Well, after having acquainted ourselves with the main philosophical concerns with which
Sartre was preoccupied and the main lines of response that he hammered out with respect
to these concerns, I want to look now at the way in which Sartre's existentialism impacted
a kind of popular philosophy of life or gave rise to a philosophy of life that impacted
the mid-to-late 20th century, and which I think we're all familiar with in especially
some of its popular expressions. To do that I want to use as pivot points a couple of
Sartre's core concepts, the concepts in particular of radical freedom and responsibility and
the allied notions of authenticity and bad faith. So with respect to the questions of
radical freedom and personal responsibility, remember that according to Sartre, the concrete
existence of the human individual precedes their essence. So what that means is that
there is no ultimate stable or permanent human nature that comes before or guides or informs
the individual existence of a human being. Rather, what the essence of any human being
is is going to be a function of their own radical choice, a choice at the root to become
the sort of person that they wish to be. This brings with it, of course, a an unavoidable
personal responsibility for who you are, and it undergirds that notion of the importance,
the significance of the person's choices with respect to their life projects, their ultimate
values and ultimate concerns.
All right, so how do these notions of radical freedom and personal responsibility relate
to the ideas of authenticity and of bad faith? Well, suppose that you were to allow societal
external mores or values to decide for you, to determine for you what your life form or
what your life projects or own personal value should be. In that kind of case you're living
in an inauthentic mode, living an inauthentic mode of existence in the sense that you have
allowed something else, something external to you to play the role that only you can
play, as a kind of self-creator or an originator of your own meaning. Remember because there
is no transcendent, ultimate meaning deriving from human nature or the ordinance of God,
the only way meaning comes about or purpose can be derived in an individual life is through
this exercise of radical free choice. Any external constraints are then going to be
superimposed upon the individual person and are going to be illegitimate to the extent
that they try to remove from the person what only the person is able to do for themselves
in this exercise of radical choice. And so you can see in a in a couple ways, you can
see relations to philosophers that we've studied before. There are definite Marxist overtones
here because the idea of a sort of corruptive external power that illegitimately attempts
to take away the freedom of individual expression for their own personal reasons or personal
goals given that they are in this position of power again has the kind of Marxist overlay
that we've come to expect in this kind of Sartrean milieu.
In addition to that, there is the notion that we picked up from Rousseau, the notion of
the noble savage. So you remember on this sort of picture, the human individual is by
nature good, lives according to the state of nature in a kind of noble, uncorrupted
way. And society, and in particular Western society, Western civilization, Western culture
has a corruptive influence so that the human individual who begins good, unbounded, and
free, ready to take on and to exhibit their own self-expression according to their own
radically free choices is then inhibited in morally sort of monstrous ways by these external
forces. You can certainly see how this this cluster, this sort of melting pot of philosophical
ideas came to fruition again in the 50s and 60s and influenced generations of artists,
influenced literature, and influenced popular culture. Many of the what were at the beginning
sort of radical philosophical notions that I've been discussing just now seem or have
the air of being almost platitudinous, you know, very very common and particularly common
themes in art, in literature, and in popular thought. But what can we say about them? You
know, we've we've we've traced a sort of mini philosophical ancestry here. We've noticed
how some of these modern ideas have cropped up in popular culture. How are we to assess
or to evaluate them? What should we say about their truth?
Well, there's a couple of critical reactions to Sartre's existentialism but more particularly
the kind of popular expression of it that I've been describing, which I want to discuss.
There's a an empirical and broadly scientific reaction, and there's also a more straightforwardly
philosophical or sociological reaction as well. Here I want to focus principally on
the the empirical, broadly scientific reaction that we get from the body of work called evolutionary
psychology. So the main tenants of evolutionary psychology are pretty easy to follow and outline.
The basic idea is that owing to our shared evolutionary history, there are a number of
psychological components or functions that have adaptive uses and that pick up the functions
that they have in contemporary life and culture by way of their adaptive history. So these
psychological functions or mechanisms have an evolutionary story behind them. They're
multifaceted. They're complex. They're tailored to different specific situations, and again
they, given our shared evolutionary history, are going to lead us to expect that there
is going to be some degree of stability in human nature across the board.
