Sartre: Leading an Authentic Life

are we free what does that even mean a broad definition might be that freedom is the freedom to choose for yourself unencumbered but aren't we always constrained if not by the world even if we're free to go where we want to go by our own personalities our own character traits our own emotional makeups iq even our own physical characteristics don't these things make an i a self a me that in a way like a hard rock imprisons us determines who we are sartre answers a resounding no we are always free unconditionally universally transcendentally to be

who we want to be and to craft our lives into a beautiful meaningful [Music] melody [Music] jean-paul sartre was the most famous philosopher in the world in the post-war era faced with totalitarian governments in the east and ever-expanding capitalism in the west sartre wrote extensively about the power of the individual our freedoms and our responsibilities he was interested in everyday philosophy and as a young man became excited when his friend raymond iran told him about a new idea called phenomenology sat in a cafe in paris ron said you see my dear fellow if you're a

phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it [Music] phenomenology is a philosophy that pays close attention to conscious experience to phenomena as they appear to us for the founder of phenomenology edmund husserl consciousness is always consciousness of something consciousness is focus it aims at is directed towards an object it is who's rule argued intentional it brackets out the rest of the world around it and focuses on a thing in particular what's distinctive about phenomenology is that that thing does not have to be out there in the world but can include

feelings memories imagination concepts speculations anything the mind focuses on let's try it focus on this passport what do you experience it's brown red has a shape and size but it means something to me and you it's a passport this one's a british one your consciousness focuses on it selects it picks it out of the environment and considers its relationship to it now phenomenologists have thought about this experience in many ways but until sartre they all made a fundamental assumption one that seems commonsensical that this phenomenological experience as two components the focus the experience or the

object the passport and the i the experiencer the person or the subject there's you and the x for sartre though this misguides us the thing doing the focusing is not the eye at all it's actually something deeper bear with me [Music] this traditional view the experience and the experience sir is also the view that there's an inside and an outside a me consciousness and an object of consciousness out there in the world i'm doing x i have been thinking about why sartre's radical claim is that this i the self the ego is as much an

object to be focused on to be experienced as the passport the apple or any other object in the world and the thing doing the experiencing is something else it precedes the eye it transcends any ideas we have about ourselves as people it comes before it he calls this consciousness in the first degree and he describes it as unreflective or pre-reflective it's simply consciousness focusing on objects out there in the world what's fundamental about this consciousness in the first degree is that it's completely empty it has no content of its own nothing pulling its strings but

it's always consciousness of something else it functions by focusing on something and negating or annihilating everything else that is it can bring an object to the foreground of experience and relegate everything else to the background it can choose absolutely freely such a claims to switch and to focus on something else leaving the passport for example and turning to this apple sartre writes every choice presupposes elimination and selection a radical result of thinking in this way is that when we focus on ourselves we're still focusing on ourselves as an object an object out there in the

world somewhere apart from us sartre calls this reflective consciousness when we focus on our idea of ourselves what we're really doing is focusing on pre-reflective consciousnesses past actions and experiences so consciousness creates the i and the eye is out there in the world as much as any other object imagine you're born suddenly into your adult self you find yourself in a body with eyes and ears in a world with objects around you your memory though is blank you realize first that you can move your eyes around you realize you can focus on objects and they

appear in your conscious thought you turn to focus on something else but realize that the last thing you focused on is now available to focus on in your memory you look down at your hands you realize you can move your fingers a dog barks and your attention moves to it you feel something your heart's racing you're sweating all of these things are collected in your memory like a database a database of you but we are separate from it in some way we have a free relationship to it because if we were connected to it we'd

be determined by it all of the things in the database make up the idea of the eye the me the ego the subject but there's still something hovering over it a space in amongst it a real you that can freely focus on any of it and if the pre-reflective consciousness isn't a part of the database isn't conditioned by it it must be separate from it sartra is clearing away all the philosophical clutter engaging in a massive academic cleaning project leaving a transcendent free you sartra is probably most famous for his phrase existence precedes essence but

