Existentialism

[brewer]

Yeah, this is true. Not everyone's free will is the same.

No one disputes that people's circumstances and abilities differ, or that human power is subject to various constraints. The existentialists spent a lot of time talking about facticity, which is how they conceptualized the physical and cultural contexts of human endeavor. Simone De Beauvoir wrote:

However, man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the resistance which the world opposes to him. The will is defined only by raising obstacles, and by the contingency of facticity certain obstacles let themselves be conquered, and others do not.

What you do with what the world does to you, in other words, is what defines you.

Completely missed the point. Oh well.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Another way to look at existentialism is that the effects events have on you is somehow more real than the events themselves.

In other words, a Frenchman’s Citroen isn’t real, but the shame he feels from driving it is.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Or, if not real vs unreal in any cogent sense, more consequential to the definition of who or what you are. To avoid some difficult to resolve dilemma where a citroen is not really real.

[Istvan]

No one disputes that people's circumstances and abilities differ, or that human power is subject to various constraints. The existentialists spent a lot of time talking about facticity, which is how they conceptualized the physical and cultural contexts of human endeavor. Simone De Beauvoir wrote:

However, man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the resistance which the world opposes to him. The will is defined only by raising obstacles, and by the contingency of facticity certain obstacles let themselves be conquered, and others do not.

What you do with what the world does to you, in other words, is what defines you.

Completely missed the point. Oh well.

How did I miss the point? You raised the issue of genetic conditions that effect certain people's decision-making capabilities. I agreed that not everyone's circumstances and abilities are identical.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, it is something that needs clarification. It's not really that a person cannot be so impaired or so enabled that this does not factor into a definition of who they are. Nor is it obviously the case that this is not a more accurate definition of who they are. If we can agree to the possibility, then we should have some explanation as to why even the most extreme examples of that, instantiated, don't persuasively argue against our preferred way to define what a person is.

[Istvan]

Well, it is something that needs clarification.  It's not really that a person cannot be so impaired or so enabled that this does not factor into a definition of who they are.  Nor is it obviously the case that this is not a more accurate definition of who they are.  If we can agree to the possibility, then we should have some explanation as to why even the most extreme examples of that, instantiated, don't persuasively argue against our preferred way to define what a person is.

Existentialists talk a lot about transcendence, which they use without any mystical import; it's merely how one transcends one's circumstances. 

I never said we could come up with a simple catch-all definition of what any given human is, merely that it's what they do with what's been done to them.

[Neo-Scholastic]

IMHO what distinguishes existentialism from both classical and analytic philosophies, is that it takes the personal existent as given and then proceeds to inquire about the stances available to a personal existent given his or her condition.

[Istvan]

IMHO what distinguishes existentialism from both classical and analytic philosophies, is that it takes the personal existent as given and then proceeds to inquire about the stances available to a personal existent given his or her condition.

That's absolutely true. For all its Cartesian rhetoric, existentialism poses a radical critique to Western metaphysics by knocking ontology off its pedestal and asserting that the human experience is the starting point of all talk about how reality is. As Sartre says, "The essence is not in the object, it is in the meaning of the object."

[vulcanlogician]

I've read Camus and Frankl.

What do you think of Sartre's definition of existentialism? "Existence precedes essence." It surely has its detractors. But (since Sartre has been so influential in the movement) many take it to be a good definition.

It's fine by me. We're defined by the choices we make and the ways we encounter Being, not by our religious identity, evolutionary heritage, or genetic makeup.

Whether someone is religious or not, the main question of the human condition is How should I live? Like I said, I'm not religious but I assume that's the main concern of any religious person as well as any nonreligious one. There are a lot of ways, religious as well as secular, that one can dodge responsibility for confronting that question fully.

Yes. I agree. It's an important question. And plenty of people out there who are ready to answer it for you. I appreciate the existentialists' urge toward courage considering such things.

As a quick aside, what is your assessment on the metaphysics of free will? Not to derail your thread or anything-- trust me the risk is there. I was just curious given Sartre's philosophy which you seem quite keen on. (The short answer will do.)

[Neo-Scholastic]

IMHO what distinguishes existentialism from both classical and analytic philosophies, is that it takes the personal existent as given and then proceeds to inquire about the stances available to a personal existent given his or her condition.

That's absolutely true. For all its Cartesian rhetoric, existentialism poses a radical critique to Western metaphysics by knocking ontology off its pedestal and asserting that the human experience is the starting point of all talk about how reality is. As Sartre says, "The essence is not in the object, it is in the meaning of the object."

However, that inability to econcile meaning and existence is the central failure of existentialism IMO. They cover for it by embracing either absurdism, like Camus, or mysticism, like Martain Buber. In contrast to this, I maintain that certain knowlege of trancendant principles, such as the Principle of Non-Contradiction, are entailed in one's own existence-as-such and as such significantly relate the first-person apprehension of being with Being-In-Itself.