More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The difference between man and woman is like that between animals and plants,” he said. “Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling.
To Kierkegaard, Christianity was both so overwhelming and so irrational that it had to be an either/or. It was not good being “rather” or “to some extent” religious. Because either Jesus rose on Easter Day – or he did not. And if he really did rise from the dead, if he really died for our sake – then this is so overwhelming that it must permeate our entire life.’ ‘Yes, I think I understand.’ ‘But Kierkegaard saw how both the church and people in general had a noncommittal approach to religious questions. To Kierkegaard, religion and knowledge were like fire and water. It was not enough to
...more
‘You can never know whether a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don’t think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.’
The individual in modern urban society had become “the public,” he said, and the predominant characteristic of the crowd, or the masses, was all their noncommittal “talk.” Today we would probably use the word “conformity”; that is when everybody “thinks” and “believes in” the same things without having any deeper feeling about it.’
‘Tell me what you do and I’ll tell you who you are.’ ‘That, briefly, was Marx’s point. How we work affects our consciousness, but our consciousness also affects the way we work. You could say it is an interactive relationship between hand and consciousness. Thus the way you think is closely connected to the job you do.’
everything man touches becomes a mixture of good and evil.
‘The development of the embryo in mammals. If you compare the embryos of dogs, bats, rabbits, and humans at an early stage, they look so alike that it is hard to tell the difference. You cannot distinguish a human embryo from a rabbit embryo until a very late stage. Shouldn’t this indicate that we are distant relatives?’
She suddenly came to think of Kierkegaard, who had said that what characterized the crowd most was their idle chatter. Were all these people living at the aesthetic stage? Or was there something that was existentially important to them?
But Sartre’s allegiance was to what we might call an atheistic existentialism. His philosophy can be seen as a merciless analysis of the human situation when “God is dead.” The expression “God is dead” came from Nietzsche.’
Sartre emphasized that man must never disclaim the responsibility for his actions. Nor can we avoid the responsibility of making our own choices on the grounds that we “must” go to work, or we “must” live up to certain middle-class expectations regarding how we should live. Those who thus slip into the anonymous masses will never be other than members of the impersonal flock, having fled from themselves into self-deception. On the other hand our freedom obliges us to make something of ourselves, to live “authentically” or “truly.”’
‘All the stars and galaxies in the universe are made of the same substance.

