▶︎ 0:01 We come to our final philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. He's a French existentialist. And after World War II, existentialism became extremely prominent, very famous, very popular, and Sartre achieved a fame that's very, very rare for philosophers. When he died in 1980, about 50,000 people lined the streets of Paris to see his coffin driven down it. That does not happen very often for philosophers.
▶︎ 0:38 But he created a form of existentialism. It preceded him. Usually it's credited to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19th century, but he gave it a form that caught the imagination of the public.
▶︎ 1:01 And in this talk that he gave, "Existentialism is a Humanism," he defines it, he says, "The first principle of existentialism is that existence precedes essence." Now, the first time I ever heard this sentence, I was sitting in my high school library with my friend. He was doing a book report on existentialism. That's what he chose for his topic. And he read the sentence out loud to me, and we both nodded sagely to each other at the great wisdom of the sentence, neither of us having the faintest idea what it meant. And he actually ended up becoming a professor of European philosophy too, both of us.
▶︎ 1:48 But Sartre knows this doesn't mean a lot. Sartre knows that it's confusing, and so he tries to unpack it, and the way that he approaches explaining it is by explaining its opposite. What would it mean for something's essence to precede its existence? What does it mean for something to have an essence before it exists?
▶︎ 2:11 And his example is a knife. So, a knife is an artifact. It's something people make, and it has its essence before it exists. That means that there is a definition to it. That's what an essence is, there's a meaning to it, it's what it is, and this is around before the knife comes about, because someone makes the knife.
▶︎ 2:36 Someone creates the knife, and making a knife isn't a random activity. They're not just throwing things together by chance. Someone makes the knife intentionally for a specific purpose. They want to cut something, and therefore, they will choose the appropriate materials and put them together in a specific way so that it can perform the function that they're looking for. They want something that will cut, and so they pick metal and they will sharpen it, and it will have a handle, all the things it needs in order for them to do what they want with it for it to be able to achieve its goal.
▶︎ 3:27 And they have to know what this is before they make it, because that idea, the essence, the function, the thing they're making it for, is what guides their decisions in what materials to use. They can't make it out of pasta. They can't make it out of balsa wood. And how to put it together, they can't put just the blade, because then you couldn't hold it. They can't put just a handle or it wouldn't cut.
▶︎ 3:52 And so they have to have the idea of what it is before they make it just in order to make it. Just in order to know how to make it and what to make, how to put it together. And this is what tells us, not only does it guide the creator in creating the object, it also tells us the criteria of evaluating the object once it exists.
▶︎ 4:26 If the point of the knife is to cut, then we can evaluate whether it's a good knife or a bad knife based on whether it cuts well. The essence, which is what the creator had in mind before they made it, which is what guided their making of it, what initiated the action of making it in the first place, also determines what makes it a good example of that thing at all.
▶︎ 4:54 This is basically a version of Aristotle's function argument. If you saw the Aristotle lecture, Aristotle says, "We evaluate things based on their specific, distinctive activity," what he called their ergon in Greek. And so you evaluate a knife based on its essence, based on what it does. You don't evaluate a knife on whether it plays a guitar or holds a book open. You evaluate on whether it cuts, because that's its essence. That's why the person made it, and the essence precedes existence in that the person, the creator had it in mind before they made it.
▶︎ 5:34 Now, Sartre says, if God created us, then that act of creation will follow the same basic pattern. God has an idea of what he'll make, God has a purpose in making us, and therefore, God has an essence of humanity. There is a thing that is what it is to be human. God makes us so that we will have that essence. And we have a particular function, a particular activity that determines what it is to be a good person.
▶︎ 6:14 This is exactly Aristotle's function argument, though he based on biology rather than on religion. And Sartre says, "Yes, this essence can be biological, it can be religious. It can be like Kant, just our having reason. It can be like Mill, our enjoying pleasure and suffering from pain." But for something to have an essence preceding existence is for it to have an essence at all.
