Thanks very much to Embrace the Dull for bringing this little nugget to my attention.
ok, i don’t really have much to say. i never read much sartre, and what i did, i never understood. inspite of basil’s best efforts to explain him to me–he’s impossible (sartre not basil) for me to understand. at first i was gonna comment on how robertson singled out JP, vs. the other big hitters of last century, but then why would PR know about heidegger, or any of the other anti god crew.
so shit, on the surface it looked like i was gonna have a chance to get my 20th century-secularization of western kultur-why sartre was a chump-overal ontotheologicalization of our society-blahblah-death of god-blahblah jibbajabba on. but now i don’t have the energy.
quebey? basil? cover for me.
thanks
22 responses so far ↓
1 rcg // Feb 8, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Well, I’ve been out of the loop for a bit, but I’d sum it up thusly:
Sartre was an excellent phenomenologist who took Husserl’s lines of thought to their radical and, frankly, logical conclusions. Brilliant.
Then, because of the street-cred these tranchant insights gave him, he thought he was qualified to start thinking and talking about all kinds of stuff.
From this point on Sartre is (as I recall with a shout-out to the gone but not forgotten Rob) a tool.
He was also a dirtbag. And I mean a real dirtbag who exploited whatsername and dillied with his female doctoral student’s dallies and really had little or no intellectual or moral merit for the rest of his days.
He also embraced the Soviet Union and was unrepentant even after details of the gulag and the political eradication of the intellectual class surfaced.
But again, credit him with having had the guts to go where Husserl dared not.
I don’t know about that whole Pat Robertson thing, but if the Europeans are in a funk, it has been festering since long before Sartre. Sartre is at best a symptom.
Rud, I expect a return volley.
No doubt it’s high time B put up more than a 3-word comment.
Natty is going to love this one.
2 rcg // Feb 8, 2006 at 1:22 pm
He also had that funny eye, and was, in general, an ugly slug.
3 Don // Feb 8, 2006 at 3:09 pm
His feet stink!
4 jefke // Feb 8, 2006 at 4:53 pm
i’m still happy i got to use ontotheological it’s been a long time. and i missed it.
I refine my earlier lazy stand. i started his road to freedom trilogy. i liked the first book-got part way through the 2nd, and it was like he was trying to get all joyce and stream of consciousness. so i bailed. I have read the 3 big plays in the little blue penguin classicesque version. no exit was amusing to me. not nearly as doom and gloom as everyone said it was.
i guess what was most interesting to me was that PBR err PR knew to even bring up one eye/le garcon du cafe i believe levinas called him mockingly (don’t jump on my bad french) /i ding got to drop manny!!/
and then further to credit the malaise of the times (desmond!) to him. agreed he was a symptom, nay merely a harbinger of a bigger sickness, the sickness unto civil unions, universal health care and environmental awareness. damn him.
5 rcg // Feb 8, 2006 at 7:13 pm
C’mon rud, give us a lil’ sum-sum.
6 rud // Feb 8, 2006 at 9:36 pm
A strange idiocy, this, no? ( I mean this posted link, and not necessarily the ensuing posts in this thread). sartre the end of hope? Ridiculous. Well, we’ve got our second on the way and I’ve been steeping in sartre over the past years. So stuff it, PR - “Sartre is smartre!”
Um, let’s get down to bidness, biznitch. You eat nacho cheese Bugles but i still read your comments. Also, Jefke’s hoop game is mud (like yours) but his blog is like ambrosia to me. Heidegger was brilliant, period. Plato couldn’t govern, blah blah blah. We can all be better people. Our WORK is perhaps just how we attempt to reach this, for better or worse. This means one’s failures can be the motivation for one’s work, but that the worth of such work is not necessarily undercut by association with those failures. (I thought we were above all this, and also, by my understanding, de Beauvoir always knew what she was getting into with Sartre le célibataire.)
Let me offer up some further suggestions with reference to rcg’s quite nuanced and well thought-out executive summary of Sartre as man and philosopher, if only for other interested researchers passing through these parts.
The starting point with Sartre should always be with his observation that we are always more self-aware than we ever care to admit. At the same time, in thus being aware of how we act and why we act, we find very little that is substantial or reassuring about the basis for our actions.
This leads to the curious situation of knowing that there is a choice involved in one’s actions, wihtout being able to explain where it comes from. (’Why did I order that extra side of fries?’) It is here perhaps that Sartre’s dispute with psychoanalysis comes to the fore. This choice or intention in one’s actions does not have a hidden source, as in the unconcsious. He will try to argue that there is something gratuitious and unjustifiable about it-it comes from nowhere, nothing.
There is no richer field for adducing support for Sartre’s position than phenomena of failure. For Sartre, evidence of this ‘nothingness’ clinging to our actions, this ‘freedom,’ can be found in all the *inappropriate* and stupid things we do and say to each other, as well as in how we try to compensate for this. Sartre is the philosopher of failure par excellence.
Finally, however, the life inappropriate or ‘absurd’ is no reason for dismay or resignation. The insubstantiality of the self means for Sartre that we have nowhere to resign to (unlike the stoic). We must engage, and indeed always are, for instance by ‘thinking and talking about all kinds of stuff.’ We are putting our faith in things all the time, and this is unavoidable (’What things’ is another question).
