Learning:
The Journey of a Lifetime
A Cloud Chamber of the Mind

February 2006 Philosophy Notebook

An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

Magazine: Philosophy Now, No. 53, November/December 2005.

I bought this magazine in Lennox Head while browsing the newstand. It looked interesting and featured Jean-Paul Sartre (he would have been 100 if he were still living). One of my fond memories was during my first sabbatical (1978-79) from Queen's University, which I spent in Armidale NSW, when I read a 3 volume set of novels by Sartre.

5:30 am

Here are a number of quotations about Sartre:

"Why Sartre Matters" by Benedict O'Donohoe [p. 7 - 10]

• "His distinction is to have obeyed his own injunction of 'commitment'. " [p. 7]
  
  
• " Existence precedes essence. [from Sartres' book 'Existentialism is a Humanism'] " [p. 7]

• "[The above quote] claims there is no a priori conception of humankind, whether as a species or individual. It therefore disposes at one stroke with the Platonic realm of the ideal, with the Judeo-Christian creator God, and with the Hegelian notion of the Absolute Idea. " [p. 7]
  
  
• "In effect, Sartre inverts this premise to say: Sum ergo cogito, I am therefore I think, which is for Sartre the natural (arbitrary but actual) order of things. " [p. 7]

• "Sartre's project in Being and Nothingness was to try to describe the real nature of human existence in a material world of which we are (as bodies) constituent parts ..." [p. 8]
  
  
• "... he also wants to go beyond mere description by drawing out the ethical implications of his ontological analysis, and this enquiry leads him to the moral concepts of freedom, responsibility, authenticity and bad faith." [p. 8]
  
  
• "For Sartre, however, it is not so much the absence of God ... as the nature of consciousness that makes humans the authors of all moral value. The discriminating power of self-consciousness, enabling us to stand outside ourselves as if we were things in the world much like other things, also enables us to discern that any present situation could be different and that we could make it so ... Moreove, in most situations, we can conceive of more than one way to change things: in short, we can - indeed, we have to - choose. [This] is for Sartre, the defining characteristic of human being: freedom. ... Whether we like it or not, we are responsible for the actions we commit, and we are therefore, on the evidence of these, amenable to moral judgement." [p. 8]
  
  
• "... very commonly, we tend to deny or disguise our freedom in order to evade responsibility for our actions. This tendency he calls 'inauthenticity' or 'bad faith'. A typical strategy is role-playing, behaving in a way that we feel is dictated or required by the functions we fulfil. ... Another common evasive strategy, is to claim that one was 'only following orders' " [p. 8]
  
• "Throughout the 1940's and 1950's, Sartre moved away from what he called the analytical and aploitical phase of this thought - enshrined in Being and Nothingness ... towards a dialectal conceptualization, culminating in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). ... This is a pragmatic acknowledgment that our freedom, albeit inherent and ineluctable, in necessarily conditioned by time and place. ... This progressive realization on Sartre's part ..." [p. 9]

"Was Existentialism a Humanism?" by Gerald Jones [11- 13]

• "[Sartre's short book] was to show how existentialism, a philosophy of individual freedom, could be seen as a form of humanism, a philosophy that locates value in humanity." [p. 11]
  
  
• "Humanism is a term that alludes to a shift in our intellectual and moral focus - from God to human beings." [p. 11]
  
  
• "We package, pigeon-hole and objectify other people, attempting to deny them their freedom ... whilst at the same time we experience their denial of our freedom. This power struggle between us, with each treating the other as an object, determines all our relationships with other people." [p. 12]

I am glad I bought this issue. In just a few pages I have an excellent overview of much of Sartre's writing. Similarly, making these notes forced me to come to grips with the question of where I stand on these issues. It made me think.