Sartre and Lived Experience

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Characteristics	Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed
Key points	Sartre argues that his earlier Being and Nothingness, though a monument of rationality, collapses into irrationalism because it cannot rationally account for processes below consciousness that are rational yet lived as irrational. He proposes the notion of 'lived experience' to preserve a self-presence indispensable to any psychic fact, while holding that this presence is so opaque and blind to itself that it is also an absence from itself.

Characteristics

Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed

Key points

Sartre argues that his earlier Being and Nothingness, though a monument of rationality, collapses into irrationalism because it cannot rationally account for processes below consciousness that are rational yet lived as irrational. He proposes the notion of 'lived experience' to preserve a self-presence indispensable to any psychic fact, while holding that this presence is so opaque and blind to itself that it is also an absence from itself.

Abstract

Abstract"The conception of 'lived experience' marks my change since L'Etre et le Néant ... L'Etre et le Néant is a monument of rationality. But in the end it becomes an irrationalism, because it cannot account rationally for those processes which are 'below' consciousness and which are also rational, but lived as irrational. Today, the notion of 'lived experience' represents an effort to preserve that presence to itself which seems to me indispensable for the existence of any psychic fact, while at the same time this presence is so opaque and blind before itself that it is also an absence from itself."1

Study at a glance

Abstract

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