Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 15:51:34 +0200
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: H in the media - Sartre


Cologne 23-Sep-2003

That Pete schrieb  Mon, 22 Sep 2003 21:53:46 -0700 (PDT):

> But how good was Sartre as a philosopher? Some critics say that in creating
> existentialism he simply took the ideas of Heidegger and give them a Gallic
> gloss. Sartre's Being and Nothingness, they complain, is just Heidegger's Being
> and Time with some racy passages thrown in about the anus and Italian
> love-making. That is unfair. It is certainly true that Sartre, who grew up in a
> bilingual Alsatian household, owed a great debt to German thought. But the
> starting point for his philosophy, as he always insisted, was the Cartesian
> formula "I think, therefore I am." Consciousness, the core of our being, is an
> emptiness or "negativity" that must fill out its nature through arbitrary
> choices—that is the idea behind Sartre's celebrated aphorism "We are condemned
> to be free."
>
> Despite the phenomenological complexities of his philosophy, Sartre managed to
> make it exciting. Anybody could become an existentialist, especially the young.
> The teutonic dread of Kierkegaard and angst of Heidegger gave way to Sartrean
> fun.
>
> http://slate.msn.com/id/2088648/
>
>

It is precisely the proposition "Consciousness, the core of our being" that
Heidegger's thinking puts into question. Of course, wearing black polo-neck
sweaters and smoking filterless Galoises in desolate cafes was much more chic than
plodding through some pine forest or other.

To the present day, French philosophers talk incessantly about "the subject". Seems
to be a result of the French Cartesian hang-up, a kind of patriotism that recurs to
their one grand name in the history of philosophy (leaving thinkers such as
Montaigne, Pascal and Montesquieu aside).

Michael
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