▶︎ 6:49 The essence is what defines it and what determines what it is and determines what it ought to be. So a knife is something that cuts and it ought to be something that cuts well. And if God created the universe, then we have an essence and there's something we ought to be. And the purpose of ethics is to find that.
▶︎ 7:14 But if there is no God, which Sartre does not believe there is, then there was nowhere for us, for an essence of humanity to exist before we did. There was no mind of a creator to think of what we should be, what we will be, and then create us according to that plan. There was no planner and so there can be no plan. There was no creator and therefore there can be no purpose of the creation.
▶︎ 7:59 Sartre is arguing that humans are the entity for whom existence precedes essence. The knife, the essence precedes existence. There is a thing that it is and a thing that it should be, and that's in the mind of the creator. Humans are not like that.
▶︎ 8:19 Humans exist. We are thrown into this world. We occur, we're born nothing. A complete blank slate. No one and nothing made us. No one and nothing had a purpose in our creation. We are not heading anywhere. We are not coming from anywhere. We just happened.
▶︎ 8:48 This is whereas Aristotle, he was a biologist and he saw all of life as teleological. Sartre is philosophizing after Darwin. And Darwin says, "Life is not the kind of thing that has a goal. The only goal a living being has is to survive long enough to pass on its genes, but there's no goal to life as a whole." It just happened. All of these random events occurred and out of the random pressures, the fittest beings survived and passed on their genes.
▶︎ 9:20 And that's it. There's nothing else here. There's no purpose, there's no reason, there's no goal. So to say that existence precedes essence is to deny the existence of an essence, is to say that we don't have an essence.
▶︎ 9:44 And this is very, very important because every philosopher so far that we have seen has given us an essence. Every philosopher we've seen has defined the essence of humanity and has based their ethics on that. To say what we ought to be is to presume something that we are. If there is nothing that we are essentially, truly, deeply, then the very question of what we ought to be is thrown into disarray.
▶︎ 10:29 Sartre thinks that every ethics up until now has been based on the assumption that there's an essence to humanity and that has been its fundamental foundation, and he is denying that foundation. This is not a minor revision. This changes the entire endeavor. What he sees in the three ethicists that we have examined, Mill, Kant, and Aristotle, are not major disagreements and fights, but minor variations on a single theme.
▶︎ 11:06 Each one of them has a slight difference in saying what our essence is. What rule should we obey? What is the ideal of human life? And he is saying all of those are based on a presupposition, which is that we have an essence. That there is something we ought to do, that there are rules binding us. And that's a presupposition that they aren't examining or questioning and he thinks there's no reason to believe that. He thinks it's a very bad presupposition.
▶︎ 11:42 When he reads the early Socratic dialogues, he sees two different things. One of them is what we've been focusing on this entire course, the demand for form. Socrates says, "I want to know what goodness is so that I can be good." But the other thing that happens in all the Socratic dialogues is that they end in aporia. They end without an answer. And Socrates says in The Apology, "The only thing that I know is I don't really know anything." Is that human wisdom can't achieve these great feats of knowledge that we think we can.
▶︎ 12:27 And Sartre would say that we should pay more attention to the aporia than to the request for forms. That the fact that they come to no answer is not an accident. It's not a coincidence. That the lack of an answer is the answer. The failure is the truth because there simply is no answer to these questions. The problem isn't that they find no answer. The problem is that they believe in the question in the first place. They believe that they can find a truth about what we really are, about what we really should do, and he thinks there's no really here.
▶︎ 13:20 When he looks at reality, he does not see a dimension that contains values. There's what is, there's what happens. There's no should. There's no, "This is what should happen. This is what ought to happen." That just doesn't exist.
▶︎ 13:53 We looked at, in the Euthyphro, Socrates asked the question, "Is piety pious because the gods love it or do the gods love it because it's pious?" Asking, is there some essential feature of goodness that the gods love, they simply recognize, they see that it's there and that's why they love it? Or do they create goodness? Does something about them make it and it's nothing before them?
