Symposium Make-Up: Sarte

            Since I was excused from the symposium last Friday April 10, 2015 I will write a blog post defending one of the philosophers I did not get a chance to cover on Wednesday and I am choosing to do Sartre.

Sartre believed in existentialism, with the basic principle “existence precedes essence”. To understand this, one must compare the subject to an object that is a thing-in-itself. For instance a table is something in which “essence precedes existence” meaning the only thing that one knows about a table, or whatever makes a table a table is the characteristics that facilitate the object. The only reason the table exists is because of the essence of it which is the exact opposite of a human and existentialism. Humans have the facility that occurs in objects but what makes us humans is the transcendence or freedom. The reason our existence precedes essence is because we have the freedom to do as we choose and think how we choose. Whatever one does in life, those experiences, or projects, define that individual. “You are what you do” is a phrase someone used in class. One might criticize and Sartre explained a main criticism with an analogy. There is a waiter in a restaurant and he acts the way he does because that’s how a waiter should act and even if doesn’t want this lifestyle he has to because “that’s what waiters do”. He has made his freedom and objectified it claiming he is “just a waiter”. Sartre would say this is an individual not wanting to live up to responsibility and take on another project. It was stated that one IS responsible for EVERY thing that occurs on this world because we have the freedom to act or not to act on something. Even an individual confined to the most hopeless state and has “all” freedoms taken away, one always has the freedom to think. A criticism I would have for Nietzsche, regarding the whole “slave revolt of mortality” and that there are simply weak and strong people, weak people still have the freedom to think and choose as they do.