Existentialism

[Turenne]

I am currently studying for an Existentialist exam next week. However the following passage is from the book I am using as an aid for the exam, and somewhat confuses me, so a little help would be useful...

But the role of nothingness does not end with (1) the imaging consciousness's awareness of itself as spontaneously creating out of nothing and (2) the 'object-as-imaged' posited as nothingness. To image is also to set the object-as-imaged (the image) in opposition to the world, it is to know that the imaging consciousness presents to itself an image that is detached from the world and thus to make (to apprehend) the world as nothing in relation to it. To image is both to nihilate perception and to nihilate the world.

My main problem is with the use of the word 'nihilate'.

[Lumpen Prole]

Sartre, I presume? Some of my philosophy friends self-identify as existentialists. They're also moral nihilists. Do you have a specific question? Personally I feel Sartre's philosophy borders on solipsism, which he himself tries to shake off briefly in "Existentialism is a Humanism."

[Turenne]

I wish for someone to explain the final line in the above paragraph. And the use of nihiliate above seems different to me, something other thyen what we understand as moral nihilism.

[Lumpen Prole]

I think he's saying that the world and how we perceive it stem from our own subjective conscious experience. Sartre emphasized that we all have a subjective consciouss experience, and that is the starting point from which we perceive and evaluate the world around us. Consciousness is a sort of thing in itself; it comes from nothingness. The 'human subjective' precedes our sensing the world.

[burntgorilla]

You have exams next week? What term times do you have?

[Turenne]

I have a 'special' time because I managed to flunk my earlier test. ;) I got 27% in my first Philosophy test. Ethics and Plato are fine, but Existentialism and Philosophy of the Mind are mother...

I'll try again; Sartre did not write the above paragraph, Steven Earnshaw did. What is throwing me specifically is his use of 'nihilate' in that context.

[::Major_Baker::]

nonsense.

[Lumpen Prole]

I have a 'special' time because I managed to flunk my earlier test. ;) I got 27% in my first Philosophy test. Ethics and Plato are fine, but Existentialism and Philosophy of the Mind are mother...

I'll try again; Sartre did not write the above paragraph, Steven Earnshaw did. What is throwing me specifically is his use of 'nihilate' in that context.

Again, I would think he's saying that the world and how we perceive it are essentially projections of our subjective conscious experience. Hence the word 'nihilate.'

[burntgorilla]

Yes, I think he's saying that what we perceive isn't what's really there, but instead is in "apposition to it". So presumably, if you image something you're essentially buggering perception and reality since it's all messed up. But I don't know, I don't like that type of philosophy, I don't really really understand it all. Can't you just write similar stuff in the exam?