Excerpt from: The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy by R. Audi pages 710-711 found below as part of the reading
This discussion centers around Existentialism. As you read the following excerpt and your textbook pages, think about the following: What do you think of Sartre’s ideas? Does modern day society seem to be living his ideas? Do we suffer from choosing? Do these ideas stem from any other philosophical concepts we have looked at in this course? What are your thoughts?
Reading: “The separation of self and consciousness and the rejection of the self as simply self-consciousness provides the framework for Sartre’s greatest philosophical work, “Being and Nothingness”.
” It is through the nothingness of consciousness and its activities that negation comes into the world, our ability to imagine the world other than it is and the inescapable necessity of imagining ourselves other than we seem to be. And because consciousness is nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality. Central to the argument of “being and nothingness”, and Sartre’s insistence on the primacy of human freedom is his insistence that consciousness cannot be understood in causal terms. It is always self-determining and as such, “it always is what it is not, and is not what it is”- a playful paradox that refers to the fact that we are always in the process of choosing. Consciousness is “nothing”, but the self is always on its way to being something”.
