Existentialism and suicide link? Everyone( believers, philosophy lovers)read on.?

Question

"Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is, therefore, nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life". - Sartre

If everything is indeed planned, why bother? Now, you ask, what makes me think everything is planned? well, i i happen to believe that everyone is the result of his genes and environment. Man has no control over either. Where is free will then?( soul?) Furthermore, can you really delude yourself with hedonism and pretend that this is the point of life, to live and experience it( from an invisible prison cell, i might add, as you will only experience what you "can"( genes, environment restrict you))
I dont know about you, but this makes me feel like a damn machine, or a robot.

Answer 1

The question of free will took its worst beating back in the hedays of Newtonian thinking when scientists were convinced that there was little left to discover! ( honorable mention to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler,Bacon, etc.).

Everything could be explained, predicted and determined. The physical world was considered hierarchical, structured in ever-descending units of analysis: compounds/molecules/atoms, etc.

And we saw the unraveling of our raison d'etre- the disallusionment with three centuries of Western thinking. Existentialism was an inevitably hard but honest, slap in the face.

BUT there is a new way of seeing the world- a paradigm shift that no one fully understands. But what we do know is that our basic assumptions about our world are wrong.

What we are learning comes from different fields- relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos-and complexity theory, new theories of the mind.

In a nutshell, there is no real cause and effect. Everything is a wave of probability. Acausality, observer participation, holism, nonlinerity are all are the modern day insights that basically tell us that nothing is determined. The very fabric of our existence precludes us from being able to simply respond to our genes or environment.

In many ways what becomes reality is what we choose to observe and what we choose to observe, is a roll of the dice, always changing, always emerging, in ways that can not be controlled or predicted whether we like it or not.

I think when we begin to really understand this, we will probably yearn for the days when we could simply feel like a robot.

Answer 2

Maybe for a small, minimal amount of your life you are nothing but what outside forces have made you but then eventually you grow strong enough to make a choice, and that's when you separate yourself from "some mindless thing". Afterwards, a person can tell you to do something but you don't have to do it, God (if you believe in him) could tell you to do someting and still, you wouldn't have to do it (he did give you free will, didn't he? I can't remember) And environment could DEMAND that you be something, behave some way, and you DO NOT have to listen. There are always options. Say no. Run away. Suicide, even. Our freedom lies in our ability to make a choice. I don't believe everything is planned because if it were, there'd be a way to go against that plan. In a plan where nothing can go wrong because anything is expected you lose the essence of there actually being a plan, because if anything is possible then there can't be any determined outcome, which is what a plan is supposed to be for. Does that make sense?

Answer 3

I believe that although your genes and environment play a large effect on your life - they don't control your life. They may play a big role in what kind of job you have or where you go to school but you decide whether you enjoy that job and whether you put in 100% or slack off everyday. You temperment and your personality is determined before you are born and there are no genes that are linked to this phenomenon. You are more than your acts or your wants or desires - you are what you make of your achievements, your soul determines whether you will rise after a traumatic experience or whether you will fall - not your birth or breeding. It is these experiences that make us who we are

Answer 4

perhaps what he is getting at is that each person is responsible for creating their own plan....in which case there is a lot of free will to create this plan which in the end will define who he is and who he has become in the process of living. the assumption you make is that without free will there is only hedonism. we are all prisoners to life sitting in our cells and we all have keys to get out it is just that some choose to sit on them.

Answer 5

I think as an athiest existentialist thought could make scuicide easier. like an affirmation of nothingness, no divine punishment ect ect...as a christian existentialist (or most 'spiritual' existentialists) it makes scuicide look like a joke, a mistake. If everything was planned then you finding that out and your reaction to that information is planned, or, maybe there is a little give in the fences of the mind?

Answer 6

Can you decide whether you want to go exercise now or not? There may be hormones that don't want you to and you may live in an environment that makes it hard, but you ultimately make that decision.

And as far as suicide - it's always possible you could be wrong. Infact it's highly likely you don't know everything there is to know about this world. So live life to find out things you don't know and never thought of.

Answer 7

You are a prisoner of your own mind. The Judgment is negative, the Will is positive, but your Judgment now rules. Further, you have misinterpreted Sartre in this quote, which the quote, in its self, says nothing.

Answer 8

untill I discovered weed,whiskey and women, I thought like you. Yes, hedonism, but it gives you time to think, and a not so foolish reason to keep going on until you discover some answers that work for you

Answer 9

I completely agree with your line of reasoning. Now if only I can fine a loaded revolver.

Answer 10

Perhaps it's like a movie, you don't know what's going to happen next, so isn't it worth waiting for?