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 (!)
  • With freedom comes responsibility. 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.)
  • The revolution cycle. (flip-side: The Toyota Way kaizens; Measure What Matters goal-setting) 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) “The blood of people conveniently far away”
    • Outsiders make the best soldiers. The Italian government conscripted soldiers from Southern Italy during Friuli/Yugoslava tensions post-WWII — in order for them not have existing ties to local people — to provent “conflicted loyalties”.
  • Community spaces are especially important in times 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. Being yourself in the company of others – as you would without their company. ⇒ 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.”