Maybe sometimes people get too close to truth and are ignored in favor of being lost.

I was tempted to ask if anyone still reads Being and Nothingness. But of course no one ever actually read Being and Nothingness. — Banno

I did, back in the late 1950s. Existentialism and the Look made an impression and influenced my attitude toward solo climbing. The simple presence of another living soul alters experience.

Yeah, sure you did :joke: . I got to page two hundred and fifty something.

But yes, the Look remains the most penetrating dismissal of solipsism imaginable.

I read three quarters of Being and Nothingness in my twenties and pick it up again here and there. The most famous things he said and wrote are ugly things. Ugly is fun but lacks the staying power of the beautiful.

Sartre was popular, but among professional philosophers he was never well-respected. There are videos of Derrida just saying he was a bad philosopher, and Heidegger apparently thought he was an idiot.

And it's often what goes in professional philosophy that trickles down to discussion elsewhere.

I was tempted to ask if anyone still reads Being and Nothingness. But of course no one ever actually read Being and Nothingness. — Banno

Not only have I recently re-read Being and Nothingness, but I'm reading the Critique of Dialectical Reason right now. I guess I am getting prematurely senile.

I guess I am getting prematurely senile. — David Mo

:grin:

I'm sure senility would help.

There are videos of Derrida just saying he was a bad philosopher, and Heidegger apparently thought he was an idiot. — Snakes Alive

Derrida's views on other philosophers seem irrelevant to me. I have only read half of Derrida's book about the gift and I found it insufferable pedantry. Post-moderns are usually like that.

As for Heidegger, he began by praising Sartre's intelligent insight on his philosophy, and moved to insults when he realized that Sartre was also criticizing him. He was an insufferable egomaniac. Sartre criticized him for defending a hidden theology that despised man. If you have read only some pages of Being and Time you will have realized that the first criticism is accurate. As for the second, Heidegger confirmed it to the letter when he began to exalt Hitler.
It seems to me that Sartre still has a lot to say for anyone who has the patience to read his writings, which are not always easy or, of course, entertaining.

By the way, two months BV (Before Virus) I attended a performance of Nekrassov in my town in a theater filled to overflowing and long minutes of applause. Sartre lives! I was surprised.

What makes Sartre the black beast of most philosophers of his time and of today is his defence of the revolutionary path to socialism and of violence against colonialism. His insistence on the responsibility of intellectuals is not to the liking of contemporary intellectuals who live very well on the heights.

With Sartre it is like with Freud, everyone abominates them, but everyone uses concepts like bad faith, condemned to be free, hell is the others, etc. that have come from Sartre. There must be be a reason for that.

The most famous things he said and wrote are ugly things. — ZzzoneiroCosm

What if we're ugly and we don't want to see it?

Another true believer has entered the room, I see...

I don't see what you see... Vision problems?

:up:

Thank you.

With Sartre it is like with Freud, everyone abominates them, but everyone uses concepts like bad faith, condemned to be free, hell is the others, etc. that have come from Sartre. There must be be a reason for that. — David Mo

I was going to mention exactly this. Just as Freudian lingo is part and parcel of everyday vocabulary (unconscious, libido, ego, id, on the couch, etc), so too is Sartre's language part of the furniture, even though he's not studied all that much. The return of the repressed.

What if we're ugly and we don't want to see it? — David Mo

@unenlightened?

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.

Who else has so fallen from grace? — Banno

Henri Bergson.

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.

A friend translated a book by Deleuze. It was a translation much appreciated by the critics and quoted by experts. Privately he admitted that he hadn't understood anything he was translating. The same thing happened to me with the original. It's just that we weren't true believers.

Who else has so fallen from grace?
— Banno — emancipate

Marcuse, Russel himself. It turns out that dirty old men don't make he greatest moral philosophers. Wittgenstein survives maybe because he was gay.

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.

Who else has so fallen from grace? — Banno

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

Who else has so fallen from grace? — Banno

Every philosopher who does not enter the Olympus of Anglo-Saxon philosophy. In the mid-20th century, there were channels of communication between Europe and the Anglo world. Today there is a wall higher than the Berlin Wall. The one who does not write in Anglo-Saxon journals does not exist. The one who is not quoted in Anglo-Saxon journals goes on into the world of Oblivion.

It is not a question of ideology ...only. It is a question of cultural domination mechanics.

I was tempted to ask if anyone still reads Being and Nothingness. But of course no one ever actually read Being and Nothingness. — Banno

I'd struggled all the way to the end of BnN 1.5x (on my own, not for a class) during my first year at university. The ordeal had left me respecting but hating that old wall-eyed, boujee-comrade. :sweat:

Odd, that someone of his status should be so forgotten.

Who else has so fallen from grace? — Banno

M. Merleau-Ponty

J. Dewey

M. Buber

T. Paine

P-HT, Baron d'Holbach

M. Merleau-Ponty — 180 Proof

Nah man, M-P is everywhere.

Well, so is Sartre. A respected archive for citations but not - no longer - a cause célèbre in contemporary philosophical circles (or, at least, not for the authors I read).

:up:

Every philosopher who does not enter the Olympus of Anglo-Saxon philosophy.

Even some who found themselves on those peaks at the beginning of the 20th century ended up being thrown down the mountain. Something very sinister appears to have happened to so called analytic philosophy after WWII.

Some examples of who am I talking about: Grace and Theodore De Laguna. Grace even wrote the companion piece to Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Theodore was one of the most important philosophers in the USA at the begnning of the century, nobody gives a toss about him now, but he was saying "meaning is use" back in the 1920s.

Odd, that someone of his status should be so forgotten. — Banno

What is your answer? Why is he forgotten?