I will argue that Buber’s position is more insightful because his theory of human relations lays the foundation for an ethical system. I will first examine Sartre’s notion of intersubjectivity. Second, I will examine Buber’s view, comparing and contrasting it to Sartre’s view in two respects. I will first compare how the Other changes the subject’s worldview. My second comparison will deal with the idea that intersubjective relations for Sartre and Buber involve the subject viewing the universe through the Other. Lastly, moving away from the compare and contrast section, I will show how Buber’s model is more likely to give rise to an ethical relationship than Sartre’s model.
In order to explicate Sartre’s notion of intersubjectivity I will follow the progression that Sartre takes in Being and Nothingness. I will first distinguish between “being-for-itself” and “being-for-others”. Second, I will provide an explication of the subject’s encounter with the Other as an object. Third, I will explain the significance of “the look”. Here I will show how the look provides the foundation for the self. I will also show how the look of the Other affects the subject’s freedom.
One of the aims of Being and Nothingness is to describe consciousness, or human subjectivity. Sartre distinguishes two different modes of consciousness in order to accurately describe human subjectivity. These two modes are being-for-itself and being-for-others. Being-for-itself refers to a transcendent conscious being (Oaklander, 238). Transcendence is the antithesis of facticity. I will describe facticity first, in order to make the concept of transcendence more tractable. Facticity denotes the concrete details of the subject’s being including past decisions, plac...
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...d suddenly seems spacious and empty without the presence of his lover. The lover therefore views his world in relation to the beloved. It is as if the beloved permeates his perception like a sweet smell permeates a room. Buber describes this permeation vividly, writing “man dwells in his love” (Buber, 59) and that the “You is spread over me” (Buber, 55). This does not mean that the I perceives only the You or that the lover only perceives his beloved. It means that the lover views the world in relation to his lover as well as through his lover. Buber confirms, it is “not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light” (Buber, 55). In other words, the world is coloured by the beloved. APPLY TO GENERAL?
While Buber claims that we conceive the world through the Other, Sartre argues that we come to view ourselves through the Other.
At the end of Being and Nothingness,Jean-Paul Sartre concedes that he has not overcome one of the key objections to existentialism viz., an outline of ethics, and states that he will do so later. Although Sartre attempted the project of an existential ethics, it was never quite completed. Enter Simone De Beauvoir. In this book, De Beauvoir picks up where Sartre has left us, refusing to answer the question of ethics. For De Beauvoir, human nature involves and ontological ambiguity whose finitude is bound in a duality. This duality of body and consciousness is the ambiguity which remakes nature the way we want it to be as a facticity of transcendence. It is within this understanding that the project of ethics must begin in ambiguity. However,
We choose, act, and take responsibility for everything, and thus we live, and exist. Life cannot be anything until it is lived, but each individual must make sense of it. The value of life is nothing else but the sense each person fashions into it. To argue that we are the victims of fate, of mysterious forces within us, of some grand passion, or heredity, is to be guilty of bad faith. Sartre says that we can overcome the adversity presented by our facticity, a term he designs to represent the external factors that we have no control over, such as the details of our birth, our race, and so on, by inserting nothingness into it.
Philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber both emphasize how the presence of others in our lives and the bonds which we create with them define who we are and affects our self-perception. Both have their own theory of how this occurs. I will begin by discussing Sartre’s perspective on the subject, and Buber’s stance will follow.
In this essay, I shall briefly examine the relationship between Sartre's phenomenological description of the "self" as expressed in his early work (especially Being and Nothingness) and elements to be found in some approaches to Buddhism. The vast enormity of this task will be obvious to anyone who is aware of the numerous schools and traditions through which the religion of Buddhism has manifested itself. In order to be brief, I have decided to select specific aspects of what is commonly called the Theravadin tradition as being representative of Buddhist philosophy.
At the core of Jean-Paul Sartre’s views was that existence precedes essence. This contrasted with the Aristotelian and Scholastic views that individual existence is an expression of essence or being (Brennan, 2003). Instead, Sartre believed that existence defines the essence of an individual such ...
(5) Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness translated by Hazel Barnes(New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), pp 432-434.
