Apricot Cocktails Flashcards
(15 cards)
How did Sarte first discover existentialism
Raymond Aron in 1933 telling Sarte that one can make a philosophy out of this apricot cocktail. He was relaying his understanding on phenomenology.
Why does the author think existentialism is still relevant
We find ourselves surveilled and managed to an extraordinary degree, farmed for our personal data, fed consumer goods but discouraged from speaking our minds or doing anything too disruptive in the world, and regularly reminded that racial, sexual, religious and ideological conflict are not closed cases at all. Perhaps we are ready to talk about freedom again – and talking about it politically also means talking about it in our personal lives. This is why, when reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology, or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science, one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news. Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? and what should we do?
Who were the existentialists
Moreover, it is unclear who was an existentialist and who was not. Sartre and Beauvoir were among the very few to accept the label, and even they were reluctant at first. Others refused it, often rightly. Some of the main thinkers in this book were phenomenologists but not existentialists at all (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), or existentialists but not phenomenologists (Kierkegaard); some were neither (Camus), and some used to be one or both but then changed their minds (levinas)
Who were the precursors
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard
Why was Nietzsche a precursor
They found a philosophy more to their taste in the other great nineteenth-century existentialist precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Born in Röcken in Prussia in 1844, Nietzsche set out on his brilliant career in philology, but turned to writing idiosyncratic philosophical treatises and collections of aphorisms. He directed these against the pious dogmas of Christianity and of traditional philosophy alike: for him, both were self-serving veils drawn over the harsher realities of life. What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history. He believed that every great philosopher actually wrote ‘a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’ rather than conducting an impersonal search for knowledge. Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.
Why was Kierkegaard
They found a philosophy more to their taste in the other great nineteenth-century existentialist precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Born in Röcken in Prussia in 1844, Nietzsche set out on his brilliant career in philology, but turned to writing idiosyncratic philosophical treatises and collections of aphorisms. He directed these against the pious dogmas of Christianity and of traditional philosophy alike: for him, both were self-serving veils drawn over the harsher realities of life. What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history. He believed that every great philosopher actually wrote ‘a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’ rather than conducting an impersonal search for knowledge. Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.
What is existentialism. Authors definitions
Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence. – They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free – – and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes – an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself. – On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. – Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. – Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. – An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. – By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.
What did Sartre propose re the oppressed?
all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest.
How did existentialism become unfashionable
On the other hand, I also became aware that the existentialists were already considered out of fashion. By the 1980s, they had given way to new generations of structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists. These kinds of philosopher seemed to treat philosophy as a game. They juggled signs, symbols and meanings; they pulled out odd words from each other’s texts to make the whole edifice collapse. They searched for ever more refined and unlikely wisps of signification in the writers of the past. Although each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were not. The dizziness of freedom and the anguish of existence were embarrassments. Biography was out, because life itself was out. Experience was out; in a particularly dismissive mood, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘shop-girl metaphysics’. The goal of the human sciences was ‘to dissolve man’, he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same.
What other precursors are there?
Long history of interweaving life and ideas - Epicureans and Stoics - although a new twist with the existentialists.
Describe phenomenology
Aron may have been saying something like this: traditional philosophers often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. They set aside most of what had kept philosophy going since Plato: puzzles about whether things are real or how we can know anything for certain about them. Instead, they pointed out that any philosopher who asks these questions is already thrown into a world filled with things – or, at least, filled with the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’ (from the Greek word meaning ‘things that appear’). So why not concentrate on the encounter with phenomena and ignore the rest? The old puzzles need not be ruled out forever, but they can be put in brackets, as it were, so that philosophers can deal with more down-to-earth matters. The
What did husserls see in concept of intentionality?
Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle.
How did Sarte build on husserls work?
Husserlian phenomenology never had the mass influence of Sartrean existentialism, at least not directly – but it was his groundwork that freed Sartre and other existentialists to write so adventurously about everything from café waiters to trees to breasts. Reading his Husserl books in Berlin in 1933, Sartre developed his own bold interpretation of it, putting special emphasis on intentionality and the way it throws the mind out into the world and its things. For Sartre, this gives the mind an immense freedom. If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean. He gave this idea a Sartrean makeover in a short essay which he began writing in Berlin, but published only in 1939: ‘A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality’.
How did Husserls philosophy evolve?
He turned first inward thinking that all his phenomenality was done in the head but then outward again later in career when he emphasisied social relations. The initial turn inward was partly why stein left as his assistant.
How did Heidegger see husserls work ultimately?
As missing the key initial issue - being.
