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Show fcistentialist Interprets jjpne On Human Mind ;- 1 ), i i 'ffilOF BERGMANN Noted existentialist. By JUDY TODD Chronicle Staff Writer "The mind is merely an openness towards the world." There is no "real you" which lies buried within with-in a multi-layered complexity commonly com-monly known as the "internal self. THIS THEORY, postulated by Jean Paul Sartre, French existentialist, existent-ialist, was discussed by Dr. Frithjof Bergmann, noted existentialist from the University of Michigan, at 11 a.m. Thursday in Spencer Hall Auditorium. Prof. Bergmann, in a lecture entitled en-titled "Sartre's Theory of Mind," pointed out that people tend to think of the mind as an "obscure cathedral of complexities," When it can actually be compared to a one-surfaced one-surfaced receptacle an "openness which receives." He stated that there are "certain "cer-tain things which are imagined to go on inside the mind, which should actually be placed on the cutsida of it." It is a common assumption for people to believe that there are many different kinds of internal sensations, when there are really very few, he said. CLAIMING the support of many psychologists, he noted that it is impossible to explain the difference of internal feeling between sadness sad-ness and depression or awe and exaltation without considering the external causes of these feelings. "The -difference in these emotions lies outside internal sensations," he said. SINCE feelings are fleeting and subject to change by everything a person does, there is actually a "host of emotion,;' but few actual internal sensations. Therefore, we can't decide what emotions we feel on the basis of our internal sensations, sen-sations, since they are the same for many emotions, he said. He stressed the moral implications implica-tions that Sartre attaches to this philosophy. The question of our internal sensations becomes a problem prob-lem of "deciding" how to act on the basis of our feelings, rather than trying to "detect" them. With the statement that "We ; are nothing beyond acts; what we have done constitutes our beings," be-ings," he demonstrated how easy it is to fall into self deception. Since Sartre proposes that there are two aspects of the "open" mind, ("transcendency" or a changing and progressing mind and "factis-ity" "factis-ity" or the actual fact of consciousness), consc-iousness), self deception comes about identifying with one of these qualities, to the exclusion of the other. |