▶︎ 14:24 And I argued, Socrates doesn't explicitly come down on one side or the other, but I argued for his endeavor to make sense at all, for it to be meaningful for him to engage in these conversations and try to find an answer to these questions, he must believe that the gods love piety because it's pious, that there's an essential quality, objective quality out there the gods perceive and recognize and that we can find too.
▶︎ 14:50 And this is what Sartre is denying. Sartre is saying goodness is good because we think it is, because we make it so. There is no goodness but what we make. The universe simply doesn't work on shoulds. The universe doesn't have values. It has things, it has actions, it has objects, it has people. It doesn't have values. That's not a thing in the world. That doesn't exist. We make them up.
▶︎ 15:34 We make them up and then we believe in their objective existence. We do that because it's comforting. You see, he has this very interesting take on ethics. When we look at, let's say, Kant. Kant says, "Hey, look, you have inclinations to do bad things."
▶︎ 15:59 If you find a wallet on the ground, it's filled with money. Your inclinations say keep the money, go get a fancy meal, go buy a video game, go do something pleasurable. And your reason says, "No, no, no, no, no." It's a little devil and angel on your shoulders. "No, no, no. Return the money. Do the right thing." And ethic says listen to reason. Ethic says do the right thing whether it makes you happy or not. Ethic says sacrifice your happiness for your duty.
▶︎ 16:31 And Kant says, and we chaff at this, we say, "Oh, God, I want it. Keep the money. I wanna spend the money. Oh, Kant, my conscience, my reason. Okay, I'll do the right thing," and we don't like it. Sartre says, "No, that's not what happens." We love having the rule. We love being told not to do things. We love being told what to do. Being told, "Sacrifice your happiness," is fantastic because if we're given a rule, then we know what we're supposed to do.
▶︎ 17:12 If we're given a rule, here's the categorical imperative, do this. Here's the greatest happiness principle, do this. Here's the golden mean, do this. All we have to do is do that and we're a good person. Oh my God, that's fantastic. What a comfort, what a reassurance. I know how to be good.
▶︎ 17:33 I know how to look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say, "You're a good person. You have earned your right to another day. All the things you have, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, all these nice things, you deserve them. Good job." I know I did those because I followed the rules. I sacrificed the money, I turned it back, and I did the right thing.
▶︎ 18:03 But giving up the pleasure of that video game is nothing compared to the pleasure of patting myself on the back for being a wonderful person. That is fantastic. Oh my God, the pleasure I get out of that is incomparable to anything else. That feeling is spectacular. That's what we want, Sartre thinks. That's what we seek.
▶︎ 18:29 That's why we read the ethicists. For all of philosophy, all the history of philosophy, philosophers have said, "What we want is freedom." And Sartre says, "Nope, we hate freedom. Freedom's horrifying. Freedom's hard. Freedom means I have to come up with a system myself. I have to decide what is good and what is bad. I don't want to do that. Not only is it hard but I never know if I'm right. That's terrifying. To come to the end of the day and look myself in the mirror and say, 'Did I do a good job? Am I a good person? Do I deserve what I have?' feels awful. And so what do I do? I look for crutches. I look for things that will reassure me. I look for rules."
▶︎ 19:26 But this is what he calls bad faith. This is a denial of my freedom. For Sartre, there is no answer in the back of the book that we can peek at. There's no scoreboard that we can look at to see how we're doing. There are no answers. We are free and we are, in this wonderful phrase, condemned to be free.
▶︎ 20:02 If you take one of these rules, one of the three ethical rules we've seen, according to Sartre, you are doing it in order to avoid responsibility for your actions. "Hey, I followed the rule. You can't blame me. I did the greatest happiness principle. I'm good. Something bad happened. Well, not my fault, it's the rule." We try to avoid responsibility because it's terrifying to be wholly responsible, and so we embrace what he calls bad faith, where we say to ourselves and we say to others, "I'm not responsible for my actions. I followed. I did what I was supposed to do. I did what I was told to do."
