Ideal Value and Exemplary Experience

This chapter examines ideals and the role that concrete exemplary value experiences play in both shaping the models through which we are oriented towards ideals, and our understanding of the ideals themselves. It considers how the existentialist emphasis on negative value experiences – specifically, Sartre’s notion of the ‘slimy’ – plays a role in viewing the ideal self-world relationship as one of dominance and the corresponding ideal self-relation as one of autonomous self-grounding. The suffocating horror of the slimy gives one a taste of the Sartrean ontological anti-ideal, whereby freedom is consumed by being but still retains the awareness necessary to experience its own dissolution. This experience of suffocation and exile in the midst of hostile being correspondingly grounds Sartre’s understanding of the ontological ideal – namely, freedom’s triumphant self-grounding. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of a different kind of exemplary value event – namely, one in which self and world are experienced as existing in a harmony that challenges the hostile model on which Sartre’s understanding of the ideal is founded. Positive value experiences such as beauty suggest a different way of understanding the ideal relationship between self and world. By emphasizing the import of such positive value experiences, the sharp divide between autonomous and heteronomous approaches is put in question, and with it, the nihilism and decisionism that continues to haunt existentialist ethics.