A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (7 page)

This is the basis of Sartre’s communism.
One could wonder why Sartre, in choosing communism, a system defined by values, is not a bastard.
It is that every other social system signifies the exploitation of man by man, thus a limitation on freedom.
In choosing communism, we choose freedom.

Wednesday, May 7, 1969

The View of Others

We are subject to other people’s point of view.
Naturally it is necessary to recognize the existence of others.
It is an
obvious fact
.
Sartre does not find any philosophical reasons to justify it.
This view of others
takes away our freedom, defines us.
For the other, we are a thing, an object, we have a character,
etc.
This view of others is contrary to our freedom, but it is only in recognizing the other’s freedom that I free myself from his gaze.
All of Sartrean morality consists
of recognizing and of affirming freedom
.

Consequently, Sartre naturally insists that every writer be engaged, that he belong to the left, and that he be subject to its rigorous rules!
In other, less successful works, Sartre tries above all (in
The Critique of Dialectical Reason
) to reconcile existentialism with Marxism, which naturally is nonsense.

Sunday, May 11, 1969

Heidegger

Before Sartre there was Martin Heidegger, who is undoubtedly more creative.
Born in 1889, professor at Freiburg, and author of the book
Being and Time
, 1927.

It should be said right away that Heidegger was supposed to write a second volume, but he ultimately
never managed to organize his thinking.
His thinking is difficult and tortured.

Existentialism quite simply means to describe the rapport of our consciousness with our existence, in other words, what are for man the most profound, the most definitive aspects of existence.
We proceed by the elimination of the more superficial lateral aspects, and we reach the deeper, more authentic concepts regarding our existence.
This phenomenological method is not concerned with God, etc., but only with what is in our consciousness, when it confronts our specific being, our existence.
It is phenomenological ontology.

Ontology means the science of Being (existence).
Phenomenological means that there are only phenomena, and one must not look for something behind the phenomena.
In this sense, this method is completely atheistic.

Heidegger said that complex arguments are not needed as much as heroic naïveté.

General ontology is the main problem: what is Being?
Here we rediscover a drop of Schopenhauerism: by the analysis of our existence, of what “Being” means for us, we can reach that general problem
which was supposed to be resolved in the second volume of
Being and Time
.

First question:

What is Being?

What is existence?

(What is a form of “Being”).

Second question: What is the meaning of this existence?

Heidegger says that everyone knows, but no one can answer.
It is Saint Augustine who said about time: “I know what it is when they don’t ask me, but when they ask me, I don’t know.”

Classical philosophy wanted to explain Being in a rational way and not by experimenting.
We begin, says Heidegger, by man’s Being, and afterward we move to being in general.

Now, first, we must notice that only man is capable of questioning himself on the subject of his existence.
But how?

This is not an introspection, because introspection and psychoanalysis regenerate through contact with the phenomena of existence but not with existence itself.

What is existence, that is, man’s specific being?

He says:

It defines itself by what he calls “
Da-sein
,” “to be there” (over there).
To be man.
To exist as a man.
The “
Seindes
” is a way for things to exist, an absurd atemporal way (a chair, it is but does not know it).

But man is also a “
Seindes
,” and he is conscious of that: being a thing.
But he also transcends this (transcendent: that which within me navigates toward the exterior), since man is a thing but he is also something more.
He extends beyond the thing.
He is transcendent.
The word “
Sein
,” to be.

Existentialism (Heidegger)

The confrontation of our consciousness with our existence.

It is not about man, but about the human being and the way of being, so to speak, human.

“
Seindes
” is the way of being things, senseless, absurd.

You clearly see how existentialism does not talk about the lack of meaning of an idea, or of the meaning of God, but of the way that things have of being.
Things are absurd because they are here without doing anything so to speak.
They are as they are.
They have no history.
They are not in time.
It’s true that a thing can deteriorate in time, but it undergoes this passively, it is always that way.
The “
Sein
,” to be meaningful, significant.
Now, the “
Da-sein
” gives meaning to the being of things.

In this first place, it is an affirmation of man.
Next, it is about giving a meaning to things, that is,
to men
.

We already said that things do not have limits.
We cannot say where a table ends and where the floor begins, because in truth, it is always about matter composed of atoms.
Energy for Einstein is nothing more than a “curvature” in space, and the thing is a definite thing because man defines it.
Man does this in view of his necessities and his plans.
The chair is for sitting, the table is for writing.
Therefore, the “
Da-sein
,” the higher being, existence, forms a higher being which rightly is a significant being, a human being, an existence.
Heidegger says that absurd
existence is “ontic,” while meaningful, higher existence leads to ontology.

There again is something important which inspired Sartre (who appropriated a lot from Heidegger).

Heidegger says that man’s essence is his existence, that man is not a definite thing.
There are no models of man—as for example in Catholic philosophy—but man is an existence in the process of making itself.
Subtle but profound difference.
One cannot say that someone is man; one can say only that he becomes man, that he achieves himself as human existence.
It is because of this that Sartre ascribes to man a total freedom to choose himself.

Heidegger differentiates the existence that he calls banal and the existence that he calls authentic.
Therefore man exists on two levels:
1.
daily existence,
banal

2.
and
authentic
existence.

Kierkegaard made the same classification, but he added religious life.
Now, for Heidegger, as for Sartre or Marx, religion is an invention of men to avoid confrontation with the true human condition.
And daily life is not necessarily and entirely banal.
Man can exist in the two dimensions of the banal and the authentic.

