(Roughly) 200 Words on Sartre

This is one of many intended posts like this: length-constrained posts on interesting works, philosophies, systems, etc. The aim of this post is to condense interesting pieces of the work for future retrospection. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Sartre is genuinely attempting to answer the question, "how do we think about our lives?" drawing on Descartes and the phenomenologists, among others. It's a blend of practical, greek-style 'life-guidance' and the systematic, dense style of 19th century philosophy; it's epistemology, it's mostly not ethics but also kind of ethics, it's... the good life? I find it hard to categorize.

Existence precedes essence; humans are born into 'nothingness,' a condition of non-definition. This inspires anguish, abandonment, and despair. We are given a world, (a condition of facticity) and we must decide what to make of it (we have the capacity for transcendence). To slip from for-itself/pour-soi to the mode of existence of the in-itself/en-soi — that is, to take on an 'essence' — is to abdicate, to act as if we have no choices when we do. It is bad faith.

Sartre speaks to questions I have: how do we tell stories about ourselves; how do these stories shape our lives? (c.f. transcendence). The sense of lostness without a coherent essence. (c.f. anguish, etc.) The requirement of self-definition (the original condition of nothingness), the impossibility of describing oneself in as one single thing (good faith and bad faith). The falseness of taking on someone's values.

Existentialism easily gets trivialized; reading the original texts is refreshing.