So, you know, going back again in time a little bit to the 50s, 60s, what we find there is
a number of works given to us by cultural anthropologists, works which were generated
within this kind of milieu, which was influenced by notions of radical freedom, you know, the
noble savage and so forth. And these works, particularly and most infamously the works
of Margaret Mead, tended to bolster these ideas of the noble savage, bolster the idea
that the the human individual is a sort of blank slate, infinitely malleable, and human
culture is not the expression of a kind of permanent or universal human nature expressing
itself in outward behavior or social cohesion or whatever it is, but rather it is something
that is artificial and impresses itself upon the blank slate which is the human being.
So many of these studies in cultural anthropology tended to bolster the idea, the myth of the
noble savage to reinforce and support the notion that the human person is infinitely
malleable, not possessed of any kind of permanent or universal human nature, and that human
culture impresses itself upon this blank slate, sometimes to ill effect. So, you know, in
some of these reports what you'd, what you'd read about are these exotic tribes, you know,
island dwellers where the very notions, the concepts of of jealousy, of avarice, of unhealthy
competition were simply unknown to them. You know, we'd read stories about cultures, tribes,
people groups in which the so-called traditional gender roles were reversed. Women were in
charge. The men possessed sort of effeminate virtues and played a kind of submissive role
to the females within the tribe. You know, the the the people being studied and reported
on were again and again presented as being sort of in harmony with one another, in harmony
with themselves, in harmony with nature. And that I suppose is to be expected given that
they were far removed from the corruptive and insidious influences of Western civilization,
Western culture.
Well, of course, notoriously, further investigation gave the lie to these reports. It turned out
that these tribes, these exotic people groups that had been reported upon turned out to
live in ways that were quite recognizably Western civilization oriented, in the sense
that they displayed the same corruptive practices. They displayed the same sort of corruptive
influences with respect to jealousy, avarice, competition, gender roles, and so forth that
the cultural anthropologists had identified as being Western and had decried. So you know,
this gave fodder for the early opponents of the view that there really wasn't such a thing
as human biological nature. It gave fodder in particular to the budding science of evolutionary
psychology, which wanted to say that we should empirically expect to see much more in the
way of commonality across the board, across people groups, given our evolutionary history
than what some of these cultural anthropological reports had been saying that they found. And
so this itself, you know, the sort of the the undermining of this kind of quixotic,
romantic vision given by the cultural anthropologists, and it's giving way to a little bit of a more
hard-nosed evolutionary psychological framework.
This itself tends to undermine the kind of Sartrean inspired philosophy of radical freedom,
which remember derives from the idea that there isn't any kind of stable or universal
human nature that imposes itself and and imposes constraints upon the sorts of choices that
we might make. You know, this itself does is not a death blow to the view that there
is no such thing as human nature, that we create our own meaning by way of our own free
choices and so forth. I mean, for for one thing, you know, evolutionary psychology has
critics of its own. It's it's a young and controversial science, but even to the extent
that these conclusions concerning human nature are justified and justifiable, even to that
extent, evolutionary psychology does not offer a sort of return to the very robust metaphysical
biology of an Aristotle, for example. I mean to say that there is some kind of biological
essence of humanity grounded in the contingent facts of shared evolutionary history is not
the same thing as postulating a kind of substantial form or an essence to human nature in the
way that Aristotle had in mind. And it certainly doesn't bring with it the very robust notion
of purpose, of goal directedness, and of meaning and with it the ideas of human flourishing
and the good life and so forth that we get from Aristotle's sort of philosophical biology.
Nevertheless, it does present a sort of important obstacle to those who wish to maintain a kind
of Sartrean position, which says that human beings are able somehow to, you know, pull
themselves up by their hair from the swamps of nothingness, create for themselves meaning
and value in a way that's unconstrained by external constraints or forces or structures.
You know, this sort of idea is an idea that anyone who is concerned with the notion of
human nature and of human destiny is going to have to confront.