Sartre and the Rationalization of Human Sexuality Essay -- Philosophy

Sartre and the Rationalization of Human chargeualityABSTRACT Sartre rationalizes sexuality a good deal 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 whole, highlights those features of sympathetic existence which seem most revolting 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 just now consciousness and its opposite nothingness and being. This irreducible dualism is the key to the trouble human beings have with existence. Humans try to deal with the tensions implied by this dualism by stressful to pretend people are not subjects but aims. Sartre calls this bad religious belief. He begins by attempting to take h uman sexuality seriously as a fundamental category, but ends by abandoning the effort in favor of new(prenominal) substitutes. Akin to Plato in his rationalization of sexuality is Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre is probably the end of existentialist philosopher philosophy in two senses in the first place in the sense of extending existentialist premises as far as they rotter be taken, and in the second place in the sense of dowery as the canonical example of existentialist thought.Since existentialism is the philosophy above all other philosophies which takes seriously the concrete existence of a human in all of its facticity, anxiety, temporality, and fleshliness, and will place this existence before all decisions about essence, it would seem that above all others we can expect from Sartre a philosop... ...y important in sexuality. This is bad faith in reverse, the treating of objectivities as though subjective. On the other hand, the For-itself is too much bound or enwrapped to abs tract categories. Is sexuality really a dialectic of subject and object? It is this, but is it only this? These broad categories cover all cosmic relationships. Sex disappears into an abstraction. Wherein lies the distinguishing difference of sexuality and what difference does this make? These considerations are nowhere in Sartre.This is Sartres sexuality, a bloodless and a passionless dance of the categories.Notes(1) Translated and with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes and published by Philosophical Library, New York, 1956. Page metrical composition placed in parentheses in the text refer to this edition.(2) Sartre illustrates bad faith with a sexual illustration. See pages 55-56.