It is such a pleasure to read your writings, Aurelien. I feel lucky to have found your blog and wish I had access to more of your writings. What a treat your musings are! Thank you.
That's very kind, and I will keep writing so log as the number of subscribers and the number of views continue to creep up, which they still are, just, and reach a reasonable level. Do by all means share the links with others, and with any sites that you leave comments on.
Fully agree with amans021, it's a real pleasure to read you. You've hinted that you publish under other formats; i'd be interested to have a look at your other texts.
I hope you don't stick to your principle of blogging as long as your readership increases, not sure it's perfectly sound.
I have another editorial comment. The paragraph starting "As it happened, Sartre was in Berlin during this period," suggests Sartre was in Berlin during "the defeat and the occupation". At this point I thought you were referring to defeat and occupation of Berlin. (Wat.) Maybe if you added a note about Sartre returns to France and where he spent the rest of the war?
When this sentence appears, "In our current age, when nobody is free, and nobody is responsible for their actions, this cold, austere, philosophy inevitably has much less appeal than it once did." I'm not sure what you're talking about.
I'll say more about this next week, but in essence we live in a society whose iconographic figure is the Victim, and where weakness and inability to act perversely makes you powerful, because you can demand things from others. An entire generation of thinkers, from at least Marcuse onwards, has helped diffuse the idea that we are helpless victims of a system that we cannot control, whether you christen that system capitalism, racism, patriarchy etc. and all that we can do is to map the extent of our impotence. In such a situation you are not free, and you are not responsible.
Thanks. The context of that sentence made this meaning hard to imagine. I thought it might be critique of something in current fashions but defining this stuff is quite complicated. I'll leave that to your Part 2. I guess you are familiar with Wesley Yang's extensive writing on the subject?
At the risk of sounding the dilettante, I would push the roots of Existentialism back to circa 1820, circa Marx and Kierkegaard, both students of Hegel, who revolted, in different directions, against their teacher's absolutism even with regard to what in his teaching are "existentialist" sonorities. Beethoven's late string quartets anticipate Existentialism, IMO, pointing to Schoenberg and Berg, both "High Existentialist" composers. Kandinsky, of course, brings Existentialism right to the forefront of artistic-theological discourse in his paintings and writings. These were serious men doing serious work.
Among 20th Century Existentialists, I missed mention of Teilhard de Chardin and his "Phenomenon ..." and Paul Tillich and "Religious Socialism," which Paulus and some fellow German theologians and pastors worked out after WWI as an alternative to the atheism of Communists and Socialists -- aka Humanists -- which are Sartre, Heidegger, Frankfort School, Dewey, Marcuse, and the rest of the boys and girls.
I have always loved Heidegger's phrase to the effect that reality is "thrown into existence." In the phrase "And God said, 'Let there be light.'", the most important word is "said." A phrase in this essay alludes to this importance by way of recognizing linkage between politics and language. Language throws politics into existence.
Well, some of these will be in Part 2 next week. Here, though, I'm more concerned with the politics, and the link (which I have never seen articulated elsewhere) between the Resistance and Existentialism, as twin outcomes of a state of mind that we have now largely lost and may need to recover. Beethoven now, I hadn't thought of him .....
Said state of mind indeed it would be well to recover. War-conflict is the father of all things, etc. (Heraclitus). Existentialism helps put a certain hunting heat under the backside of totalitarians.
I neglected to mention Nietzsche in my enumeration of Existentialists of the philosophical tendency. He intuited and reached for a supra-mundane consolation without having purity of heart sufficient to deserve and therefore sustain it. Drove him nuts. Still, an Existentialist of material influence.
His 1960s-era American acolytes, "Death of God Theologians," rapidly made fools of themselves even though they too were Existentialists of material and continuing influence, to include towards summoning Resistance to consequences of their speculations.
It is such a pleasure to read your writings, Aurelien. I feel lucky to have found your blog and wish I had access to more of your writings. What a treat your musings are! Thank you.
