12 pages

Study+Guide+Outlines+Marx+_+Sartre+2015.doc

MARX Study Guide

Class #22: Lawrence H. Simon, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett, 1994),

1. According to Marx, human beings, like animals, live by nature. Show how human life is like animal life in the way it uses nature, and unlike it in being more universal. What does Marx mean when he says that this makes nature the "inorganic" body of humankind?

2. Analyze the structure of human work and explain how this distinguishes human life from animal life.

3. What does Marx mean when he says that humans make their own life an object of consciousness and will? Explain how “objectification” belongs to conscious life.

4. Explain how consciousness makes human work a free activity.

5. Explain how Marx demonstrates that human beings are social beings.

Marx Lecture Outline

A. Species Being: the essence of human beings ( Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (pp. 62-64); Capital, Vol. One (pp. 274-75)

1. nature: humanity's inorganic body

2. the structure of work

3. consciousness

4. human freedom

4. species being

B. The Social Character of Human Beings (pp. 45-46, 52-53, 72)

1. the individual/social character of work

2. distinguished from the alienation of private property production

3. individuality rooted in the shared life of the whole

4. only common life can humanize nature

SARTRE Study Guide

Class #23: Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp.lx-lxii, 4-12, 21-28.

1. Describe the structure of questioning.

a. Identify in this structure the different facets of consciousness developed in the ontological proof.

b. What does questioning add to the structure of consciousness developed in the ontological proof?

2. seq level1 \h \r0 Explain the difficulties involved in claiming that the negative really exists.

. a. Describe the experience of questioning and show how in this experience we have an intuition of non-being. Use an experience like not finding Pierre in the cafe or in his room. Apply the same observations to the experience of "destruction" or "only."

b. The experience of the negative involves not only the experience of non-being in the object questioned but also the experience of non-being in the one who questions. Explain.

3. Explain the difficulties involved in finding the origin of a real nothingness.

. c. Identify the condition that makes questioning possible?

d. Explain Sartre's argument proving that questioning would be impossible without this condition.

e. Explain how the answers to a and b prove that nothingness must have its origin in human beings.

4. seq level1 \h \r0 If human beings are the origin of nothingness in being, what kind of being must they be? The answer to this question reveals what Sartre means by freedom

SARTRE (Outline)PRIVATE

Text: Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (Special Abridged Edition).

I. THE ONTOLOGICAL PROOF (pp. lx-lxii)

A. Consciousness of something

1. consciousness related to what is not consciousness

2. reveals a plenitude

B. Consciousness cannot be the source of the plenitude

1. consciousness has no content of its own

2. the plenitude cannot be reduced to its negative status as not-consciousness

3. transcendent, trans-phenomenal being

4. even self-consciousness requires a plenitude

C. Abstract vs Concrete (the dialectical), (p. 3)

II. HUMAN BEING-IN-THE-WORLD (pp. 4-5)

A. Phenomenology (p. 4)

1. begins within our consciousness of the world

2. objective, not subjective

B. Questioning (pp.4-5)

1. the question we are asking: 'Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man with the world?'

2. the attitude of questioning itself gives us a beginning

3. the structure of questioning

4 expectation

5 assumes the possibility of a yes or no answer

6 an attitude we live in our dealings with the world outside ourselves

C The Negative (pp. 9-11)

1. the problem

a. the possibility of questioning depends on the real possibility of a no answer

b. how can something which simply is what it is reveal itself in terms of what it is not?

2. Pierre is not in the café (pp. 9-10)

a. being: simply is what it is

b. expectation makes non-being appear

c. is this just putting together two positives?

d. both positives must be questioned (p. 26)

III. FREEDOM

A. Questioning Is Uncaused (pp. 23-27)

1. the causal order is positive

a. the order of things in the world

b. the order of psychic events

2. questioning disengages us from the causal order

B. Human Being Is Freedom (pp. 24, 25, 28)

1. what is freedom: being in a questioning relation to being (p. 24)

2. freedom as what human being is (p. 24,. 25)

3. existentialism (p. 25, see also pp. 34-35)

a. existence, i.e. being in the world

b. precedes essence, i.e.what human beings are

c. essence is suspended in freedom

4. transcendental-phenomenological proof of human freedom

a procedure (p. 25)

(1) phenomenological starting point: the experience of questioning

(2) transcendental procedure: what condition is necessary to account for the possibility of questioning

b the steps of the argument (p. 28)

listnum "WP List 0" \l 5 questioning presupposes the possibility of real negation

listnum "WP List 0" \l 5 this possibility depends on our being able to detach ourselves from the way things are

listnum "WP List 0" \l 5 and this detachment is what we mean by freedom