▶︎ 20:51 But no matter what we do, according to Sartre, there is no getting out of our freedom because you're the one who chose which rule to follow. You're the one who decided how to follow it. It's an extreme form of the phronesis we saw with Aristotle. Don't murder. Well, what's murder? Is killing in wartime murder? Is killing in self-defense murder? Is abortion murder? No matter what rule you're given, it's always up to you to decide whether you should recognize that authority and how to apply it.
▶︎ 21:31 Sartre fought in the French Resistance in World War II. Nazis took over France and he fought to resist them. And what he saw after the war in the Nuremberg trials was a lot of people who collaborated with the Nazi government saying, "It's not my fault. I had no choice. I was just following orders." Sartre says, "Of course you had a choice." He knows because he made the other choice and he ended up in a prisoner of war camp. He risked his life for this.
▶︎ 22:02 Of course, he had his revenge. While he was a prisoner of war, he wrote his 500-page giant book of Being and Nothingness that German students have had to read ever since. But he says even if we give the stereotypical example of where we say you have no choice, someone has a gun to your head, you still have a choice even then. You can choose death. And that's not flippant because there were things that people were ordered to do that they should've chosen death instead of. And they could have.
▶︎ 22:43 There is no getting outside of our freedom, even though we try to, even though we want to. And peculiarly, the way that ethics has been practiced for all these centuries is itself, in his opinion, unethical, because it itself is a way for us to lie to ourselves. It's a way for us to tell ourselves we have the answer, we know what's right, we are following a rule and not making a choice.
▶︎ 23:18 There is an essence here that we can discover and act in accordance with. But he believes that piety is pious because we love it, that the right thing to do is like the side of the street in the island with Tristan da Cunha. We pick it, we choose it, we can change it at any time. Nothing outside of us tells us what to do. Anything that is outside of us that we think is telling us what to do is really us.
▶︎ 24:01 He tells a story, he uses Kierkegaard's story. Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham and Isaac. God tells Abraham, "Take your son, your only son, whom thou lovest, to Mount Moriah. Take him to the top of the mountain and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering to me." Abraham has to walk with his son for three days, take him up there, and he's about to plunge the knife into his chest when an angel comes down and says, "No, no, don't do it. You passed the test. You don't have to kill him."
▶︎ 24:34 Kierkegaard has a lot to say about this story. It's very fascinating work, Fear and Trembling. But one thing he says, he says, "Look, this seems like a situation where you have a perfect authority. Here is the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator of the universe telling you what to do. It's a horrifying thing to do, but you have absolute permission. You have permission from the deity. How could you go wrong? You know exactly what to do. You do what God tells you to do. Here's a situation where freedom doesn't enter into it. There's no interpretation, there's no application. You just do it.
▶︎ 25:25 But how do you know it's God talking to you? Hearing voices telling you to kill people, that's a textbook case of schizophrenia. How do you know it's not Satan tempting you? How do you know God isn't testing you, but the test isn't to follow him but to disobey him? What if the test was to say, "God, that's terrible, I'm not gonna kill my son," and then he would've said, "Congratulations, you get the chocolate factory, you pass, that's terrific"?
▶︎ 26:01 That's how Kant reads it. Kant thinks that Abraham failed it, because Abraham unthinkingly obeyed the order to do something unethical, that Abraham knew, could have known, could have used his reason to figure out the ethical thing, do not kill, and said to God, "God, you haven't read your Kant. You need to go read Kant and realize that this is wrong," and then God would've said, "Terrific, you did great. That's terrific." But instead, he followed unthinkingly and treated Isaac as a means only.
▶︎ 26:36 What if that was the right thing to do? What if it was Satan? What if it was Bob from accounting with one of his pranks, pretending to be God, and he goes out there and kills his son? Even in the most perfect circumstances where you seem to know exactly what to do, it's still you deciding. What does this mean? What should I do? Do I follow this or not? You can't get out of it. There is no way to escape your freedom. You are doomed to be free.
