Sartre

In class this week, we have talked about the thoughts and viewpoints of Jean Paul Sartre. He has some very interesting thoughts but also some very confusing as well. What I found most intriguing is the concept of lying to oneself. In class, we discussed whether or not it was even possible to lie to your actual self. The class was mixed in if you could actually do it. To me, I think you can. I tell myself all the time that I can procrastinate my work and still get it turned in on time and get a good grade. Even though I know perfectly well that by doing that I compromising my grade by waiting until the last minute to do my work. Someone brought up the example of lying to yourself about how you did well on a test even though you know you probably bombed it. I believe that you can really convince yourself you really did well. If you tell yourself over and over again you did good, you really start to believe it. Something I like about Sartre is idea on existentialism which assumes freedom is essential because without it there is no concept of responsibilities. Basically, every person is absolutely free. You are free to make your own choices and form your own thoughts. He also says that with this freedom, if you wanted to, you could kill yourself at any given time because that’s just how free you are. That thought is a little scary to me. Humans are a being-for-itself which is “the being in the mode of not being it”. This means you are a human and you have certain innate facts about that cannot be changed, such as when you were born and when you die, the fact that you need food to live. By being a being for itself, you have transcendence which is freedom.