Existentialism
这里记一些网络上的关于存在主义的公认的论断，来补全此前不成熟，模糊的印象。以后再读原著。
疑惑：
科学网—“哥德尔不完备定理”到底说了些什么？——（一） - 赵昊彤的博文 (sciencenet.cn)
古德斯坦定理
现象学
萨特的理论在什么程度上否认了形而上学
以下大部分皆为引用：
Some scholars argue that the term should be used only to refer to the cultural movement in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s associated with the works of the philosophers Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus.[6] Others extend the term to Kierkegaard, and yet others extend it as far back as Socrates.[17] However, it is often identified with the philosophical views of Sartre.[6]
Sartre argued that a central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which is to say that individuals shape themselves by existing and cannot be perceived through preconceived and a-priori categories, an “essence”. The actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called their “true essence” instead of an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life.[24] This view is in contradiction to Aristotle and Aquinas who taught that essence precedes individual existence.[citation needed] Although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger, and Kierkegaard.
Opposition to positivism and rationalism
See also: Positivism and Rationalism
Existentialists oppose defining human beings as primarily rational, and, therefore, oppose both positivism and rationalism. Existentialism asserts that people make decisions based on subjective meaning rather than pure rationality. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical free will and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard advocated rationality as a means to interact with the objective world (e.g., in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient: “Human reason has boundaries”.[50]
Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of “bad faith”, an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena—“the Other”—that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserted, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by “the Look” of “the Other” (i.e., possessed by another person—or at least one’s idea of that other person).[51]
Criticisms[edit]
General criticisms[edit]
Walter Kaufmann criticized “the profoundly unsound methods and the dangerous contempt for reason that have been so prominent in existentialism.”[111] Logical positivist philosophers, such as Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer, assert that existentialists are often confused about the verb “to be” in their analyses of “being”.[112] Specifically, they argue that the verb “is” is transitive and pre-fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is red) (without a predicate, the word “is” is meaningless), and that existentialists frequently misuse the term in this manner. Wilson has stated in his book The Angry Years that existentialism has created many of its own difficulties: “we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole”.[113]
Sartre’s philosophy[edit]
Many critics argue Sartre’s philosophy is contradictory. Specifically, they argue that Sartre makes metaphysical arguments despite his claiming that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse criticized Being and Nothingness for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself: “Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory”.[114]
In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre’s existentialism:
Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato’s time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.[115]