saturday night existentialism

this book, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, is an excellent book.

it's by a wonderful and engaging writer, Sarah Bakewell. and she also writes romance novels, interestingly.

I finished the book many months ago now. nine of its pages have been successfully dogeared.

the trouble is... I rarely remember which specific passage or paragraph on each dogeared page is the one I most wanted to go back to. so I reread the whole page, searching my memory and the words and waiting for it to click. sometimes, I don't know for sure if I've remembered right at all. sometimes, nothing clicks and I curse my past self for not adding a little pencil mark in the margin to help me out.

in any case, I'm gonna blog today about my best guesses for the quotes I meant to remember from some of those dogeared pages. first up, the most dramatical of them all, on the topic of love:

"If I love you, I don't want to control your thoughts directly, but I want you to love and desire me and to freely give up your freedom to me. Moreover, I want you to see me, not as a contingent and flawed person like any other, but as a 'necessary' being in your world. That is, you are not to coolly assess my flaws and irritating habits, but to welcome every detail of me as though no jot or tittle could possibly be different." (p. 214)

this is glorious and tantalizing. the idea of being utterly necessary, just the way you are, no matter what, to somebody else's world. so romantic and also so unrealistic. in real life, the practicalities of love are so much more difficult.

many of my other quotes here are on the topic of freedom and its paradoxes. there's one each touching on what Jean Paul Sarte, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have to say about it.

"None of this means that I make choices in a completely open field or voice. I am always in some sort of pre-existing 'situation', out of which I must act. I actually need these 'situations', or what Sarte calls 'facticity', in order to act meaningfully at all. Without it, my freedom would only be the unsatisfying freedom of someone floating in space .... Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free-- context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives-- for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense. / Sarte takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom." (p. 157)

this is frustrating stuff. very familiar, but frustrating at the same time. recognizing that the funnel I feel like I live my life in is actually structuring whatever freedom I do have? not a very comfortable thought. but without it, can I ever really rebel against the funnel and transform my future path into a candy store instead of a funnel?

freedom and control. limits and possibilities. beautiful, ineffable paradoxes. how Bakewell writes about all this is so masterfully smooth. I loved reading this book so much.

"The ambiguous human condition means tireless trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir's view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment." (p. 226)

and then in a section closely following that, Bakewell quotes Merleau-Ponty's note that "The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity." and in the next paragraph, she elaborates:

"What Merleau-Ponty is describing here is another kind of 'chiasm'-- an X-like interweaving, this time not between consciousness and world, but between knowledge and questioning. We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I've ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point." (p. 241)

I learned about this 'chiasm' concept in Sunday school once upon a time. there were anecdotes about learned, cultured people recognizing a chiasmus as a mark of divinity. the internet tells me that such awe-filled discussion of this literary form in the scriptures I grew up studying goes back to the 1970s. interesting. thinking about chiastic forms and what they can mean, outside of a religious context, is new. expansive.

in the book's last chapter, the discussion of freedom gets pragmatic (or as pragmatic as can be expected for a historical/biographical book on philosophy).

"...freedom may prove to be the great puzzle for the early twenty-first century. In the previous century, I grew up naively assuming I'd see a constant, steady increase in this nebulous stuff through my lifetime, both in personal choices and in politics. In some ways, this has come true. On the other hand, unforeseen by anyone, basic ideas about freedom have been assailed and disputed in radical ways, so that we are now unable to agree what it amounts to, what we need it for, how much of it can be allowed, how far it should be interpreted as the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we are prepared to give away to remote corporate entities in exchange for comfort and convenience. What we cannot do any longer is take it for granted." (p. 318)

freedom, justice, peace-- what do we say these things are? for whom?

relatedly, I have this twitter thread about how to preserve freedom in the face of authoritarian terribleness bookmarked to read later/soon.

the next few pages I dogeared and remembered more or less why I dogeared them feature an infamous Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger. to quote Heidegger is quite often controversial these days. if I were writing a real scholarly paper about anything, I'd very much pause and consider not quoting him-- not giving him any further authority or power in our always-already problematic ivory tower.

for now, I'll put aside the discussion of how and when and why we should or shouldn't separate someone's scholarship from their politics. there is a meaningful discussion to be had there. I may save a slot in my July of blogging to take it up in earnest.

initially I marked these two passages because of their relevance to work, technology, and the way we value human beings. I'm not sure what else to say about them here yet; they give me plenty to think about in terms of thinking and being and material consequences.

"Phenomenology itself is thus threatened by modern humanities challenging, devastating way of occupying the earth. This could lead to the ultimate disaster. If we are left alone 'in the midst of objectlessness', then we ourselves will lose our structure-- we too will be swallowed up into a 'standing-reserve' mode of being. We will devour even ourselves. Heidegger cites the term 'human resources' as evidence of this danger." (p. 183)

the insidious danger of the term 'human resources' reminds me that I still want to write a scathing rhetorical analysis of all the ads for ziprecruiter.com that I hear and cringe at on all the podcasts. someday...

here is the last dogeared page:

"Later Heideggerians, notably Hubert Dreyfus, have written about the internet as the technological innovation that most clearly reveals what technology is. Its infinite connectivity promises to make the entire world store-able and available, but, in doing so, it also removes privacy and depth from things. Everything, above all ourselves, becomes a resource, precisely as Heidegger warned. In being made a resource, we are handed over, not just to other individuals like ourselves, but to an impersonal 'they' whom we never meet and cannot locate." (p. 324)

now, enough writing for this infinitely connected impersonal placelessness of a blog. it's past time for dinner, and there is pizza dough waiting to be pizza-ified and eaten.