Artists, actors, poets, musicians, writers, readers, watchers, listeners, walkers, standers, sitters, sleepers…anyone can be understood and misunderstood. Nobody owns their own consciousness or its subsequent impact. Who do we think we are? We are not a subject or an object, but a temporary process. If someone startles me in my peaceful journey and knocks me unsteady for a second, I just say, “oops!” I wink at them, and myself, then wobble back and keep going. ;)
I know I should stop coming back to this but you've inspired a lot of thoughts. It's about photography, an archive as a diary and not at all about uploading to social media. I'm glad I have years of photos of places I'd forgotten I'd been and seen but remember afresh when I see the photos again. I simply don't feel I've lost anything when I immediately want to take a picture of something that moves or excites or simply interests me, on the contrary, I've added something. And these days, with email, I often want to share it with friends or family, a further enrichment. And yes, occasionally tho' not very often, I'll upload it to Bluesky (bsky) actually not when it has some deep personal significance for me but because I think it has general social or political significance.
I'm probably not a fan of Sartre. I once had a senior (at the time) psychiatrist colleague who dismissed Sartre as "a brilliant ass". By the way many years ago the late philosopher and cultural writer Bryan Magee (whose writings I greatly admired, especially the book on Schopenhauer) ran a BBC television series, straight interviews and talk, chairs, a sofa, a table and camera, blessedly free from all the gimmicks you get these days, no music (muzak, ugh).
In his programme on Sartre, he was quite clear that Sartre had misunderstood Husserl's work on phenomenology and went further, saying that although it was quite possible that Sartre's work as novelist and playwright might live on, but that as a philosopher he wouldn't be much remembered or evaluated highly.
Perhaps he lives on quite a bit in existential therapy circles largely through the work of RD Laing, but personally I don't find that much of a recommendation, myself -- for both subjective and objective reasons.
A second stab at this. Assuming I've understood this right (maybe I haven't), is Sartre right (about "Other People")? We are a social species, highly affiliative. Put humans in solitary confinement, they go mad after a time. Sartre's rhetoric, like that of de Beauvoir, is highly charged, reminding me of those patients diagnosed with borderline disorder or narcissistic personality disorder, ultra hypervigilant, pathologically, overinclusively aware, super highly tuned in to the every slightest move and vocal inflection of the doctor / therapist, without actually being psychotic.
Sartre and others from early existentialist writings seem to inhabit a highly rarefied, highly charged universe where experience can scarcely be described in words, if at all, which doesn't stop them trying.
In the situation set up by Sartre (the guy at the keyhole) the first subject is already the sort of person everyone would despise. Is Sartre saying that we're all of us, all the time, at some keyhole everywhere all the time? Are we all guilty simply by daring to exist? (I thought "existential guilt" was all about remorse, not having fulfilled our potential, not lived life to the fullest our "givens" had vouchsafed us -- not about being, as the comics from my childhood had it, so many "Keyhole Kates".)
As for ways to be free of the accusing gaze of the Other, is it always good for us, indeed is it ever good for us, to try to be blithely indifferent (even were that possible) to what others think of us, or say about us? Aren't there very good reasons societies have evolved such censures as shunning, excommunication? As said, we're a social species. (And for that matter, conversely, societies have Nobel Prizes and their equivalents. To which, I concede, the Sartres of this world are indifferent or antipathetic, though I heard years later (true? false?) that he tried to claim the money when he was hard up. Beckett deplored the win but took the money and gave much or most of it away, I understand.)
Without others, our individual lives would be hell. Indeed the mere presence of others in our lives can constitute our very own individual heaven.
I once came across a psychotherapeutic technique for countering the destructive effects of all the negative things others said to a child growing up. The idea was to negate and remove the power of such statements to construct false, self-destructive personal identities. The therapy consisted of positive affirmations whose basic form was, e.g. "i, [personal name here], am
[positive adjectives, phrases &c] or [am becoming ...] ..." I don't know if outcomes have been tested according to the most rigorous standards of evidence-based medicine, but you get the basic idea.
Perhaps as social psychologists have said, our identities are constructed by others and not by ourselves, but does that have to be so hellishly Sartrean? Or if it has to be, is that the "price" humans have to pay for the "loan" (Schopenhauer: it's not a "gift") of life?
I love this way of writing and speaking about existential philosophy, so clear, totally free of obscurantist prose, or using familiar words in completely new, undefinable ways with meaning that can't be so much grasped intellectually but have to be somehow "felt", more as if listening to music, a song; or maybe even worse, coining neologisms without any resonance to experience. Thanks for posting this. Many years ago I enjoyed reading the bits in Being and Nothingness where Sartre the novelist and playwright takes over from the philosopher -- the famous waiter, the girl in bad faith and the rest. But the rest of the book -- I might as well have tried reading it in my schoolboy French. A few consolations -- Heidegger is far worse, and I haven't even tried more than a brief intro to Merleau-Ponty.
A lucid and powerful text: it precisely captures the existential wound of the gaze and transforms it into a brilliant critique of contemporary life.
But it also reveals its limitations: by distrusting the individual as the ultimate source of meaning, it relies on a well-intentioned but philosophically flawed socialism that confuses criticism of oppression with the erosion of personal responsibility. A great philosophy; intellectual courage still unfinished.
