Back at the S(t)artre

            Of the three philosophers that we studied for the symposium this week, I agreed most with Sartre. Sartre believed that humans were subjective and objects were objective. Objects have facticity only, but subjects have facticity and they are transcendable. This means, subjects not only are what they are, but they have the freedom to change what they are too. Sartre uses a waiter to be an example. This specific waiter dislikes their job very much. They do not want to quit because they need the money from the job to keep them alive. This waiter feels as if they are trapped in this situation. Sartre says that they are not trapped though. They are basically lying to themselves because they could quit and find another job if they wanted. Sartre says they are free to choose.

            Sartre also says that humans have no aspect in their life that they are un-free. For example, there are millions of starving people in the world. Sartre basically says that you are responsible for this. Yes you didn’t cause this, but you are choosing not to do something about it. Sartre says that even though it may be hard to do, we are choosing to let them starve. I do not really agree with this because it is a bit over exaggerated to say this. According to this philosophy, Sartre would also feel that it was up to Americans to have stopped 9/11 from happening. When in reality, there was no way we could have known this terrible terrorist attack was going to happen. Therefore, there is no possible way we could have stopped it from happening if we had information. We were not free to choose whether or not 9/11 would have happened. Yes, we are free to change almost any aspect of our day-to-day lives, but we cannot necessarily change anything in the world from happening.