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Philosophy 1: Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel

Plato:

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MissThundercat said:
I read The Stranger by Camus and loved it. Where else should I go with Camus?
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The Plague (which is brilliant) and The Fall (which is snarky and funny) for fiction.

The Myth of Sisyphus for a detailed and demystified explanation of existentialism. Stay with it. I know it is lugubrious in spots and, unusually for Camus, almost Sartrian in its academic rigor, so it's not a fun read, but it does give the clearest and best examination of the problems existentialism sets out of solve.
 
Kepler said:
The Plague (which is brilliant) and The Fall (which is snarky and funny) for fiction.

The Myth of Sisyphus for a detailed and demystified explanation of existentialism. Stay with it. I know it is lugubrious in spots and, unusually for Camus, almost Sartrian in its academic rigor, so it's not a fun read, but it does give the clearest and best examination of the problems existentialism sets out of solve.
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I just ordered all of those. I will let you know what I think.

And when I withdrew from grad school last week, I included "the benign indifference of the universe" in my resignation letter.
 
Kepler said:
That's my girl! :-)
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I figured out that I've done a lot in 41+ years, including a sustained fitness journey, sobriety, and Thriving While Queer and Neurodivergent In America. Indeed, the "only thing left to hope is that on the day of my execution, there will be spectators and I will be met with howls of execration."
 
For Sartre, definitely start with Existentialism is a Humanism. Then go to the fiction.

Being and Nothingness is an extremely difficult book, and I don't think it is either required or really even helps somebody understand existentialism unless they are literally a PhD candidate. I think it's actually more difficult than Heidegger's notoriously insane Being and Time, though it's a breeze compared to anything Hegel.

Randomly selected passage from Being and Nothingness, Sartre:

Thus the Past is a For-itself reapprehended and inundated by the In itself. How can this happen? We have described the meaning of being past for an event and of having a past for a human reality. We have seen that the Past is an ontological law of the For-itself; that is, everything which can be a For-itself must be it back there behind itself, out of reach. It is in this sense that we can accept the statement of Hegel: "Wesen ist was gewesen ist." My essence is in the past; the past is the law of its being. But we have not explained why a concrete event of the For-itself becomes past. How does a For-itself which was its past become the Past which a new For-itself has to be? The passage to the past is a modification of being. What is this modification? In order to understand this we must first apprehend the relation of the present For-itself to being. Thus as we might have foreseen, the study of the Past refers us to that of the Present.
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My translation: a life is lived differently than it is seen. Your life as you live it is a series of radically free decisions that are by definition always in the present. Your life as seen is the sum of these decisions that are by definition always in the past. The fun part is your life as seen is visible to and contributes information to your life as you live it. Thus, your present and your past are reciprocal feedback mechanisms which are united in your consciousness, which is always in the present.

Randomly selected passage from Being and Time, Heidegger:

But Dasein is equiprimordially in the untruth. Anticipatory resoluteness gives Dasein at the same time the primordial certainty that it has been closed off. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein holds itself open for its constant lostness in the irresoluteness of the they-lostness which is possible from the very basis of its own Being. As a constant possibility of Dasein, irresoluteness is co-certain. When resoluteness is transparent to itself, it understands that the indefiniteness of one's potentiality-for-Being is made definite only in a resolution as regards the current Situation. It knows about the indefiniteness by which an entity that exists is dominated through and through. But if this knowing is to correspond to authentic resoluteness, it must itself arise from an authentic disclosure. The in definiteness of one's own potentiality-for-Being, even when this potentiality has become certain in a resolution, is first made wholly manifest in Being towards-death. Anticipation brings Dasein face to face with a possibility which is constantly certain but which at any moment remains indefinite as to when that possibility will become an impossibility. Anticipation makes it manifest that this entity has been thrown into the indefiniteness of its 'limit-Situation'; when resolved upon the latter, Dasein gains its authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole. The indefiniteness of death is primordially disclosed in anxiety. But this primordial anxiety strives to exact resoluteness of itself. It moves out of the way everything which conceals the fact that Dasein has been abandoned to itself. The "nothing" with which anxiety brings us face to face, unveils the nullity by which Dasein, in its very basis, is defined; and this basis itself is as thrownness into death.
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My translation: your recognition and acceptance of your purposeless and finite life burns off all the superficial meanings which your culture, education, and wishing has larded upon it, revealing the Truth at the center of your life: a nullity. But you are still conscious even then. The "You" in that sentence is therefore something that has neither purpose not externally meaningful identity, yet is still real. Close your eyes and fully appreciate your utter absence of meaning and also the absence of meaning in everything you could use as a touchstone from spatial extension to temporal extension to the relations thereof to any presumptive spirits emergent from such. Something -- indeed, everything that was "really" there before -- remains. Your Being is that thing. That is the authenticity of your self. It is a paradox it can only be reached by sloughing off the artificial purposes and implicit denial of death that constitute day-to-day living.

Randomly selected passage from Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel:

What has just been said can also be expressed by saying that Reason is purposive activity. The exaltation of a supposed Nature over a misconceived thinking, and especially the rejection of external teleology, has brought the form of purpose in general, into discredit. Still, in the sense in which Aristotle, too, defines Nature as purposive activity, purpose is what is immediate and at rest, the unmoved which is also self-moving, and as such is Subject. Its power to move, taken abstractly, is being for-self or pure negativity. The result is the same as the beginning, only because the beginning is the purpose; in other words, the actual is the same as its Notion only because the immediate, as purpose, contains the self or pure actuality within itself. The realized purpose, or the existent actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming; but it is just this unrest that is the self; and the self is like that immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it is the result, that which has returned into itself, the latter being similarly just the self. And the self is the sameness and simplicity that relates itself to itself.
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My translation: I have no idea.
 
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Also, Kep

If i understand it correctly, "Hell is other people" means "watch who you hang out with; the company you keep can become hell?"
 
MissThundercat said:
Also, Kep

If i understand it correctly, "Hell is other people" means "watch who you hang out with; the company you keep can become hell?"
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Nope, even good other people are hell. Other people make you realize you are an object to them, and you lose the freedom and spontaneity of pure subjectivity. You become imprisoned in their perception and concommitant judgment of you.

He has a famous example called "The Look." You are looking through a keyhole in a hotel. In that moment, there is no "you" -- all there is in your mind is what you are watching. Then somebody comes along and you are caught. Everything changes. You become the YOU that is seen by another person, with all that implies (shame, anxiety, etc).

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"Hell is other people" is Sartre for "dance like no one watching."

Something else of which I am sure you are already painfully aware, it is remarkable that Sartre said this first, and not a woman philosopher, as women are always under the male gaze, being measured and scrutinized, like a prisoner under the authority of a warden.

Men aren't radically free, but we are less under the microscope and more free to just be. Now, occasionally, this hurts my vanity, not to be looked at in that way. But the other 99.9% of my life, I am free to just be my authentic self. That's a good trade.

The only time this is not so is if I am walking in the vicinity of a woman at night or in a sheltered place, and I am anxious not to be threatening. I consciously make sure not to quickly overtake them, or be too close, or come around a corner quickly.

But my god how much more frightening must it be to feel like prey all the time. At least Jean Paul only had to worry about being self-conscious, not attacked.
 
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