More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 1 - April 11, 2023
IT IS SOMETIMES said that existentialism is more of a mood than a philosophy,
The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’
don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.
‘if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’
it was a way of doing philosophy that reconnected it with normal, lived experience.
I think I know something, but how can I know that I know what I know? It was demanding, yet futile, and all three students – despite excelling in their exams – had felt dissatisfied, Sartre most of all.
He was bored with teaching, bored with what he had learned at university, and bored with not yet having developed into the author of genius he had been expecting to become since childhood.
To write what he wanted – novels, essays, everything – he knew he must first have Adventures.
The brilliance of Sartre’s invention lay in the fact that he did indeed turn phenomenology into a philosophy of apricot cocktails – and of the waiters who served them. Also a philosophy of expectation, tiredness, apprehensiveness, excitement, a walk up a hill, the passion for a desired lover, the revulsion from an unwanted one, Parisian gardens, the cold autumn sea at Le Havre, the feeling of sitting on overstuffed upholstery, the way a woman’s breasts pool as she lies on her back, the thrill of a boxing match, a film, a jazz song, a glimpse of two strangers meeting under a street lamp. He
...more
Where philosophers before him had written in careful propositions and arguments, Sartre wrote like a novelist – not surprisingly, since he was one.
In his novels, short stories and plays as well as in his philosophical treatises, he wrote about the physical sensations of the world and the structures and moods of human life. Above all, he w...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.
But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms.
He led his audience to think about it more personally. What is it like to be faced with such a choice? How exactly does a confused young man go about dealing with such a decision about how to act?
Sure enough, Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.
Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters
If you avoid this responsibility by fooling yourself that you are the victim of circumstance or of someone else’s bad advice, you are failing to meet the demands of human life and choosing a fake existence, cut off from your own ‘authenticity
In his essay ‘The End of the War’, written just after Hiroshima and published in October 1945 – the same month as the lecture – he exhorted his readers to decide what kind of world they wanted, and make it happen.
One story in Samedi-soir in 1945 claimed that he tempted women up to his bedroom by offering them a sniff of his Camembert cheese.
The topic of philosophy is whatever you experience, as you experience it.
‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre’s.
Kierkegaard thought that the answer to ‘anguish’ was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure that He was there.
What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way.
There is no God in this picture, because the human beings who invented God have also killed Him. It is now up to us alone. The way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, conducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate.
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existentialism.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, existentialism offered people reasons to reject convention and change their lives.
A man is not ‘intelligent’; he is free or he is not.
Yet he insisted all his life that what mattered was not the past at all: it was the future. One must keep moving, creating what will be: acting in the world and making a difference to it.
I managed to spend my days and evenings more or less as the existentialists had in their cafés: reading, writing, drinking, falling in and out of love, making friends, and talking about ideas. I loved everything about it, and thought life would always be one big existentialist café.
They asked big questions about what it means to live an authentic, fully human life, thrown into a world with many other humans also trying to live.
They tackled questions about nuclear war, about how we occupy the environment, about violence, and about the difficulty of managing international relations in dangerous times.
Many of them longed to change the world, and wondered what sacrifices we might or might...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What distinguishes humans from other animals? Is it only a difference of degree, or are we truly set apart in some way?
They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.
The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone-screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock.
For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, ‘in a nice warm room with the shutters closed’, we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.
For Heidegger, the call is more fundamental than that. It is a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had: to wake up to your Being. Moreover, it is a call to action. It requires you to do something: to take a decision of some sort.
Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise.
He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life – ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.
In both cases, what is rigid is cleared away, and the trembling freshness of what is underneath becomes the object of the philosopher’s attention.
For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.
If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy.
Viscosity is Sartre’s way of expressing the horror of contingency. It evokes what he called ‘facticity’, meaning everything that drags us down into situations and inhibits us from flying free.
He had felt so loved and encouraged as a child, he said, never having to work hard for approval, that his disposition remained cheerful for life. He could be irritable sometimes, but he was, as he said in a radio interview in 1959, almost always at peace with himself. This makes him about the only person in this entire story who felt that way; a valuable gift.
She briefly considered him as boyfriend material. But his relaxed attitude was disturbing to someone of her more combative disposition. She wrote in her notebook that his big fault was that ‘he is not violent, and the kingdom of God is for violent people’.
She was a creature of strong judgements, while he looked for multiple sides to any situation. He considered people a mixture of qualities, and liked to give them the benefit of the doubt, whereas in youth she saw humanity as consisting of ‘a small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration’.
Sartre, if we can judge by the vivid descriptions in his books, found sex a nightmarish process of struggling not to drown in slime and gloop. (Before we mock him too much for this, let’s remember that we know it only because he revealed it so candidly. Well, okay, let’s mock him a little bit.)
In coming years, he would become ever more interested in the way human beings can be swept up by large-scale historical forces, while still each remaining free and individual.
For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good, because they stimulate people to self-questioning.