▶︎ 27:20 And following a rule, following an authority, nope. It's you choosing the rule. We've seen there are three different rules. You have to pick which one. You have to decide you're gonna follow it. You have to decide how to follow it. You never can get away from that.
▶︎ 27:41 This is Aristotle's phronesis taken to an extreme. The application is always on you. But that means that the rule is never more than just a suggestion, is never more than just a gesture. It's always you deciding what to do. It's always your freedom. It's always your responsibility.
▶︎ 28:09 You see, you don't know what the right thing to do is. You can't know what the right thing to do is, but that doesn't alleviate your responsibility. In fact, that makes you completely responsible. In Sartrean existentialism, you are absolutely responsible, because there is no essence to you.
▶︎ 28:39 You see, for Sartre, there's no such thing as an inertia to life. Aristotle says you perform actions, the actions collectively form habits, the habits collectively form a character, and that's what makes your decisions. Sartre says, "Nope, every single choice is new." Every moment, you recreate yourself, you redefine yourself. Every moment is open to you, completely open, and that's why if you keep doing the same thing, you're responsible for it. There is no way to blame anyone or anything.
▶︎ 29:27 This is what he thinks horrifies people about existentialism, because we want something to blame, we want someone to blame. We don't like having full responsibility for our actions, especially if we can't know what the right thing to do is. This is, he calls it, anguish. It's very unpleasant, it's very difficult, but it's the human condition, in his opinion.
▶︎ 29:50 There's a moment that occurs in many people's lives, usually early teenage-hood, when you realize that all the adults around you that you trusted so much, that seemed to know what they're doing, that seemed to have such a solid structure of society, you realize they're all just making it up as they go along. You thought you were the only one. You thought it was kids who don't know what they're doing, but the adults, at least they know what they're doing. Society is objective. Society is solid.
▶︎ 30:28 And then you find out, no, those rules are only there because people sustain them. That the things that we think are solid are gossamer, and if people stopped believing them, they would disappear. And that the entire structure that gives order to our lives is not based on a granite foundation, but is hovering over an abyss. And it's often horrifying. It's a first existential crisis of many people's lives.
▶︎ 31:06 Sartre thinks that is the true deep insight, that is the beginning of ethical wisdom, that is the moment that happens at the end of the Socratic Dialogues, not the beginning when Socrates asks for the forms. Socrates asks for the ethical knowledge, and what he comes to discover is that there is none.
▶︎ 31:42 Within the dialogue, the point is to awaken the desire, the drive, the demand for answers. It's to show Euthyphro you need to find what's right and wrong before you can act. For Sartre, the true beginning of maturity, of ethical wisdom is a realization that we have to act without ever knowing the answers, without ever having the form. It is the aporia that is the answer. It is the lack of an answer that tells us the truth.
▶︎ 32:29 What we need to do for Sartre is to face up honestly and look the abyss in the face. We need to give up the quest that Socrates has charged us with for 25 centuries. That is the beginning of ethics. That is when we can be honest with ourselves. That is when we can accept our freedom. That is when we can start acting freely and responsibly and create our values.
▶︎ 33:18 When he looks at Socrates' requirements, these are requirements that have guided us through the entire class. Socrates says, "We must have the essence of goodness." And Sartre says, "Existence precedes essence." First we are, and then we make it up. And we can make it up any way we want.
▶︎ 33:43 Socrates says, "We need to have something that guides our actions." And Sartre says, "That's bad faith. That's you trying to escape your freedom. You're trying to get someone else to take responsibility, someone else to tell you what to do." That's not ethics. That's the failure of ethics. That is what is unethical, is to try to have your actions guided.
▶︎ 34:16 Socrates says, "It must be universal." Sartre says, "It is always you on your own, making up your own mind."