Existentialism

[Angry Young Man]

Why do people say that Existentialism is not reconcilable with Marxism? From what I understand, it says that every person is their own author, but also fashions other people.
It seems that it would be perfectly applicable to a Marxian society. The only tension i can see is the nihilism and the mistrust. Sartre says in Existentialism and Humanism that, as people are their own authors, they cannot trust other self-authors, say perhaps after I die, Fascism could be set up.

What other tensions are there?

[Epoche]

The only notable difference between Marx and Sartre is that Sartre's system is somewhat Cartesian while Marx is an empiricist. The metaphysical implications of Cartesian philosophy can result in a theory of freewill since they begin with a dichotomy of substances; mind is the rational and matter is the empirical. The mind, or what Sartre simply calls "consciousness" or "being-for-itself" is a transcendent feature of experience in that it is not causal like the "objects" of experience. Sartre claims that because consciousness-of-something is always intentional, it is therefore not determined by circumstances but rather determines the ends of circumstances...the "motives," which are a unity of intention/act/end simultaneously. Consciousness is therefore a "freedom" which is only contingent to the citrcumstances but not determined by them. There is a difference here....freedom is not free "will" for Sartre.

The problem still remains for Sartre as it did for Descartes: how do these categories interact....how can mind ever reach matter and vice-versa? One can adopt a monist position and evade these problems.

Marx does not propose a "transcendent" or "ontological" category for consciousness and maintains an epiphenominalist postion (this is where he broke with Hegel, who was essentially the source from which Sartre draws his phenomenology). Mind and consciousness is an "emergent" property of the neural-net. For empiricists, the illusion of freewill is a consequence of time lapse in awareness and experience, as well as a complication in language. We think we are free and talk about it, but this is after the effect of executive functions in the nervous system.

The differences then are minor when Sartre's political theory is unified with Marx's. Sartre agrees that material circumstances create the "field" of conditions and choices, but do not necessarily direct them. Marxism is appealing to Sartre because Sartre proposed that human relations are bound in conflict. These conflicts he would eventually admit are class based and therefore directly economic. Eliminating the conditions for conflict was for Sartre a step in the right direction. It is the class antagonisms which cause people to "objectify" other people in a negative way. This was for Sartre terribly detrimental to authentic freedom.

[Bretty123]

Another thing I'd add is that Sartre says there is no human nature only a priori things. But in the Communist Manifesto Marx suggests that human behaviour is created from the influence of their surroundings, i.e. environment, economics.

Call it what you will but Sartre more or less traditionally advocates a freedom of the 'will' as well as a transcendental ego, in the Cogito sense.

Marx was a materialist and believed that economic and environmental factors play a part in a persons behaviour. i.e. behaviourism.

[bezdomni]

Another thing I'd add is that Sartre says there is no human nature only a priori things. But in the Communist Manifesto Marx suggests that human behaviour is created from the influence of their surroundings, i.e. environment, economics.


"Freedom is merely what you do with what's already been done to you" -Sartre

That is to say, your "free will" is clearly limited and obviously influenced by your material conditions.

Sartre Archive (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/index.htm)

Sartre has a pretty coherent reconcilation with Existentialism and Marxism.

His essay "Critque of Dialectical Reason" is great, as well as "Existentialism is a Humanism".

[Epoche]

advocates a freedom of the 'will' as well as a transcendental ego, in the Cogito sense.

Yes yes, but a unique aspect of the "cogito" for Sartre is that it is not a "willing" but a consciousness-to-willing. Sartre parted with Descartes when Descartes suggested that the "ego" was a "spontaneous" mediation, a thing which was known directly and without contemplation. His formula is spontaneous- "I think therefore I am." Sartre supposes that this mediation is "methodical" or "methodological." The same structures which exist for consciousness, that is, the necessary intent of the conscious idea, is applicable to the idea of the "self," itself.

