The Ontological Pursuit

As a teenager, perhaps simply to define myself as something--
as is the natural tendency-- I envisioned myself as an existentialist. Perhaps that may have been the only way that I understood the pursuit of truth and authenticity, as an existential one. Truth be told (pardon the pun), Sartre's classical existential argument that "existence precedes essence," has always been difficult for me to accept. First of all, I thought of it as ostensibly ducking the very search for truth that defines philosophy. The essence of Being, and the Truth that goes along with it, is what philosophers seek. Only recently have I come to to understand that in the existential philosophical climate, it is existence, posited precisely as essence that defines the philosophical argument.

It wasn't until I began delving into the work of Simone de Beauvoir, most known not quite ironically as Sartre's life-partner, that this concept began to be clarified for me. I am currently immersed in the first tome of her pivotal feminist, and really existentialist, text, Le deuxième sexe. In framing sexism as a type of unceasing destiny rooted in the very situation of the body, and female alienation de Beauvoir eloquently writes "il est impossible d'en rendre compte sans partir d'un fait existentiel: la tendance du sujet à l'alienation, l'angoisse de sa liberté conduit le sujet à se rechercher dans les choses, ce qui est une manière de se fuir, c'est une tendance si fondamentale, qu'aussitot après le sevrage quand il est séparé du Tout, l'enfant s'efforce de saisir dans les glaces, dans le regard de ses parents son existence alienée. Les primitifs s'aliènent dans le mana, dans le totem; les civilisés dans leur propriété, leur ouvrage: c'est la preemière tentation de l'inauthenticité."

(To be continued...)