Sartre - Pros and Cons - Existentialism Part I

Part I of an indeterminate number of videos on this subject.

Part I
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MADFiV0V-ac
Part II
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Po0FmBeDfwo
Part III
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sSaJM2pfw2s

This is a video about Sartre's Existentialism. I will discuss some of his key points and then challenge some of the choices that Sartre made with his existential freedom. This first video is fairly introductory. If you know Sartre already, the con section may be more interesting.

"Existentialism is a Humanism":
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm

Excellent Documentary on Sartre in 6 parts:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cdKx71XD4Ss
(Other parts to the documentary linked to the first)

Music:
Dissolved Girl by Massive Attack
Change by Deftones

Category:

Education

Tags:

• jean
• paul
• sartre
• existentialism
• philosophy
• atheism

[collins1188]

Doesn't anyone know how to pronounce Sartre? It's pronounced like "SART".... come on...

[PianoIsTheRemedy]

You're wrong, bro. Check around on the internet. The phonemes in the French pronunciation don't exist in English. The closest approximation is "Sar-truh" in English. Look around on the internet with the keywords Sartre and pronounce.

[wgaule]

I was interested in this until you said you hadn't read Being and Nothingness. After that I felt there was nothing to learn from this video. You have to read it before doing any more of these videos. You could easily get through it in a couple of months. Reading it will give you more credibility, even if you don't reveal that you read it, you will know what you know you know, if you know what I mean ...

[PianoIsTheRemedy]

Well, I probably won't read it, but thanks for the recommendation. I view Youtube as a forum for discussion. I apologize if you believe I intended my video to be a college level class. Was there anything specific you disagreed with in the video? Seems hypocritical to tell me I should read Being and Nothingness and then you comment without watching my video.

[orbis2009]

Sartre's early existentialism wherein existence precedes essence ---where man authenticates himself through the acts of freedom---was contradicted by both his conformist Marxism---a universal which substituted for religion for him, though its hardly distinguishable as a contradicting essence / idealism--- and denial about Marxism's horrors; also by his return to moralism in condemning the war in Vietnam. He collapsed into essence over existence in all this,

[PianoIsTheRemedy]

Agreed on Marxism. I cannot forgive his militant Marxist radicalism.

[riv3rrun]

Nietzsche died before WWI, in 1900. The Nazi's didn't need to distort his views, his own sister (an extreme anti-Semite), "edited" his works to lend them a more anti-Semitic tone. More accurately anti-Jewish, or anti-Zionist, as Palestinians are obviously Semites too. Gos is far from dead here in the US, the influence of religion here is off the scale compared to other modern industrial countries, and has been steadily increasing over the past 10-20 years.

[Hoobifta]

So you talk about existentialism as a question of why you were here, which you have to find out for yourself, that is, you're here in this world, but how did you get there? Yeh, and you say it's humanism. So let me get this straight: you speak of a very complicated philosophy in an 800 page book and you can't read it because you don't get it, then you were an academic student in existentialism and you know how a lot of it operates, but you find it somewhat confusing and don't know some of it.

[ILikeTheRain123]

Towards the end of the video when you were discussing the effect ww2 had on culture very much reminded me of the theory of modernism. That coupled with the fact that Nietzche was (in my opinion) a pre-cursor or father of both modernism and existentialism, makes me wonder are the two theories connected? And to what extent?

If anyone could answer this for me, I'd be really grateful.

:)

[gims333]

by "free willist" do you mean libertarian

[bardic88]

I agree with wgaule, Being and Nothingness is an essential book to understanding the phenomenology behind his existentialism. Further, "Transcendence of the Ego" was a prelude to Being and Nothingness, and certainly a rebuttal to Husserl's miraculous find of the ego, although he agreed with Hume in the beginning. Also, "The Humanism of Existentialism" is a public address, a sort of manifesto, shortly after WWII. Although brilliant, one can't learn enough from the mentioned essays

[AbdielAbiram]

Not just Kierkegaard. Marcel, Buber, Dostovoesky, Tilich, and Jaspers are prominent existentialist thinkers, all of which are religionists.

[roborat91]

Massive Attack for the win

[orbis2009]

@koikila You write "There's never been such thing as a Communist country yet. Stalinism and Maoism are not representative of Marxism" Yes, that is the usual Talking Point reply; but it is only convincing to neo-marxist true believers. It is like saying capitalism has never existed yet.

[koikila]

@orbis2009 But there's never been such thing as a Communist country yet. Stalinism and Maoism are not representative of Marxism .There different ways of understanding it and each party has its own strategy...or technique (i dont know the english word).I don't thik Marx's theory(on economics, sociology, history, as a dialectic method etc)is not at all bloody..I think that if some took it to justify their fascism then that's up to them, not the whole theory itself. Marx was Marx,not his folowers.

[orbis2009]

@koikila For the most Marxism in actual time-and-space history involves direct  and often blood assaults on human creativity, freedom, dissent and ends in the Gulag or body pits. Only when disincarnated, as it were, does Marxism live as a kind of Platonic ideal in the minds of its proponents. Capitalism is likewise loathsomely violent. The old economic theory of Distributism avoids the pitfalls of Marxism and Capitalism (which provoke each other into existence) as well as anarchism.

[koikila]

@PianoIsTheRemedy The first guy is right... And it wouldn't hurt trying to pronounce another language's words and names, even if its phonemes aren't like english ones , the rest of the world do it with english words :)