PHILOSOPHY NOTES

L1;Q2: Existentialism

EXISTENTIALISM- a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the EXISTENCE of the

individual person as a FREE AND RESPONSIBLE agent determining their own development through
the acts of will.

- Also, existentialism is derived from the term existence. This existence comes from the latin
word existere, which means to stand out/to emerge/to come out from.
- Thus the term existence denotes emergence, standing out from, or coming out from being
there
- In this case, existentialism stresses the difference between existing and living.
- Existentialism highlights the word exist-ex-stare; is to stand out from faceslessness and
anonymity.
- Existence is more than mere biological living
- One can breathe, perform and sustain his psysiological functions, but may not truly exist.
- One who truly exists is the one who owns up to her existence.
- The main tenet of existentialism is that we are the authors of our lives.
- Existentialism argues that every human individual begins fron birth as zero, nothing.
- She becomes her real self as soon as she exercises her freedom

FREEDOM-

- Is something that is exercised through our CHOICES.

- Whern a person exercises her freedom, the becomes REAL.

SOREN KIERKERGAARD (1813-1855)

- A danish philosopher
- Born on May 5,1813, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Died on November 11,1855, Copenhagen, Denmark
- His full name was Soren Aabaye Kierkegaard
- Influenced by: Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein
- He said that Freedom is related to our capacity to choose, in choosing, the personality is
consolidated
- We allow dominant forces or personalities around us to choose for ourselves, most
important aspects of our lives.
- “Ourselves remain INAUTHENTIC” -Soren Kierkegaard
- The answer should be largely come from your own resolve and decision.

Essence- Can be understood as a pre given nature of a person

- Assume that there is an existing “real self” that has been pre-cut for me, and that all is left
for me to do with, my existence is to confine all of my actions according to this essence.

DEVELOPMENT OF A PERSON TOWARDS MATURITY

- From infancy to childhood

A person is not yet be said to be completely free, both in negative and positive sense of
freedom. Dahil bata pa sila, the parents control their lives because they are still not free from
their parent’s care. So, the parents must be incharged on everyhting during childhood.
 In positive sense of freedom, we can say that a child’s action are not yet a product of their
own choices. Most of it are driven by external motivation. (Your parents will give you a
rewared once you have accomplished something.)
- When a child grows into a mature adult, the situation changes. The adult now realizes that
they can steer the directions of her life through her own choices.
- There is a high tendency for young adults to feel lost like a driftwood in a boundless sea.

L2;Q2- Jean Paul Sartre

Jean Paul Sartre

- Was born in 1905

- The son of Jean-Bastite, a naval officer and Anne Marie Schweitzer
- Sartre was educated at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, exhibiting at an early age his
precious gifts for literary expressions
- He was attracted to philosophy by Henri Bergson
- He left him “bowled over” feeling that philosophy is absolutely terrific; you can learn the
truth through it.
- He spent years 1934 and 1935 at the institue Francias in Berlin, where he studied Husserl’s
Phenomenology
- Sartre wrote Trancendental Ego (1936) in Germany under the influence of Husserl.
- Nausea- which he considered his best at work even at the end of his career.
- This deals on Pathological feeling upon experiencing through intuition the accidental and
absurd nature of existence
- Feeling that human existence is contingent and without explicit purpose
- During the WW2, Sartre was active in the French Resistance movement and became a
German prisoner of war.
- While in the prisoner of war camp, he read Heidigger three times a week and he explained it
to his friend priest
- At te elite Ecole Normale Superieure, he met a fellow student, Simone de Beauvoir
- Whom he enjoyed a lifelong companionship
- They were not married because they believed that even without marriage, they still love
eachother
- During their 51 years together, they had a strong relationship of loyalty and love.
- Sartre simply lived and with few possesions, finding fulfillment in political involvement and
travel, and needing inly a small apartment on the Left Bank in Paris.
- He died on April 15,1980 at the age of 74.
- “Existence precedes essence.”

