Sartre and the Rationalization of Human Sexuality Essay

Sartre and the Rationalization of Human Sexuality ABSTRACT: Sartre rationalizes sexuality much like Plato. Rationalization here refers to the way Sartre tries to facilitate explanation by changing the terms of the discussion from sexual to nonsexual concepts. As a philosophy which, above all, highlights those features of human existence which seem most resistant to explanation, one would expect existentialism to highlight sexuality as a category that is crucial for considering human existence. Descartes comes immediately to mind when one focuses on Sartres major categories. In Sartres case however, it is not mind and matter but consciousness and its opposite: nothingness and being. This irreducible dualism is the key to the†¦show more content†¦All reality is either consciousness or non-conscious being. However, this Cartesianism is qualified by a dialectic derived from Hegel and by Hegelian concepts and explicated through a phenomenological method influenced by Husserl. Yet the net effect of Sartres picture of sexuality is surprisingly platonic; it is what Plato might be expected to say if he had published his position after World War II. Sartres philosophy is presented in his major work, Being and Nothingness, subtitled, An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. (1) Hazel Barnes notes in her introduction that Sartre is one of the few philosophers in the twentieth century to produce a complete philosophical system. This system is presented in Being and Nothingness. The terms in the title refer to the two primary constituents of reality: being, which is non-conscious, and the negation of being, which is the way Sartre conceives of consciousness. This consciousness of being is examined by a method called phenomenological, which suggests that no pretension is being made to uncover the ultimate nature of reality in a metaphysics, but that Sartre intends to describe as accurately as possible the structures of reality as it appears. The dichotomy of being and nothingness is a new version of platonic and cartesian dualism with several severe qualifications.Show MoreRelatedCnps 365 Midterm 1 Notes Essay3947 Words   |  16 PagesChapter 4 5 Psychoanalytic Therapy †¢ Sigmund Freud. †¢ Freuds psychoanalytical system = model of personality development, approach to psychotherapy †¢ Often a benchmark used for other theories †¢ Freudian view of human nature = deterministic †¢ Behaviour determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivations 0biological/instinctual drives, evolve through key psycho sexual stages in first 6 years of life †¢ Instincts central †¢ Libido = energy of all life instincts †¢ Libido, source of motivationRead MoreFrom Salvation to Self-Realization18515 Words   |  75 PagesConsumption: Critical Essays in American History, 18801980, ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, New York: Pantheon Books, 1-38. Reprinted with the permission of the author. 1On or about December 1910, Virginia Woolf once said, human character changed. This hyperbole contains a kernel of truth. Around the turn of the century a fundamental cultural transformation occurred within the educated strata of Western capitalist nations. In the United States as elsewhere, the bourgeois