the authority she has over her identity. It removes her freedom and/or power over the creation of herself, and this is an unsettling thought. Thus to be sincere (or kind) to herself, allows her to permit the idea that she and others can be as they make themselves. They can be ‘the dancer’ or ‘the woman who took his hand’ for example, and so project this identity into the external world.
However this cannot be the case. The ‘flux’ of the being-for-itself is a transient one. I, the conscious being, can therefore never be a ‘fixed permanence’. (Sartre 1993 pg 55) The Bad Faith of the conscious being, comes into play when one is sincere to oneself in the attempt to project a concrete identity. In doing so one is attempting to establish themselves as a static being, which simply cannot be done for Sartre. We are, perhaps without being aware of it (?) constantly remaking and reinventing ourselves. We thus cannot be ‘defined’ as the actor, the girlfriend, or the sister. We may have been all these;(our ‘facticity – all that we have been’), but all these do not make us ‘who we are’.
Existence for Sartre is the earthly or ‘corporeal’ being. ‘Existence’ in itself then, can be the only thing with regards to a being-for-itself (the conscious being) that is non-transient.
Our essence, everything that we have done and thought, is ephemeral or transient by its nature.
I wish to take a moment and reflect on this.
The word transient I think, assigned to Sartre's human 'essence', suggests a certain level of unimportance. As does the word ephemeral. I don’t know how much importance Sartre assigns to ones essence; or furthermore to the very idea of the conscious being-for-itself, in a state of constant flux. If our essence, the sum total of everything that we have been, is in very simple terms, here one moment and gone the next, how much meaning can it have? Has it bared no mark on our own personal conditions? Or does it have no importance, and bare no relevance to our individual identities at all? In saying that our transient essence, is not ‘who we are’, it can be further seen that one is suggesting that our past experiences and previous roles have no bearing on our identity. In later dialogue I would like to look into this a little further.
So to follow on, the being-in-itself is ‘as the table is round or square, as the wall colouring is blue or gray’ (Sartre 1993 pg 55), as this desk is flat and brown. The being-for-itself, is the conscious being, and that which sets us corporeal beings apart from others.
Now for a being-for-itself to act in Bad Faith, to my understanding, is as follows.
Very simply to begin with, Bad Faith is ones ‘bad faith’ in their own transience. It is their knowing negation of this, in whatever action or thought implied. But furthermore it is the concealment of ones knowledge of this transience say, from themselves. The deceiver is also the deceived in a single unity. As Sartre claims, ‘…in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.’ (Sartre 1993 pg 49)
Take the example of the young woman in the café. The very act of this woman, say choosing to withdraw her hand as he places his own upon hers, does not make her ‘the woman who withdrew her hand’. She will not exist in this ‘self’ as it were, as a stone will exist as a stone. Her deliberation over whether to withdraw her hand or to take his, in the thinking that either one of these actions will define her in a sense, is absurd according to Sartre. To approach the situation in this way is to deny ones transience from oneself. To do so isn’t right or wrong. Rather, to attempt to work against oneself as a transient being is not merely ridiculous for Sartre, but very impossible.
Perhaps another example of Bad Faith in this particular passage is the young woman’s perceptions of the young man’s sincerity;
‘If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behaviour of the speaker, the immediate meanings…’ (Sartre 1993 pg 55)
The ‘qualities’ she then assigns to the young man are somewhat permanent and fixed. Is she acting in Bad Faith in this instance also? In doing so perhaps she is not only attempting to deny him his transience through her own perceptions, but also perhaps her own.
In attaching these permanent qualities, to both herself and the young man, she is being sincere to ‘herself’: perhaps in a way protecting herself from her own transience, because in some way the notion of her as a 'being of transience', questions the authority she has over her identity. It removes her freedom and/or power over the creation of herself, and this is an unsettling thought. Thus to be sincere (or kind) to herself, allows her to permit the idea that she and others can be as they make themselves. They can be ‘the dancer’ or ‘the woman who took his hand’ for example, and so project this identity into the external world.
However this cannot be the case. The ‘flux’ of the being-for-itself is a transient one. I, the conscious being, can therefore never be a ‘fixed permanence’. (Sartre 1993 pg 55) The Bad Faith of the conscious being, comes into play when one is sincere to oneself in the attempt to project a concrete identity. In doing so one is attempting to establish themselves as a static being, which simply cannot be done for Sartre. We are, perhaps without being aware of it (?) constantly remaking and reinventing ourselves. We thus cannot be ‘defined’ as the actor, the girlfriend, or the sister. We may have been all these;(our ‘facticity – all that we have been’), but all these do not make us ‘who we are’.