Existentialism in Jean Paul Sartre

- Sartre’s name became identified with existentialism

- The notion is that humans exist first and each individual spends a lifetime changing their
essence or nature
- The belif is that people who are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life
as they make choices based on their experiences, belifs, and outlook.
- Existentialist believes a person should be forced to choose and be responsible without the
help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions
- What appeared first in the heavy language of husserl and heidegger now came forth from
sartre’s pen in the open, captivating style of novels and short stories.
- Sartre’s principal contribution to existentialism is undoubtedly lenghty
- His bried lecture is that Existentialism is Humanism, his piece was later rejected and defined
existentialism in somewhat different terms.
- In this lecture, he presents his classic formulation of the basic principle of Existentialism,
- Existence preceeds essence, we cannot explain huma nature in the same way that we
described a manifactured article;
- For example, a knife, we know that it has made by SOMEONE and who had in his mins a
CONCEPTION OF IT. Including on what it would be used for and how it would be made. Thus,
even before the knife is made, the creator of the knife already conceives that it has having a
definite purpose and as being the product of a definite process.
- If by the essence of the knife, we mean the procedure by which it was made and the
purposes for which it was produced, we can say that the KNIFE’S EXISTENCE PRECEDES ITS
EXISTENCE.
- To look on a knife, is to understand exactly what its useful purpose is.
- When we think about human naturem we tend to describe ourselves also as the product of a
maker, God.
- Sartre says, as heavenly artisan implying that when God creates, he knows precisely what he
is creating.
- This would mean that in the mind of God the conception of human nature is “comparable”
to the conception of knife in the mind of the artisan.
- Each individual on, is the fulfilment of a definite conception, which resid3s in God’s
Understanding.
- Some philosophers of the 18th century including Diderot, Voltaire, and Kant wither were
ATHEISTS or suppressed the idea of God.
- They retained the notion that human people possess a “human nature” that is found in every
person.
- Each person is a particular example of the universal conception of humanity.
- We all possess the same essance, and our essence precees our individual concrete or
historical existence
- Sartre turned all this around by taking Atheism seriously.
- He believed that is there is no God, then there is no given human nature. Precisely because
there is no God to have conception of it
- Human nature cannot be defined in advance because it it not completely thought out in
advance. People such merely exist, and only later do we become our essential selves.
- Sartre says that people exist, confront themselves, emerge in the world and define
themselves afterwards.
- We simple are, and then we are simply that we make ourselves. Sartre’s main point here is
that a person that has a greater dignity than a stone of a table.
- The most important consequence of placing existence before essence in human nature is not
only we create ourselves, but that responsibility for existence rests squarely on each
individual
- A stone cannot be responsible. And if human nature was already given fixed, we could not be
responsible for what we are.
- We are what we make ourselves, we have no one to blame for what we are except ourselves.
- Sartre’s analysis began as an amoral subjectivism now turns out to be an ethics of strict
accountability based on individual responsibiity.
- Sartre says, even though we create out own values and thereby create ourselves, we
nevertheless create at the same time an image of our human nature as we believe ought to
be.
- When we choose this or that way of acting, we affirm the value of what we affirm the valye
of what we have chosen, and nothing can be better for anyone unless it it better for all.
- Sartre does not wish to invole any universal law to guide moral choice, Insteand a calling
attention to one of the cleaest experience of human beings. That is, all people must not
choose and make decisions although we have no authoritative guide, we must still choose
and at the same time ask wether we would be willing others to choose the same action.
- We cannot escape the disturbibg thought that we would want others to act as we do.
- The act of choice, is one that all of us must accomplish with a deep sense of anguish, for this
act we are responsible not onlyu for ourselves but also for each other.
- If I evade my responsibility through self-deception, I will not, Sartre argues, be at ease in my
conscience.
- He accepts Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead” and Dostoyevskey’s notion that “if
God did not exist, everything would not be permitted.”
- In Godless World, our psychological condition is one abandonment (Heidegger)
- Abandonment means for Sartre that the dismissal of God there is also a disappearance every
possibility of finding values in some sort of intelligible heaven.
- There cannot be not any “good” prior to our choice since there is no infinite or perfect
consciousness to think it.
- Everything is indeed permitted. As a result, we are forlorn, for we cannot find anything on
which we can rely, either or outside ourselves.
- Our existence preceds our essence. Apart from our existence, there is nothingness.
- To say there is nothing besides existing individual means for Sartre, that there is no God, no
Objective system values, no built-in essence, and most importanly, no determinism.
- An individual is free: a person is freedom.
- We are condemned because we find ourselves thrown in the world, yet free because as soon
as we are concious of ourselves, we are responsible for everything we do.
- Sartre says, freedom is appalling, this is precisely because there is nothing forcing us to
behave in any given way, nor there a precise pattern luring us into the future.
- We are all free, Sartre says, so we must choose that is, invent because there is no rule of
general morality that can show us that we ought to do. There are no guideliness guaranteed
to us in this world.

