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Episode 87: Sartre on Freedom and Self-Deception

January 1, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 11 Comments

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_087_1-2-14.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:56:05 — 106.3MB)

On Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1946), "Bad Faith" (pt. 1, ch. 2 of Being & Nothingness, 1943), and his play No Exit (1944).

What is human nature? Sartre says that there isn't one, but there is a universal human condition, which is our absolute freedom. This freedom is a basic certainty in our experience, and it comes out of the mere fact of our being able to will, so no subsequent alleged science can contradict it. If you claim to be determined by your character or circumstances, you're acting in "bad faith," which is what for Sartre has to serve as an ethics given the lack of good and evil floating out there in the world or duties assigned to us by nature or God or any of that. He describes his project as a matter of teasing out the often unrealized implications atheism.

Though his reading is rife with fun, literary examples, we (the regular foursome) had trouble both with this insistence on absolute freedom in all circumstances and on on this claim about no human nature which ends up making bad faith seemingly inevitable: you can't be "authentic" to your "true self" because there is no true self to be authentic to! So ha!

Read more about the topic and get the texts. Listen to Mark's introduction and our read-through of "No Exit."

End song: "Minnesota Freak" by Mark Lint and the Fake (2000). Read about it.

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Filed Under: Podcast Episodes Tagged With: existentialism, freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, meta-ethics, philosophy podcast, self-deception

Comments

  1. christian chaves says

    July 3, 2016 at 1:02 pm

    Love what you guys are doing. Addicted to the podcast.
    A quick comment: So, in general I like it better when you guys present the content of the philosophy before getting bogged down in criticisms; having a more or less completed image of what the philosopher is communicating makes it easier to keep up with the criticisms, but criticizing a concept used by a philosopher without first sketching out the sense in which the philosopher means it makes it difficult to grasp whats going on … At least for a noob like me. It could just be me and my not so well developed philosophical aptitude, in which case, just ignore me.
    Once again, you guys are awesome, and thank you for what you do.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Topic for #120: Guest Eva Brann on Will (and Aquinas, Augustine, Heidegger, etc.) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 26, 2015 at 6:44 pm

    […] exert our will contrary to all reason and the framework of our lives, but it is more a matter (as Sartre argued) of how well your life as a whole, your character as built over time, reflects what you really […]

    Reply
  2. Rereading Hannah Arendt’s “The Jew as Pariah” | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    August 10, 2015 at 6:00 am

    […] keeps “The Jew as Pariah” relevant as compared to the work of Arendt’s contemporaries, like Sartre’s well-meaning but ultimately misguided Anti-Semite and Jew from […]

    Reply
  3. Sartre's "No Exit" Read with Lucy Lawless & Jaime Murray | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    October 24, 2015 at 9:49 pm

    […] support of our ep. #87 discussing Sartre, the PEL Players present our 2nd annual dramatic reading of a work of philosophical […]

    Reply
  4. Episode 140: De Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    May 30, 2016 at 7:00 am

    […] Other touchstones are Nietzsche (most centrally ep. 84), Camus (ep. 4), and especially Sartre (ep. 87). We also bring up Augustine (eps. 121 and 122), Eva Brann's take on Nietzsche (ep. 120), and […]

    Reply
  5. Bojack Horseman and Aristotelian Self-Love | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    November 1, 2016 at 7:00 am

    […] with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you'll be dead.”), radical freedom (as proposed by Sartre), and embracing the absurd (as suggested by […]

    Reply
  6. Precognition of Ep. 87: Sartre | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 19, 2017 at 11:13 pm

    […] Listen to the full episode. […]

    Reply
  7. Episode 160: Orwell on Totalitarianism and Language (Part Two) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 20, 2017 at 7:00 am

    […] might "contain" a mind that it controls, and "doublethink," where one mind is split—much like Sartre's "Bad Faith"—to intentionally delude […]

    Reply
  8. Episode 172: Mind, Self, and Affect with Guest Dr. Drew (Citizen Edition) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    September 18, 2017 at 1:39 am

    […] Sartre made between "the me" and "the I" in ep. 47 and his consequent views on freedom described in ep. 87. Another recent stab we made at discussing this confrontation with "the Other" was in our Levinas […]

    Reply
  9. Episode 172: Mind, Self, and Affect with Guest Dr. Drew (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    September 18, 2017 at 7:40 am

    […] made between "the me" and "the I" in ep. 47, and his consequent views on freedom described in ep. 87. Another recent stab we made at discussing this confrontation with "the Other" was in our Levinas […]

    Reply
  10. Existentialism: A Collection of Online Resources and Key Quotes – The Daily Idea says:
    September 9, 2019 at 4:05 am

    […] Sartre on Freedom and Self-Deception […]

    Reply

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