This paper critically examines Sartre's treatment of the problem of alterity in his early works, arguing that his first philosophical work, The Transcendence of the Ego, presents an unsatisfactory account of alterity. The paper proposes that Sartre's study of imagination offers opportunities to re-examine the question of alterity and arrive at a more adequate formulation of the self's relation to the other. The paper begins by demonstrating that The Transcendence of the Ego perpetuates the Cartesian tradition of defining the self primarily in terms of self-consciousness and immanence. Next, the paper turns to Sartre's Psychology of Imagination to find another way of conceptualizing the problem. The paper argues that Sartre's theory of imaginary consciousness reduces the alterity of the imaginary object to sheer absence, and therefore does not allow us to bring the fundamental character of alterity to light. However, the paper uncovers a more adequate way of dealing with alterity in the context of the imaginary life. The paper shows that the notion of the "picture itself" allows us to conceptualize alterity as the radical withdrawal of the other. Finally, the paper argues that the imaginary subject is necessarily divided between itself and itself as another, and due to that internal split, can grasp the alterity of another person. The paper notes that The Transcendence of the Ego is Sartre's first philosophical work and investigates the problem of otherness, alterity, or transcendence. Sartre develops the notion of transcendence in opposition to immanence, aiming to arrive at the notion of immanence purified of any transcendent elements and to use that notion as a clue for his definition of subjectivity. The paper notes that the idea of pure self-transparent subjectivity has a long history, originating in the philosophy of Descartes and further developed by Husserl.
Staels, Hilde. "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; Resistance Through Narrating ." English Studies (1995): 455-467.
In his lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre discusses common misconceptions people, specifically Communists and Christians, have about existentialism and extentanitalists (18). He wants to explain why these misconceptions are wrong and defend existentialism for what he believes it is. Sartre argues people are free to create themselves through their decisions and actions. This idea is illustrated in the movie 13 Going on Thirty, where one characters’ decision at her thirteenth birthday party and her actions afterwards make her become awful person by the time she turns thirty. She was free to make these decisions but she was also alone. Often the idea of having complete free will at first sounds refreshing, but when people
Callaway, Alanna A., "Women disunited : Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale as a critique of feminism" (2008). Master's Theses. Paper 3505.
Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a story heavily influenced by the Bible and has many biblical themes that are used to prove Atwood’s belief in balance. The novel is set in the Republic of Gilead which was formerly the United States. The story is told through the perspective of a handmaid named Offred and begins when she is placed at her third assignment as a housemaid. Offred describes her society as a fundamentalist theocracy where the Christian God is seen as the divine Ruler over the Republic of Gilead. Atwood is often thought of as a feminist writer but through this novel her writing is not completely feminist nor patriarchal but something in the middle. Atwood is also someone who described herself as a “strict agnostic”
Milan Kundera contends, “A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral” (3). In this it is seen that the primary utility of the novel lies in its ability to explore an array of possible existences. For these possible existences to tell us something of our actual existence, they need to be populated by living beings that are both as whole, and as flawed, as those in the real world. To achieve this the author must become the object he writes of. J.M. Coetzee states, “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (35). Through this sympathetic faculty, a writer is able to give flesh, authenticity and a genuine perspective to the imagined. It is only in this manner that the goal of creating living beings may be realized. Anything short of this becomes an exercise in image and in Kundera’s words, produces an immoral novel (3).
Thesis: In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood characterizes Handmaids, as women with expectations to obey the society’s hierarchy, as reproducers, symbolizing how inferior the Handmaid class is to others within Gilead; the class marginalization of Handmaids reveals the use of hierarchical control exerted to eliminate societal flaws among citizens.
The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel in which Atwood creates a world which seems absurd and near impossible. Women being kept in slavery only to create babies, cult like religious control over the population, and the deportation of an entire race, these things all seem like fiction. However Atwood's novel is closer to fact than fiction; all the events which take place in the story have a base in the real world as well as a historical precedent. Atwood establishes the world of Gilead on historical events as well as the social and political trends which were taking place during her life time in the 1980's. Atwood shows her audience through political and historical reference that Gilead was and is closer than most people realize.
Ultimately, though both philosophers have had a huge impact on the idea of human nature and the answering the questions of like “What does it mean to be a human? Is there really a human nature?” I may I may personally find Sartre more attractive at the end of the day, but like this paper hopefully showed, everyone has some ability to make their own choices, and with that in mind may have come up with a completely different opinion.
The Handmaid's Tale presents an extreme example of sexism and misogyny by featuring the complete objectification of women in the society of Gilead. Yet by also highlighting the mistreatment of women in the cultures that precede and follow the Gileadean era, Margaret Atwood is suggesting that sexism and misogyny are deeply embedded in any society and that serious and deliberate attention must be given to these forms of discrimination in order to eliminate them.
(5) Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness translated by Hazel Barnes(New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), pp 432-434.
We choose, act, and take responsibility for everything, and thus we live, and exist. Life cannot be anything until it is lived, but each individual must make sense of it. The value of life is nothing else but the sense each person fashions into it. To argue that we are the victims of fate, of mysterious forces within us, of some grand passion, or heredity, is to be guilty of bad faith. Sartre says that we can overcome the adversity presented by our facticity, a term he designs to represent the external factors that we have no control over, such as the details of our birth, our race, and so on, by inserting nothingness into it.
In order to explicate Sartre’s notion of intersubjectivity I will follow the progression that Sartre takes in Being and Nothingness. I will first distinguish between “being-for-itself” and “being-for-others”. Second, I will provide an explication of the subject’s encounter with the Other as an object. Third, I will explain the significance of “the look”. Here I will show how the look provides the foundation for the self. I will also show how the look of the Other affects the subject’s freedom.
To begin I will tell the history of Lego. Master carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen opens the doors of his business in 1932, in the village of Billund, Denmark. He made stepladders, ironing boards, stools and wooden toys. His son, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, started to work in the business at the age of 12. In 1934, Ole Kirk Kristiansen Company and his products now adopt the name LEGO, formed from the Danish words "LEg GOdt" ("play well"). After some time, they realized that in Latin the word "LEg GOdt" means, "I put together". At this time, the company also has 6-7 employees. In 1935, the business creates its first LEGO wooden duck and markets “Kirk´s Sand game” first construction toy. In 1936, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen takes Ole Kirk 's motto
Sartre writes that man is the one who gives himself purpose and creates himself. Sartre writes “Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” (Sartre 22). Sartre is saying that man is not what he considers himself to be, he is what he does, and he is constantly changing. Man cannot be what he regards himself as unless what he considers himself to be is what he has already completed or what he is currently doing. He also states that man is only what he is until after he exists, because man knows what he wants to be until after he exists, he cannot know what he wants to be before because he does not exist yet.
Truth of oneself makes it visible when faced with absurd events in life where all ethical issues fade away. One cannot always pinpoint to a specific trait or what the core essence they discover, but it is often described as “finding one’s self”. In religious context, the essential self would be regarded as soul. Whereas, for some there is no such concept as self that exists since they believe that humans are just animals caught in the mechanistic world. However, modern philosophy sheds a positive light and tries to prove the existence of a self. Modern philosophers, Descartes and Hume in particular, draw upon the notion of the transcendental self, thinking self, and the empirical self, self of public life. Hume’s bundle theory serves as a distinction between these two notions here and even when both of these conception in their distinction make valid points, neither of them is more accurate.