[L2;Q2] 1.2 NOTHINGNESS, BAD FAITH, AND HUMAN CONCIOUSNESS BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE

- There is an element of despair in human existence, Sartre says, from the realization that we
are limited to what is within the scope of our own wills.
- We cannot expect more from our existence than the finite probabilities it posseses.
- Here, Sartre believes that he is touching the genuine theme of personal existence by
emphasizing our finiture and our relation to nothingness.
- Nothingness lies coiled in the heart like a worm.
- Heidegger located the cause of human anxiety in our awareness of finitude when we
confront death. Not death in general, but our own death.’
- It is not only people who face nothingness, Heidegger “All being has this relation to
nothingness”
- Human finitude is, therefore not simply a matter of temporary ignorance or some
shortcoming or even an error.
 Finitude- Is the very structure of human mind, and such words as guilt, loneliness and
despair describe the consequences of human finitude.
- The ultimate principle of being Heidegger says is will.
- Sartre concurs by saying that only in action is there any reality.
- We are only a sum of our actions and purposes; besides our daily lives, we are nothing.
- Although, there is no prior essence in all people, no human nature, nevertheless, a universal
human condition.
- We are in a world of intersubjectivity. This is the kind of world in which I must live, choose,
and decide. For this reason no purpose that I choose is very wholly foreign to another
person.
- Sartre would not agree that it does not matter on what we do or how we choose, I am
always obliged to act is a situation- that is, in relation to many people- and consequently, my
actions, must not be capricious, since I must take responsibility for all my actions.
- Moreover, to say that I must make my essence, or invent my values, does not means I cannot
judge human actions.
- It is still possible to say that my action was based on either error or self deception, for if I
hide behind excuse of following my passion or espousing some theory of determinism, I
deceive myself
- To invent values, Sartre says, means only that there is no meaning or sense in life prior to
acts of will. Life cannot be anything until it is lives, but each individual must make sense of it.
- The value of life is nothing else but the sense of each passion fashions in it.
- To argue that we are the victims of fate, of mysterious force within us, of some grand passion
or heredity is to be guilty of bad faith (mauvaise foi) or self-deception of inauthencity.
- Sartre says, that a woman who consent to go out with a particular man knows very well what
the man’s cherishes intentions are, and she knows that sooner or later she will have to make
a decision.
- She does not want to admit the urgency of the matter, preferring to interpret all his actions
and discreet and respectful. They are in self-deception; her actions are inauthentic.
- All humans are guilty, in principle of similar inauthencity of acting in bad faith, of playing
roles and trying to disguise their actual personality behind a façade.
- The conclusion of sartre’s existentialism, therefore, that if I express my genuine humanity in
all my behaviour, I will never deceive myself, and honesty will then become not ideal but my
very being.
Human conciousness
 Underlying Satre’s popular formulation of existentialism is his technical analysis of
existence. He argues that there are different ways of existing.
 1st, there is a Being in it self (l’en-soi), which is the way that a stone is: it merely just
exist, just the same way as anything else is, as simply being there.
 2nd, there is being for itself (le pour-soi), which involves existing as a concious object,
which what people do and things rock cannot do.
 Sartre says, “the world of explanations and reaons is not the world of existence”
 At the level of the characters experience, the world is the unity of all the objects of
consciousness.
 Sartre agrees with Husserl that all the consciousness is the consciousness of
something, which means that there is no consciousness without affirming the
existence of an object that exist beyond, that is, transcends, our consciousness.

[L3;Q2] FREEDOM
1.1 FREEDOM AS THE CAUSE OF EVIL BY ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

 Augustine did not agree with Plato that the cause of evil is simply ignorance.
 Augustine says that even the ungodly have the capacity to “blame and praise things in
conduct of men”
 The overriding fact is that in daily conduct people uinderstand praise and blame because
they already understand that they have an obligation to do what is praiseworthy and to
abstain from what is blameworthy.

 Authentic freedom is not the “right to say and do anything” but “do the good”
 “To know good is to do good”
 People are not ignorant because they stand in presence of alternatives.
 People must choose to turn toward God or away from God.
 Whichever way a person chooses, it is the hope of finding happiness.
 People are capableof directing their affections exclusively toward finite things, persons or
themselves and away from God.
 Augustine says that “this turning away and this turning are not forces” but voluntary acts.
 Evil, or sin, is a product of will
-In spite of the fact of original sin, all humanity possesses the freedom of will.
 A person must have the help of God’s grace. Whereas evil is caused by an act of free will,
virtue on the other hand, is the product of people’s will, but God’s grace.

