A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's Ontology

ISBN-13: 9789024714902 / Angielski / Miękka / 1973 / 142 str.

M. A. Natanson; Maurice Alexander Natanson

Opis

"Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed?" -Jeremiah "Existentialism" today refers to faddism, decadentism, morbidity, the "philosophy of the graveyard"; to words like fear, dread, anxiety, anguish, suffering, aloneness, death; to novelists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoievski, Camus, Kafka; to philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Jaspers, and Sartre-and because it refers to, and is concerned with, all of these ideas and persons, existentialism has lost any clearer meaning it may have originally possessed. Because it has so many definitions, it can no longer be defined. As Sartre writes: "Most people who use the word existentialism would be em barrased if they had to explain it, since, now that the word is all the rage, even the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist. A gossip columnist . . . signs himself The Exis tentialist, so that by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all. " 2 This state of definitional confusion is not an accidental or negligible matter. An attempt will be made in this introduction to account for the confustion and to show why any definition of existentialism in volves us in a tangle. First, however, it is necessary to state in a tenta tive and very general manner what points of view are here intended when reference is made to existentialism."

Spis treści

I Exposition.- I: The Search for Being.- 1. What is Being?.- 2. What is the Relation of Consciousness to Being?.- 3. What is the Relation of Temporality to Being?.- 4. What is the Relation of Nothingness to Being?.- II: The Other.- 1. Three Theories of the Other.- a. Husserl.- b. Hegel.- c. Heidegger.- 2. The Look.- 3. The Body.- 4. Attitudes Toward the Other:.- a. Love.- b. Language.- c. Masochism.- d. Indifference.- e. Desire.- f. Sadism.- g. Hate.- 5. Being-With (Mit-sein).- III: The Self.- 1. Freedom.- 2. Situation.- 3. Death.- IV: Existential Psychoanalysis.- 1. Existential Versus Freudian Psychoanalysis.- 2. Existential Psychoanalysis and Ontology.- 3. Viscosity.- V: General Summary.- 1. Appropriation.- 2. The Dualism of en-soi and pour-soi.- 3. Metaphysical Questions.- 4. Ethical Questions.- II Evaluation.- VI: Sartre’s Phenomenological Method.- VII: Three Theses of L’Être et le Néant Criticized.- 1. Freedom.- 2. Nothingness and Bad Faith.- 3. Being.- VIII: Sartre’s “Copernican Revolution”: An Interpretation.- IX: Final Evaluation.- Additional Bibliography.