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January 2 - January 30, 2025
He compared it to the period in ancient Greece, after the death of Alexander the Great, when Athenians turned away from the calm reasonings of Aristotelian science towards the more personal and ‘more brutal’ thinking of the Stoics and Epicureans — philosophers ‘who taught them to live’.
Husserliana.
H works
pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaximander.
Pre-socratics
and this at a time when ‘cosmopolitan’ was becoming recast as an insult, often interpreted as code for ‘Jewish’.
Coastal elites?
Enlightenment spirit of shared reason and free inquiry.
‘On the Ontological Mystery’, Gabriel Marcel
Christian converts were exempted from the deportations, but this soon changed and the Nazis began raids on all Dutch monastic communities in July,
Red Cross records show the two sisters arriving at Auschwitz
Nuns gassed in Aushwitz
The nuns guarded this as long as they
Ludwig I’s Bavarian Valhalla, a hall of heroes high in the forest overlooking the Danube. She joined Frederick the Great, Goethe, Kant, Wagner and many more, including another anti-Nazi, Sophie Scholl, who had been executed in 1943 for her resistance activities.
in May 1946, aged eighty-six, did she manage to join her children in America for her last few years of life.
Where in the US?
Brumath, in Alsace near the German border,
Merleau-Ponty was posted as an infantry officer to Longwy on the front line. He later recalled one long night during which he and his unit listened to the calls for help of a German lieutenant who had been shot and was stuck in the barbed wire:
Longwys dying German soldier
rational view, although, like other seemingly rational calculations in the Nazi era, it came at a psychological cost.
French regret
Beauvoir resumed her habit of writing in cafés, but had to get used to the sight of groups of uniformed Nazis enjoying their coffees and cognacs at nearby tables. She also set about adjusting to the
library of the Sorbonne, where she read her way through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The effort of sustained attention was comforting, and so was Hegel’s stately vision of human history progressing through inevitable sequences of thesis, antithesis and synthesis towards sublimation in Absolute Spirit. She would leave the library each afternoon feeling a radiant sense of the rightness of all things
What if Simone Debouvier had read Hegel b4 she became Sarte's groomer?
Kierkegaard with his insistence on freedom and choice, and Hegel with his vision of how history plays out on an epic scale, swallowing up individuals.
Heidegger’s philosophy had grown partly out of the humiliation of Germany in 1918; now it spoke to a humiliated France after June 1940.
Heidegger and Sarte-captive Frenchman reading from his captors POV
shimmering comfortably within their tubes of rarefied gas, seemed inaccessible to me,
Everyday life required constantly negotiating this balance between submission and resistance, as well as between ordinary activity and the extraordinary underlying reality.
The cafés, always filled with familiar faces, also became an index to disappearances.
I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French
cafés.’
Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, and avant-garde writers such as Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau and Jean Genet.
Co-conspiring artists during the war
‘A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility.’
Camus sensibility
during the French defeat, that ‘even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism’.
World-making worlds
Camus concludes his book with Sisyphus resuming his endless task while resigning himself to its absurdity. Thus: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
Farmer Dan
somehow Abraham is still confident in his love for his son. For Kierkegaard,
Well said!
Abraham ‘resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’.
British morale-boosting poster: Keep Calm and Carry On.
Bernie Sanders gen x
nothing can be gained by saying it is.
Keynote on absurdity
failures of intentionality,
Failures of intentionality
the fear of freedom, and the tendency to blame and demonise others.
Hilite of analysis by Sarte
We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.
Bec it is so damn meaningful
Useless Mouths
The Blood of Others, which weighed the need for rebellious action against the guilt that comes from putting people in danger.
the art of life lies in getting things done.
Did they read Rand?
Now, he sought to develop a more Marxist-influenced view of human life as purposeful and social.
Merleau-Ponty too, having been radicalised by the war, was still desperately trying to be less nice. Having mastered the art of being beastly to Germans, he now far outdid Beauvoir and Sartre in writing fervent arguments for an uncompromising Soviet-style Communism. In an essay of 1945, ‘The War Has Taken Place’, he wrote that the war had ruled out any possibility of living a merely private life.
Forgoing the freedom of a private life
What Is Literature?
Les Temps modernes.
The Blood of Others
Boris Vian spoofed
Saint-Germain-des-Prés ‘manual’, giving maps, descriptions and pen portraits of the exotic cavern-dwelling ‘troglodytes’ to be found in
your twenty-first-century time machine could take you back to a Parisian jazz club immediately after the war,
you would not find yourself in a sea of existentialist black; you would be more likely to think you’d walked into a lumberjacks’ hoedown.
bouquinistes along the Seine, they bought American fiction.
Spit on Your Graves, ostensibly by ‘Vernon Sullivan’ and translated by Boris Vian, was by Vian himself.
the morning fruit juices, the national Scotch and soda … the anti-Semitism and the love of animals — this last extending from the gorillas in the Bronx Zoo to the protozoa of the Museum of Natural History — the funeral parlors where death and the dead are made up at top speed (‘Die, and leave the rest to us’), the barber shops where you can get a shave at three in the morning
Camas on Americans
Nelson Algren, a tough-guy novelist
