sartre's 'existentialism and humanism'

The main ideas of Sartre's philosophy as expressed in "Existentialism and Humanism" can be summed up in a few basic points:

1. "Existence precedes Essence" - which is an ontological claim, that one must exist already in order to investigate the essence of that existence

2. Subject-Relative Constructive Ethics - which is a meta-ethical position, in the sense that it is a claim about ethics as a whole. There is no static, objective ethics to speak of, yet individuals have the power of creating their own ethical standards through their personal investigations of their own essence. And

3. Humanistic Marxism - which is an ethical/political position. Each individual will eventually reach conclusions, through the construction of their own ethics, approaching a humanistic Marxism. That is to say, that their ethical stances will be human-centered and equalitarian.

Each of these positions is causally independent. One can defend any of these three basic points without holding either of the other two; but Sartre combines these three to form the basic tenants of his Existentialist Philosophy. Because they're independent of each other, they can each be critiqued independently. Further, they can be critiqued in relation to each other. What I shall be doing, however, within the limited scope of this paper, is to critique at least a bit each proposition independently. I will leave the problem of their consistency untouched (although I suspect they cohere as well as Sartre would have liked).

1. 1. "Existence precedes Essence" is a quotation of Sartre's that could be taken one of two ways. It is either trivial or false. If by "existence precedes essence" he means that it is necessary for a cognizant person to be alive in order for it to investigate their own essence, then that seems to me to be a trivial point. Of course someone has to have the property of existence in order for them to have any thoughts whatsoever. However, if by this ontological claim he means to say that in order for any human being to have an essence they must first exist, I don't see how this is true. We can figure out the essence of any human being just as we figured out the essence of gold, or the essence of electricity: through scientific investigation. Gold's essence is a substance having the atomic number 79, the essence of electricity is what Einstein figured out, and the essence of Humanity is having 46 chromosomes and the only living members of the Homo genus. So to me this claim is rather nonsensical.

2. 2. Having an ethical system of subject-relative constructive ethics has many potential advantages as well as many drawbacks. If all ethics is is a series of claims reached by each individual through their own constructions, then there is obviously a sense of empowerment that each individual attains. In this sense, Sartre is very similar to Nietzsche, who would have agreed with his vision of individuals creating their own ethics. However, to me this reeks of a self-help manual more than a rigorous examination of what the true meanings of "right" and "wrong" are. IF this is all that ethics boils down to, there are no real truth values to ethical statements, only truth values as assigned by each individual. What then, if anything, do we use as a basis for grounding our morality? Do we use consensus between independently attained ethical propositions held by individuals? But then we slide back into a kind of utilitarianism that I believe Sartre wouldn't agree with either. My point here is that, as of right now, I can't make a decision as to whether I like Sartre's meta-ethics or not, but I feel that this kind of idea might as well be Dr. Phil's.

3. 3.I won't touch the third point.

So where does this leave Sartre? I don't think he's in very good shape if any of my criticisms hold.

nietzsche's superman morality

Nietzsche is a particularly interesting philosopher because, as Russell pointed out, most of the objections that are brought up against his ideas are not rational in nature: that is, they stem from deep seeded “feelings” or other kinds of arguments not based in logical argumentation. However, if there is a way to find counterexamples to his theory without the appeal to feeling, then there might be a way to logically argue against it. I’m going to try to do just that in this brief post.

“A morality of the ruling class applies the principle that one has duties only to one’s equals…”. Here, Nietzsche is summing up a discussion that deals with the distinction of different ethical systems used by individuals in a society. The first system is the one that is constructed by religion and the masses and is what Nietzsche calls the “slave morality”. This system or morality makes individualism and self-interest the “evil”. Further, it makes the interest of the common people the “good”. This system, Nietzsche suggests, was contructed only as a contrast to the “master morality”, the morality used by the success-driven individuals in a society who worry less about popular conceptions of “good” and “evil” and instead look out for whatever they want to. This kind of morality is what drives civilizations forward, Nietzsche believes, and is thus the type of morality everyone should adopt.

Special attention should be payed to the concept of the Master Morality. According to this way morality is construed, what is good to the “overman” is just whatever makes him more powerful, and weakness is what is the “bad”. More and more power will lead the overman to be more happy, and this is how morality should be conceived. There are many ways to attack this kind of reasoning, but some of the ways are limited by our method. Let me show how this is so.

The first way to try to object to these claims is that it just doesn’t seem right. More and more power is not the same as more and more good. These two words designate different things; they’re independent concepts. A Nietzsche-an would quickly retaliate that this is precisely the point he wants to bring forth. That these two concepts are not independent and attempting to make a distinction between them is just a product of our indoctrination to the slave morality. Although this move is kind of shady on the part of the Nietzche-an, Let’s let it slide and explore other routes.

