David Morris | Philosophy and Existentialism: Freedom, Existence, and Existentialism as a Philosophy for Today

Philosophy takes up fundamental questions and probes the conceptual underpinnings of our thinking about the world, human affairs, ethics, science, and more. Studying philosophy exercises and improves your ability to analyze texts, arguments, and concepts, and communicate complex points with clarity and precision. A degree in philosophy gives you training that can help you tackle problems in a surprising range of areas. As an added benefit, studying philosophy helps you ‘AI-proof’ yourself.

But philosophy also provides important insights into enduring questions and concerns that haunt us today. I’ll illustrate this by speaking about existentialism, as it developed in France, in the period during and after World War II, in the work of figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon. My focus is on two key points in Sartre’s public lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism,” given to an overflow audience at the Club Maintenant on 29 October 1945.

The first is his conceptual distinction between essence and existence. This distinguishes between entities like staplers, which are built and stamped out according to a formula for what they must be by definition, and beings like ourselves who, in principle, must choose what we are to be. On the one hand, the underlying point here is quite familiar to us today: it might look like I define myself or am defined by the way I appear in my social media profile, as essentially this or that. But is that all I am? On the other hand, this point is quite radical in its implications: at best I can say of myself that I am to-be a professor. It’s something that I keep choosing to-be, not something that defines me once and for all.

Second, Sartre’s claim that our existence as a freedom is more fundamental than any essentializing formula means that we have to choose everything for ourselves. There is no fixed recipe we can rely on. This could look like an unruly, unlicensed, nihilist or self-centred position. Yet, paradoxically, Sartre argues that “when I choose, I choose for all humanity.” There is a deeply important point about responsibility and the way that my own freedom impacts upon and is inseparable from the freedom of others that Beauvoir develops. And that offers important lessons for today.

After the presentation and questions on existentialism, I’ll give a very brief overview of our undergraduate programs in philosophy.

This introductory lecture in Philosophy is part of Concordia's Open House.