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June 22 - September 30, 2021
phenomenology — a word so long yet elegantly balanced that, in French as in English, it can make a line of iambic trimeter all by itself.
Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.
‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard.
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.
Sartre too supported gay rights, although he always insisted that sexuality was a matter of choice, which put him at odds with the views of many gay people who felt that they were simply born that way.
Be realistic: demand the impossible.
As Sartre remarked, the demonstrators on the 1968 barricades demanded nothing and everything — that is to say, they demanded freedom.
For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, ‘in a nice warm room with the shutters closed’, we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.
quotation from Plato’s dialogue The Sophist: For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.
call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’ — the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious’.
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.
He does have some moments of respite, and these occur when his favourite café plays the record of a woman (probably Sophie Tucker) singing a melancholy, bluesy number called ‘Some of These Days’.
To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire.
What astounds Kierkegaard is neither the obedience nor the reprieve, but the way in which Abraham and Isaac seem able to return to the way things were before. They have been forced to depart entirely from the realm of ordinary humanity and fatherly protection, yet somehow Abraham is still confident in his love for his son. For Kierkegaard, the story shows that we must make this sort of impossible leap in order to continue with life after its flaws have been revealed. As he wrote, Abraham ‘resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’.
For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.
Sartre replies, ‘I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream.’ The waiter goes off, but comes back apologising. ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream. How about with no milk?’ The joke hinges on the notion that the Absence of Cream and the Absence of Milk are two definite negativities, just as Cream and Milk are two definite positivities.
We cannot say (to quote more examples from Sartre’s 1945 lecture) ‘I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so.’ We do say such things, all the time; but we are in bad faith when we do it.
Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.
In existentialism, there are no excuses. Freedom comes with total responsibility.
With the sagacity that came from its being someone else’s problem, he said, ‘Write anything.’
girls come to think of themselves as ‘positioned in space’ rather than as defining or constituting the space around them by their movements.
Sartre then adds a twist. This time he puts us in the hallway of a Parisian hotel, peering through the keyhole of someone’s door — perhaps because of jealousy, lust or curiosity. I am absorbed in whatever I’m seeing, and strain towards it. Then I hear footsteps in the hall — someone is coming! The whole set-up changes. Instead of being lost in the scene inside the room, I am now aware of myself as a peeping tom, which is how I’ll appear to the third party coming down the hall. My look, as I peer through the keyhole, becomes ‘a look-looked-at’. My ‘transcendence’ — my ability to pour out of
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As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’
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.
Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.
The word ‘chiasm’ or ‘chiasmus’ comes from the Greek letter chi, written χ, and it denotes exactly that crossed intertwining shape. In biology, it refers to the crossing of two nerves or ligaments. In language, it is the rhetorical device in which one phrase is countered by another inverting the same words, as when John F. Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ or when Mae West said, ‘It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men.’
Albert Camus. In his essay ‘Neither Victims Nor Executioners’ he wrote, ‘I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder.’ Whatever the pay-off, he would not support formal justifications for violence, especially by the state.
People will always do violent things, but philosophers and state officials have a duty not to come up with excuses that will justify them.
suffer what historian E. P. Thompson later called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.
After Korea, he has concluded that one needs a longer perspective to understand history. He no longer wishes to ‘become engaged on every event, as if it were a test of morality’ — a tendency which he describes as bad faith.
‘he said first of all: I’m a Jew’. Sartre had once criticised this kind of firm identity statement as an act of bad faith, since it implied presenting oneself as a fixed self rather than as a free consciousness. In truth, she and Sartre always had a weakness for people with uncompromising identities and attitudes.
the Genet Principle: that the underdog is always right.
As Sloan Wilson recalled, executives began wearing (identical) sports clothes to work instead of grey suits — just to prove that they, unlike all the other conformists, were free and authentic individuals.
‘I can’t be bothered to tell you everybody’s name. Address the men as daddy-o and the women as toots.’
Unfortunately, this is the deal we get. We can taste phenomenology only because, one day, it will be taken from us. We clear our space, then the forest reclaims it again. The only consolation is to have had the beauty of seeing light through the leaves at all: to have had something, rather than nothing.
‘His death does separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.’
Moreover, recent research suggests that those who have been encouraged to think they are unfree are inclined to behave less ethically, again suggesting that we treat it as an alibi.
In one of his transcribed conversations with Beauvoir, he said to her, ‘It seems to me that a great atheist, truly atheist philosophy was something philosophy lacked. And that it was in this direction that one should now endeavour to work.’ Beauvoir replied, ‘To put it briefly, you wanted to make a philosophy of man.’
would come to play in our lives, although in his 1954 book Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, the German author Friedrich Heinemann warned that the coming ‘ultra-rapid computing machine’ would raise a ‘truly existential question’, namely that of how human beings could remain free.
As Forster glosses it, ‘The imponderable bloom, declared by discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was ignored by the machine.’