The ego is also intentional and is therefore not a thing, but an "object." The "will" is not, for Sartre, an "ontological entity" like it was for post-Kantian idealism (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, et al). Rather there is consciousness and the world which constitutes the project of the "will" through the intentions of what the "self" is wanted to be.

Here is the example of Sartre's existence precedes essence. The world is not a "Will to Power" but, in this case, a project of being conscious to the choice of intending "The Will to Power" to mean this or that. There is no "will-in-itself" for Sartre.

Its not important but it is interesting. This is borderline metaphysics and therefore not the essential aspects of materialist philosophy.

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2006 09:07 pm

Another thing I'd add is that Sartre says there is no human nature only a priori things. But in the Communist Manifesto Marx suggests that human behaviour is created from the influence of their surroundings, i.e. environment, economics.


"Freedom is merely what you do with what's already been done to you" -Sartre

That is to say, your "free will" is clearly limited and obviously influenced by your material conditions.
Erm, surely that's the opposite of what he's saying. Sartre would say that claiming your "material conditions" effected your ability to make choices was bad faith?

Sartre rejected the notion that anybody or anything could effect your choices and that ultimately the individual was responsaible for their actions and that to ellude otherwise was 'bad faith'; or in otherwords it's a way of elluding responsability by claiming the choices you make aren't really yours.

[Bretty123]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2006 08:21 pm

advocates a freedom of the 'will' as well as a transcendental ego, in the Cogito sense.

Yes yes, but a unique aspect of the "cogito" for Sartre is that it is not a "willing" but a consciousness-to-willing. Sartre parted with Descartes when Descartes suggested that the "ego" was a "spontaneous" mediation, a thing which was known directly and without contemplation. His formula is spontaneous- "I think therefore I am." Sartre supposes that this mediation is "methodical" or "methodological." The same structures which exist for consciousness, that is, the necessary intent of the conscious idea, is applicable to the idea of the "self," itself.

The ego is also intentional and is therefore not a thing, but an "object." The "will" is not, for Sartre, an "ontological entity" like it was for post-Kantian idealism (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, et al). Rather there is consciousness and the world which constitutes the project of the "will" through the intentions of what the "self" is wanted to be.

Here is the example of Sartre's existence precedes essence. The world is not a "Will to Power" but, in this case, a project of being conscious to the choice of intending "The Will to Power" to mean this or that. There is no "will-in-itself" for Sartre.

Its not important but it is interesting. This is borderline metaphysics and therefore not the essential aspects of materialist philosophy.
I've read Transcendence of the Ego by Sartre. So he was saying that he believes there is only consciousness initially and that is existence, and therefore everything afterwards including 'willing', 'ego' etc. are all objects posited in consciousness? So consciousness-of-willing, consciousness-of-identity[ego]?

[Epoche]

Yeah I think that's right. It is just a detail you can consider important or not....the way in which Sartre disagreed with the Cartesian cogito. The immediacy of consciousness is not an "acting" consciousness. One cannot contemplate the "self" outside of a matrix of choices and intentions, and this is a method and process. For Descartes, it was absolute that the "self" was an essential substance. Sartre claims the contrary-- the "self" is the negation of being, of substance, and the primacy of consciousness is "nothing" until it is intentional.

Now consider the criteria of the intention and what "intention" implies. It is the supposition and anticipation of a "not-yet" and the idea is nothing but a motive. In my thinking, I will call myself a "waiter." That is what I am. To be this I must do what waiters do. But what do waiters do if being a waiter is intentional? (Sartre uses this example in B&N.) It is not simply the automation of the act of being a waiter that determines the waiter in definition, since these acts are meaningless. So simply mimicing a role is insignificant here. It is the idea and choosing to act carefully so to be what one thinks is a waiter. All the while the individual is choosing what the waiter is by what he intends and how he acts. There is no waiter. There is no essence of "waiter."