Defining Sartre's ontology, and the consequences this has for 'bad faith'.
I think we should take what you said in your last post, Helen, and elaborate on it a little further. Then we subsequently arrive a stronger position to see what this means in terms of Sartre's idea of 'bad faith'.
When you say 'Sartre maintains that humans are not exactly as one might consider them to be at any given point in time', and also that you do consider us to be in something of a state of flux, you arrive at a position that allows us to examine Sartre's ontology further. In other words, you establish some fundamental principles of his thought in Being and Nothingness.
Sartre's ontology:
We fundamentally must understand that Sartre's ontology exhibits some very key concepts and terminology.
They are; 1. That existence is the real and tangible (corporeal) being. This is subjective being; 2. That essence is what you have been, or the sum of your decisions and actions. This is a transient essence that is constantly determined and ever-evolving. It is not 'who we are', since we as being are, as you quite rightly pointed out Helen, in a constant state of flux; 3. The notion of being must be defined here. Being is objective and of two kinds. Being-in-itself is non-conscious and exists independent from observation, whereas Being-for-itself is a conscious being. This consciousness sets this being apart from other beings in the world.
In addition to this, we must understand that Sartre identifies facticity all that we have been, and transcendence as the possibilities of everything we can be.
A key to Sartre's thought here is the transience of being, and this has implications for the example of bad faith concerning the woman in the cafe that I shall now exhibit.
Bad faith:
We must understand bad faith as the instance when an individual, knowingly, renegades against the subjective desire under the context of freedom established by the circumstances that reside over the possibilities. This excludes, in my understanding, the case of the actions of an individual that are undertaken unknowingly in relation to subjective desires (although perhaps we can further elaborate and tease out this point further through dialogue).
There is more to be said about lying here (Sartre, 1993, pp.48-50) but again perhaps we can discuss this further through dialogue.
The notion of sincerity is key to Sartre's conception of bad faith, particularly in relation to the case of the woman in the cafe. It seems that, to a certain degree, she has posited a certain idea of what it would be to be sincere to 'herself', and in doing so she establishes a static conception of self that renegades against the transient nature of her being that is inescapable. For example, "she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents. She restricts this behaviour to what is in the present..." (Sartre, 1993, p.55). In addition "The qualities thus attached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed in permanence like that of things, which is no other than the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux" (Sartre, 1993, p.55). I think this may help you Helen, interpret the concept of 'flux', which you touched upon in your previous post, in a slightly more developed light. I would be interested in hearing how you respond to this. The 'flux' we talk of is very much a transient flux. The emergence of bad faith, in the instance of positing sincerity, is that one is implying some sort of declaration of self, which is nonsensical to Sartre since it involves some kind of proposition of a fixed and static being. This is contra to Sartre's conception of being. His conception of being is one that is constantly recreating itself, has no fixed and static reality, and subsequently cannot be defined as being 'of such a sort or of a certain kind'.
When you say 'Sartre maintains that humans are not exactly as one might consider them to be at any given point in time', and also that you do consider us to be in something of a state of flux, you arrive at a position that allows us to examine Sartre's ontology further. In other words, you establish some fundamental principles of his thought in Being and Nothingness.
Sartre's ontology:
We fundamentally must understand that Sartre's ontology exhibits some very key concepts and terminology.
They are; 1. That existence is the real and tangible (corporeal) being. This is subjective being; 2. That essence is what you have been, or the sum of your decisions and actions. This is a transient essence that is constantly determined and ever-evolving. It is not 'who we are', since we as being are, as you quite rightly pointed out Helen, in a constant state of flux; 3. The notion of being must be defined here. Being is objective and of two kinds. Being-in-itself is non-conscious and exists independent from observation, whereas Being-for-itself is a conscious being. This consciousness sets this being apart from other beings in the world.
In addition to this, we must understand that Sartre identifies facticity all that we have been, and transcendence as the possibilities of everything we can be.
A key to Sartre's thought here is the transience of being, and this has implications for the example of bad faith concerning the woman in the cafe that I shall now exhibit.
Bad faith:
We must understand bad faith as the instance when an individual, knowingly, renegades against the subjective desire under the context of freedom established by the circumstances that reside over the possibilities. This excludes, in my understanding, the case of the actions of an individual that are undertaken unknowingly in relation to subjective desires (although perhaps we can further elaborate and tease out this point further through dialogue).
