I’d like to be able to say that I’m reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Basic Writings for my own pleasure, therefore, making me sound deep and enlightened. But alas, I’m reading it for a class (Black Existentialism) so I don’t get to collect any extra cool points along the way.

When I first began this book, my initial impression was that this philosophy shouldn’t be called Existentialism, but instead Pretentiousramblingism. Seriously – Sartre talks in circles 90% of the time and the other 10% of the work seemed to contradict the stuff that actually made sense to me. But as I slowly started deconstructing what I was reading, it all began to click into place. I get it.

For example, the biggest belief existentialists from Sartre’s school of thought tout is that all human beings have the freedom to make their own choices in life. From freedom comes responsibility and every person has to own up to the choices they’ve made because their actions not only affect themselves, but the people around them as well. There is no God so there’s no grand design, no ultimate morality clause that humans have to live up to. Since that doesn’t exist, our actions carry that much more weight and it’s even more important that we strive to avoid living in bad faith (i.e. self deception or deceiving others in some way) because we’re all we have in this life.

It’s a very interesting book and I’m intrigued to see how this stuff is going to pertain to the rest of what I read in the class. I just began the first couple of chapters of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and he builds on some of what Sartre suggests in his writings, but uses it as a jumping off point to describe the black experience both philosophically and psychologically.  More on that next week.