Hooshmand asked:

Could you please tell me what is the meaning of Sartre saying:”freedom alone can account for a person in his totality”?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

I had to do a search in Google for your Sartre quote which apparently is in a work by Jean Paul Sartre that I have not read: his biography of Jean Genet, Saint Genet. (David Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’ according to Wikipedia.)

Now, I could borrow or buy the book and read it and then give you an answer, but you might be waiting rather a long time. As I have read other books by Sartre, including Being and Nothingness that will have to do.

It seems to me that I understand what Sartre meant and I think I agree with it. Let’s take a topic that might have interested Sartre: Adolf Hitler. The accepted view is that Hitler was an evil man. He hated the Jews and wanted the Jewish people to be gone, permanently, and was willing to resort to mass murder to achieve his objective.

Biographies of Hitler try to explain the particular circumstances in which Hitler formed his beliefs and attitudes — the circumstances that ‘made’ him the monster that he was, et cetera. What would Sartre say about that? Impossible. It cannot be true that Hitler was ‘made’ because each person — as a ‘totality’ — makes him or herself.

It’s true that we can take a partial view, where we view an individual person as merely an example of a ‘type’. Statistics don’t always lie. Like who was most likely to vote for Brexit, who was most likely to vote against. But it is also a truism that individuals don’t always conform to type, and each person is uniquely different.

An individual can either act ‘authentically’ or in ‘bad faith’. Either way, that is something that person has freely (but not always with fully self-conscious knowledge) chosen to do.

But how can someone who is not intrinsically evil or mentally deformed in some way choose evil? Surely, there is something intrinsically wrong with you if you prefer evil, if you find it attractive as an option. What is good about evil, is the question one has to ask. Feeding Christians to the lions is good for entertainment (if you happen to not like Christians), reduces the number of Christians and also takes care of the lions.

Anyone, and I mean absolutely anyone, can knowingly commit an evil act. Pick your favourite hero or saint, it makes no difference. Take Mahatma Gandhi at the age of 18. He still has most of his life choices ahead of him, choices that will make it more and more difficult (but still not impossible) to choose evil over good. But, at 18, he is still half-formed, there is a wide range of alternative possible lives. I don’t think it would be too difficult to write a novel in which Mahatma Gandhi took the place of Hitler as a dictator intent on world conquest.

Gandhi notoriously argued that the British should not attempt to oppose Hitler because the way of violence can never be right. With the passage of time, evil dictators and empires pass. Some would argue that that view — the doctrine of passive resistance — is evil because it permits evil to flourish. I wouldn’t say that. The point is that Gandhi knew perfectly well what would happen as a result of allowing Hitler to triumph and made the mental calculation that the cost was acceptable, in order to uphold a principle.

Make of that what you will.

Trisha asked:

What is the question?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

My first impulse was to take a swipe at this, which on the face of it doesn’t look a lot different from, ‘Is this a question?’ which we get asked with boring regularity. (‘If this is an answer,’ is one response.)

There is something which is the question. For whom? What is the question for me? for you? No. For everybody — even if they don’t know this. There is ultimately only one question, and that question is…

Let’s consider some candidates for ‘the’ question:

— How can I find love?

— How can I attain eternal salvation?

— How can the human race end suffering and achieve world peace?

(OK, those are two questions but they usually go together.)

— What is the answer to the question of the Universe, Life and Everything?

(Douglas Adams humorously makes the point in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that we can’t know what an answer to that question means until we know what that question actually is.)

I am bored of eager proselytizers trying to convince you that their question is ‘the’ question. It’s a disease. An epidemic. It’s one of the aspects of human frailty that we manage to con ourselves into thinking that there is just one thing which is in question. As if, if only we know the answer, all problems would be solved, everything would be wonderful, etc. etc.

If you want to know what drives you, get psychoanalyzed. Then you will learn that what you really want is to kill your father and make love to your mother, or own a penis, or some such nonsense.

Human nature is complex. The things that move us, the things we find puzzling, or gripping, or exciting can be many and various.

As a heuristic, it can be useful to ask, when you are faced with a complex problem, ‘What is the question?’ It’s a way of focusing your inquiry and being methodical. You attack the weakest point, tease out the piece of loose string or cotton that allows the rest to unravel. Then you will likely discover that the first question you asked wasn’t the question you were really after.

One question leads to another.

‘The’ question does not exist.

Canton asked:

How does Socrates force Callicles to admit that there are ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

Thank you for this question, Canton. I was getting a bit tired of seeing ‘EU Referendum’ stuck at the top of the page.

This is a typical philosophy instructor’s question. You’ve been given Plato’s dialogue Gorgias to read. I did this as a first-year undergraduate and it blew my mind. This is the dialogue to read if you are looking for inspiration to choose philosophy as a career!

Ah well, I’m guessing that you feel less than inspired. In fact, I would go further and say that there’s a good chance that you haven’t even opened the book? Right? (I do hope that your instructor made you read the original text and not some watered-down summary.)

You wouldn’t be asking this question if you had, because you would know. Unless, having read the dialogue, you still don’t get Socrates’ case against Callicles. That would be sad. I’m not going to make things easy for you, why should I? We’re not here to pamper and please. (Does that statement sound familiar? who said it?)

This is philosophy. Take a view X. Look at the consequences of X and decide whether they hold up, logically or conceptually or in some other way. If they do not then X must be false. That’s one of the most basic argument forms in philosophy: reductio ad absurdum.

With me so far, Canton?

Callicles has a view about pleasure. What is it? If you don’t know what it is, stop right there because there is no point in going any further.

All right, I’ll give a hint. Callicles (along with a lot of other people, and a lot of them unfortunately are reading this) thinks that pleasure is a good thing. The best. The ultimate. You can’t have too much of a good thing. If you eat too much candy you will be sick and then you will feel sorry. So there’s a limit to how much candy you can eat. The pleasure turns to pain. But if something is pleasurable, and doesn’t turn to pain, if it just carries on being pleasure, then there’s no limit.

And it doesn’t matter what gives you the pleasure. That’s the other thing Callicles believes. Pleasure is pleasure. All  that matters is the intensity — how pleasing it is. If you enjoy squashing beetles (remembering an early episode of Game of Thrones when Tyrion gives some insight into his early family life) then the more beetles you squash, the more pleasure you will get. In fact, you would be perfectly happy — nothing could improve your state of happiness/ pleasure — if you just spent your whole life squashing beetles, while you were fed intravenously and had various other bodily functions taken care of.

This is basically Socrates’ argumentative strategy against Callicles, although he doesn’t give the example of beetles (and Game of Thrones didn’t exist then, or maybe it did?).

What Socrates is asking you to do is look at the life that has been described and form an attitude about it. This attitude isn’t intrinsically moralistic, but rather based on your ability to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ different kinds of life. You wouldn’t want to be that person, would you?

In that case… what?

You fill in the dots (and give the relevant examples from the text). I’m not writing your essay for you!