There is more to be said about lying here (Sartre, 1993, pp.48-50) but again perhaps we can discuss this further through dialogue.
The notion of sincerity is key to Sartre's conception of bad faith, particularly in relation to the case of the woman in the cafe. It seems that, to a certain degree, she has posited a certain idea of what it would be to be sincere to 'herself', and in doing so she establishes a static conception of self that renegades against the transient nature of her being that is inescapable. For example, "she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents. She restricts this behaviour to what is in the present..." (Sartre, 1993, p.55). In addition "The qualities thus attached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed in permanence like that of things, which is no other than the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux" (Sartre, 1993, p.55). I think this may help you Helen, interpret the concept of 'flux', which you touched upon in your previous post, in a slightly more developed light. I would be interested in hearing how you respond to this. The 'flux' we talk of is very much a transient flux. The emergence of bad faith, in the instance of positing sincerity, is that one is implying some sort of declaration of self, which is nonsensical to Sartre since it involves some kind of proposition of a fixed and static being. This is contra to Sartre's conception of being. His conception of being is one that is constantly recreating itself, has no fixed and static reality, and subsequently cannot be defined as being 'of such a sort or of a certain kind'.
Monday, 15 February 2010
Patterns of Bad Faith
I do think we are in a constant state of flux. But whether we are constantly attempting to reassert our awareness that our existence transcends essence, is questionable.
However, I don't think Sartre speaks with contempt as such. Rather, he makes a large assumption on the intricate workings of human thought.
'The man who is speaking to her, appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is round or square...'
Sartre maintains that humans are not exactly as one might consider them to be at any given point in time. i.e. I am not a student in the same way a house is a house. My being as 'the student', does not transcend or override my being in its entirety. I have a past and a future. Other 'roles' have been, and will be assigned by the 'other' in whose gaze I become an 'object'. In Patterns of Bad Faith, it appears that the young woman is the object of the young man's desire. But why does she choose to see this young man as 'sincere and respectful' as the colouring of the wall is blue or gray? Sartre claims this is because she doesn't know what she wants. Yet she knows, that in order to be 'satisfied' her entire person must be acknowledged and addressed - her freedom of being, must be acknowledged.
However, I don't think Sartre speaks with contempt as such. Rather, he makes a large assumption on the intricate workings of human thought.
'The man who is speaking to her, appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is round or square...'
Sartre maintains that humans are not exactly as one might consider them to be at any given point in time. i.e. I am not a student in the same way a house is a house. My being as 'the student', does not transcend or override my being in its entirety. I have a past and a future. Other 'roles' have been, and will be assigned by the 'other' in whose gaze I become an 'object'. In Patterns of Bad Faith, it appears that the young woman is the object of the young man's desire. But why does she choose to see this young man as 'sincere and respectful' as the colouring of the wall is blue or gray? Sartre claims this is because she doesn't know what she wants. Yet she knows, that in order to be 'satisfied' her entire person must be acknowledged and addressed - her freedom of being, must be acknowledged.
Friday, 12 February 2010
Sartre's contempt...
I don't know about you but I really can imagine Sartre going about Paris, observing and interacting with so many people who at least in their actions towards others offer that they are so grounded and sure of the intricacies of their own existence and thinking, 'I need to prove to these people that nothing they take for granted is certain, that their very selves are transient and malleable and not fixed and static, and that they recreate themselves in every moment because existence precedes essence'. Sartre wanted to show them that they are not what their essence would suggest, but they are in a constant state of flux. This fact, above all others, coupled with the problem that they cannot grasp a 'non-static' conception of being, is the source of existential angst that besieges humans.
Sartre... Bad Faith
Ok, i'll get set the ball roling here.
This will have to be edited out later, but I should probably set the parameters of this discussion at the outset so that we know what we're dealing with, and where we stand.
(2500 words per group)
Discuss the example of bad faith Sartre offers of the woman on a first date, pp.55-56. (Section II 'Patterns of Bad Faith) and ending with the line "in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other.
Focus on this example by Sartre, and not the othere examples exhibited in 'Bad Faith'.
This will have to be edited out later, but I should probably set the parameters of this discussion at the outset so that we know what we're dealing with, and where we stand.
(2500 words per group)
Discuss the example of bad faith Sartre offers of the woman on a first date, pp.55-56. (Section II 'Patterns of Bad Faith) and ending with the line "in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other.
Focus on this example by Sartre, and not the othere examples exhibited in 'Bad Faith'.
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