Existentialism 101

Sartre

• Being-in-itself
• “repetitive, material existence humans share with animals, vegetables, and minerals”
• associated with bodies
• body is constant and objective, it needs to be fed and farts and sweats and stinks and hurts
• it is perceivable

• Being-for-itself
• “moving, conscious existence humans share only with other humans”
• does the perceiving
• not an object, but a subject

• Being-for-others
• Conflictual social relations
• makes itself by objectifying the Other
• self-definition depends on having power over others

• Freedom
• This is what makes a person a self (compare this to Liberalism or Marxism)
• No such thing as human nature (then we wouldn’t be free)
• Human condition we have to make choices
• Every time we make a choice we kill a little bit of our potential –nausea
  
  
• Bad faith
• Believing that we are not burdened by the human condition
• Trying to escape the responsibility of being a conscious subject or being for itself

• We are in a role that takes away our choices
• Waiter, coward, mother
• We allow ourselves to become “thing like”
• The young woman

• Problem of living in Bad faith
• We can’t do it
• It is horrific

Existentialist feminism

Beauvoir

• Man = self
• Woman = other
• Therefore woman is a threat to man and man must subordinate woman in order to be free.

• How do women become the Other?
• Not biology
• There are biological differences between men and women
• What is important is not the differences, but rather how we interpret these differences
• Body does not define woman:
• don’t fool yourselves into thinking that we are all being in itself and no being for itself

• Not Freud
• There is more to civilization than sex
• Rethink this crazy thing “penis envy”
• “women “envy” those who possess a penis,… not because they want a penis per se but because they desire the material and psychological privileges society accords to penis possessors.”

• “Women are other not because they lack penises but because they lack power”

• Not Marx
• Engels made a connection between women and being in itself tasks and men with being for itself tasks
• If we didn’t seek to dominate the Other, then economic systems would not entail that women are oppressed.
• We need to eliminate men’s desire to control women

• So, what is the explanation for why men = self and women = Other?
• The idea of Other comes automatically with the idea of being a self
• “Woman became for man everything man was not, an alien power that man had best control lest woman become the self and man the other.”