what does this mean well he says that a person first of all exists surges up in the world and defines himself afterwards some of the experience consciousness has began to categorize in the database are being categorized as coming from you you notice for example that your eyes move in a certain way you had a particular feeling when a dog barked at you you seem to be good at juggling you like the taste of oranges all of these experiences are categorized as you the self the i the ego in retrospect philosopher david detmer puts it like

this by recalling selectively its own past acts and by synthesizing them again selectively with its present ones and with its projected and planned future ones my consciousness constructs an ego or sense of self this eye is something i find in the world through reflection to have certain properties that are more or less stable just as is the case with other kinds of objects in the world now you might have noticed something if your consciousness is separate from yourself and yourself is separate from your consciousness if your conscious focus is hovering over the database separate from

it not connected what determines what your consciousness does what guides it if not yourself's desires needs or character traits sartre's answer nothing now of course sometimes it's guided sometimes it's determined by things a dog barks my focus is move to it i'm hungry my consciousness focuses on that we feel like our consciousness is pushed and pulled around but ultimately we always have the power to pull our focus elsewhere we're not stuck to these things like glue or a magnet they're objects that can be focused on that might attract or deter us but we are able

to modify them to negate them to ignore them or to use them sartre writes that consciousness is purified it's as clear as a strong wind there is nothing in it but a movement of fleeting self a sliding beyond itself if impossible though it be you could enter into a consciousness you would be seized by a whirlwind and thrown back outside in the thick of the dust near the tree for consciousness has no inside this means that rather than being determined by the world or your character traits or personality rather than being born an artist a

weightlifter an angry person a slave or a rock climber we're always free to not be defined by not be stuck to these things even if they feel like they compel us even if they feel like they're in our very human nature this is what separates human consciousness from all other things in the world it's not a thing in itself not what sartre calls being in itself like a tree or a rock for example destined to be defined by its treeness or rockiness consciousness is being for itself it has no definitions of its own it's empty

completely free this is being for itself because it's aware of itself thinks about itself and lives for nothing but itself but is that not frightening disorientating if it's completely free then what the is it meant to do in his 1938 novel nausea sartre's protagonist rokon tan is overcome by this frightening disorientating nauseating realization rock on town starts to feel like there's much more to the world than appears on the surface sartre calls this trance phenomenality that there's so much meaning everywhere so much sense data so many options that we only really ever notice some of

the world in front of us and what we notice depends on who we are what we're pursuing what our projects are take the way we experience a car there are so many details so many parts so many possibilities yet we use our cars in very specific ways some of its features are brought to the foreground while others are relegated to the background and not noticed at all and we do this with everything there's always more to the world than what we focus on which means that meaning in the world doesn't come from the objects as

they're presented to us meaning doesn't come from the car it comes from us and how we look at and interpret things i mean look at the world around you right now why did you not just see a mass of colours shapes abstract lines i bet that most of you would be able to pick out objects and describe how they have meaning for you and you describe them in relationship to your life your projects and nausea rock on town begin seeing the world with no meaning as just neutral abstractions and he becomes nauseated by everything he

says i straightened up empty-handed i'm no longer free i can no longer do what i want objects ought not to touch since they're not alive you use them you put them back in place you live among them they're useful nothing more but they touch me it's unbearable i'm afraid of entering into contact with them just as if they were living animals [Music] okay so where are we well we're free we're not constrained by our personalities or our environment but if that's the case what does guide us why is the world not an incomprehensible abstract mess

such as primary concern was this question of meaning how do we find meaning in a seemingly meaningless world if we're free from everything free to pursue anything then how do we choose anything at all what guides our decisions for sartre the meaning of life is much like a melody rock and han said that i wanted the movements of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion as consciousness starts to notice things about itself or about objects they begin to be categorized into that database they begin to be organized into a coherent structure where