That's very kind, and I will keep writing so log as the number of subscribers and the number of views continue to creep up, which they still are, just, and reach a reasonable level. Do by all means share the links with others, and with any sites that you leave comments on.
Will do. I shared it with a friend of mine recently, and she subscribed as well.
Fully agree with amans021, it's a real pleasure to read you. You've hinted that you publish under other formats; i'd be interested to have a look at your other texts.
I hope you don't stick to your principle of blogging as long as your readership increases, not sure it's perfectly sound.
I share the same feelings, great reading, great content, beautifully written. Thanks and I feel lucky as well
I have another editorial comment. The paragraph starting "As it happened, Sartre was in Berlin during this period," suggests Sartre was in Berlin during "the defeat and the occupation". At this point I thought you were referring to defeat and occupation of Berlin. (Wat.) Maybe if you added a note about Sartre returns to France and where he spent the rest of the war?
When this sentence appears, "In our current age, when nobody is free, and nobody is responsible for their actions, this cold, austere, philosophy inevitably has much less appeal than it once did." I'm not sure what you're talking about.
I'll say more about this next week, but in essence we live in a society whose iconographic figure is the Victim, and where weakness and inability to act perversely makes you powerful, because you can demand things from others. An entire generation of thinkers, from at least Marcuse onwards, has helped diffuse the idea that we are helpless victims of a system that we cannot control, whether you christen that system capitalism, racism, patriarchy etc. and all that we can do is to map the extent of our impotence. In such a situation you are not free, and you are not responsible.
Thanks. The context of that sentence made this meaning hard to imagine. I thought it might be critique of something in current fashions but defining this stuff is quite complicated. I'll leave that to your Part 2. I guess you are familiar with Wesley Yang's extensive writing on the subject?
"Now what?" Part II?
At the risk of sounding the dilettante, I would push the roots of Existentialism back to circa 1820, circa Marx and Kierkegaard, both students of Hegel, who revolted, in different directions, against their teacher's absolutism even with regard to what in his teaching are "existentialist" sonorities. Beethoven's late string quartets anticipate Existentialism, IMO, pointing to Schoenberg and Berg, both "High Existentialist" composers. Kandinsky, of course, brings Existentialism right to the forefront of artistic-theological discourse in his paintings and writings. These were serious men doing serious work.
Among 20th Century Existentialists, I missed mention of Teilhard de Chardin and his "Phenomenon ..." and Paul Tillich and "Religious Socialism," which Paulus and some fellow German theologians and pastors worked out after WWI as an alternative to the atheism of Communists and Socialists -- aka Humanists -- which are Sartre, Heidegger, Frankfort School, Dewey, Marcuse, and the rest of the boys and girls.
I have always loved Heidegger's phrase to the effect that reality is "thrown into existence." In the phrase "And God said, 'Let there be light.'", the most important word is "said." A phrase in this essay alludes to this importance by way of recognizing linkage between politics and language. Language throws politics into existence.
Well, some of these will be in Part 2 next week. Here, though, I'm more concerned with the politics, and the link (which I have never seen articulated elsewhere) between the Resistance and Existentialism, as twin outcomes of a state of mind that we have now largely lost and may need to recover. Beethoven now, I hadn't thought of him .....
Said state of mind indeed it would be well to recover. War-conflict is the father of all things, etc. (Heraclitus). Existentialism helps put a certain hunting heat under the backside of totalitarians.
I neglected to mention Nietzsche in my enumeration of Existentialists of the philosophical tendency. He intuited and reached for a supra-mundane consolation without having purity of heart sufficient to deserve and therefore sustain it. Drove him nuts. Still, an Existentialist of material influence.
His 1960s-era American acolytes, "Death of God Theologians," rapidly made fools of themselves even though they too were Existentialists of material and continuing influence, to include towards summoning Resistance to consequences of their speculations.