The first properly philosophical work written by Sartre-The Transcendence of the Ego (1) -is an investigation into the problem of otherness, of alterity or-to use Sartre's terminology-of transcendence. Sartre develops the notion of transcendence in a radical opposition to that of immanence i. e. of a uniform and homogenous sameness. His ultimate aim is to arrive at the notion of immanence purified of any transcendent elements and to use that notion as a clue for his definition of subjectivity. That is to say, to the question: "What am I?" Sartre would reply: "I am an immanence without transcendence. I am a pure stream of consciousness without any contents. I am an absolute transparency without opacity. I am no more than the temporal unity of my life-which means-a pure self-contained flow that no alien element can interrupt or contaminate".
...ating Sartre's attitudes towards the constituents of human action, that which constitutes human being. Even though it may, in the final analysis, prove to be an unsatisfactory account of consciousness, it serves to illuminate some possible further lines of study, if only as a negative example.
... the complexity and the guilt of a complacent citizenry, both writers re-evaluated the idea of the author and the subject. In spite of being largely contradictory, they both leave room for some agreement. One could argue that the choice presented by the author to the subject in Sartre fits within Althusser’s ideology of ideologies. Insofar as it is the author’s responsibility to reveal the ideology, the world, to the subject and it is the subject’s responsibility to interpret the ideology or the text. However, this common ground is both narrow and unstable and would be difficult, at best, to support.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a notable French philosopher and writer of the 20th century whose literary works have strongly influenced the world of academia and spurred intellectual contest in the Modern era. In Sartre’s 1945 publication, “Existentialism and Humanism,” Sartre had argued extensively about the notion of abandonment – the notion that we live freely in this world without purpose, and his stance on atheistic existentialism. His main argument was that existence precedes essence so humans acquire meaning through lived experiences since humans are free to choose and decide for themselves. From this, he concludes that there exists no such thing as ‘a priori’ morality and that “God is a useless and costly hypothesis” (28). In this paper, I will be rebutting Sartre’s moral nihilism argument since it lacks apparent linkage between the notion of freedom of choice and the idea that ‘a priori’ morality does not exist.
Finally, Husserl stated that as people, we are subjects living in a world of objects. However, Heidegger changes this subject-object theory and instead states “Being-in is not a ‘property’ which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could just be just as well as it could be with it.” This is due to the fact that, as Sartre distinguishes, objects have both being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Through being-in-itself, humans, via their
Existentialism could be defined as a philosophical theory that focuses on the individual person being a free and responsible person who determines his or her own development through acts of will. Existentialism is a thesis that has been discussed by some of the greatest philosophical minds ever to live. Minds such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche all had their own view on what existentialism was and major impact on the development of this thesis. Each of these philosophies played a huge influence on a great mind that would come later on in history. That was the mind of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, who is considered one of the great philosophical minds, based many of his ideas around the idea of existentialism and phenomenology. Throughout this paper we will take an extensive look into the life and mind of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre is one of the constructors of the philosophy of existence that is existentialism. Humans must first be born and exist before they are able to define their essence. He states that there is no universal statement about what humans are. But, there is one overall statement about the circumstances that make us human, which is that we are free. He believes that when we have to make decisions nothing is forcing us to do what we are doing. Which leads to the idea that humans have to take full responsibility for our actions, beliefs and emotions. By being aware that we are free, the responsibility of this can cause “anguish” according to Sartre. One of the most painful thoughts can be that we alone are totally responsible for what happens to us. To avoid the pain of some of the bad decisions we make people can act as if they had no choice and may pretend that they are not free which would make them not responsible. When you act like you were not free and are not responsible is known as having bad faith. That is humans try to convince themselves that outside forces, forces that are beyond control or our conscious mental state helped determine the decisions we made.
This paper attempts to discuss the main features of existentialist views as well as dissect Sartre's Theory into two parts, analysing its merits and consequent demerit.
The second aspect of the Situation we shall consider is My Death. Here, the restriction on one's freedom is the facticity of death, because it is unavoidable fact of being a living beng. Sartre sees that death robs us of creating meaning in life because once dead we no longer have a perspective. Following this, once we die we become beings-for-others, meaning that we become only what exists in the memories of others, thus making us an object. Meaning that once we die we are determined by the perspectives of others and thus their individual experience of us. Sartre explains this as, death being a facticity which “alienates us wholly in our life to the advantage of the Other [...] To be dead, is to be a prey for the living.” (Sartre, 2003, p. 564).