each experience belief or object has a kind of relationship to the other ones aristotle has said of stories that the events which are part of a plot must be so organized that if any one of them is displaced or taken away the whole will be shaken and put out of joint satura sees meaning in life developing in much the same way what we see when we look at certain things much depends on how we think about other things take the example of the car again i'm going to get some lunch i might be going to

a meeting i'm making a video on sartre and one small action changing gear for example is for the purpose of pursuing these other projects saatra says our reality identifies and defines itself by the ends which it pursues we look at an object like a bottle of water differently depending on whether we're thirsty a shopkeeper a chemist or an artist painting it the meaning of an object like this bottle of water doesn't announce itself to us force itself upon us we interpret it freely with our conscious focus the mountain crack looks different to the geologist the

artist the farmer and the mountaineer and the mountaineer will always look at rocks mountains ropes chalk travel art music in a particular way that connects them all to give meaning to something is to give reasons for it to justify it to you to relate it to your life and projects what sartre calls the fantasity of the world presents itself to you like a cold hard rock like entries in a database but its meaning is not presented to you with it its meaning comes from how you choose to see it i see that crag as a

background to a video as illustrative of a point but the climber sees it as a certain height roughness dampness sees it as a challenge and sartre thinks that freedom only makes sense up against this facticity he says the paradox of freedom there is freedom only in a situation and there is a situation only through freedom human reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human reality is what we have are individual experiences phenomena joining together in a structure

of meaning that we impose onto the world that only makes sense in relation to other experiences and phenomena meaning can be made deeper more connected more well meaningful by uncovering and creating patterns between things so that the world rhymes so that there's rhythm reason and coherence [Music] meaning in the song some of these days he says for the moment it's just the jazz that's playing there's no melody only notes a host of little jolts they know no rest an unchanging order gives birth to them and destroys them without ever giving them time to recover to

exist for themselves i must accept their death i must even will it i know a few harsher or stronger impressions another few seconds and the woman will sing it seems inevitable the necessity of the music is so strong nothing can interrupt it nothing which comes from this time in which the world is slumped it will stop of its own accord on orders the meaning of the notes like the meanings of our individual actions don't mean much in isolation but only in relation to each other only have meaning in relation to the wider project the widest

song melody sartre says refers to nothing but itself and like jazz can change adapt and reinvent itself at any moment [Music] sartre was one of the last great system builders of philosophy he had a unique insight to contribute to the history of philosophy and then spent his entire life working out the consequences of that insight but if you're not convinced by the foundation that we're always completely free then the whole system comes crashing down there's much i've had to miss out here like how our sense of who we are in that database we talked about

comes as much from others as from ourselves he was famous for the phrase hell is other people because other people get to define you but he believed that ultimately it was us that was responsible for our lives and our actions and this was powerful if we didn't use the searchlights of our consciousness to survey all the nooks of our beliefs and all the injustices of the world around us we were living in bad faith not appreciating the gifts that we were uniquely born with well here's a confession for you i don't believe in a lot

of what sartre says about freedom free will and responsibility however the system he builds for talking about it is incredibly useful for thinking about those questions and i'd like to at some point investigate them further by looking at how responsibility is framed culturally different periods and different places and how it's sometimes placed on the individual sometimes on corporate responsibility sometimes on the collective and think about relationship between say existentialism and post structuralism that maybe can help us find a new way of thinking about responsibility because i think it's more of a gradient that exists throughout

society which saatra did believe too so i'd like to look again at him especially his later work on marxism anyway i hope you enjoyed this video and if you'd like to support more videos like it like all these incredible wonderful beautiful people scrolling up the screen right now then you can do so on patreon through the link below or at patreon.com forward slash then and now for as little as a dollar honestly i can't tell you how uh appreciated it is it's the only way the channel survives but please hit like uh hit the bell

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