Why I say this will become clear in a moment, but first let me make a general point: disagreeing with someone is not the same as critiquing them. Students often have a difficult time grasping this point, believing that if they write why they disagree with position X, they've critiqued position X, but that's not how critique works. I can say, "I think abortion should be legal because women should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies," but in doing so I haven't critiqued any arguments for the pro-life position, or even the pro-life position itself. I've simply set up my own position in contrast to it.
OK, on to Vallicella's posts, specifically the second one. After describing Sartre's distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-itself, and what this means for humanity, he writes (under the heading "critique"):
One problem, though, is that one cannot give the very fact that one exists in the first place a purpose. A healthy, well-situated adult can assign purpose to his waking life, but that he exists at all is not within the scope of his 'purposing.' I can no more 'purpose' my existence as a whole than I can cause my existence as a whole. I can do various things to maintain my existence. But I couldn't do these things if I didn't already (both logically and temporally) exist. The same goes for 'purposing': I cannot give my existence as a whole a purpose. I remain on Sartre's scheme a fundamentally purposeless purpose-positer. I cannot 'retroactively' give my life as a whole a purpose. At best I can give my lucid hours a purpose, albeit a merely subjective one. I cannot 'recuperate' my entire existence from purposelessness by assigning myself tasks in the present. For example, if I just now 'wake up' in authenticity to my radical freedom and assume the burden of making myself, this does nothing to rescue my past, all the way back to infancy, from purposelessness.If Vallicella were offering an actual critique of Sartre, this would be a weird place to start, considering the fact that, for Sartre, this meaningless of life itself is precisely the point. If life itself, independent of my choosing, has meaning, then my choosing is not (absolutely) free. Therefore, while "Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making," and "the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless" is true, in that meaning only comes about through choice. For Sartre, this is a necessary condition of the freedom that is at the center of his thought. So instead of actually critiquing this position, Vallicella is simply disagreeing with it. As he puts it:
Thus my Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making. And if there is no God, then it is beyond the scope of any divine making as well. Thus the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless, purposeless, absurd. Sartre might say that this is just the way things are. But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning? At most, we give our lucid hours meaning. But the vast backdrop of our lucidity is darkness and absurdity
But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning?In other words, he just doesn't find Sartre's position personally satisfying, which is hardly a critique. Vallicella wants meaning in the substratum, and Sartre can't allow it. We have two opposed positions, but nothing approaching critique.
Vallicella next tackles Sartre's position that when one chooses for oneself, one chooses for all men. As Sartre puts it:
I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.Vallicella writes:
A second problem concerns whether the central organizing purpose I choose is worthwhile. Whatever one chooses is open to doubt, and will be doubted by many. The choices I make are merely my choices and there is nothing to validate them objectively. We invent values and in so doing we invent the sense of our lives. We are creative like artists. (364) Aware of this, I must admit in all honesty that none of my choices can lay claim to being objectively worthwhile. Uncomfortable with this upshot, Sartre says repeatedly (e.g. 350) that when one chooses for oneself one chooses for all men. But he never, as far as I can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all. He remains stuck in value subjectivism.Vallicella's contention that Sartre, "never, as far as [he] can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all" is odd since Vallicella cites Being and Nothingness and "Existentialism is a Humanism," in both of which Sartre gives this position and justifies it (extensively in the former). For example, Sartre writes in "Existentialism is a Humanism":
When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole.In other words, we choose for all when we choose for ourselves because, by choosing, we indicate that we've decided the choice we've made is the best available one in that context. This necessarily implies that, for someone else in that context, it would also be the best available choice. Therefore, by choosing for ourselves, we choose for all. Sartre goes into much more detail in Being and Nothingness. In essence, if I'm acting in good faith, then I recognize that I'm responsible for the choices which make up my life, and therefore my life. If I were to make choices only for myself, and not for others, then one of two things would be true: either I am acting in bad faith, and therefore don't recognize that I am responsible for my choice, or I recognize that I am responsible for my choices, but don't feel that others should be able to choose as I do in the given context. Take stealing for example. If I choose to steal (for fun, say, not out of necessity), then presumably if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn't want someone to steal from me. So, either I fail to recognize that I'm responsible for my choice to steal (i.e., I'm acting in bad fath), or I don't feel that others should be able to choose what I have chosen because even though I've decided it's what's best for me in this context.
This is a pretty ingenious route out of "value subjectivism" into the sort of subjectivism that Sartre attributes to his existentialism, namely "that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity." If I am responsible for choosing not merely for myself but for all, then my values are not subjective in the pejorative sense, but only in the sense that there is no other way to get values but through choosing. I suspect that Vallicella would not be happy with that type of subjectivism either, as his distaste for the meaninglessness of life itself in Sartre suggests, but again, disagreeing with it is not critiquing it.
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