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thanks outpour....at least now i can get a toehold here.
i do not see why there need be any connection between the idea--which is quite marxian--that meaning is created through praxis and nihilism. i really dont. the outcomes can be linked only if you adopt a metaphysics-based viewpoint, which would require some kind of transcendent principle up front in order to make an ethics possible--which seems to me goofy.
it seems simple: such values as are imputed to objects in the world are social in nature and origin--the mechanisms that reify these are multiple--for marx it is the combo platter of money and commodities that do it in the end, and other institutions simply double/elaborate/apply to local situations this basic feature of capitalist ideology.
if you are reading sartre, it helps to position his existentialist stuff against marxism, which is a constant partner in dialogue--the relation between the two elements flip publically in 1952, with his essay "the communists and peace"--which is a kind of absurd essay in many ways, but would take things far off topic.
on this, as on most things, it is more interesting and productive to read and think about merleau-ponty than it is to dwell on sartre. particularly when it comes to navigating both the relation of philosophy to marxism (given the way each was instituted in france during the late 1940s-1950s)....there is a good book that gives a history of this general relation: francois dosse's two volume historiy of structuralism, particularly the first volume.
the american version of existentialism strips out this context and thereby reduces it to an individualist position--this is the legacy of good ole walter kaufman in particular--and this move leads to basic misunderstandings of the game.
for example, it does not follow that meaning does not exist for sartre: of course it exists, but it is made--the model is from marx's 1844 manuscripts, but in sartre you have this model stripped of the situation that marx used to elbaorate it. in this sartre ran into the problem of trying to retain the core of marx's understanding while generalizing it--one that later, more interesting thinkers who tried to work their way out from under marx to a more contemporary type of revolutionary theory also encountered--but they resolved it differently. (castoriadis in particular)...
the problem with sartre's formulations of the late 1940s (which is what we are talking about here) is that he gives you no way to situate that making/practice socially--too much hiedegger i susupect. social being is reduced to a variant of "throwness" from being and time...the social world therefore is an abstraction, and all codes for generating meaning have to collapse back onto the individual. which is absurd (this not in the sense sartre gives the term, but in a pejorative sense)
similarly it is only in principle that human beings have absolute freedom of choice--in fact, their freedom is delimited by Others around them--and it is in the idea of responsibility toward others that a practical ethics can be elaborated--it is also a problem for sartre (whence the famous "hell is other people" line) because the previous move of collapsing back onto the individual of the production of meanings renders the limits imposed by responsibility to others necessarily arbitrary.
so this responsibility is abstract, without any particular content. this is why some folk read existentialism--and the popularity of it in the postwar climate--as a kind of bourgeois response to the fact of the vichy period in that it enabled an assumption of guilt through purely formal linkages of practical actions undertaken by individuals to the Other in general, which enabled content to be given to these linkages in any number of registers, including a kind of ex-post manner.
i seem to be rattling on again.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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