The challenge Sartre puts to us thus has to do with honesty and respect. Despite the clear difficulties, can we be honest to ourselves and each other about the choices we are aware of making, and will we respect each other’s condemnation to choice, however exasperating or trying the other person’s choices may be?
7 B // Feb 9, 2006 at 12:17 am
*Yawn* Uhmm, yah, well… bollocks!
Wanna hear about the end of hope? That’s the day I spend five minutes interpreting ANYTHING Pat Robertson has to say.
And what’s this wild accusation that my comments are too brief? You want MORE? You know where my blog is, chump.
8 jefke // Feb 9, 2006 at 7:19 am
it’s here for the uninformed and lazy.
http://www.jefke.com/virtually_squared/
rud,
this is getting depressing–are there no continential philosophers to hate anymore, if what you’re saying is true (excellent explaination btw) then, it seems like pepe le wandering eye is like mr.potatohead vattimo…’yeah wow, when you think about it there really is nothing holding all this shit together…but don’t fret, this frees us up to dump all the bullshit of yesteryear and start fresh, new and going things the /insert word that no one can define (authentic, proper, but never right or better) way/
we need a villian. we need someone that says what we all think is true, but won’t admit, and then doesn’t apologize or make it warm and fuzzy.
rud, your destiny awaits you!
9 rcg // Feb 9, 2006 at 9:12 am
I think we can safely say that the villany you seek is alive and well and in Leuven under the name Visker. I can’t remember if his eye wandered but they kinda bluge don’t they?
B, the last time I checked your blog you hadn’t posted since July 2005. I see–having been glove-slapped in the face–there has been a resurgence of late.
Lastly, rud, my summary of John Player Special was neither nuanced nor well-thought out. I don’t do nuanced/well-thought-out anymore — not entirely sure I ever did. But thanks for the courtesy.
Birthday #1 is around the corner. no? 22nd?
10 rcg // Feb 9, 2006 at 9:13 am
“bluge” = “bulge”
11 rcg // Feb 9, 2006 at 9:14 am
Whoa. My knbowledge of the alphabet just got challenged by your blog. Ha. I won.
12 jefke // Feb 9, 2006 at 2:50 pm
i recall visker having solid eye control, it was the frothing of the mouth and the occasional spilt globulal that would hit the table that was frightening.
13 Cormac // Feb 9, 2006 at 3:02 pm
I never got around to reading Why I am Not a Christian (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671203231/sr=8-1/qid=1139515196/), but boy, does this make me want to. Thoughts, oh Philosopher King?
14 Natty // Feb 9, 2006 at 3:34 pm
yes, richard, i am just loving this one. actually, it doesn’t bother me here. if anything, i get a moment to remember life in belgium. with this online forum of philosophy blah, blah, blah i can turn it off much more easily than when i was submerged in it. what the hell was i thinking, enrolling in a one year, intensive philosophy program…oh, it was love (for jefke- i think he was grateful). thanks B, for getting me into that program! maybe you’re the reason jefke and i are still together after all these years, your green light.
15 rcg // Feb 9, 2006 at 3:46 pm
“thanks B, for getting me into that program!”
I seem to recall asking B what it took to get accepted, and I believe he put his finger to the soft part of his wrist, feeling for a pulse.
Where B’s powers were fully exercised was when he got us into the forbidden room of professorial photographs so we could borrow them, scan them, and then make trading cards.
And for that I am, to this day, grateful.
16 Cormac // Feb 9, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Err, make that
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671203231/
17 jefke // Feb 9, 2006 at 4:41 pm
ahh the memories of B–him taking me to the bank to have me granted access to the 87 francs that were in the Philosophy club account and then going ot plectrum for a beer. I believe it was then that he said “really, you can do anything with the club–do what ever you want”
hmm perhaps a retrospective is needed.
18 B // Feb 9, 2006 at 9:35 pm
I strongly recommend we do NOT have a retrospective. Don’t go snooping around in the past, ladies and gentlemen. You don’t know what you’ll find. And you don’t want them to take back those diplomas now, do you?
I don’t believe I ever found my pulse. But they let me in anyway. I was merely extending the same courtesy to the rest of you.
Speaking of the philosophical undead, Bertrand Russell is another of those butt-ugly philosophers whose mug advances dialogue by horrifying most people into silence. I can recommend the book on Amazon mainly because it does not seem to feature a picture of the guy anywhere on the cover.
19 Natty // Feb 9, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Quebey, I wasn’t saying that it was so hard to get in to the program, but given my less-than-spectacular performance in my organic chemistry class, I was a bit concerned. Hahahaha!! Seeing it in print makes me laugh. Like they even looked at the chem (or any) grades. Funny, funny, funny.
20 rud // Feb 10, 2006 at 3:00 am
Yes, a retrospective, yes!!! wITH CARDS!
Yes the 22nd, good memory! It’ll be the 2nd b-day, though–we’re going to the Aquarium to find nemo.
21 rcg // Feb 10, 2006 at 9:00 am
He’s already 2. Christ. Oh yeah, and you’re expecting another… so that’d make sense. Jeeps.
Elizabeth is turning 12.
KUL can have that multicoloured laser-print diploma, as far as I care. I’m surprised they didn’t issue a platic-laminated wallet-size M.A.
Bastards.
22 B // Feb 10, 2006 at 6:42 pm
Yo’ mama.