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August 8 - September 21, 2019
To write what he wanted — novels, essays, everything — he knew he must first have Adventures. He had fantasised about labouring with dockers in Constantinople, meditating with monks on Mount Athos, skulking with pariahs in India, and battling storms with fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland. For now, just not teaching schoolboys in Le Havre was adventure enough.
But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.
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You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress.
Husserl’s philosophy became an exhausting but exciting discipline in which concentration and effort must constantly be renewed. To practise it, he wrote, ‘a new way of looking at things is necessary’ — a way that brings us back again and again to our project, so as ‘to see what stands before our eyes, to distinguish, to describe’. This was Husserl’s natural style of working. It was also a perfect definition of phenomenology.
The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality.
Phenomenology frees me to talk about my experienced coffee as a serious topic of investigation. It likewise frees me to talk about many areas that come into their own only when discussed phenomenologically. An obvious example, close to the coffee case, is expert wine tasting — a phenomenological practice if ever there was one, and one in which the ability both to discern and to describe experiential qualities are equally important.
Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: we can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately.
They found him funny, but he did not share the joke because his sense of humour was somewhere between peculiar and non-existent.
Or, as his biographer Rüdiger Safranski has put it, Heidegger ‘states the obvious in a way that even philosophers can grasp’.
As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.
Prague had grown into something of a centre for phenomenology through the early twentieth century, partly because of Tomáš Masaryk — Czechoslovakia’s president, and the friend who had persuaded Husserl to study with Franz Brentano.
For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good, because they stimulate people to self-questioning.
It seemed that Sartre would rarely be as relaxed and happy again as he had been as a prisoner of war.
They had a bad scare when one member, Jean Pouillon, lost a briefcase filled with incriminating pamphlets together with the group members’ names and addresses. They all faced arrest, torture, death. Luckily, the person who found the briefcase turned it in to a lost-property office. The incongruity of this — the threat of Gestapo torture coexisting with the decent civic tradition of the lost-property office — captures the strangeness of life under Occupation.
Even after the war, the American writer James Baldwin would observe in the 1950s, ‘The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés.’
For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control.
As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre later explained that he did not mean to say that other people were hellish in general. He meant that after death we become frozen in their view, unable any longer to fend off their interpretation. In life, we can still do something to manage the impression we make; in death, this freedom goes and we are left entombed in other’s people’s memories and perceptions.
For a start, she pointed out that the idea of love, or any other relationship, as a reciprocal encounter between two equal participants had missed one crucial fact: real human relationships contained differences of status and role.
If done correctly, all existentialism is applied existentialism.
‘The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.’
anti-imperial revolution must inevitably be violent, not just because violence was effective (though that was one reason) but because it helped the colonised to shake off the paralysis of oppression and forge a new shared identity. Without glorifying violence, Fanon considered it essential to political change; he had little sympathy for Gandhi’s idea of non-violent resistance as a source of power.
It is intriguing to read Heidegger’s lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ with its talk of the ‘monstrous’ and ‘terrible’ in man, the violation of the earth, and the stripping of resources, while musing on the fact that the published version came out in the same year as Godzilla.
As pointed out by Iris Murdoch, the country’s first populariser of the topic, the English were used to ideas that emerged from a world in which ‘people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus’, whereas the existentialists came from a world in which people commit great sins, fall in love, and join the Communist Party.
Even when existentialists reached too far, wrote too much, revised too little, made grandiose claims, or otherwise disgraced themselves, it must be said that they remained in touch with the density of life, and that they asked the important questions. Give me that any day, and keep the tasteful miniatures for the mantelpiece.
