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January 2 - January 30, 2025
they maintain a point of view in which they are the objects
The male gaze
Hegelian ideas of the Other and the alienated gaze: ‘It was I who thought about that! It was absolutely not Sartre!’
Look up
those moments in which a person makes a choice about some situation, and thus changes everything. In these crux points, we catch a person in the very act of turning existence into essence.
He sought out those experiences during which a child in a challenging situation took control and bent that situation his own
he was ‘no longer someone who could be persecuted’. Interestingly,
The gaze of Other
‘farewell to literature’.
Feeling ‘superfluous’, Flaubert does not know what his role in the world is supposed to be.
‘I was in error when I thought I could define a morality independent of social context’, she wrote meekly. But perhaps we need not follow her in this.
This is an early and extreme variety of the ‘trolley problem’, in which one person must be sacrificed in order (it’s hoped) to save many.
In a note to Merleau-Ponty, Sonia Brownell wrote that she’d just had lunch with some French writers in London who could not stop gabbling about the battles they intended to fight on Paris’ streets, and the best way of making petrol bombs.
If war is imminent, how can you keep silent? Merleau-Ponty took a gloomy view: ‘Because brute force will decide the outcome. Why speak to what has no ears?’
‘In the language of the Church, this was my conversion.’
philosophers as the people who are wakeful while others sleep.
They too each thought they were sailing into new and more exciting territory,
It certainly made a contrast with her former friend Merleau-Ponty, who, with every rise in the pressure level, seemed only to smile more wryly and make more quips.
Temprament of 3 philosophers
‘He was probably the last good friend I had.’
Soviet citizens did not travel because they had no desire to do so and were too busy building Communism.
This generosity of purpose is an easily forgotten fact about Sartre.
He is good. His ‘goodness’ was his fatal flaw: it led him to overwork, and more significantly it was what led him to believe that he must reconcile his existentialism with Marxism in the first place.
Beauvoir considered the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre’s ultimate response to the catastrophe of 1956.
He tries to adopt the gaze of the outsider, turned against the privileged caste — even when that caste includes himself.
The gaze of the Outsider
Communists believe that only the party can decide what is
Only the party decides
Sartre had by now become so used to taking radical stances that he hardly knew any longer how to be moderate.
‘Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner’
War
radical ethical politics,
The word radical never gets broken down; unconventional or action-based are synonymous
existentialist psychotherapy,
Influence leading to positive psychology
‘anti-psychiatrists’
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Barnes followed it with books comparing existentialist thought to other traditions, including Zen Buddhism
The Outsider was one of the few sources of light during a drab period in post-war Britain.
The Outsider
‘Against Dryness’,
Iris Murdoch
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.
Justifying Existentialists' work
Heideggerian J. Glenn Gray,
More pls
that old philosophies would offer little to the post-war world and that everything must be reinvented.
people simultaneously suffer from the system and perpetuate it, while telling themselves that none of it matters.
The phenomenological imperative to go straight to experienced reality may have had a more lasting impact
here than Sartre’s more overt radicalism.
death is an outrage that comes to me from outside and wipes out my projects.
Writing prompt
‘the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities’.
Boris Vian was only thirty-nine when he died, on 23 June 1959, of a heart attack, which came while he was in a cinema attending a preview of a film based on his novel I Spit on Your Graves.
Irony
He was, said Sartre, a man whose ‘stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged a dubious battle against events of these times’.
Moraliste Sarte
as soon as one becomes one, all those ways of Being disappear that would disappear from a position
Japanese haiku.
Like Heidegger
Montparnasse, where Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s grave
Friesian islands.
Look this up.
The Life of the Mind.
Has this author read it?
although seventeen years older than Arendt, outlived her by five months, before dying peacefully in his sleep on 26 May 1976, aged eighty-six.
Heideggers death
He acted as though he was unaware of what people needed to hear, yet his friend Heinrich Wiegand Petzet reported that Heidegger knew very well what was expected: it just made him feel more misunderstood.
When was the phrase 'throw your pearls to swine' come into being?
He was disdainful about mass tourism, which he considered symptomatic of the modern ‘desert-like’ way of being, with its demand for novelty.
Here here!
and at last Heidegger found the Greece he was looking for.
He never thought of Greece in terms of trade and openness, as Husserl had done.
I know that everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.’
The rightful home
