Being and Nothingness is indeed quite a tome, but even if you don't want to commit to reading the whole thing, taking a chapter by chapter approach works out fine considering each chapter is devoted to a particular topic and can be profitably read on its own. Publishers often even make separate books out of just cherrypicking certain chapters; e.g., the book Existential Psychoanalysis basically only consists of Sartre's B&N chapter on bad faith and the chapter of his (excellent) critique and reinvisioning of Freudian psychoanalysis.

If you want to avoid Being and Nothingness entirely, I'd still recommend everyone reading The Imaginary.

Who else has so fallen from grace? — Banno

Just to add to the list here--maybe Levinas (sadly)?

Ha! I'm not surprised. I will say Deleuze excels at criticism (e.g., his books on Proust and Kant are fantastic) but he never manages to convince me with his overtly philosophical works.

Deleuze made Bergson popular to talk about again for a while, but I don't know if it stuck or encouraged people to actually read him again. Likely not. Personally, while I enjoy reading Deleuze, nothing of his has changed the way I think compared to reading Matter and Memory for the first time.

This is interesting, because I have just returned to Being and Nothingness after many, many years, and literally just made a post regarding the book on another thread before seeing this one. All things considered, it's still a fantastic read.

Don't have much to say regarding the antinatalism debate itself here, but due to the virus situation I decided to finally read through all of Sartre's Being and Nothingness front to finish (had only read certain chapters before, and many years ago). I live in NYC, so things have been pretty crazy here, as you all probably know. I also know Heideggerians bristle at Sartre's book, but it really is a damn beautiful piece of philosophy and I'm enjoying it immensely.

Of what I've read so far (and which might be tangentially useful to the present discussion), one of the most interesting existentialist reversals is that death is no longer the arrival of nothingness, as we might normally think of it. The common fear is that when we die, we become nothing. Death, in other words, is nothingness. But under existentialism as Sartre has it, conscious life (the for-itself) is itself negation, and only life brings nothingness into the world. Only while we are alive can nothingness be present; this is the basis of freedom (and also our failure to achieve it). When we finally die, we return to the domain of the in-itself, of full coincidence with ourselves, of A=A and the night when all cows are black. Our corpse is our corpse and our past our past in the same sense that this table is a table, yet the for-itself that is writing this post and finds its Being thereby could equally just as well be a for-itself pouring itself another glass of whiskey.

There is thus a strange optimism here. In other words, it is in death that we achieve that which we are always striving for, and while alive only evanescentally attain: being in-itself, full positivity, full coincidence with who and what one is/has been. However, this is not necessarily to say death is preferable, even if it is inevitable, and even if the for-itself as a project is always a failure. Without wanting to sound like a self-help book, it is also true in the existentialist sense that it is only within the experience of failure that we also find the real seeds of success, of transfiguration, of being something while also not being that something after all.

I get that you are talking about the representative "contents" of an experience, rather than the experience itself. Separating the two is perhaps not the best way to think of things on a phenomenological level, but I get what you mean.

To put it another way, this experience right now does not seem to be of the past, but of the present. If it is actually of the past, then it is illusory. — Bartricks

Why can't it simply mean that what we consider the present is also always impregnated with the past (and also with the future, for that matter)?

Yet on the time-as-soup view, what my experience represents to be the case is not the case. The objects of my experience (that is, not the experience itself, but what it represents to be the case) have in reality a quite different property - pastness - to the presentness that I perceive them to have.

How are such experiences not, therefore, illusory? — Bartricks

Simply because the things of our present experience may contain the "property of pastness" does not mean that we are under the sway of an illusion. Again, I know that the light from the stars I am seeing is the result of an event that occurred long ago. But that does not make the light's presence in my immediate experience an illusion--there is nothing "false" about it's appearance in my visual field, or in my experience of it as something present. In the same way I am not in error when I consider this phenomena to be part of my experiential present.

If - if - our experiences lag behind the reality they are giving us an experience of, then we are subject to an illusion of the present, for what our experience represents to be present is actually past.

As Augustine has said, strictly speaking there is (for us) no past, only the present of things past.

Appearances can be deceptive while also being true. If I peer into the night sky with a telescope, I can rationally cognize that the stars I am observing are the result of events that have happened long ago. Perhaps the stars I see no longer even exist. But it does not follow that my experience of the present moment is therefore illusory. In other words, I think we are in agreement here, but I think you are framing the question with a faulty premise.

There is no "illusion" of the present in the way you are framing it. This is not to say we don't "lag behind" our experiences; indeed this is exactly what Proust has already described in his thousands of pages of writing.

As @tim wood has said, you are stumbling along in this post and there's nothing but your own feet to blame.

The man's politics were definitely irritating, and he seemed to revel a bit too much in being willfully controversial. Arguably, however, this did sometimes lead to good results. For example, his essay "Photography and Representation"--in which he makes the rather unpalatable claim that photography and film cannot be considered "art"--led to a host of brilliant responses and rebuttals that definitely furthered overall discourse in the philosophy of film.

As a side note, I've spoken briefly with Scruton over the phone while working at a small publishing company (we published his novel Notes from Underground), and although I find his views rather distasteful, he was at least pleasant enough to speak with (which, believe me, cannot be said for many authors).

Jacques Ellul - The Technological Society. One of the most important works of the 20th century, in my humble opinion.

Also, hello everyone! Been away for a number of years, but it's great to see many familiar faces still haunting the forums.

I mostly appreciate his love for/fiscal contributions to promoting jazz music (Miles Davis was the first long-form interview published by the mag in 1962).