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Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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The aim of this thesis is to determine whether having an ability to choose otherwise aids our understanding of the kind of balanced autonomy that is required in order to claim that people should be held responsible for their actions. By looking to the theories of three historical philosophers (Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre), I find evidence that suggests having an ability to choose otherwise should not be the ground on which we base responsibility for an agent’s actions; actions involve ‘choosing one’s self’ and there is a relationship one has to one’s self which is often overlooked. My investigation reveals evidence that existential authenticity is an inherent quality of autonomy and that the ‘genuine self’ which grounds an agent’s actions ought to be viewed as a ‘dependence’ rather than a ‘cause’. My investigation also reveals a concept of a ‘genuine self’ as distinct from the concept of a narratively structured ‘ego’; the self and the ego appear to be distinct entities which are existentially interdependent. This thesis raises questions which should be addressed in future investigations. First, how is, and how should responsibility be related to the dependences from which actions arise and second, is the objective world best understood as causally structured, in accordance with the doctrine of determinism, or rather, should we seek an understanding of the objective world as dependently structured. / Thesis / Master of Philosophy (MA) / Is having an ability to choose otherwise the best ground on which to hold persons responsible for their actions? This thesis considers the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, which reveal some evidence that persons should not be held responsible for their actions on the basis of being able to choose otherwise. I argue that authenticity is an inherent feature of autonomy which involves the relationship one has to one’s self and ‘choosing one’s self’; and that there is a distinction to be made between the ‘ego’ and the ‘self’. Further, I advance an argument that actions are dependent on a ‘self’, but that the ‘self’ is not a cause of action. This thesis raises questions to be addressed in future investigations regarding the connection between responsibility and dependence as well as whether the world is best understood as dependently structured rather than causally structured.

<p>Jean-Paul Sartre' s central purpose in writing the Critique of Dialectical Reason was to render intelligible Karl Marx's principle that circumstances make people just as much as people make circumstances. With the intent of complementing Marx's work, Sartre sought to theoretically connect the marxist outline of social process with its constituting parts--individuals. He sought to do this without ascribing to circumstances a superorganic existence, and in terms of the general structure of individual action per se. In place of a super organic being he attributed unintended consequences to all individual action (as well as intended consequences). The actual influence of circumstances upon people he explained by the fact that products bear some trace of the intentions of those who made them. The product becomes a sign, and people construct about them a world of signs.</p> <p>Within this world of signs people tend to become separated as mediations between constructed things. It is in this sense, that is, in explaining how social relations tend to occur indirectly through the products of praxis, that Sartre sought to justify a rejection of organicism by developing his interpretation of Marx's theory of fetishism.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This project outlines, through a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of sadistic and masochistic manifestations of embodiment as forms of bad faith, relationships to clothing, especially those conditioned by the fashion industry. Through an analysis of the concept of a disguise, I argue that the fashion industry encourages consumers to play what I call a game of fashion. This game involves hiding from one's freedom through self-deception while interacting with seemingly replaceable others. Clothing enables one to engage in a two-fold disguise - hiding one's freedom from oneself and evading intersubjective relations with others. In bad faith, one wears the self falsely while immersing oneself in a game of false interactions with others. Bad faith is a two-fold assault on the self and the basic make-up of social life. Within the contemporary milieu of Western consumer society, fashion is a ready accessory for the performance of bad faith. This study is an examination of such phenomena. A contemporary attitude toward clothing, or fashion, is that particular garments are able to "remake" the self - as if what adorns the body were all there is - and that it can hide the self through such adornment because the "real self" supposedly exists elsewhere. This perspective on fashion, and by extension, the body, depends on a Cartesian severing of mind and body - the exact attitude that informs bad faith. These two approaches to fashion are examples of assertions of the self as a material thing on one hand and the assertion of the self as a complete transcendence on the other. Both are forms of bad faith. Instead of thinking of fashion as a mask beneath which there is either nothing or the body beyond which there is the real transcendent self, I argue for thinking of clothing as a veil where the garment naturally conceals through acts of revelation, but what is concealed and what is revealed are never complete. Such a conception involves maintaining a distinction between public and private, while acknowledging there being something beneath that could be known and, through the cultivation of intersubjective relations, offer a richer understanding of the ways in which clothing affects intimate relationships. / Philosophy

This project offers a unique contribution to the scholarship on Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith by providing a sustained exploration of bad faith in the context of contemporary tourism. More specifically, I explore the bad faith of what I call "checklist tourism," which defines the tourist trip as a rapid succession of visits from one "must-see" site to the next, snapping photos and collecting souvenirs along the way. I argue that checklist tourism offers a safe and comfortable structure for travel that protects tourists against Sartrean anguish--that is, the experience of alienation, fear, freedom, and responsibility--that travel can sometimes evoke. This analysis contributes to the literature on bad faith in three main ways. First, I provide an extended analysis of the Sartrean spirit of seriousness, highlighting part of this concept that has thus far been underdeveloped in the scholarship. I argue that checklist tourism manifests the spirit of seriousness, which accepts the obligation of "must-see" sites and belief in the transcendent value of the material objects seen on the tour. Second, I explore the embodied bad faith of the possession and appropriation of the material world (rather than studying the possession of people, as most scholars have done), arguing that the tourist attempts to appropriate tourist sites through bodily engagement with them. Third, I develop a theory of play as authenticity, and I offer a systematic investigation of it as a rejection of the ontological bad faith project to be self-identical (i.e. to be God), and a reflective conversion to self-recovery. I then explore the character of the "post-tourist," which has been developing in the tourism literature and which represents a way of touring that rejects the seriousness of the "must-see" sites in favor of an attitude of levity, spontaneity, and playfulness. / Philosophy

Ce mémoire porte sur la conception sartrienne de la liberté. Afin d'éviter de porter un jugement préconçu et moralisateur sur la liberté sartrienne, ce projet tente d'élaborer et de manier les principaux concepts d'une liberté dont la caractéristique fondamentale réside dans le fait qu'elle ne s'acquiert jamais définitivement. En se limitant principalement à L'être et le néant, ce projet vise par ailleurs à faire surgir l'essence paradoxale de la réalité humaine en tant qu'elle est un être à la fois libre et contingent.