First of all, thanks again guys for showing up.
And Stuart…. You Abstract? Or are you just quoting him. Anyway:
And, Obe, isn’t that the reason to be for a lot of Sartre’s earlier writings –primarily Le Etre le Neant . We have to put in mind here that Sartre wrote a lot of it while he was a prisoner of war as a resistance fighter and knew that anyone, at anytime, could be tortured in order to get information. He had to think in terms of pure free will and later admitted that as an underlying justification for his thought.
But it saved you. And from a pragmatic perspective: that’s all that matters.
However, I would offer an alternative perspective on Sartre’s perspective. I have, throughout my life, gone through a lot shit phases. And throughout it all, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix them and prevent them from happening again. And the only real answer I have found came from a documentary on people stranded in snowstorms. At the end of it, they pointed out research that defined an MO for those that tend to survive such situations: they’re generally people who accept that it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is that they’re in the situation; they don’t expend energy on assigning blame; they simply recognize that it is their problem and that if they just keep trudging on, it will pass one way or the other.
And you’re right: I really do need to get back to Nausea and No Exit.
Tonight, at the bar, Stuart, I was on the patio of the bar having a cigarette with 2 other guys. One was talking about people’s gambling addictions. I decided to be publically philosophical (something I don’t normally do) by pointing out that there is an underlying psychological aspect to all such self destructive behaviors. I started with the example of a woman who stays in an abusive relationship. I argued that if something is tearing down your self esteem, then there would be only thing that would build it up more than anything: the very thing that tore it down in the first place. This is why abusive men tend to give their victims moments of affection. And the same goes for gambling addictions. The gambling addict doesn’t care if they come out ahead in the long run. All they care about is the “good run”. And the same can be said of the drug addict. What they are always trying to get back to is that feeling of being on top of the world. And, unfortunately, the same principle seems to be at work with people like us. Through our efforts, we achieve that feeling of being on top of world. But when we reach those phases where we seem to have lost our Mojo, we keep on keeping on in hopes of getting it back. This has killed many great minds and artists.
Unfortunately, this was lost on the person I was explaining it to. He focused on the abused woman and distinguished the 2 by pointing out that a gambling addiction was one thing, but if someone abused a woman, he would kick their ass. Hard to disagree with that.
But I think the incident properly illustrates the isolation we feel as the intellectually curious. It’s why I don’t talk a lot about what I have learned with normal people.
While having a cigarette on that patio, I was looking at the Bag and Save and the landscape in general and wondering if Van Gogh’s style of painting could capture it. The architecture of the Bag And Save just seemed too straight-lined for Van Gogh’s more organic style. It just seemed to me that someone like Steeler would be far more equipped to capture it.