complications of choice
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I just stumbled upon this from my friend Angela's blog and the thought that popped into my mind was 'democracy'. Especially the part about "We do not know what we want", because perhaps, we don't know what's good for us.
3 comments:
This is one of the justifications for fascism
I'm not saying I'm for fascism. I'm just saying, we don't know what's good for us and one of the reasons that democracy is probably the worst form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time. (churchill)....
Yeah I think the basic argument for democracy is that you can distill something more profound from consensus than you can from personal opinion. That is to say, the individual doesn't know what he or she wants, but "the people" somehow do.
This assumes that basic goodwill and rationality will prevail in a large enough mass of people, enough to overcome idiosyncrasy and perspective limitations.
I think that as Sartre is questioning this assumption, he also knows that within his own worldview he has no solution to the problem. He has already fundamentally eliminated any kind of "totalizing metanarrative" that might provide some sort of outside guiding perspective for the confused mass. So it ends up being a rather fatalistic and meaningless axiom, because there's an assumed clause that's missing from it, which is fully contained within the word "yet" (implies: unfair, unfair!):
1. We don't know what we want
(2. We can't figure out what we want, or what we need, or what is good)
3. We're still responsible
I agree with what he actually states, but not with the implied #2.
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