Artists, actors, poets, musicians, writers, readers, watchers, listeners, walkers, standers, sitters, sleepers…anyone can be understood and misunderstood. Nobody owns their own consciousness or its subsequent impact. Who do we think we are? We are not a subject or an object, but a temporary process. If someone startles me in my peaceful journey and knocks me unsteady for a second, I just say, “oops!” I wink at them, and myself, then wobble back and keep going. ;)
I know I should stop coming back to this but you've inspired a lot of thoughts. It's about photography, an archive as a diary and not at all about uploading to social media. I'm glad I have years of photos of places I'd forgotten I'd been and seen but remember afresh when I see the photos again. I simply don't feel I've lost anything when I immediately want to take a picture of something that moves or excites or simply interests me, on the contrary, I've added something. And these days, with email, I often want to share it with friends or family, a further enrichment. And yes, occasionally tho' not very often, I'll upload it to Bluesky (bsky) actually not when it has some deep personal significance for me but because I think it has general social or political significance.
I'm probably not a fan of Sartre. I once had a senior (at the time) psychiatrist colleague who dismissed Sartre as "a brilliant ass". By the way many years ago the late philosopher and cultural writer Bryan Magee (whose writings I greatly admired, especially the book on Schopenhauer) ran a BBC television series, straight interviews and talk, chairs, a sofa, a table and camera, blessedly free from all the gimmicks you get these days, no music (muzak, ugh).
In his programme on Sartre, he was quite clear that Sartre had misunderstood Husserl's work on phenomenology and went further, saying that although it was quite possible that Sartre's work as novelist and playwright might live on, but that as a philosopher he wouldn't be much remembered or evaluated highly.
Perhaps he lives on quite a bit in existential therapy circles largely through the work of RD Laing, but personally I don't find that much of a recommendation, myself -- for both subjective and objective reasons.
A second stab at this. Assuming I've understood this right (maybe I haven't), is Sartre right (about "Other People")? We are a social species, highly affiliative. Put humans in solitary confinement, they go mad after a time. Sartre's rhetoric, like that of de Beauvoir, is highly charged, reminding me of those patients diagnosed with borderline disorder or narcissistic personality disorder, ultra hypervigilant, pathologically, overinclusively aware, super highly tuned in to the every slightest move and vocal inflection of the doctor / therapist, without actually being psychotic.
Sartre and others from early existentialist writings seem to inhabit a highly rarefied, highly charged universe where experience can scarcely be described in words, if at all, which doesn't stop them trying.
In the situation set up by Sartre (the guy at the keyhole) the first subject is already the sort of person everyone would despise. Is Sartre saying that we're all of us, all the time, at some keyhole everywhere all the time? Are we all guilty simply by daring to exist? (I thought "existential guilt" was all about remorse, not having fulfilled our potential, not lived life to the fullest our "givens" had vouchsafed us -- not about being, as the comics from my childhood had it, so many "Keyhole Kates".)
As for ways to be free of the accusing gaze of the Other, is it always good for us, indeed is it ever good for us, to try to be blithely indifferent (even were that possible) to what others think of us, or say about us? Aren't there very good reasons societies have evolved such censures as shunning, excommunication? As said, we're a social species. (And for that matter, conversely, societies have Nobel Prizes and their equivalents. To which, I concede, the Sartres of this world are indifferent or antipathetic, though I heard years later (true? false?) that he tried to claim the money when he was hard up. Beckett deplored the win but took the money and gave much or most of it away, I understand.)
Without others, our individual lives would be hell. Indeed the mere presence of others in our lives can constitute our very own individual heaven.
I once came across a psychotherapeutic technique for countering the destructive effects of all the negative things others said to a child growing up. The idea was to negate and remove the power of such statements to construct false, self-destructive personal identities. The therapy consisted of positive affirmations whose basic form was, e.g. "i, [personal name here], am
[positive adjectives, phrases &c] or [am becoming ...] ..." I don't know if outcomes have been tested according to the most rigorous standards of evidence-based medicine, but you get the basic idea.
Perhaps as social psychologists have said, our identities are constructed by others and not by ourselves, but does that have to be so hellishly Sartrean? Or if it has to be, is that the "price" humans have to pay for the "loan" (Schopenhauer: it's not a "gift") of life?
I love this way of writing and speaking about existential philosophy, so clear, totally free of obscurantist prose, or using familiar words in completely new, undefinable ways with meaning that can't be so much grasped intellectually but have to be somehow "felt", more as if listening to music, a song; or maybe even worse, coining neologisms without any resonance to experience. Thanks for posting this. Many years ago I enjoyed reading the bits in Being and Nothingness where Sartre the novelist and playwright takes over from the philosopher -- the famous waiter, the girl in bad faith and the rest. But the rest of the book -- I might as well have tried reading it in my schoolboy French. A few consolations -- Heidegger is far worse, and I haven't even tried more than a brief intro to Merleau-Ponty.
Yes, but not in this article. Can you point me toward what you're indirectly referencing? I want to see more.
A lucid and powerful text: it precisely captures the existential wound of the gaze and transforms it into a brilliant critique of contemporary life.
But it also reveals its limitations: by distrusting the individual as the ultimate source of meaning, it relies on a well-intentioned but philosophically flawed socialism that confuses criticism of oppression with the erosion of personal responsibility. A great philosophy; intellectual courage still unfinished.