21 ideas
| 3847 | Man is nothing else but the sum of his actions [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Man is nothing else but the sum of his actions. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.41) | |
| A reaction: This might be plausible if unperformed actions are included. For some people, their whole life story consists of what they failed to do. |
| 3846 | Man IS freedom [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: There is no determinism - man is free, man IS freedom. …Man is condemned to be free. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.34) |
| 3843 | There is no human nature [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: There is no human nature. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.28) | |
| A reaction: Everything which can be individuated has a nature, say I, wearing my Aristotelian lapel badge. Does he think the same of cats? Does he think the mind is a blank page? |
| 20762 | There are no values to justify us, and no excuses [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: There are no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. …We are alone with no excuses. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.296), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 6 'Bad' | |
| A reaction: If there are no values or duties, why might you ever need excuses? |
| 3852 | If values depend on us, freedom is the foundation of all values [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, he can only will one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.51) | |
| A reaction: I don't think so. Is freedom the foundation of all arithmetic, because I am untrammelled when doing addition? Values are ridiculous if they don't reflect facts. |
| 20180 | A happy and joyous life must largely be a quiet life [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A happy life must to a great extent be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness [1930], 4) | |
| A reaction: Most people's image of happiness is absorption in an interesting task, or relaxing in good company. The idea that happiness is wild excitement exists, but is a minority view. |
| 20764 | In becoming what we want to be we create what we think man ought to be [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: In creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.293), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 7 'Anything' | |
| A reaction: I recall this being one of my earliest thoughts about morality - that in everything we do we are all role models for the people around us. For me, that leads to virtue theory. |
| 3848 | Cowards are responsible for their cowardice [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: The existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.42) |
| 20763 | When my personal freedom becomes involved, I must want freedom for everyone else [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Freedom as the definition of man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is involvement, I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.306), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 7 'Anything' | |
| A reaction: Appears to be a highly Kantian sense of rational duty, and a rather odd constraint on someone whose only value is freedom. Sartre is aware that he needs an existential politics, but he's not there yet. 'Involvement' is an interesting addition to Kant. |
| 22229 | Existentialists says that cowards and heroes make themselves [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: What the existentialist says is that the coward makes himself cowardly, that the hero makes himself heroic. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.35), quoted by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.3 | |
| A reaction: A nice statement of the existential plasticity of the self, in opposition to the much stronger concept of human nature in Aristotle (who nevertheless believes you can acquire virtues and vices). |
| 20177 | Boredom always involves not being fully occupied [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is one of the essentials of boredom that one's faculties must not be fully occupied. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness [1930], 4) | |
| A reaction: He gives running for your life as an example of non-boredom. I suspect that this is only the sort of boredom that troubled Russell, and not the sort of profound boredom that led the actor George Sanders to suicide (according to his last note). |
| 20179 | Happiness involves enduring boredom, and the young should be taught this [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A certain power of enduring boredom is essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness [1930], 4) | |
| A reaction: As an example he suggests that Wordsworth would never have written 'The Prelude' is he had never been bored when young. Which suggests that Russell doesn't really get boredom, seeing it merely as a stimulus to work. |
| 20176 | Boredom is an increasingly strong motivating power [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Boredom has been, I believe, one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch, and is so at the present day more than ever. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness [1930], 4) | |
| A reaction: Most of his essay tells us how to avoid boredom, rather than how it motivates. |
| 20178 | Life is now more interesting, but boredom is more frightening [Russell] |
| Full Idea: We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness [1930], 4) | |
| A reaction: I get the impression that the invention of the powerful mobile phone has largely banished boredom from human life, except when you are obliged to switch it off. The fear of boredom may hence be even greater now. |
| 3842 | Existence before essence (or begin with the subjective) [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Existentialism says that existence comes before essence - or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.26) |
| 6868 | 'Existence precedes essence' means we have no pre-existing self, but create it through existence [Sartre, by Le Poidevin] |
| Full Idea: I take 'existence precedes essence' to mean that we do not have a pre-existing self, which organises our behaviour, but rather that we create our self as we go along, through our existence and activities. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945]) by Robin Le Poidevin - Interview with Baggini and Stangroom p.222 | |
| A reaction: The direct opponent of this is Aristotle, who builds his ethics on a fairly fixed human nature, but even he agrees that we mould our moral characters through our activities, in a circular way. There are not, though, infinite possibilities in mankind. |
| 3844 | Existentialism says man is whatever he makes of himself [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.28) |
| 20754 | It is dishonest to offer passions as an excuse [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions is a dishonest man. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.305), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 5 'Core' | |
| A reaction: To say 'my passion was so strong that I was too weak to resist it' doesn't sound prima facie dishonest. Sartre's idea is more of an exhortation than a fact, and sounds rather old fashioned and puritan. Do my reasons constitutes excuses? |
| 6571 | When a man must choose between his mother and the Resistance, no theory can help [Sartre, by Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: When a young man must choose between his bereft mother and the French Resistance, Sartre says no moral theory is capable of resolving the dilemma; the man must act on his own, and in the process define his moral character. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.35-9) by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Fogelin agrees, but rejects Sartre's claim that all morality is like this. I agree with Fogelin. However, what I like is the idea of 'defining one's moral character' by choices, but that is because it endorses the views of Aristotle (e.g. Idea 4394). |
| 3851 | If I do not choose, that is still a choice [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: If I do not choose, that is still a choice. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.48) |
| 3845 | Without God there is no intelligibility or value [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: For the atheist existentialist there disappears with God all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. (Dostoevsky wrote "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"). | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.33) |