I’d been listening to a popular Philosophy podcast recently called Partially Examined Life. It’s quite good and I’d recommend for all who read this!
When listening to one of their podcasts on Sartre, some criticisms against him I found quite off base.
Choice
A main theme in Sartre’s body of works is that of radical freedom, that one always has a choice so to speak. It does get complicated, given Sartre also acknowledges facticity, or the factual components of a human being.
A criticism that came up was on considering a person drowning with no way to survive. Is it true that this person has no choice but to drown? Yes (lets assume that’s true in any case). Does that then provide criticism of Sartre’s conception of choice? No. That does not mean that you do not have a choice. What you may have is nothing but bad choices. That does not leave you without choice though, nothing about the idea of radical freedom suggests that you have good and bad choices, it simply means that your actions are your own, regardless of what those actions may be.
You could be completely incapacitated and have no ability to move your body except for your eyelids, and you still have a choice between blinking and not blinking. It may not be meaningful choice, but it’s still choice.
Existence Precedes Essence
Sartre’s argument is that if there was a god, humans essence would be pre-ordained. When we examine our lives however we find that we are ultimately free in our actions, we have no ‘likeness’ to anything in particular, no innate or inbuilt purpose or nature that we must pursue, unless we will it ourselves. Because we have no predetermined essence, we exist first, encounter ourselves, and are then free to define ourselves however we like, and pursue what ever projects we see fit.
Sartre’s example of something whose essence does actually precede its existence is that of a knife. A knife was a concept first, it’s project defined by our need to cut things. In realising that concept we create the object second. A knife does not come into existence without its essence being first created in our minds, in the same way a god would create us for a specific purpose (or to create us in his image).
In any case, the major criticism against this position is pretty clear. It’s clear that Sartre’s task here is merely to establish human freedom, and not actually provide a metaphysical account of the nature of things, because if we take this reasoning further, we find that there really isn’t anything whose essence precedes existence except for human artefacts.
If it is true that humans are free because our existence precedes our essence, why is that not then true of plants? It would seem to us that plants and rocks and other natural things are incapable of making action, but for Sartre’s theory there is no accounting for this.
I think Sartre’s position is redeemable (though not a particularly strong position) by assuming Sartre means that it is true only for humans that if our existence precedes our essence then we are free. That it is not necessarily true that this means other things are free, and because Sartre’s task is an existential one, he simply disregards theorising about the nature of other things, because he simply doesn’t care. It might not impact his theory at all…
Existentialism is among my favourite topics, though Sartre’s arguments are perhaps the weakest at the best of times, and the most infuriatingly unclear arguments at the worst. Let me know what you think in the comments down below!
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