1.2FREEDOM FOR ISAIAH BERLIN

- Born on June 6,1909 on Riga, Latvia.

- Died on November 5,1997 on Oxford, United Kingdom
- Notable ideas are Negative and Positive Liberty (freedom)
- Was influenced by: Karl Marx, John Stuart, Mill Friedrich Nietzsche, and David Hume.
- Was a Russian British Social and Political Theorist, Philosopher, and Historian of Ideas.
NEGATIVE FREEDOM- Refers to the absence of interference, interference may be physical
coercion such as kidnapping or verbal coercion such as issuing threats to another person. “I
am no one’s slave” or Natural right
POSITIVE FREEDOM- Is a kind of freedom that requires active effort on the person that is said
to be free. The control is exhausted in the control mastery of themelves. (Person against
herself or wants v.s needs.). “I am my own master” or Entitlement.

1.3 FREEDOM ACCORDING TO WILLIAM JAMES

- Born in New York City in 1842
- Studied at Harvard and traveled to universities throughout Europe
- He received his M.D from the Harvard Medical Shool
- He died in 1910 at the age of 68

FREEDOM ACCORDING TO WILLIAM JAMES

- James was convinved that we cannot rationally prove that human will is either free or
determined.
- We will only find equally good arguments for each side of the dispute.
- The issue is worth investigating since it involves something important aabout life.
- The determinist says that there are no ambiguous or uncertain possibilitesm that what will
be will be.
 - On this view, “those parts of the universe already laid down absoluetly appoint and decree
what th other parts shall be.”
- On the other hand, the interdeterminist says that there is some “loose play” in the universe
and some present arrangement of things does not necessarily determine what the future will
be.
- According to James, the issue of free will “relates solely to the existence of possibilities,” of
things may, but need not be.
- We could only answer that such a universe is like a machine, in which each part fits tightly so
that the slightest motion of one part causes a motion of every other part. There is no loose
play in the machine.
- But James feels that WE are not just mechanical parts in a huge machin. What makes is
different is our conciousness.
- For onr thing, we are capable of judgements of regret.
- Not only do we make judgements of regret, but we make moral judgements of approbal and
disapproval.
- We persuade others to perform some actions to avoid others. We also punish or reward
people for their actions.
- All these forms of judgement imply that we constantly face genuine choices.
- We judge these acts to be wrong not only to retrospect but because we feel that they were
not inevitable when they were done.
- The determinist must explain away all of these judgements and instead defind the world as a
place where what “ought to be” is impossible.
- James concludes that this “problem” one and he cannot conceive of universe as place where
murder must happen. Instead, it is a plac where murder can happen and ought not.

[L4;Q2]; INTERSUBJECTIVITY

- The term intersubjectivity was coined by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

- Is most simply stated as the interchange of thoughts , both concious and unconcious,
between two persons or “subjects”, as facilitated by empathy.
- We are capable of understanding others even if their position is completely different
from our own. This is made possible by communication.
- We cannot understand other persons by simply observing them from a distance.
- It is in communication where we can have access to their inner realities.
- Intersubjectivity is a structure of relationship that is supported by genuine
communication.
- Some people treat others as mere objects because they only look at other’s bodes
like a machine.
- The human person is not an object. She only appears to be one because of her body.
Her body is what makes her a thing like other things.
- We do not refer to human beings as objects, but as subjects.
- We are expected to treat others as fellow subjects, and not as objects in the service
of other subjects.
- This relationship among subjects is what philosophers call inter-subjectivity.
- A peron who always exists with others in the world.
- Man’s “being with” should not be confused with man’s “being for” level of
relationship

1.2 DEFINING INTERSUBJECTIVITY: GABRIEL MARCEL

 - Intersubjectivity is the “realm of existence to which the preposition with properly applies.
- Through intersubjectivity, we transcend the labels that society puts on us we recognize an
incalcuable inherent value of a person.
- As Gabriel Marcel points out, this preposition “with” does not apply properly.. it is purely
objective world.
- The preposition “with” properly applies to the realm of persons, of subjects, not objects.
- To be with signifies co-presence, an openness of my presence to the presence of other
person.
- There are circumstanced that we are not really with them.

