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January 2 - January 30, 2025
Questions in OT
Aron may have been saying something like this: traditional philosophers often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. They set aside most of what had kept philosophy going since Plato: puzzles about whether things are real or how we can know anything for certain about them. Instead, they pointed out that any philosopher who asks these questions is already thrown into a world filled with things — or, at least, filled with the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’ (from the Greek word meaning
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They were more than ready for this new beginning. At school and university, Sartre, Beauvoir and Aron had all been through the austere French philosophy syllabus, dominated by questions of knowledge and endless reinterpretation of the works of Immanuel Kant. Epistemological questions opened out of one another like the rounds of a turning kaleidoscope, always returning to the same point: 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
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predefined nature at all. I create that nature
proto-punk style.
he sang ‘Old Man River’
Publications
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964,
citing a writer’s need to stay independent of interests and influences.
Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well,
Kierkegaard’s specific use of the word ‘existence’ to denote the human way of being,
Sartre agreed with him that this constant choosing brings a pervasive anxiety,
It is not the fear of falling so much as the fear that you can’t trust yourself not to throw yourself off.
Sarte an original choice
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.
both were self-serving veils drawn over the harsher realities of life.
because the human beings who invented God have also killed Him.
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.
For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.
Claude Lévi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘shop-girl metaphysics’.
Merleau-Ponty was a friend of Sartre and Beauvoir (until they fell out), and a phenomenologist who specialised in questions of the body and perception. He was also a brilliant essayist. I became diverted from Montaigne into the volume’s other essays, and then to Merleau-Ponty’s main work The Phenomenology of Perception. I was amazed afresh at how adventurous and rich his thinking was. No wonder I used to love this sort of thing! From Merleau-Ponty, I went on to revisit Simone de Beauvoir — whose autobiography I’d discovered during a long student summer selling ice creams on a grey, dismal
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty summed up this relationship, ‘Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life.’
Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it — that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either.
epoché
general suspension of judgement
we do talk about music phenomenologically
aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’.
She also converted to Christianity, after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, and in 1922 become a Carmelite nun — a dramatic transformation. The Order gave her special dispensation to continue her studies and to send out for philosophy books.
George Steiner to call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’ — the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious’.
the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our
The philosopher who led Heidegger to notice being was the same who led Husserl to intentionality, and thus to the inward turn.
the philosophers’ second-biggest mistake (after forgetfulness of Being) has been to talk about everything as though it was present-at-hand.
It turns them into objects for contemplation by an unconcerned subject who has nothing to do all day
Naval gasing
No longer is the world a smoothly humming machine. It is a mass of stubborn things refusing to cooperate, and here I am in the middle of it, flummoxed and disoriented — which is just the state of mind Heidegger seeks to induce in us when we read his prose.
Heidegger was set against a great humanist scholar of Kantian philosophy and the Enlightenment: Ernst Cassirer.
Casseir Humanist
das Man is me. It is everywhere and nowhere; it is nothing definite, but each of us is it. As with Being, it is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to see.
Dasein’s Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place.
Excellent distinguishment from enlightenment and romanticism
‘Dummheit.’ Stupidity. The implication was that his worst failing was unworldliness.
Dummheit
Their effort to figure him out gave them a glimpse into a void.
‘turn’ (die Kehre),
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 severely restricted their lives:
Colin Wilson, described having an encounter with raw Being that was ‘like waking up on a train and finding a stranger with his face within an inch of your own’.
‘beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence’.
The Righteous Mind
I love the idea that Sartre’s philosophical epiphany about the necessity and freedom of art might have come from the Little Tramp.
Uncanny zeitgeist
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.
Sarte & viscocity
Focus on an image, he said, until you feel ‘a swelling, like a bubble, also a sort of direction indicated to you’.
Invoking Dasein
poetry, Sartre and Beauvoir made it novelistic, and hence more palatable for the non-professional.
She Came to Stay. She based it on a recent three-way love affair between herself, Sartre and one of her former students, Olga Kosakiewicz.
De Beauvior poly
melodramatic finale involving a murder.
virtuoso marveller
Awe as Simones asset
He always remained a sociable, alpha-type person, riddled with hang-ups, yet never hesitant about dominating a circle.
1970s style description , oh my!
