Sartre

On the potential benefit of reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

Below are some basic points that some people have difficulty with:

1. There are many cultural memes that attempt to sway us into actions that don't work towards our own empowerment, using fear and confusion.

2. Existence, which includes ourselves, is as it is, or changes as it changes.

3. We can't possibly know about existence what we don't yet know.

4. When there's the supposition that there is knowledge which we don't have which we should have, to take action regarding that supposition, in a way most personally empowering, is to take action towards obtaining that lacking knowledge, not by attempting to guess it.

Reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness may be particularly beneficial to a person: If he at least suspects 1 true, if he is at least willing to entertain that 2 is true, and if he assumes that if 3 is true then 4 is also true. Then conversely, one must at least be vague or skeptical about 3.

Quote :

3. We can't possibly know about existence what we don't yet know.

Better stated one can't know what he doesn't except obviously in the temporal context, in which case he may later know what he doesn't now. Further explanation might help what may otherwise seem to simply be a tautology:

One must be free of something, freedom by itself is non-sense. Sartre doesn't necessarily make that fact explicit, but he does show how we're free from the perspective of others. When an other says something is so, even if he's being honest, he's still speaking from his perspective. One may not be free from the will of an other, a will that is intertwined that other's perspective, but one is free from that other's perspective. One doesn't know what an other knows, so to act on the claimed knowledge of an other is nonsense. One can only act on one's own knowledge, so when he thinks he's acting on an other's knowledge he's actually just acting on knowledge of his own. To call it second hand knowledge would be a redundancy being that all knowledge comes to us through a process of interactions.

One can make up his own fantasies, but not to give any one person too much credit, the fantasies created by an accumulation of people - culture, are far more extravagant, precise, or appealing to a mind seeking escape than what that mind can come up with in his own. Once a person realizes the simple fact that not only is it empowering to strive to think for himself, but - in the context of perspective as explained above - one can only think for himself, he may over time develop a less inaccurate view of reality.

Sartre advocates something similar to Kant's categorical imperative, but in a secular justified version. Connected also to being condemned to be free is that one experiences the full existential weight of the conditions one has to countenance. 

A la. Nietzsche and his 'yea saying', affirmation, with Sartre it becomes a call to eros or eroticism. Every judgment, at the base of humanist thought and principle, has to be resolved erotically. Therefor, when Sartre talked about 'hell being other people', they are the other representations of the species which one has to redeem the judgments thereof. This means that every judgment must be resolved erotically or else one is 'bigoted', to the humanist, which puts the lowest bar standard for 'human' possible into effect.

One becomes inauthentic, then, to Sartre, if one has thymos toward other humans/human beings, if one doesn't submit erotically to his judgments. He reserve thymos for himself and his own confidence in judgment, with no humility: "There is no God(s)." and his imagination of humanism is somehow indistinct from what anyone else imagines - countenancing no differences in capabilities between humans. If a race cannot countenance the ideal like he does, then this presents a problem with them being classified as non-human. Since his sentiments are isolated to his particular ethnic makeup, the resolution of this problem will be the postmodern 'multiculturalism'. The ideals are changed or flexible but the anti-ideals, or the 'evils', are not changed.

Nice.