patient.For the patient, this operation is lived .It is subjective , and it must be undergone by him and by no one else.There is another thing: in the past, we felt subject to causality while the future seemed to depend on ourselves.This is why Heidegger said that existential time is the future.Everything that man does may be considered from the point of view of the past.I move my hand because I feel like smoking.Or of the future: I move my hand in order to pick up the pipe.
Therefore we can assert that freedom is a feature only of existence while causality is the feature of the Being in itself .
Existentialism is not a science.
In existentialism, the whole is not a mechanism, the sum of the components always means something more than the sum total.Let us imagine that the words which form a sentence are not just a quantity of words but also a meaning.Between the way of seeing man as object, from the outside, characteristic of medicine, of psychology, of history, etc., and that of existentialism, which is to feel, so to speak, from the inside , within his being, there is an ABYSS.
Monday, May 5, 1969
Existentialism
Existentialism is subjectivity.
Personally, I am quite subjective and it seems to me that this attitude corresponds to reality.
Subjective man Concrete man.
Not a concept of man, but Pierre or François, since the concept of man does not exist, says Kierkegaard.
Because of this, it is monstrously difficult for existentialism to make arguments, since arguments are based on concepts, and only thanks to Heidegger’s betrayal which took hold of the phenomenological method, can one speak [ sentence incomplete ].
The existentialist is a subjective, free man.He has what one calls free will, unlike a man viewed from the scientific outside, who is always subject to causality, like a mechanism.
This bold theory that man is free seems absolutely mad in a world where everything is cause and effect.It relies on an elementary sensation: we are free and there is no way to convince me that if Imove my left hand it is not because I want to.It is not easy to specify what this possibility of freedom is based on.
I imagine that it is based on a difference in time.Time for man is not the past but the future.If one does something, it is not because of but rather in order to .“I read in order to remind myself,” etc.
If in the past, you have causality, in the future, in man’s existence, we are dealing with the future.
One can say, more profoundly, that in our consciousness one finds the same internal rupture, which reveals itself, for example, in the physical.
Man, that being for himself , is divided in two (with a hole).It is in this nothingness, in this void (the hole), that the concept of freedom is introduced.Freedom has an enormous role for Sartre, because it is the foundation of his moral system.
Sartre is a moralist, and it is curious that the same deviation observed by Husserl in Descartes is produced again in French philosophy.
Descartes, in an extremely categorical way, reduces thought to a single description of consciousness, but suddenly, frightened by the annihilation of God, of the world, he betrays himself.He recognizedGod’s existence.This already deduces, from the existence of God, the existence of the world.
Now, in Sartre, in my view, we are dealing with the same cowardice.There are perhaps fifteen pages in Being and Nothingness where Sartre makes some dramatic efforts to logically justify a phenomenon which seems absolutely evident, the existence of a man other than “self.”For example, the phenomenon of Witold’s existence is the same as that of a chair.
Sartre analyzes all the systems: Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and he demonstrates that none of them has any possibility of recognizing the other man.Why?Because to be man is to be subject.It is to have a consciousness which recognizes everything else as object.If I admitted that Witold too has a consciousness, then inevitably I myself am an