Another way to try to argue against Nietzsche’s Master morality is to try to accept the distinction between the slave and master morality, yet be agnostic about which morality to prefer. After all, the more people follow the slave morality, the more people will live longer and be saved, or so it seems. If more people are looking out for the interest of the group as a whole, then more people will place the interest of their brethren as high as their own and thus people will be more likely to help each other in times of need, when other are attacking, etc. The contrasting morality will also be necessary until a certain extent, but there would be no need for a preference either way. This I feel might be a powerful argument against Nietzsche prioritization of the master morality, as Nietzsche seems to be straddling the line between relativism and objectivity about morality. On the one hand, he says all morality is relative and there is no objective basis of morality. Yet on the other hand, he says master morality is the best morality, the right morality. There May be an implicit contradiction there.

Finally, and on to what I believe to be the most powerful argument against the assimilation of “good” and “power” in Nietzsche’s master morality, is a rather simple argument by consequence. If one person in the “master” morality decides to attain as much power as he could, and then someone else has the same objectives, then it is possible that in gaining more and more “good” one of the individuals annihilates the other. Thus for that person there is no more “good.” The acquirement of power was not in the best interest of the destroyed person, as it led to his death. Of course here the Nietzsche-an could counter-argue and say something like this: “well, that the person died was just evidence of his weakness, not necessarily that power is not good. After all, the person who ended up killing the other guy now has even more power and thus he is even more good.” But would follow with this. If ethics is a relative concept, and the preferred conception of ethics is power=good and weakness=bad, then, to the person who was attempting to attain power and failed, he was in the good yet it led to the worst kind of weakness, death. So maybe, just maybe, looking for more and more power isn’t the same as goodness after all.

Obviously my arguments aren’t very refined yet nor are they knock-down, but at least I think they show that there’s either some inconsistency in the concept of the master morality or that it’s just something that needs to be worked on by Nietzsche followers. (For all I know someone has made these terms clearer but I’m not familiar with more recent literature on the subject.)

amateur metaethics part 1: on ethical systems

okay, due to some discussions with G i kinda wanna develop my thoughts on ethics. so this is kinda what i've come up with so far:

any ethical system can be reduced to a set of axioms of what isn't permissible. a hypothetical, single-cause environmentalist ethics would include pretty much one axiom: {hurting the earth or any natural things therein is impermissible}. anything that adheres to that axiom is okay, although up for debate, under that ethical system, and anything that violates that law is condemned as "wrong".

of course, it's very rare for anyone to follow such a simple ethical system, and probably nobody does. irl, people have multiple axioms they attempt to incorporate in ethical systems. so it also seems to me that some of these axioms are weighted. if, for example, you subscribe to a fundamentalist evangelical right-wing pro-lifer christian ethical system, you'll put more emphasis on axioms such as {abortions are impermissible} than on {not attempting to treat your neighbors as your kin is impermissible} (or some other variant of the golden rule). so in the case where some one who follow the system i just described is faced with a choice of (a) acting civilly towards a someone who decides to have an abortion and (b) attempting to deny their choice of aborting, they'll go for (b).

the reason for the different weights in the axioms of ethical systems may or may not be due to derivation. that is, there are a set of basic axioms and other, derrived axioms may be consequences or someway related to the basic axioms, yet the basic ones are more fundamental in such a way that violating those would cause more harm to the ethical edifice.

now, it's the job of the philosopher, ethicist, or metaethicist, to figure out if there's even a chance of any of these criteria for constructing ethical systems will yield a system that is the correct ethical system by any objective standard. further, if there IS a way to figure out if there's a "right" ethics, the philosopher should then use that method to figure out which ethics IS right after all, and then proceed to spell out the axioms involved.

a lot of people just see the variety of ethical systems and assume that, due to the sheer number of them, there must be something wrong with the concept, and ethics is really a word influenced by power, linguistic habit, gender, or whatever the flavor of the month is. although i'm all for throwing away concepts that are harmful to inquiry, i want to be a bit more rigorous as well.

we all know that people, people in power, have done horrible things and attempted to justify it in ethical terms. in a similar vein, we know that, historically, even arguably now in some cultures, women are treated as inferior and there exist ethical systems in which that's okay. but just because these systems of ethical justification exist doesn't mean that there isn't a system that actually gets the axioms right, or at least a way for us to figure which ones are right, or righter than others.

also, we all know that "ethics" is a word that is applied in individual instances by given people, and they may use it to refer to different things. but it, again, it doesn't follow from this that "ethics" is just a linguistic construction applied at given instances and nothing else, it might be that this word is being used to attempt to single out a particular conception with given properties (as anybody who adopts ANY ethical system would have to commit to).

okay, so in my next post i think i'll talk about some of my ideas on how to find the methodology of assessing ethical systems.