So if we try to define "self" we must call it something. What would we call it? "Body," "mind," etc. No, its too late then, we are already involved in the intentional idea and the matrix of defintions we are present to. This was the case for Descartes-- he had mistaken the "self" as an essential thing....while it is really only a "not-yet."

Still Sartre was a hard idealist for a great while and this model is from such a position. He is easily pinned if you ask him how one can choose not to be exhausted, or not in pain. Clearly then consciousness cannot completely "transcend" the body because of this undeniable attachment and relationship to it.

[emma_goldman]

Existentialism emphasizes the individual and not the society. Sarte's protagonist Mathieu in The Age of Reason refuses to join the Communist Party because he wishes to remain free.

[bezdomni]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17, 2006 08:06 pm
Existentialism emphasizes the individual and not the society. Sarte's protagonist Mathieu in The Age of Reason refuses to join the Communist Party because he wishes to remain free.
You know Sartre was a Communist, right?

How does existentialism "emphaize" the individual? What does that even mean?

Have you read Existentialism is a Humanism?

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17, 2006 11:07 pm
How does existentialism "emphaize" the individual? What does that even mean?
From 'Existentialism and Human Emotion': "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does"

We are born alone, we exist alone and we die alone.

[Angry Young Man]

Originally posted by The Anarchist Tension+December 18, 2006 11:51 am--> (The Anarchist Tension @ December 18, 2006 11:51 am)
[email protected] 17, 2006 11:07 pm
How does existentialism "emphaize" the individual? What does that even mean?
From 'Existentialism and Human Emotion': "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does"

We are born alone, we exist alone and we die alone. [/b]
But also, your actions react upon others. It's not essentially individualistic; by alone, Sartre means without a god or higher being. What I do believe he meant was all of humanity is alone and must come to terms of being without a god.

[The Feral Underclass]

Which is essentially the same as what I said.

[Angry Young Man]

Originally posted by The Anarchist [email protected] 18, 2006 01:31 pm
Which is essentially the same as what I said.
sorry I thought you were implying that he was an isolationist, as someone raised the idea of the individual.

[7189]

Well Red Star Over Yorkshire (great name by the way), I have always found that existentialism is the kind of intellectual self-indulgence that can result in alienation and isolation from society. Whenever I slip into existentialist moods I feel like hanging myself as all the purpose of my life is extinguished. I find my fellow man absoutely banal and disgusting, and pointlessly so. Therefore I find it highly incompatible with Marxism. Christianity would go better.

[gilhyle]

I think what is fundamentally wrong with Sartre is his belief in the integrity of reflection. It is true that he treat the individual as (at least potentially) a reflective being who can grasp the freedom which he cannot escape. IN other words for Sartre your rationality is your essential characteristic.

Thus when it comes to explaining Stalinism he invents a dialectic of collective consciousnesses, and explains action as a form of consciousness.

This explanation is deeply unmarxist and unmaterialist.

This emphasis on the rational, reflective individual is what pushed Sartre in the direction of Maoist voluntarism.

FOr Marx, on the other hand, the individual has no potential individual or collective reflective integrity. All reflection is partial and compromised and there is no potential to grasp the essentias of any human's actual condition by analysing the nature and implications of human consciousness and self-awareness.

In the end, it must also be said that existentialists do (contrary to the Communist Manifesto) form a separate party with their own ulterior motive for supporting the caus of the working class and with - consequently - significant caveats around their allegiance to the working class.

[OkaCrisis]

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t...9jxxr0s20t7335x (http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t4qclp5gps7qp17lc9jxxr0s20t7335x)

[gilhyle]

Originally posted by [email protected] 24, 2007 04:44 pm
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t...9jxxr0s20t7335x (http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t4qclp5gps7qp17lc9jxxr0s20t7335x)
"Even Sartre, not only in his plays and novels but even in his heaviest philosophy, seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself."



