Selfhood and Facticity:

After reading Part A. and most of Part B. of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I decided to give  my brain a "mild" break by "getting my feet slightly wet" by moving my attention to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre - at the moment, working my way slowly by reading Sartre for Beginners, and the Translator's Preface and Introduction to his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness.

I’m experiencing my own sort of “nausea” in that am dealing with my own facticity in that during my undergraduate years, I considered myself an Existentialist. Since then, I have transitioned from that school of thought to Post-Structuralism (although maintaining, and becoming more solidified in my Nietzschean tendencies).

Existentialism and Post-Structuralism, at least in certain aspects of its various forms, share several theoretical currents such as, non-essentialism, and a sense that identities are created, fluid, and that the social dimension plays a large and important role in this development. However, where Existentialism is vastly different is in unrelentingly maintaining the notion that one’s life and identity is one’s own to create. To say that another way, each individual is completely and utterly free, from linguistic, socio-political, and ontological conditions, which might determine or cause his/her constitution/interpellation as a subject.

Thus, my cumbersome question of the evening is: Can/do human beings [freely] choose from among the various events and influences of their past, without the facticity of the past being determinant, in their own (re)formulation of selfhood in relation to the world of the present and the future? Both in a “common” sort of understanding, as well as Post-Structuralist thinking, this is impossible, and apparently Sartre doesn’t make it much easier by implying that our “condemnation of freedom” is so deep that the linguistic dimension is subordinate to it as well. This is especially perplexing for Post-Structuralist thought since, as it is a reaction to – yet in many ways simply revisionary of – Structuralism which in-turn was founded on the methodology of the Structural Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. In short, thinkers labeled Post-Structuralist argue that the social (i.e. the linguistic) exists prior to persons. Thus, persons are, not unlike the Existentialist notion, “thrown,” or more simply, are born into a socio-linguistic world which, only afterward, constitutes them as subjects.

A deeper problem exists it seems, in that from Sartre’s perspective, the (re)creation of our “selves” requires not only an ontological self which is somehow in suspension of the socio-linguistic dimension, but also in the fact that the, any, process of subjective creation requires a system of signification which is extrinsic of the self. In other words, to cast/recast my self according to my own creative potentialities is to transpose the so-conceived “free self” immediately into a field of operation constructed by (to use Foucauldian-Butlerian terminology) discursive apparatuses.

Yet, at the same time, Sartre’s notion continues to hold sway over my ponderings. I cannot help but ask myself how he could be wrong in suggesting that what we gesture to as deterministic facticity, is actually a mere element of our pasts with which we “choose” (another troubling Sartrean category) to identify as the being of our selves. This is in concordance with the question of how we possibly ever can or do evolve, change, and grow, as human subjects in our own lifetimes. How can we alter ourselves through reflection, sublation, sublimation, etc.? Or, am I merely seeing disparities between these two great philosophical systems which aren’t really there?