Message to those who visit this blog who aren't into Sartre's Being and Nothingness as much as I am (which includes almost everybody, I'm pretty sure):
Today I reached a point in my re-reading of the book where it dawned on me what my central problem with Sartre's existentialist philosophy is -- freedom. It's a big enough problem that I likely will put Being and Nothingness back on the shelf where I picked it up recently.
I enjoy trying to encapsulate complex philosophies and world views in a few words, as crazy as this would seem to an expert in them.
"Humans are free" makes sense to me as a summary for Sartre. "Life is suffering" strikes me as appropriate for Buddhism. But Sartre also speaks a lot about anguish, which for him is the dilemma created by human freedom.
Here's how his translator defines anguish in her Key to Special Terminology, a handy thing to have around when it comes to reading Sartre, who often writes in a dense fashion.
The reflective apprehension of the Self as freedom, the realization that a nothingness slips in between my Self and my past and future so that nothing relieves me from the necessity of continually choosing myself and nothing guarantees the validity of the values which I choose. Fear is of something in the world, anguish is anguish before myself (as in Kierkegaard).
This obviously is different from suffering, but it's interesting that both Sartre and Buddhism find difficulty at the heart of the human condition.
For Sartre, the cause of this difficulty is our inherent freedom. For Buddhism, the cause of this difficulty is attachment, desire, craving -- which arises because we fail to understand that emptiness is the defining characteristic of everything in existence. Meaning, nothing possesses inherent existence but is part of an interconnected web of relationships and mutual dependencies.
I don't believe in freedom of the will, or free will. Most neuroscientists don't either, or at least lots don't.
Sartre, for some reason, doesn't accept the reality of the unconscious or subconscious. So he takes as self-evident the feeling that he has, which is common to the feeling everybody has, that it is possible to do something different from what we actually choose to do.
Sartre uses the example of a gambler who vows to stop gambling after this activity causes him problems. However, when he comes upon a gaming table, he decides to gamble. Sartre sees this as nothingness coming between his prior vow and his current decision to keep gambling.
Hence, nothing guarantees that he will ever stop gambling, since he is always capable of exercising his inherent freedom to choose to act in a manner contrary to what his vow demands. That leads to anguish, given that he will always need to choose anew whether to gamble, in accord with his inescapable freedom.
This is pretty much exactly opposite to how I see things. I'm much more in the Buddhist camp. Which also is the neuroscientific camp. I find comfort in what I consider to be this fact: we humans don't have free will. Our beliefs, emotions, actions, and such are fully determined by the laws of nature.
As Sam Harris cogently points out, and I heartily agree with him on this, if we make a decision, and every atom in our brain and nervous system is in exactly the same state as it was when the decision was made, we would make the exact same decision again.
In other words, there is no mysterious nothingness or free-will-fairy in our consciousness that makes it possible for our thoughts, emotions, and actions to be outside of the realm of determinism, as Sartre believes is the case.
In my view of reality, the only psychological freedom we really have is the freedom to feel that we aren't making freely-chosen decisions. There's a tremendous benefit in trading a belief in illusory free will for the hugely more likely fact that we humans are as driven by deterministic forces as the planets in our solar system are.
Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."
I love the idea that I've lost my free will because I never had it, though for much of my life I believed that I did. I find peace in the realization that everything that's happened in my past, everything that's happening now in my present, everything that will happen to me in the future -- my entire life is the result of deterministic causes and conditions (a thoroughly Buddhist concept) that extends from the moment of the big bang some 14 billion years ago to a possibly infinite future of the cosmos.
Sartre, of course, disagrees with this perspective. He's an exceedingly accomplished philosopher, so in Being and Nothingness he anticipated the objections of people like me to his assertion that freedom lies at the heart of human consciousness.
Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things.
It attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these very acts it makes transcendent: it assigns to them a foundation in something other than themselves by endowing them with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses.
Psychological determinism denies that transcendence of human reality which makes it emerge in anguish beyond its own essence. At the same time by reducing us to never being anything but what we are, it reintroduces in us the absolute positivity of being-in-itself and thereby reinstates us at the heart of being.
But this determinism, a reflective defense against anguish, is not given as a reflective intuition. It avails nothing against the evidence of freedom; hence it is given as a faith to take refuge in, as the ideal end toward which we can flee to escape anguish.
That is made evident on the philosophical plane by the fact that deterministic psychologists do not claim to found their thesis on the pure givens of introspection. They present it as a satisfying hypothesis, the value of which comes from the fact that it accounts for the facts -- or as a necessary postulate for establishing all psychology.
Well, I would have loved to see a debate between Sartre and a modern neuroscientist. I suspect Sartre would be demolished in such a debate.
I have no problem with links between my past and present, and between my present and future. I have no problem with a nature that produces my acts. I have no problem with never being anything but what I am. I have no problem with accepting a determinism that accounts for the facts.
But I do have a problem with Sartre calling introspection a "pure given." We all can be very wrong about what is in our minds. We can be led astray by unconscious influences. There are countless psychological experiments that demonstrate this.
Sure, it seems like we have free will. It also seems that the sun sets. Both seemings are wrong. Almost certainly we don't have free will, and it is certain that the earth rotates while the sun remains at the center of our solar systems.
What seems to be true has to yield to facts. That's why I reject Sartre's view of freedom.
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