Thats cos he was on drugs when he wrote them

[Hit The North]

Originally posted by gilhyle+January 24, 2007 08:32 pm--> (gilhyle @ January 24, 2007 08:32 pm)
[email protected] 24, 2007 04:44 pm
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t...9jxxr0s20t7335x (http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t4qclp5gps7qp17lc9jxxr0s20t7335x)
"Even Sartre, not only in his plays and novels but even in his heaviest philosophy, seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself."



Thats cos he was on drugs when he wrote them [/b]
That explains large chunks of his Critique of Dialectical Reason :D

Which drugs, by the way?

[gilhyle]

uppers...speed, something like that

[bezdomni]

He was using amphetamines when he wrote Critique of Dialectical Reason.

He took mescaline a short time before he wrote Nausea.

[Hit The North]

He should've stuck with the mescaline. Nausea is a much better read than CDR.

[bezdomni]

Originally posted by Citizen [email protected] 25, 2007 01:56 am
He should've stuck with the mescaline. Nausea is a much better read than CDR.
You can't reallly compare the two. One is academic and the other is fiction....

[hoopla]

Is existentialism really fashionable/unfashionable in the us? I don't think i've ever come across anyone who cares about it irl, but theres lots on the internet about a mindless pop culture surrounding it. Weird. Maybe its the uk too. Shrug.

[pandora]

Originally posted by [email protected] 24, 2007 07:26 pm
I think what is fundamentally wrong with Sartre is his belief in the integrity of reflection. It is true that he treat the individual as (at least potentially) a reflective being who can grasp the freedom which he cannot escape. IN other words for Sartre your rationality is your essential characteristic.

Thus when it comes to explaining Stalinism he invents a dialectic of collective consciousnesses, and explains action as a form of consciousness.

This explanation is deeply unmarxist and unmaterialist.

This emphasis on the rational, reflective individual is what pushed Sartre in the direction of Maoist voluntarism.

FOr Marx, on the other hand, the individual has no potential individual or collective reflective integrity. All reflection is partial and compromised and there is no potential to grasp the essentias of any human's actual condition by analysing the nature and implications of human consciousness and self-awareness.

In the end, it must also be said that existentialists do (contrary to the Communist Manifesto) form a separate party with their own ulterior motive for supporting the caus of the working class and with - consequently - significant caveats around their allegiance to the working class.
But isn't it only through consciousness reflection, or critical consciousness that the worker becomes aware of his or her participation in the machine, and the meaninglessness of that existence.

This is why I think the work of Freire is so important, but for Freire that self-reflection is not the null and void self-absorbed reflection of the existenialists, but the earthy strong healthy culture of the reflection of oneself as a object of oppression, and one's needs as a truly free living alive human being, with a spirit and a will to live.

This person says it best, rather humorously--thank you hermes
http://www.hermes-press.com/freire1.htm

Self-Reflection here takes on a sense of need: The need to interpret past other influences, and self-educate oneself recognizing that one's history is important &
Overcoming
the lack of awareness that we are the oppressed
the lack of solidarity among the oppressed people
the loss of a common tradition of democracy and human rights
the indifference of oppressed people to their situation

This last awareness is where schools such as existentialism play a part. Despite their initial hopelessness and despair eventually Sartre and others came to the realization that there must be more, however he did see Che and others as overly young and volitale. Direct action never appealed to his sense of dignity.

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2006 11:55 pm
Marx is an empiricist.
No he wasn't

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

No he wasn't

Wrong!

In his methodology he was indeedy.

[Hit The North]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25, 2007 03:14 pm

No he wasn't

Wrong!

In his methodology he was indeedy.
Wrong!

Although Marx valued empirical knowledge he cannot be viewed as an empiricist for the following reasons: in epistemology, because of his activist view of knowledge; in methodology, because of his dialectical holism; and finally, in ethics because of his rejection of the distinction between fact and value.

Marxism (in my view) is best understood as a scientific realism: the job of science is to penetrate beneath the surface appearance of the empirical world.

