indeed...misery is a prime precursor to philosophy.
happy people in this day and age have to be natural philosophers.
perhaps when your expectations match or exceed your reality, philosophy is just another iteration of that fact, too obvious to even mention or name.
i don't know quite how to put this, but some stranger's eyes have occasionally taught me more about philosophy than any tortured ramblings from sartre, though the ones you cite here are indicative of some responsibility...
n_euro_sis...what a european thing it is, after all, or were we just the first to name it/them?
do neurotics make good philosophers? sometimes...nietsche was as nutty as a squirrel, and did his job of reflecting the zeitgeist.
in reflecting the current state of mental evolution sartre does a fair readout on the nihilism pervading europe during its darkest historical phase, the void is palpable, a quicksand sucking meaning out of life, a black hole of soul-lessness that only some can endure, with practice.
buddhism tries to toughen up our minds to face it daily, surrendering conquers fear, but the ego pulls towards identification, clinging to the mask, like drowning clutching broken masts in the wreckage of a sinking ship.
looking back on his era, i give him credit for mirroring the void, he didn't learn to play with it, and overseriousness did him in, another quality we yurpeans excel in, compared to polynesians fr'example.
strong women like sensitive men, good for practicing those all-important mothering skills!
if men had had good mothers and fathers they wouldn't need so much mothering.....or even philosophy, lol!
a sick society can/must devise its own cure, or perish with the rest of history....philosophy and psychiatry are the best institutional efforts we can come up with, and both largely miss the point of why, as they struggle to understand how (to 'fix' or 'normalise') and where (as in neuromapping).
computers will probably deduce whatever meaning of life we need to embrace faster than the general public, who have been ignoring the anton wilsons through the ages, because they're not miserable enough yet, ore they are but just don't know it yet, distracted with retail therapy while it still lasts...
and when that megaprocessor spits it out, i bet it says something like:
you don't need religion or philosophy, you need awareness, good will and kindness....find something to offer that you love to share and curb your pretensions to majesty.
look where your centuries of cult of personality, competition and bigotry have led you!
put them behind you, along with all the other silly arguments you've fostered in the smelly old caves of your psyches, drop them all like old snakeskins and step out into the sun!
or our (ex-mostly-friendly) pissed-off local ecosystem is going to kiss our (too-late-to-be-) sorry asses goodbye.
every day is earth day ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
i don't know quite how to put this, but some stranger's eyes have occasionally taught me more about philosophy than any tortured ramblings from sartre
Perhaps you don't know how to put it because you didn't actually learn any philosophy from "stranger's eyes". If you did, please try harder to share these insights with us.
These "ramblings" are condescending (as are some others here) with no attempt to justify it, and they reveal that, as far as some philosophers are concerned, you don't know what you're talking about.
Nietzsche, for example, can't just be dismissed as "nutty as a squirrel". He did become ill during the last years of his life and this affected his thinking, when and to what extent is still debated. Prior to this he was a brilliant philosopher, academically precocious, he became a professor of philology at 25. His philosophy is still being studied and argued about today.
Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844-1900) influence on the present age is all pervasive. In 1955, Martin Heidegger wrote, it is "Nietzsche, in whose light and shadow all of us today, with our `for him' or `against him' are thinking and writing..." 2 This is even more evident today. Stanley Rosen has called him the most influential philosopher in the western world; and for Charles Taylor, all contemporary philosophy is neo-Nietzschean. http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/nietzsche/
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/nietzsche/
Maybe a little more respect would be appropriate - though he'd be the last to advocate uncritical acceptance - but he would expect informed disagreement.
Far from doing "his job of reflecting the zeitgeist" he was a radical critic of the general zeitgeist.
"you don't need religion or philosophy, you need awareness, good will and kindness....find something to offer that you love to share and curb your pretensions to majesty."
Who is this supposed to be addressed to? Many philosophers found in philosophy something they "loved to share", as did Nietzsche - while urging others not to adopt his ideas, but to follow his general example and to think radically and be critical of existing beliefs and attitudes. We are - if we actually take the trouble to read them - the lucky heirs to such philosophers.
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
