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January 2 - January 30, 2025
Her response to America was the now usual mixture of wariness and bliss.
People would call her ‘a black man’s prostitute’, and her career would be ruined. Conversely, many black Americans
Proust — whom Sartre abhorred.
Me too
French ways of thinking about existentialism. For the French in the 1940s, it tended to be seen as new, jazzy, sexy and daring. For Americans, it evoked grimy cafés and shadowy Parisian streets: it meant old Europe.
Richard Wright, who, after first meeting the existentialists, wrote to his friend Gertrude Stein that he could not understand why Americans insisted on seeing it as a gloomy philosophy: to him it meant optimism and freedom.
twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other central and eastern European countries;
Germans expelled
Decameron-
Sachsen-Meiningen;
capacious, which prevails in the expanse, brings us to something freeing.
Nature of freedom is capacity
Vladimir and Estragon,
The five years of uncertainty were difficult, and for the first year he also had the worry about his lost sons. In early 1946, he had a complete psychological breakdown, and in February was taken into the Haus Baden sanatorium in Badenweiler to recover.
As he was turning, Heidegger paid increasing attention to language, to Hölderlin and the Greeks, and to the role of poetry in thought.
Source of "the turn" Kehre
making-machine-like of all things:
Meaning making machine
We bully things into yielding up their goods.
‘Everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.’
Gelassenheit, which can be translated as ‘releasement’ or ‘letting-be’.
Enabling things to un-hide themselves is what humans do: it is our distinctive contribution. We are a ‘clearing’, a Lichtung, a sort of open, bright forest glade into which beings can shyly step forward like a deer from the trees.
Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’
Cezanne
the very period when Sartre was becoming more concerned with questions of action and involvement in the world, Heidegger was retiring almost entirely from consideration
those questions. Freedom, decision and anxiety no longer play much of a role for him. Human beings themselves have become hard to discern, and this is particularly disturbing coming from a philosopher who had not yet convincingly dissociated himself from those who perpetrated the twentieth century’s worst crimes against humanity.
Heidegger Sarte at odds
Reading the late Heidegger requires a ‘letting-go’ of one’s own usual critical ways of thinking. Many consider this an unacceptable demand from a philosopher, even though we are willing to do it for artists.
Writing prompt
‘Nobody is likely to climb 1,200 metres to make a scene’, she claimed.
Observation on Heidegger avoiding criticism or rational thought
he did not want to issue a facile statement of repudiation, because so many real Nazis had rushed to do just that in 1945, announcing their change of belief ‘in the most loathsome way’
Irony of a silent philosopher
Karl and Gertrud Jaspers had somehow managed to survive in Heidelberg throughout the war, in their cautious way, with Karl neither teaching nor publishing. It was a close thing, for it emerged later that their names were on a list of people due to be deported to concentration
He concluded that Heidegger was a philosopher of the greatest importance who should be given all the university support he needed to pursue his own work — but who should not yet be allowed to teach.
1946 book Die Schuldfrage (translated as The Question of German Guilt).
Die schuldfrage
filled with talk of the need to wait for the ‘advent’ of something that would take humans over, or appropriate them; the notions of advent and appropriation were also among Heidegger’s post-‘turn’ concepts.
Advent and appropriation: to Jaspers and psychology there was no world-building except among the DSM1. who controlled the Zeitgeist?
Heidegger became the overwhelming presence in university philosophy all over the European continent from then
Existence and Existents,
Levinas
‘il y a’ (‘there
Impersonal Being beneath Angst
Totality and Infinity,
The dog would bark and fling itself around with delight at seeing them, as dogs
OMG!
We do not merge; we respond to one another.
Mitsein vs. Buber
This relationship is more fundamental than the self, more fundamental than consciousness, more fundamental even than Being — and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation.
Philosophers becoming fundamentalists
Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel
Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is unknown in our lives.
probably as a consequence of his having no real interest in the human.
Unfounded premise
Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for what we do — and yet that we must ground our existence and
A century's legacy
bourgeois types, professing to be well-meaning humanists, had ‘never allowed themselves to be affected by the meaning of a face’. In Being and Nothingness, he went on to say that the placid old ethical principles based on mere tolerance did not go far enough any more. ‘Tolerance’ failed to engage with the full extent of the demands others make on us. It is not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt. We must learn to give each other more than that. Now he went even further: we must all become deeply ‘engaged’ in our shared world. The young French writer Frédéric de
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Sarte's turning
Elfride, who was also present, asked, ‘Mais enfin, qu’est-ce que l’existentialisme?’ (‘So what is this existentialism anyway?’)
Sartre was stuck between two opponents who both hated him while having almost nothing in common with each other.
Controlling the narrative on Sarte
Sartre later told his secretary Jean Cau that, when he first brought it up, Heidegger looked at him ‘with infinite pity’. Actually, Heidegger’s face was probably communicating something more like, ‘Must we
Reading faces: two philosophers get pilled by looking outward from ego rather than together
The days had long passed when Sartre had seized on Being and Time as his only consolation during the days after France’s defeat in 1940.
Ego
It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.
boys are already aware of the penis as something important, while the girl’s genitals are never mentioned and seem not to exist.
Sex parts as hidden for women lead to a diverse range of experiences, many threatening
female writers disappointing because they do not seize hold of the human condition; they do not take it up as their own.
The master perceives everything from his own viewpoint, as is natural. But, bizarrely, so does the slave, who ties herself in knots trying to visualise the world from the master’s point of view — an ‘alienated’ perspective.
Owning the libs
Episodes of competitive gazing
Competitive gazing
love you, I don’t want to control your thoughts directly, but I want you to love and desire me and to freely give up your freedom to me. Moreover, I want you to see me, not as a contingent and flawed person like any other, but as a ‘necessary’ being in your world.
Bam! Sarte tells on monogamy
‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.