[gilhyle]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25, 2007 04:30 am

But isn't it only through consciousness reflection, or critical consciousness that the worker becomes aware of his or her participation in the machine, and the meaninglessness of that existence.

the indifference of oppressed people to their situation

This last awareness is where schools such as existentialism play a part. Despite their initial hopelessness and despair eventually Sartre and others came to the realization that there must be more, however he did see Che and others as overly young and volitale. Direct action never appealed to his sense of dignity.
There is no place in Marx's concept of revolution such a concept of reflection. What relationship wold such a process have to the material conditions that are COMMON to the generality of the working class.....very little

I dont deny that Marx allowed for a process of reflection whereby individuals become aware of their place in history and (somewhat irrationally) then turn to revolutionary politics. But for Marx this historical self-awareness was the characteristic route to revolutionary politics of the small number of intellectuals who come to the revolutionary cause and is secondary to the economic processes and the struggle for common self interest that mediates revolution.


BTW just cant see Marx as an empiricist unless to be an empiricist is to start from the concrete. Even then for Marx to start from the 'concrete' does not mean to start from the immediately perceived - there is already a process of judgement and reflection included in the identification of the concrete. (Though personally I would not call him a holist or a realist either, but that is another debate.)

[Clarksist]

Define which existentialist viewpoint. Because Sartre was a Marxist, and I believe bridged the gap of existentialism with Marxism extremely well. However, some existentialist philosophers (I'm looking at you, Kierkegaard) could not be reconciled with Marxism very well, I don't think.

But SovietPants has already explained most of this.

[hoopla]

Right Sartre fans.

I've been reading Merleau-Ponty and here are his objections o Sartre. What do you think:

If it is only separated by nothing how can the nothingness be separate from being; to see must not be pure nihilation but a caress in a marginal moment of complicity; whereas the philosophy of negintiution” wants to replace this carnate ec-sistnece with pure-vision.

Also the "pure vision" of negintuition must "dominate" so as others are like puppets. We cannot see an Other. I cannot know the other as what I say must be derived from 'if I inhabited that body' – which is not a hypothesis but an impossibility if the other is an Other. She can never fall under our vision. Prehaps we can be agnostic, but then we still infringe as we can only speak for the for-itself in general which cannot exist as it would be the impossibility of my being for me multiplied by n. Neither can the other be the absolute negation of me because it would absorb every rival negation into itself.

So the philosophy of nothingness fails on at least 2 counts - Nothingness cannot be separate from being; and the Other cannot be acciunted for.

Any obvious mistakes I've made it would be great if you could point them out.
Thanks

Edit for grammar

[Hit The North]

Hoop:


Any obvious mistakes I've made it would be great if you could point them out.

Yeah, what in the world does ec-sistnece & negintuition mean?

[hoopla]

Originally posted by Citizen [email protected] 09, 2007 03:52 pm
Hoop:


Any obvious mistakes I've made it would be great if you could point them out.

Yeah, what in the world does ec-sistnece & negintuition mean?
:o

"Negintuition" is/is what Satre uses to intuit the negative - us.

"Ec-sistence" is our existence - which is "ecstatic" - containing the complex of our present stretched towards the horizons of past and present/temporal.

[Hit The North]

Originally posted by hoopla+February 09, 2007 05:09 pm--> (hoopla @ February 09, 2007 05:09 pm)
Citizen [email protected] 09, 2007 03:52 pm
Hoop:


Any obvious mistakes I've made it would be great if you could point them out.

Yeah, what in the world does ec-sistnece & negintuition mean?
:o

"Negintuition" is/is what Satre uses to intuit the negative - us.

"Ec-sistence" is our existence - which is "ecstatic" - containing the complex of our present stretched towards the horizons of past and present/temporal. [/b]
Blimey, I bet Sartre was a whiz at the Times cryptic crossword!