After a long week of airports, bus stations, bad food, 12-hour drives, and sneaking in and out of countries with closed borders, it's time to get this page going again! Continuing the series on Proto-Objectivism, I’m going to talk about Sartre for a few days.
As usual, let's get the mistakes out of the way. Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher who pioneered Neomarxism and Postmodernism, painting the world as a place of historical misconceptions that can only be overcome by subjective authenticity. Like most French thinkers, he was deliberately obscure - often using poorly defined concepts, and ambiguous phrases - and a subjectivist, focusing on Man's experience rather than the objective factors that shape it.
Despite his flaws, Sartre made some interesting breakthroughs with regards to the intrinsicism-subjectivism dichotomy, focusing not on the object itself, nor exlusively on the subject, but on the interaction between both. One of these breakthroughs is illustrated by his famous claim that "existence precedes essence".
One of the most enduring issues in philosophy is the problem of universals - the question of how the idea of a table relates to actual tables? Traditional intrinsicists took to metaphysical realism, giving primacy to universals. Aristotelians argue that tables exist because they contain the essence of "tableness", while Platonists see them as reflections of an ideal table. Whatever the specific form, there is a primary supernatural essence, either possessed by or manifested in the object, which is secondary.
Nominalists like Thomas Hobbes, William of Ockham and later the Positivist and Analytic philosophers, counter that idea by claiming there are no essences. They argue that tables are tables merely because we call them so, but there is no necessity to do so. While the realists place the essence entirely on the object, nominalists reject essences by emphasizing the role of the subject.
With his claim that "existence precedes essence”, Sartre rejects both of these views. Unlike the realists, he proposes existents, qua existents, have no essence - they merely are what they are. However, upon interacting with an existent, we bestow upon it a specific purpose, and thus an essence that is as real as the purpose itself. Despite his subjectivism, he acknowledges the fundamental distinction between inanimate objects, which simply are what they are, and Man’s consciousness, which creates concepts by actively, and purposefully interacting with those objects.
Like Ayn Rand, he views a thing's essence as the result of an interaction between object and subject, but, unlike her, defines it in terms of purpose, not identification. He also fails to grasp the role of objectivity - of ensuring that our concepts correspond to reality. As we will see tomorrow, their similarities and differences become even clearer in the context of Man's essence, and his free will.
2883.102 SRY