Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

©2018 of 126 response is to flee, to escape from this life sentence of freedom and responsibility. Thus, refusal to accept responsibility creates inauthenticity. Inauthentic individuals deny their freedom, attempt to surrender their freedom to others, passively let outside forces shape their lives, or pretend that the formation of their characters was beyond their control. They lack the courage to accept themselves as self-creators, creating a false image of themselves that they present to the world as real, a mask concealing their weak and trembling selves and they refuse to acknowledge their responsibility of legislating for all humankind by the choices that they make. Per Sartre, all such efforts to escape from freedom and responsibility are doomed because we are condemned to be free and our efforts to escape succeed only in creating inauthentic selves with no hope of living meaningful lives. The only way to live genuinely authentic lie is to embrace your freedom, acknowledge your responsibility, and face the profound existential emotions of abandonment, anguish, and despair with uncommon courage. Sartre contends that our moral instincts, emotions, conscience are notoriously unreliable and difficult to interpret and we discover which instinct or emotion is stronger by what alternative we choose, but then it too late to use this instinct or emotion as a guide and describes this reasoning as a vicious circle. Sartre feels that it is often difficult to discern the strength of emotions and instincts when they are in conflict with one another and it is also difficulty to differentiate authentic emotions from false emotions. He believes that we cannot discover moral guidance by trying to follow our moral instincts and emotions any more than we can look to external moral codes for moral direction. Sartre’s point is that we cannot rely on other people for moral instruction because by selecting the person we are going to for advice, we ourselves are already making the choice of which alternative to select. We know what their values and biases are and we can be fairly certain of what advice they will give us. Sartre’s ethics reinforce the primary individual and his absolute freedom in the absence of God or other universalizing moral force and emphasizes that the moral choices we make are not just for ourselves in isolation, but for all humankind. In the final analysis, this is your choice and your choice alone, for which you are fully responsible. 9.11 De Beauvoir: Our Interplay with Others Defines Us Simone de Beauvoir was another existentialist and feminist philosopher who argues that women, historically subordinate to men, have been relegated to the category of the other sex. In her writing called The Ethics of Ambiguity , she considers freedom to be radical in nature and central to the human experience. She believed that freedom is the source of all value in human experience and as it projects itself outward through intention and action, it confers value. The act of choosing freely also reveals a desire on our part that there be a world in which our choices can have meaning, a world populated with other freely choosing agents. Our freedom, which defines our existence, only has meaning in relationship to others who are exercising their freedom of choice. Even when others make choices that challenge or interfere with our own choices, we recognize that the only way we can define ourselves as humans is through our interaction with others. We need other people to become fully human, and this is the existential basis for morality. The essence of being human is to be continually exercising our freedom of choice, projecting ourselves into the future, transcending ourselves, continually evolving. This is only possible through our interplay with others, who are striving to achieve the same significance for themselves through the choices they make. Our existence can have Achieve Page 102