TRANSITION FROM KANT TO EXISTENTIALISM
 

1. Kant emphasized the way we cannot help but shape and construct our interpretation of the world.

2. Existentialism, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard in the early 19th Century, has come to emphasize how we cannot escape responsibility for interpreting/construing the meaning we find the world (and our own lives) to have in one way or another.

3. Essential to human existence (human subjectivity) is this capacity and unshirkable responsibility for “determining” the meaning and truth of things (and of our own lives).

4. Participation in this responsibility is either intentional and authentic, or unintentional and inauthentic (in bad faith).

5. The world does not interpret itself; meanings are not determinately given, not ready-made.  There are basically two existentialist positions:
 

a. Apart from human “projection,” the world is meaningless or absurd.  But this “projection” is groundless.  (Thus meaning is entirely “projected.”)

b. Apart from human “discernment,” the world is ambiguous, not fully given, but full of hints and intimations.  (Thus meaning is “discovered.”)

6. The meaning and truth of the world only emerges through how we relate ourselves to it, through our participation in disclosing and acknowledging it.  If we don’t do it intentionally, we do it unintentionally and by default.

THE EXISTENTIALISM OF JEAN PAUL SARTRE
 
 

1. The human situation is, at bottom, absurd, made up of two radically different realities, being and nothingness:
 

a. Things (being-in-itself) that unto themselves lack meaning (i.e., objective reality, “facticity”).

b. Consciousness (being-for-itself), ourselves (i.e., subjective reality, “transcendence”), for whom there are meanings but soley in light of our freely, autonomously, groundlessly (and therefore unstably) projected goals and purposes.

c. Situations / meanings / values are the unstable product of ‘a’ and ‘b,’ facticity and transcendence, being and nothingness.  They are created and sustained in being sheerly by our freely willed life projects, without which they would dissolve and disappear.

2. When we pretend to have a determinate nature and/or stable meanings and values, we are guilty of bad faith, deceiving ourselves.  For at bottom we cannot escape the groundlessness and absurdity of our fundamental life projects, which “create” these meanings from our own nothingness.

3. We would like to have a determinate nature and meanings given (to be both a being-for-itself and in-itself), but that is an impossible project, for that would be the death of conscious freedom.  (For Sartre, freedom is incompatible with meanings that are given from outside ourselves.)

4. Inter-personal relationships are fraught with the Master/Slave dialectic, where we each tend to objectify and control the other (treat a being-for-itself as if it were a being-in-itself) for our own life project.  “Hell is other people.”
 

1. The human situation is fundamentally ambiguous, not essentially absurd – as it is for Sartre.  Instead of a foundation for anguish, it is a foundation for optimism.

2. Meanings, while not simply given or found and not simply invented, emerge from the way we engage ourselves in the world and discover what is there.

3. Mutuality in inter-personal relationships is possible; “metaphysical autonomy/isolation” can be overcome.

4. In agreement with Sartre, she holds that each of us is freer than we realize.  We need not be condemned to the identity others have placed upon us.

5. In disagreement with Sartre, human freedom, when examined concretely (versus abstractly), is frequently both more limited by circumstances than Sartre maintains and more dependent on conditions outside ourselves.  Sartre’s position ignores the fact of human interdependence.

6. Beauty in nature and in art is more than something wholly subjective: they are what they are because other people too can experience them as beautiful.

7. Authentic philosophy is a matter of seeking to understand the world and our situation in order to act in response to it and according to our values -- i.e., to make a difference in the world.

8. Because authentic philosophy is integrated with human life as lived amidst multiple perspectives, literature and fiction can be essential to philosophical method.
 

1. She used existentialism as a foundation for her analysis of the situation of women, drawing on many disciplines, but her understanding of existentialism was modified in turn.

2. Women are “the second sex” because men throughout human history have presumed the power to shape and define the world, objectifying women as beings Other than the male “norm: -- as passive vs. active, matter vs. form, evil vs. good, especially as subservient to men.

3. Like all humans, women are potentially free and autonomous, equal to men, but by so defining women, men determine them as objects and doom them to a life of immanence (subject to given conditions) vs. transcendence.

4. What keeps women in a subordinate position is not biology but the social interpretation of biological difference, as expressed in the assumptions and practices of society which constitute limiting and oppressive circumstances – which women without realizing it impose on themselves.

5. Improvement in the situation of women will require women to see their situation clearly, to cease to live in bad faith and to exercise their freedom and trancendence.

6. But (most?) women cannot do this as individuals only.  Women need to be acknowledged as free beings, giving them a firm basis to freely choose projects in the world and move into a future of multiple possibilities.

7. True reciprocity between the sexes is, nevertheless, possible.  Men and women can and should recognize each other as peers and collaborators in their activities.