[L5;Q2]; THE MAN AND THE SOCIETY

1.1 Society

- The aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.

- Companionship or association with one’s fellows.
- An organization or club formed for a particular purpose or activity.

1.2 Different Social Relations and their Corresponding Interactions

JURGEN HABERMAS

- Born on June 18,1929

- Age: 81
- Born in Dusseldorf, Germany
- Sociologist and Philosopher, he is known for his theory on the concepts of ‘communicative
rationality’ and the ‘public sphere’

Kinds of Social Relations

- They differ by virtue of the kind “interaction” that takes place between individual.
Personal
- Where interactions are based on mutual regards for each as persons
- Defined by cooperation rather than competition
- The focus of the personal relationships is the preservation and development of the murual
regard for eachother.
Personal
- Where interactions are based on a mutual regard for each as persons
- Defined by cooperation rather than competition
- The focus of the personal relationships is the preservation and development of the mutual
regard for eachother.
Transactional
- Are based on the regard for eachother as means for attaining one’s goals.
- Transactional relationships are used whereas necessarily in derogatory sense, to help one
attain his goals or succeed in his plans.
- The focus of the perspm using this as means for attaining his goals is his success.
Competitive
- Usually spend the deeper reality that the other person, not just a mere object for my use.

1.3 Market, State, and Lifeworld

The three main spheres of society

- The social system of money.
- The social system of power
- The lifeword

Money- In our actual socities, these spheres take form of economic sytem, or the market

Power- These speheres take the form of political system, or the state.

Lifeword- These spheres take the form and our everyday world of communicative relations.

- Each sphere calls different interactions; in the market and in the state, relationships are
more of transactional and so individuals view eachother as means for a particular goal or
end.
- In both cases, the relationship between persons CANNOT be purely intersubjective.
- If the social system have a language which all participans understand, it would be the
medium of money and power.

Market- people linked up with other people through currencies of exchange vallue in the
market.

Political system- the use of domination, or threats of sanctions.

Lifeword- We naturally assume that all who are part of the community are persons, and must be
conciously recognized and treated as such.

- This is a presupposition of the communicative action.

- Participant in the communicative action are thus expected to treat others as subjects.
- Lifeword thrive on the mutual recognition
- We uphold and respect eachother as subjects, as embodied spirits, and as free as
autonomous beings.
- Our social interaction in the lifeword is marked by cooperative communication.

[L6;Q2] MAN AND DEATH

Death- the action or fact of dying or being killed; the end of life of a person or organism.

The realities or truths about death;

1.) Truth 2.) Permanent

3.) Uncertain 4.) Irreversible

5.) Decomposition 6.) Great Equalizer

7.) We will be forgotten

- Is there life after death?

 As long as it is not proven to be true, it will still remain to be an opinion
 The answers about what happens to us after we die, remains a matter or belief.
 All human persons are equal in ignorance in the face of death
 The task of philosophy is not to provide another answer to the question of what happens
after death but, to task the question what is the meaning of our lives in the face of
uncertainty of what happens after death.

1.2; Death According to Martin Heidigger

 He found that it is important to reflect on death because it is the most fundamental
question that a human person must learn to face.
 If we do not reflect on our deaths, chanced are we are not living an AUTHENTIC LIFE.
 If a human person dies, we cannot do anything about it. Not even the richest man can’t
bribe death.
 The problem lies on how human beings anticipate the coming of death.
 This “not knowing” brings about a feeling of dread.
 This is what Heideger terms as “inauthentic existence”, a form of running away from the
face of death, from the reality of one’s finitude, from one’s fallenness
 Angst is also drowned away by senseless obsessions over things, or by greed or want for
power.
 Some people find themselves obsessing about looking young, refusing to face
inevitability of the slow disintegration of the body.
 Others obsess about securing their wealth and property, running away from the fact that
these will be gone someday.
 Some people focus on gossiping on other people’s life as if the meaning of their own
lives is not as important as the life of others.
 Heidegger refers to all these inauthentic chatter which never quite succeeds in putting
angst away.
 Death is the destintination we all share, no one has ever escaped death.
 Death comes as the biggest traitor, astonishing us and our loved ones in the least
expected ways.

Paul Tilich

- He says that those who do not have courage to face death, end up living an inauthentic
life of denial manifested their “idle talk”, “curiousity”, and “ambiguity”
- Those who have the courage to face the fact of inevitable death live an authentic
existence, a life of achieving meaningful visions before death takes them..