The artichoke version of the self

The Artichoke Version Of Self

The Artichoke Version of the Self
Write a 2–3-page paper explaining the artichoke idea of the self. Remember to explain specific theories with supporting citations from the textbook and online lectures. (Here is a guide to help you with APA-style citations .) Free of plagarism. The readings to support the paper is the downloads.
As you develop your response, you might find some of the following questions to be relevant:

What is the existential idea of the self?
What do you make of the feminist, existential, and non-Western critiques of/alternatives to the essentialist/avocado self? Are there any problems with the idea that human beings are fundamentally rational creatures?

Readings

Does Existence Precede Essence? The Existential View The avocado view of Greek rationalism, modern philosophy, and some major monotheistic world religions is based upon the idea that human nature is characterized by a fixed essence such as reason. One way of expressing this view is to say that our essence determines our existence. On the other hand, existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir argue that existence determines essence. In other words, human beings create their essence through their actions. This freedom of self-creation is not wholly unambiguous, however, because human beings are also embodied/situated, intersubjective, historical beings. This corporeal, historical, and cultural context means that we are both free and not free at the same time. In other words, our ability to determine our essence through our existence is ambiguous. For example, I may be free to be a philosophy professor, a parent, and/or a yoga instructor, but I cannot be the King of France in the 17th century or a cat because of the specific temporal and physical situation in which I find myself. This ambiguity causes humans to experience their freedom with a kind of anguish/anxiety. Freedom is both absolute and limited by the freedom of others. Furthermore, humans are both selfdetermining (like God) and determined by forces beyond their control (other people, factual realities, etc.). Sartre and Beauvoir explain this ambiguity in terms of a human being as both a being-in-itself (insofar as we find ourselves and a body and a world over which we do not have complete control) and a being-for-itself (insofar as we are conscious). A Being initself is an object that is not free and cannot determine its essence, like a cup or a fruitfly. Being for-itself is free and selfdetermining, like our idea of how God might be if such a being exists. For Sartre, the intentionality of consciousness is unambiguous, rooted in the unambiguous desire to be, in the sense of to be, like “God,” that impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in—itself. However, our attempts to be God are in bad faith-that is, the longing to be purely “in-itself” beings, to have an essence, is to evade reality, as is our desire to be purely “for-itself” beings (which is an evasion of reality insofar as it ignores our facticity). For Beauvoir, the intentionality of consciousness is ambiguous, the site of a two-folded relationship to Being and a doubled desire—that is to say, it is our desire to be God which makes us human. This desire meets not with failure but with joy: the joy of discovering the ever-changing world around and within us. Human beings are both part of the world and the mere consciousness of the world, both individuals and dependent on the collectivity. Existentialists like Sartre and Beauvoir call this dependence on the affirmation of other people the gaze. We are all capable of gazing upon other people and experiencing them as objects of our gaze, yet when I experience the gaze of an Other on me I experience myself as an Object as well. Thus, the gaze of the Other threatens the security of my self-determined existence. This insecurity causes me anxiety, but can be overcome with authentic attempts to define myself. There are thus a variety of possible responses to this anguish, some of which are more authentic than others. Inauthentic responses to the ambiguity of the human situation are those made in bad faith, whereas authentic responses will be confirmed by other authentic beings and will acknowledge both my factical reality and the responsibility I have to create myself. While human consciousness is largely being for-itself, our facticity limits our freedom and, thus, our ability to be selfdetermining. Other people also limit our ability to be completely self-defining. For instance, I may think I have great athletic prowess, but if I try out for the NBA and am laughed off of the court by the coaches and players, I am not going to be able to sustain my view of myself as an NBA superstar. In short, facticity is the self as perceived by the world, along with my own selfperception as informed by my engagement with other people’s view of me. It is contrasted with transcendence, which is the ability of human beings to go beyond our facticity and be somewhat self-creating. In a sense, human life can be thought of as an ongoing exchange of facticity and transcendence. Since freedom is realized only in its expression, it cannot be said to be the core essence of human beings. Existential freedom is thus a little different from political/social/physical liberty. Sartre’s original formulation of human freedom was that even people in extremely oppressive conditions are free in their minds. In other words, one who has been trafficked and enslaved can still think freely, plot their escape, and so on. Simone de Beauvoir tweaks this approach a bit to suggest that people who are raised in extremely oppressive situations (like children born into slavery or brothels) might not have ever come to experience themselves as free. Even these people, however, can come to see themselves as free in the right situation, so her account is less a negation of free will than a caveat. Thus, we might think of it this way. There are three kinds of people: (1) people who are in a situation that enables them to see themselves as free and who nevertheless choose to act in bad faith and pretend to be determined by external forces (de Beauvoir's example of this is the young American college women she met in the 1940s, who pretended the only option they had was to become a housewife despite the fact that they were attending college); (2) people who are in a situation that enables them to see themselves as free and who choose projects that are affirmed by others and that give their life meaning and purpose (i.e., those who act in good faith, like a woman who chooses to be a stay-at-home Mom because she think

there is value and purpose in nurturing children); and (3) people who are not in a situation that may not enable them to see themselves as free (such as someone born into extreme slavery). If the person in category #3 can be made to see that she is free and nevertheless chooses to engage in self-destructive behavior, we may disagree, and this disagreement with her life choices may make them less meaningful and productive for her, but it does not negate her free will. So perhaps it is more existential to say that we co-create ourselves. Someone can claim to be the greatest basketball player of all time, but if no one else agrees, the project of pretending to be a great athlete is unlikely to be sustainable or to make one’s life a meaningful one.