European Tribune - Philosophy - "It's good for getting girlfriends."
But, precisely, if Nothingness is introduced into the world through man, anguish at Nothingness is simply anguish at freedom, or if you prefer, freedom's anguish at itself. If, for example, I experienced a slight anguish yesterday before the wine which I could but should not drink, it's because the "I shouldn't" was already in the past ... and nothing could prevent me from drinking. It was before that particular nothing I was so anguished; that nothingness of my past's means of acting on my present... . [N]othing allows me to foresee what I shall do and, even if I were able to foresee it, nothing could prevent me from doing it. So anguish is indeed the experience of Nothingness, hence it isn't a psychological phenomenon. It's an existential structure of human reality, it's simply freedom becoming conscious of itself as being its own nothingness.
Whatever. Drink or don't drink. Don't write books about it. (And why not stop talking adolescent rubbish and learn some real psychology?)
Meanwhile:
Bourdieu is insightful - not nearly as flamboyant, and not nearly as self-absorbed as the Foucault/Derrida axis, but always interesting.
Mary Midgley is under-rated and not nearly as well-known as she should be.
Robery Anton Wilson - oh so Californian and oh so likely to make academic heads explode. (Is there a downside to someone who does that?)
Chomsky, of course.
J K Galbraith - loathed by the free-marketeers, which is more than enough reason to read him.
So it's not quite a wasteland. But you have to look outside mainstream academia, which does rather seem to have hitched itself to a pink balloon of hot air and drifted far, far away.
An optimistic publisher sent me something by A C Grayling recently, and it was awful - one long scab of banality. Similarly with Polkinghorne, who gets trotted out by the religionists as an authority, but really isn't.
Supposedly these people are famous. Go figure.
He does not have a totally untroubled faith. Sometimes Christianity seems to him to be just too good to be true, but when this sort of doubt arises he says to himself, 'All right then, deny it' and he knows this is something he could never do.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHHHH!!! what madness is this!
Midgley is horribly underrated, and Wilson was a laugh when I met him. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
Leary and I appeared at the Libertarian Party Convention in Chicago. Coming back on the plane we met Guns and Roses, who love him - everyone knows Leary. And Tim got drunker and drunker on his bottle of Scotch, and finally he says "Fuck it! I'm gonna have a cigarette!" You're not allowed to smoke on US airlines any more, so the whole of Guns and Roses gathered round to conceal him. At this point, one of the stewards sees Leary's smoking and comes over, and he says to Tim "I just want to tell you I think you're right about everything!" When we got off the plane. Leary spotted a wheelchair and got a Joyce scholar to push it for him through the airport. I was a bit drunk too by then, so as we raced through the crowd, I pointed to Leary and shouted "Chromsome damage, chromosome damage!" Wonderful night, wonderful . . .
I always thought Sartre was a pretentious nobody who was famous for being famous, for having a sexy girlfriend and for catching the mood of the 50s in a very timely but ephemeral way. True, he gets points for being a celebrity and a philosopher - a combination that's possibly less likely now. But if you're looking for depth and insight - not so much.
I took some philosophy classes but all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Sartre was a decent novellist in addition to being a lifestyle philosopher.
Patronising punk :-) As in the case of Dawkins, have you actually read any of Sartre's "lifestyle philosophy"? If so, any specific comments ? Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Anyway, if the history of philosophy class I took is to have any purpose at all, it must be to give some direction to the stuff I do and don't read! Can't read everyone's 900 page tomes!
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
It's conclusion is a nice rebuke to Sarkozy and his (roughly) "France needs believers because it needs people who hope":
You can see from these few reflections that nothing could be more unjust than the objections people raise against us. Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do - any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
