#facticity

[philosophybits]

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity, and the sub-man feels only the facticity of his existence. Instead of aggrandizing the reign of the human, he opposes his inert resistance to the projects of other men. No project has meaning in the world disclosed by such an existence. Man is defined as a wild flight. The world about him is bare and incoherent. Nothing ever happens; nothing merits desire or effort. The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirms his long negation of himself.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

[patrickbrianmooney]

'Oh, the past. The God-damned past. It isn't so great. Just a dead thing.' She shakes her head. 'Our past is never dead. Do you know Sartre's work?' 'No.' 'A shame. He can be a big help to we who live so long. For instance, in several places he suggests that there are two ways of looking at the past. You can think of it as something dead and fixed forever; it's part of you, but you can't change it, and you can't change what it means. In that case your past limits or even controls what you can be. But Sartre doesn't agree with that way of looking at it. He says that the past is constantly altered by what we do int he present moment. The meaning of the past is as fluid as our freedom in the present, because every new act that we commit can revalue the entire thing!' Roger humphs. 'Existentialism.' 'Well, whatever you want to call it. It's part of Sartre's philosophy of freedom, for sure. He says that the only way we can possess our past—whether we can remember it or not, I say—is to add new acts to it, which then give it a new value. He calls this "assuming" our past.' 'But sometimes this may not be possible.' 'Not for Sartre. The past is always assumed, because we are not free to stop creating new values for it. It's just a question of what those values will be. For Sartre it's a question of how you will assume your past, not whether you will.'

Kim Stanley Robinson, "Green Mars" in The Martians

[thehumanfront]

I am language. By the sole fact that whatever I may do, my acts freely conceived and executed, my projects launched towards my possibilities have outside of them a meaning which escapes me and which I experience. It is in this sense—and in this sense only—that Heidegger is right in declaring that I am what I say.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness 

Language is a sacred gift with magical consequences, says Jean-Paul Sartre. In language I express myself to myself, even though I cause you to experience something else.

Read more here.

[athousandgateaux]

if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied forth the framework of the world or illumined it through and through, I should once more prove unfaithful to my experience of the world, and should be looking for what makes that experience possible instead of looking for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodeictic self-evidence. The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. 'There is a world,' or rather: 'There is the world'; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life. This facticity of the world is...what causes the world to be the world; just as the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but rather what assures me of my existence...It is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed -- and the world as this pre-objective individual whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal...Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us, is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only place it once more before our eyes and present it for our ratification.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Colin Smith), pg. xvii-xviii.

[astranemus]

...the belief that scientific models correspond to how things truly are doesn’t follow from the scientific method. Instead, it comes from an ancient impulse – one often found in monotheistic religions – to know the world as it is in itself, as God does. The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific. Recent philosophers of science who target such ‘naive realism’ argue that science doesn’t culminate in a single picture of a theory-independent world. Rather, various aspects of the world – from chemical interactions to the growth and development of organisms, brain dynamics and social interactions – can be more or less successfully described by partial models. These models are always bound to our observations and actions, and circumscribed in their application.

The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience

[isomorphismes]

Over the years, as I laboured on this book, the dispassionate compassion of Buddha had seemed to me the perfect ideal for students of history, though of course we would all fail disgracefully to live up to it, as the passions of our lives and the furies of our age knead and rework us continually on the slow wheel of time. As time reworks us, we rework history. “All works of [historiography] are interim reports,” said John Noble Wilford. “What people did in the past is not preserved in amber…. Each generation looks back and, drawing from its own experience, presumes to find patterns that illuminate both past and present.” The past [or what remains of it] is nearly as alive as the present, and it changes as the present changes, the historical past as much as our personal past. … [T]he way facts interlock is unique to each generation, indeed to each historian. …[T]he value of [historiography] depends on the felicitous catalysis of the personal vision into a universal vision. It is essentially a triumph of art.

Abraham Eraly, the Mughal Throne: saga of India’s great emperors

[monasticcellphone]

Freedom exists amongst barriers. A totality of barriers and a totality of freedom, alike, are 'no-game conditions.' Each is similarly cruel. Each is similarly purposeless. Great revolutionary movements fail. They promise unlimited freedom. That is the road to failure. Only stupid visionaries chant of endless freedom. Only the afraid and ignorant speak of and insist upon unlimited barriers.

LRH, The Fundamentals of Thought

[celestialnocturnes]

reflections on the 21st

According to Sartre, the human being has double properties - facticity and transcendence. An individual can only achieve true authenticity when these properties begin to co-exist. Our inherent freedom allows us to go beyond our current situations and upon the denial of either property comes bad faith.

Worry not, for this is not going to be a philosophical lecture. I don't think I'm a reliable person to do so. I, however, am going to ponder on this curious philosophical perspective.

Having reached the unfortunate (just kidding) of 21 a week ago, I realized how far I've already been in the journey of life. I wonder if the infant born in a meek house in her hometown were aware of the things she was capable of. I guess one thing didn't change — she's still a crybaby.

My facticity defines me by my apparent physical properties, but going beyond that, I think I've always been a girl full of inhibitions (no pun intended.) For one, my peers would always see me as one with the softest personality — one that can't ever hurt other's emotions nor dare try things outside the limits of the said trait. My family, childhood friends, and certain teachers would see me as someone crazily smart. It's so easy, especially for the former, to dismiss my struggles in college because they believe I can manage. The thing is, even if I did, I don't think I'm as intelligent as they think.

How I see myself actually changes depending on the situation and my mood. I am confident to say, though, that my self-esteem has significantly improved. My teenage self lacked self-confidence, but once you get exposed to the world of tertiary education, confidence will be your weapon against the endless failures you will get. I also think this comes from taking responsibilities outside academics and realizing that my capabilities are not merely defined by the numbers on my transcript.

I realized that I should be open myself to more things and broaden my horizons. And I did. It's not as easy as I thought, though.

I've had my share of triumphs and mistakes, the latter being what bothers me the most from time to time. Sometimes, it still scares me that I am stepping outside my comfort zone, sometimes even surprising the people who know me the most. At times, I tend to question who I really am, but is there really an answer to that? If I limit my answer to my current and has-been version of myself, will it do justice for the parts of me that I am still yet to know? If I get swayed by my fear of transcendence, I will become a stranger to myself. If I do not embrace all of me, the good and the bad, I will live a life full of fear and inhibitions.

Freedom, despite its good and attractive premise, can be at times scary. Upon our daily transcendence, we are making use of this freedom to discover our authentic selves. I don't think my facticity and transcendence are going 100% harmonious with each other yet, but here's to taking one step at a time and embracing my being in-itself and for-itself.