Sartre’s Facticity and Authenticity

Facticity as it is found in the Existentialist tradition, particularly in Sartre’s works, embodies the limitations of freedom. Facticity refers to the factual components of a human being, things we cannot choose that are necessarily a part of us. Some of these things are completely concrete. Your birth and where you grow up are two examples that are completely concrete in nature, they are essentially unchangeable by you, in yet are factors in your life that will influence who you are and how you see the world. Other things that are not exactly concrete include your history or past actions. They are still yours, and are made objective through your actions.

The main importance of facticity in Sartre’s works is in recognising the factual influences that a person must deal with in their lives that provide a limit to freedom. As those of you familiar with Sartre’s work, a person is fundamentally free to choose to be whomever they wish. Your identity is always your choice. You however obviously cannot choose to fly, as you don’t have any means to do so. Recognising these limitations to your freedom is critically important. It shows you the boundaries of your choices and actions, and that if you come to understand those boundaries, you can maximise the effect of your choices and actions.

The major virtue in Existentialism is authenticity. To be true to ones self. To fully, and radically embrace the freedom that comes with existing, and recognise that meaning has no inherent value outside of what you choose things to mean. Recognising and understanding facticity is critical to achieving authenticity.

Two important aspects of facticity as it relates to authenticity are, 1) you recognise and embrace the objective, concrete parts of yourself, and 2) you recognise that they do not define you.

In regards to your own history, to be fully authentic one has to embrace the factual matter that you have done things, perhaps things you disagree with and are ashamed of. To reject that would be inauthentic, and essentially pretending that we as human beings do not have histories. The critical part is, any persons history does not define you. You define yourself, you have to determine what your history means to you. Even if you’ve done things you think are downright terrible, it is still on you not to be those things in the future, and by embracing your past, accepting that it is a part of you, but refusing to be that person and instead changing is to be fully authentic, to be driven by your own choices, and not by facticitious things.

If that sounds appealing, I’d recommend checking out the following links.

Sartre, Jean Paul: Existentialism

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) is a beginner friendly / intermediate level resource in Philosophy.

Chapters 3 and 4 are relevant and briefly outline Facticity (Sometimes referred to as Being-in-itself)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

The chapter on Sartre’s Ontology is the relevant starting point.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is for advanced readers only. These consist of published, peer reviewed articles by professionals in the relevant fields. If you’re not familiar with existentialism and haven’t read any of the relevant literature definitely steer clear of this one for now.

Philosophy: A Reading list…

I’ve recently been taken up by an interest to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason again… It was very hard to type that sentence without screaming.

Anyway, as usual I was distracted by finding a plethora of other interesting books, and have compiled a small reading list for myself, containing the following:

 

Existentialism is a Humanism. Jean-Paul Sartre.

On Virtue Ethics. Rosalind Hurstouse

Discourses on Power, from Hobbes to Foucault. Barry Hindess

History of the Concept of Mind. Paul S. MacDonald

Using Foucault’s Methods. Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham

Critique of Pure Reason (abridged). Immanuel Kant

Cartesian Meditations. Edmund Husserl

 

As I read through these again, I hope to do a series of blog posts on each. I’ll start with Existentialism is a Humanism, because it deals quite significantly with Sartre’s relationship with the French Communist Party in 1945, which I can relate to eerily well, because those same difficulties and disagreements led me to leave a political party that was generally Marxist centric.

If any of those sound interesting, please watch this space in the coming weeks 🙂 If anyone has recommendations as to what you would like me to address specifically, or if you have any further readings to add to my list it would be greatly appreciated.

Honesty and Authenticity

 “The high minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.” Aristotle

 

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Jean-Paul Sartre

I’ve often thought that honesty was the most pivotal virtue, along side courage. What good is any other virtue if you’re not capable of standing by it when called for and willing to present honest information to others so as not to mislead them? You cannot abide any virtue without first having the courage to do what you think is right, and the honesty not to mislead anyone or misrepresent the state of things so that others may have the chance to act virtuous, including yourself.

While I still very much agree with the place of honesty and courage within my ethical framework, it has started to become quite difficult in ascertaining where exactly the appropriate amount of honesty is. I generally hold honesty in a very high regard, and hope to only lie in extreme situations. To mislead others I believe is one of the gravest immoral actions to be had, primarily because it denies another person the opportunity to act in accordance with the world around them. By lying to somebody, I essentially condemn them to failure on their attempts to be ‘good’ if I knowingly hand them faulty information, knowing full well that if they act on that information it will lead to consequences that person has not intended. In light of this view though, I feel I’ve run into some difficult situations where it would seem like lying becomes a necessary evil, but I’m still not sure to what expense. I will attempt to detail how I think honesty works, and then attempt to highlight the issue, particularly how it relates to Sartre’s concept of authenticity.

Critique of Eros: Revisited

My writing style is pretty weird, but I think I like it. I like the flow but the structure is all over the place. There are also some ambiguity in things I say, and plenty of things should be re worded.

Critique of Eros and The Ethics of Love

For millennia, people have loved. We’ve known it by many different names, and expressed it in many different ways; however the basic notion of love has been present in societies for an incredible length of time. But what love means and how we think about it has changed over the centuries, and varies with culture and society. In this essay, I will explore the notion of love, and explore whether love is a virtuous emotion or an untrustworthy passion, I will also explore the notions of love as an Aristotelian virtue, and the general problem of emotions and reason, and Kant’s practical and pathological love, in order to explore and critique notions of romantic love. To begin I must clarify what I mean by the word love and what I mean by virtue.

The ancient Greeks identified three different forms of love, eros, agape and philia. Whilst there are considerable things to be said about the word ‘love’, as Robert Solomon describes in “In the Beginning, The Word”, I will not take into consideration any sociological, or descriptive notions of what the word ‘love’ means in practice, but rather focus on the emotion, beliefs or feelings that we use the word love to convey, which for the ancient greeks was eros. For Robert Solomon, eros is defined by romantic love, and is distinguished from other kinds of love or affection, such as “… motherly, fatherly, brotherly, or sisterly love and friendship”(Solomon, 1988, p. 13). Whilst the other notions of love are just as important, I will be focusing mostly on eros. Agape is a more generalised love that one could feel for humanity or the divine or spiritual, whilst philia is more accurately translated as friendship, or as the feelings one feels for a friend.

Quote of the Week: Diogenes

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music. – Diogenes of Sinope

Diogenes of Sinope was an ancient Greek philosopher, who was one of the most well known and most controversial of the Cynics. Diogenes is also known as Diogenes the dog (Διογένης ὁ Κυνικός, Diogenēs ho Kunikos) which is the supposed origin of the term Cynic (Doglike).

One of the core ideas of Cynicism and of Diogenes is that philosophy is practical, and as a result, philosophical questions are ones that deal with the ‘everydayness’ of life, with the goal of these thought provoking questions being action. This is evident in Diogenes through his idea of Solvitur Ambulando, or, it is solved by walking (practical experiment). The quote above illustrates this core cynic idea, as the person who speaks of virtue applies none of them to their own life. Their failure to grasp the purpose of philosophy means they hear nothing where others hear music, they speak of virtues while others live by them, they miss the point, while others take action, they are reduced to mere objects, incapable of living a virtuous life for they do not grasp the connection between philosophy and life.