Some sparse personal notes on “At the Existentialist Café” by Sarah Bakewell, a very digestible introduction to existentialism and biography of its leading figures.

  • One’s life project is elucidated by one’s actions. Through one’s actions, the “fundamental project” of one’s life slowly emerges. (Sartre)
    • Our actions form a shape over time (our life’s “fundamental project”). Actions (over a lifetime) surface one’s big project or theme.
  • “Life must be understood backwards, but lived forwards.” (Kierkegaard)
  • Freedom is contingent on a context. (“The context for decisions”) Freedom is contingent on a situation, in which to exert that freedom.
    • Good news: life is fraught w/ them (× Frankl)
    • Freedom can only exist within a situation — in a social, political, biological context (“facticity”). Such constraints enable exercising our freedom; “a context for whatever I choose to do next”. (Sartre)
      • “The demands our particular historical situation is making onto us”: our Being is not universal but local; contingent on a time and place (Heidegger)
    • We often mistake the things (situational variables) that enable us to be free (to exercise our freedom) for things that take away our freedom.
    • “Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating” (“passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds”): because there is actually a lot of wiggle room (!)
  • Because we are free, we are responsible for our actions and our impact in the world. (Sartre)
  • Maxims have limited use.
    • Maxims have a tendency to be too general and thus ambiguous in their interpretation and implementation.
      • Maxims (philosophies) provide general directions; their interpretation, implementation is still at your discretion.
    • e.g. Sartre’s general rule of thumb of taking the side of the most oppressed in any one situation. (What if two groups are unfavoured, with incompatible claims?)
    • e.g. “Do good onto others…” (Christianity): what when we have to decide between two parties to do good to?
  • Phenomenology is a deeply humanist philosophy, as it is entirely concerned with individuals’ own direct subjective experience — beyond (or ahead of) (even their own) lenses, paradigms and interpretations (“époché” — suspension (of habits of minds)). Phenomenology focusses on the reality of each and every one’s experience. (× Interpersonal meditation; authentic relating; circling; radical honesty)
    • Each person is a treasure guard; a guard of their own experience, treasures.
      • (The counterpoint: others’ consciousnesses are inaccessible and we are helpless objects in their face (Sartre, The Look))
  • The mind as stage for beautiful things. “A clearing in the forest, where things can bask for a moment.” (post-Kehre Heidegger)
  • One’s personality is one’s relationship to things.
    • One’s relationship to someone is one’s relationship to their relationship to things.
      • One lives vicariously through others, vicariously through their relationship to things. (× also, through profuse sharing)
        • Experiencing the world in the presence of another, as being “side-coached” (into different ways of seeing immediate things.)
  • The mind always has an object; the mind is in a state of constant hypnosis (Brentano’s “intentionality” (grasping) of the mind)
    • In dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, the mind always has an object.
      • Be(hav)ing in hypnosis is the outward expression of our relationship and engagement with an object albeit inexistent.
  • Clearing the language slate: Existing words come with their connotations, assumptions and associations. To think clearly about something, use your own new words as you go along — giving them precise definitions as you go.
    • Heidegger rejected familiar terms (around being, consciousness) to start from scratch.
  • Responsibility in the small things.
    • Refusing integrity or responsibility in the small things primes one’s consciousness to being run over; sets you off on a slippery slope.
      • If you do not act now, you will still have to act in the future — and you are just postponing it.
      • Certain outcomes (or means) are inevitable, and if history doesn’t reach it one way, it will reach it another way. (Deaths; use of violence; etc.)
        • e.g. Pétain, saving lives through pacifism/collaboration, ending up killing many more people through the Holocaust in France. (What goes around…)
        • e.g. Daladier and Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler on his demands upon Czech territory pre-WWII (Give an inch and they’ll take a mile; setting precedents.)
      • “Few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them” (Bruno Bettelheim; on Nazism)
      • “A death of a thousand cuts” (from subservient civilians) (× Banality of Evil; “bureaucracy”)
  • One has a responsibility to call on people and confront them on things. (× Jasper’s regrets of not having confronted Heidegger on his Nazi affiliation)
    • Calling on people is made of the same “stuff” as acts of resistance, acting responsibly.
  • Not acting is as bad as acting wrongly. (× failure to assist) Failing to act is as reprehensible as acting wrongly. There is danger in not acting when the times demand it (× Arendt, Banality of Evil): “We slip into banality, failing to think. (instead of using our freedom, and acting responsibly.)
  • Each revolution brings about a new status quo, which over time develops its own excesses and calls for another revolution. “Each generation has a fresh duty to revolt against them, and this will be the case forever.” (Camus)
  • Distances tunes us out of injustice and suffering (out of sight, out of mind) (× Italian government conscripting soldiers from Southern Italy during Friuli/Yugoslava tensions post-WWII — in order for them not have existing ties) “The blood of people conveniently far away”
  • Community spaces are especially important in terms of conflict or civil unrest. (× Café de Flore during WWII)
  • Create a network of self-sufficiency. Create your distributed village. De Beauvoir and other people were relying on friends in the countryside to send them fresh produce during WWII (“in-group” (nudge); internal trade networks (Money: banks; in-group vouchers; villages/alternative communities))
  • Encountering a new culture makes one aware of one’s own culture and its contingency — that it is not beyond question, or has to remain one’s orthodoxy. (× considering our place in the universe)
    • The Greeks’ exchanges with other cultures (e.g. through trade) (combined with their introspection) might have sparked their interest in philosophy. (Heidegger)
  • “The Looker looked at” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, “The Look”)
    • When we become aware we are observed, we shift from seeing to being seen; from being a subject (immersed, lost in the world, in the scene we’re peeping), to being an object in another’s consciousness; we shift from a “consciousness for itself” to a “consciousness in the presence of others” (hence how intimate moments with ourselves can be — as we are then fully subject, unswayed — × intimacy of diaries; intimacy w/ self as a level of intimacy to tend towards interpersonally).
    • As we shift to being an object, being seen by others, we try to control how others see us — in vain, as we have no control over others’ consciousness and how they perceive us. This helplessness makes us feel uneasy. (Self-consciousness (makes us act inauthentically); × Improvise: our self-critic is the voice of others, that others actually don’t have)
      • “The privacy of other minds”: “In the very fact of recognizing that there is another consciousness behind those alien eyes, you recognize that there is another point of view on things, a point of view that ON PRINCIPLE you can never occupy.”
    • The cure is to not pay too much attention to the other’s look, to not let it bring us out of the direct experience of the world. ⇒ Uninhibitedness; un-self-consciousness. (× Trying Not to Try; “Improvisation is a flow state” (Improvise); spontaneity (Improvise); focus on the scene (Improvise))
  • Disclosing everything brings about knowing the other person a lot (more); rapidly creates intimacy.
    • e.g. De Beauvoir recounting her lesbian adventures to Sartre (by mail). × if Sartre ever meets the two students Beauvoir had an affair with; and also as a general way of being invested in Beauvoir’s life. Keeping abreast of another’s life is living a second life.
    • “It is overwhelming even to think about the quantity of written and spoken words that flowed between [Sartre and de Beauvoir] for half of the twentieth century.”