So, one will ask, what is the importance and value of this authentic existence.

Man, says Heidegger, must create himself.
As he is not a thing, well then!
he must become “man.”
Banal life simply means to flee from oneself.
This is in order to forget and to lose oneself.
To become man is only one possibility.
One does not use the word “I,” but one uses “one.”
“One” goes to the movies.
“One” has political opinions.
And man identifies himself with his social function.
“One” is an engineer,
etc.
You understand in which direction Heidegger’s probing is going.
Man
must truly become man
.

In light of this idea, you see that there are very few people who have human lives.
Our relationship with things is overall a utilitarian relationship, dominated by what one calls “
Sorge
” in German.

Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)
starts by establishing man’s constant preoccupation with the preservation of life, the “
Sorge
.”

In the psychological sense, curiosity is the superficial connection of man.
What are they talking about?
In the more profound sense, it is an interpretation
of man, of the world, of being, of scientific, philosophical, or religious problems.

It is also a way to make existence commonplace, to flee from existence, a way of replacing the profound sense of life by a superficial and limited science.
The dramatic thing about man (and here again, Sartre comes to mind) is that man gives a meaning to things by his existence.
Now, in dealing with science, for example, he gives it an inauthentic meaning.

He falsifies.
Existentialism refrains from science
.
Moving from this inauthentic sphere to the authentic does not consist of a process of culture, of knowledge, but of what he calls a
leap
, a decision to accept anguish and its revelation.
Anguish has a terrible role in existentialism.

How can anguish be defined?

Fear is the fear of something.

Anguish is the fear of nothing,
of non-meaning,
of not giving some meaning to the world,
and of losing oneself.

It is an experience of nothingness and one of the main sources of the mania for nothingness which has stupidly taken hold of European culture and literature.

For me, the stupidity comes from an extremism which is in no way man’s true reality.
Man is a being who needs a moderate temperature; neither the microcosmos nor the macrocosmos is man’s domain.
Modern physics proves that some perfectly correct laws for the micro and macro world are not carried out in our human reality.

For man, a straight line will always be the shortest distance between two points and not the curve, as demonstrated by astronomical dimensions.
I am of the school of Montaigne, and I favor a more moderate attitude: we must not succumb to theories, but must know that
systems have a very short life and not allow ourselves to be imposed on
.

As you see, it is a magnificent theme for literature!

Existence is made of nothingness (Hegelian idea), and can only be discovered by the existence of nothingness.
(Example: the duel scene in Dostoyevsky’s
The Possessed
).
Man must not be fooled by his form.
Go further and say that man escapes from all definition, from all theory, from whatever you want.

Man’s relationship with his most profound thinking is characterized by his immaturity.
It is like a schoolboy who strives to say important things with
a frivolous aim of
surpassing
others, in order to be more scholarly than others.

We must live and let live.

Unpremeditated literature.

High spirituality is a rare thing, and the human race is distinguished by its differences.
Each man has his world
.

In general, nothingness was considered by all of philosophy to be a dialectical contradiction of being, first you think that something is, and only afterward can you get to the idea of nothingness in saying that in removing something, there is emptiness.

Now, Heidegger gave a famous lecture on why
Being exists rather than nothing?

For Heidegger, it is the Being which appears secondarily as a contradiction of nothingness.

1.
nothingness
2.
Being.

This definition can seem rather unfounded, but actually it leads to an extremely curious and true experience: human existence is in constant opposition to nothingness.
Man always threatened by death and annihilation persists like a flame which wants to be revived, fed.

To conclude, a general characteristic of existence, according to Heidegger.

1.
It is “
Sorge
,” concern.

Human life is by no means assured, but endlessly wants conquests, life is to conquer what one does not have.

2.
Human beings are limited and have an end precisely because they have nothingness within them.
Authentic existence asserts man’s finiteness.
It has moral constants.
It does not permit having a clear conscience.
Never are we what we want to be, but we still want to be.
Man is essentially unhappy because he is limited.
We should add some very important things about time.

It is Heidegger who introduced the notion of “completed future.”
Man’s time is always the future.
He is never there where he is.
He is always transcendent.
Time for Heidegger is complicated.
He gets confused.
The essentials of this philosophy have been explained.

Death does not exist.
When death comes, one does not know that one is dying.

Man is for death.

The problem of death preoccupies human thought, without arriving at a result.

How to explain what I am?

And what I no longer am?
not?

We know nothing.

When I die, the world no longer exists.

The merit of structuralism is that it seriously deals with language, since we are (since philosophy is) a verbalism without end.

Monday, May 12

Marx 1818–1883

Marx knew Hegel in his youth, but at age nineteen, he indicated in a letter to his father that Hegel did not satisfy him.

And why?

It was the abstract element, the abstract logic, which distanced Marx from Hegel.

It is true that he appropriated a lot from Hegel, but he revolutionized the very meaning of philosophy.

He said that the problem of philosophy is not to understand the world but to change it.

Man is in relation to the external world.
He needs to dominate nature, and there lies his real problem, all the rest is
frippery
.

Marx said that philosophy must not be aristocratic, that is, done by men outside of communal life, but must be done on the scale of the average man, of the man who has needs and lives in society.

One can, Marx said, conduct a revision of thinking and values from top to bottom.
What comes from on top is inevitably a luxury, an ornament.
But what comes from below is reality.
One must therefore go from a lower to a higher consciousness.