© Roger M Tagg 2009 revised 2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
I couldn't resist this sub-title. I found the book thoroughly readable. I don't think I'm very far along the road to becoming an existentialist as he describes it, but I'm sympathetic. Gary Cox did his PhD on Sartre and has written books on Sartre.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 2 | The books 'Being and Time' and 'Phenomenology of Perception' are totally obscure and pretentious. |
| 3a | Existentialism aims to show you what you really are when all the nonsense and bullshit that is talked at you by scientists, preachers, parents and school teachers is binned … | |
| 3b | … rather than living as though you are a robot programmed by other people, social convention, religious dogma, morality, guilt and all the other age-old forces of oppression. | |
| 4 | The big difficulty is making the effort to maintain authenticity, while everyone - including yourself - and everything around you wants you to give up like a big sissy and succumb to bad faith. | |
| 5a | To be is to do - Sartre - action is at the heart of it all. | |
| 5b | We live in a "blame everyone but myself" culture. | |
| 6 | To choose not to choose is still a choice. | |
| 1 | 10 | "I am xxxx" (meaning this is how I am and you must accept that) - even if said authentically - is not authentic. |
| 2 | 14a | Our big anxiety - what to do about what others think of us. |
| 14b | The general idea is that you can't create a genuinely honest and worthwhile life for yourself on the horns of a fairytale. | |
| 15a | Complete happiness isn't achievable because things and people are always on the move. | |
| 15b | The meaning of life is what you make it. Death is inevitable, our time is short - what matters is the surviving, the overcoming, the journey. | |
| 16 | Camus - life is like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the mountain. | |
| 17a | Sartre - there exists no ideal, other-worldly, God-given, abstract, metaphysical essences giving reality or meaning to particular things (in other words, existence precedes essence). | |
| 17b | There are particular things, like chairs and stones, and there is nothing beyond the series of particular things other than consciousness (which is nothing but a relationship between individual persons and the phenomena they sense). | |
| 21 | "Not a thing" includes consciousness, time, expectation, anxiety (the last 2 are states of mind), numbers, mathematical symbols. Most of these indicate a Relationship. | |
| 22a | There only exist "things" and "relations". | |
| 22b | Consciousness must be embodied - never disembodied. | |
| 23 | Consciousness is not reducible to brain states. | |
| 24 | Consciousness is always of something. | |
| 25 | Phenomenology (Brentano, Husserl) - things are actually collections of appearances. | |
| 26 | Sartre allows for "undifferentiated being" - not dependent on the above until we divide things up by consciousness. | |
| 27 | Sartre, like Kant, says that phenomena are a synthesis of whatever is "out there" and consciousness. | |
| 28 | Consciousness hinges on "lacks" and "privations", e.g. absences, boredoms, dissatisfactions. | |
| 29 | A person interprets every situation according to his/her desires, hopes, expectations and intentions. But the situation itself doesn't lack anything; it only lacks for a person. | |
| 30 | We all "lack" the future towards which we are heading. | |
| 32 | Consciousness is not just at a point in time; it is about a mobile, developing thing. | |
| 33 | Phenomenologists and existentialists say that there is no such thing as time - it is subsumed by consciousness. | |
| 38 | Sartre - the "other" is a drain-hole down which our world flows. One cannot play God all the time. | |
| 39 | Each person suffers his/her being-for-others in shame, embarrassment and humiliation - but sometimes in his/her prime too. | |
| 40 | To much being-for-others is vanity. | |
| 41 | Even false modesty, shyness and quiet speaking may be vanity. | |
| 42 | We are "an (external) object" to another person | |
| 43 | Some existentialists give the impression that the essence of all human-to-human relationships is conflict; but this may not be entirely sensible. | |
| 45 | Freedom does not equate to liberty; responsibility still applies in existentialists' freedom. | |
| 46 | "The past exists only for a consciousness that transcends it towards the future" - bullshit? | |
| 47 | We are able to be free in a world of mechanical cause and effect events, because we constantly escape the mechanical world towards the future, "opening up" the possibilities of situations. | |
| 48a | The very project of surrendering one's freedom is in fact itself a free choice. It's not a once-off choice - one is continually choosing. | |
| 48b | 'Facticity' - the adversity and resistance of things and situations. Freedom works to overcome it, but it needs 'facticity' to sustain the challenge. | |
| 51 | Merleau-Ponty - a 'moderate' existentialist. | |
| 52a | There are sometimes many limits in practice to our freedom. | |
| 52b | The body can be out of control - e.g. vomiting (which may not require conscious awareness). | |
| 52c | Maybe sense of humour, sexual preference, panic reactions and insanity often have to be conscious, but they probably are not matters of choice. | |
| 55 | "Freedom anxiety" - may be tough for some people. | |
| 3 | 64 | Bad faith - resisting embracing one's being-in-situation. |
| 67 | "I am what I am" - is devious sincerity, therefore bad faith. Catholic confession - is not much better. | |
| 69 | Willful ignorance - is another form of bad faith. | |
| 70 | So is avoiding confronting what life is really about. | |
| 71 | Contingency - means the random, accidental world. | |
| 72a | Human society (and most endeavour) constantly aims to suppress contingency by imposing meanings and purposes on the world - mainly by naming and categorizing things. | |
| 72b | Things only have meaning and purpose relative to other things (c/f Frolio); and the whole lot only has the relative meaning and purpose that our ultimately pointless activities give it. | |
| 72c | Connection between this view and eastern (e.g. Zen Buddhist) enlightenment | |
| 75 | Salauds - Sartre's name for those who deny contingency (i.e. that things happen accidentally and not by necessity). He thinks this is the worst kind of bad faith. | |
| 79a | Middle class values are "mostly bad faith", but one may sometimes need to use a bit to get through - hopefully only temporarily. | |
| 79b | Will a person wake up early enough to spot when an action is leading to evil? E.g. "I was only following orders", "They forced me to do it", "That was my job", "I couldn't help it". | |
| 4 | 83 | "Buffeted consciousness" - not attuned to being in a situation |
| 88 | We are only authentic when we behave authentically - we must "run the race of authenticity" all the time. | |
| 89a | We may fail sometimes, but we shouldn't be cowardly | |
| 89b | Nobility and Dignity are similar qualities. | |
| 89c | "It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required" - WS Churchill. | |
| 91 | Imposed inauthenticity - others may expect us to fall in with the crowd. | |
| 94 | Bad faith may be a coping strategy | |
| 97 | Nietzsche gets much further down into the complexities and peculiarities of life than the average, unimaginative, logic-chopping academic. | |
| 98 | Nietzsche also knocks the "ascetic ideal" - e.g. celibacy, for the self-denial it involves | |
| 102 | Heidegger - authenticity needs to include being-towards-death | |
| 103 | Due to their limited experience of life, the young are full of crap. | |
| 104a | Youths view themselves as different and immortal | |
| 104b | Only by realizing that he is the wholly unique possibility of his own death does a person cease to treat himself as though he is a copy of the next man and of all men. (compare p 102) | |
| 104c | The authentic person … is the genuine, bona fide article, not a reproduction or a replica | |
| 105a | Unadventurous people who fail to live life to the full because they fear death, still die. They die, however, never having really lived; having already died, metaphorically, many times. | |
| 105b | "Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once." (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar II, ii) |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 22nd January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .