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Simone de Beauvoir,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Raymond Aron,
The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.
He applied phenomenology to people’s lives in a more exciting, personal way than its inventors had ever thought to do, and thus made himself the founding father of a philosophy that became international in impact, but remained Parisian in flavour: modern existentialism.
Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’. What this formula gains in brevity it loses in comprehensibility. But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms. You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is
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His ethical dilemma
‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.
They favoured the Flore, the Deux Magots and the Bar Napoléon, all clustered around the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Bonaparte.
I'm sorry, he's a banker
All the same, here is my attempt at a definition of what existentialists do.
What is coffee
Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality — provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades.
Of all the perplexing things about ‘being’, Heidegger goes on, the most perplexing of all is that people fail to be sufficiently perplexed about it. I say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘I am happy’, as if the little word in the middle were of no interest. But when I stop to think about it, I realise that it brings up a fundamental and mysterious question. What can it mean to say that anything is?
Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last.
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.
A natural human tendency is to try to continue with as ordinary and civilised a life as possible, for as long as one can. Bruno Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life could not continue unaltered: these were the ones who got away quickly.
Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes.
Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.
He said that he would not move to Berlin because it would take him away from his Black Forest environment — from ‘the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow’. When a blizzard blows around the cabin on a deep winter’s night, he wrote, ‘that is the perfect time for philosophy’.
Arendt's awesome escape story
‘It’s not just a question of having eyes, you have to learn how to use them. Do you know what Flaubert did to the young Maupassant? He sat him down in front of a tree and gave him two hours to describe it.’
Beauvoir the adventurer
Seeing the social and intellectual ‘crisis’ around him, he urged them to work together against the rise of irrationalism and mysticism, and against the cult of the merely local, in order to rescue the Enlightenment spirit of shared reason and free inquiry. He did not expect anyone to return to an innocent belief in rationalism, but he did argue that Europeans must protect reason, for if that was lost, the continent and the wider cultural world would be lost with it.
Beauvoir later said that she and Sartre found Camus ‘a simple, cheerful soul’, often funny and bawdy in conversation, and so emotional that he would sit down in the snow in the street at 2 a.m. and pour out his love troubles.
Like Sartre in Nausea, he points out that mostly we don’t see the fundamental problem of life because we don’t stop to think about it. We get up, commute, work, eat, work, commute, sleep. But occasionally a breakdown occurs, a Chandos-like moment in which a beat is skipped and the question of purpose arises. At such moments, we experience ‘weariness tinged with amazement’, as we confront the most basic question of all: why exactly do we go on living?
Great descrption of the point of Fear and Trembling including Abraham & Isaac
Sartre argues for meaning
Being and nothingness
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.
By early summer of 1944, as Allied forces moved towards Paris, everyone knew that freedom was near. The growing emotion was hard to take, as Beauvoir noted; it was like the painful tingling that comes when sensation returns after numbness.
One element of American life unequivocally horrified Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus: its racial inequalities, and not only in the South. After his first trip, Sartre wrote in Le Figaro of how black ‘untouchables’ and ‘unseeables’ haunted the streets, never meeting your gaze; it was as if they saw no one, and you were not supposed to see them either.
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 relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.
Description of The Second Sex
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.
Women try constantly to picture themselves as they would look to a male gaze. Instead of looking out to the world as it presents itself to them (like the person peering through the keyhole) they maintain a point of view in which they are the objects (like the same person after becoming aware of footsteps in the hall). This, for Beauvoir, is why women spend so much time in front of mirrors.
Women, in other words, live much of their lives in what Sartre would have called bad faith, pretending to be objects.
It is exhausting, because, all the time, a woman’s subjectivity is trying to do what comes naturally to subjectivity, which is to assert itself as the centre of the universe. A struggle rages inside every woman, and because of this Beauvoir considered the problem of how to be a woman the existentialist problem par excellence.
As Sartre wrote in response to Hiroshima, humanity had now gained the power to wipe itself out, and must decide every single day that it wanted to live. Camus also wrote that humanity faced the task of choosing between collective suicide and a more intelligent use of its technology — ‘between hell and reason’. After 1945, there seemed little reason to trust in humanity’s ability to choose well.
Communism made sense after the war
Deciding between US and soviets. Followed by Karamosov
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?’
Sartre still believed, however, that one must call the shots as one sees them at the time. If you fence-sit just because you are scared to make an error, then you are definitely making one.
Existential movies
A woman in her pod in Australia can talk to her son in Europe: they see each other’s images on special plates which they hold in their hands. But the son complains, ‘I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.’ The simulacrum is no substitute for the real Other. As Forster glosses it, ‘The imponderable bloom, declared by discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was ignored by the machine.’
