Questions SEP 10

 Ex'sm ch5-6

1. What criticism of Sartre's approach to authenticity and bad faith was shared by his Communist and Catholic critics? What do you think he meant by the penultimate line of No Exit? Do you think he was right? Is it a judgment that applies equally to all other people, or just those most prone to bad faith?
2. What did Kierkegaard say philosophers have misunderstood about understanding and living? Do you find this a wise insight or a banal truism? What fraction of people do you think ever gain the kind of understanding SK presumably means? At what stage of life (if any) should one expect such understanding to occur?
3. What attitude did Nietzsche and Kierkegaard share with Socrates? Of what (or whom?) were they equally distrustful? With what were they both most concerned? Do you share their attitude?
4. What did Habermas say of Heidegger? In light of Heidegger's political biography, was Habermas's critique really so inaccurate? Any COMMENT on the Habermas essay cited above (and excerpted below*)? Are you too an "incrementalist" (or a meliorist?)
5. What did Jaspers find objectionable about Machiavelli's political philosophy? Do you agree?
6. Marcel's philosophy was a relentless struggle against what? (NOTE: This is one of the more salient points of agreement between existentialists and pragmatists.) Do you think "concreteness" is a philosophical virtue?
7. COMMENT?: “Language transcends us and yet we speak... Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history... Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being... “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.”  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
8. What was de Beauvoir's most famous phrase? How does her view go beyond Sartre's of human nature? What did they both try to humanize? How, generally, do you think about the distinction/relation between gender and sex? Is there no essential quality of femininity or masculinity that has not been socially contructed?
9. [ch6] What is Sartrean transcendence, according to Flynn? How does this compare to Ackroyd's version, mentioned in a reply to Brent's comment below? What do you think of his concept of nothingness in relation to consciousness? And what do you think of William James's definition of rationality as a feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment? Do such feelings contradict Sartre's talk of "insufficiency"?*** 
10. What kind of philosophy caused Sartre to "blanche with emotion"? Do you think the phenomenology of everyday life makes philosophy more concrete, in a good way?
11. What is meaning, for a structuralist?* What does structuralism reduce to a "placeholder"? Is this, in your view, a healthy "reduction"?
12. What did Foucault say about Sartrean existentialism? Why do you think he said it? Does it make any sense to you?
13. How did Gadamer define "the hermeneutic circle"? What does hermeneutics mean to you? Is it anything more than a synonym for the kind of critical interpretation of texts all scholars have always engaged in?
14. Existential psychoanalysis seeks to reveal what? Is this a better approach? What in general is your view of psychoanalysis? Do you think it useful? Have you or would you submit to it?
15. An ethic of situations (such as that of Levinas) echoes what ancient Greek? (And what "new name for some old ways of thinking"?) Is it a bad thing that we are "always in media res?
16. Do you think the possible connection between James's pragmatism and Levinas's phenomenology (such as that of last year's Lyceum speaker Megan Craig) is worth exploring?****

*In the 1980s there was a lot of excitement about postmodernism, deconstruction, structuralism and post-structuralism. This flood of theory appeared to offer a radical new perspective for understanding and experiencing the world. It was an enlightenment which left all those who rejected it cursed with still being stuck in the murky mire of the old ways of thinking which had dominated western thought for 2000 years and which at last we could escape. Such religious fervour with its condemnation of heretics and establishment of new messiahs has softened, and it is now possible to look quietly and calmly at what was going on.

Structuralism

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French intellectual and philosopher of the time, and didn’t so much win, as went unanswered (which from Sartre’s point of view was worse). Here was France’s main philosopher, Sartre, who usually had something to say about everything, being attacked in Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, and yet not replying! The implication was that he couldn’t reply, and the intellectual mood began to move towards Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual position, which he called structuralism.

A simple explanation of structuralism is that it understands phenomena using the metaphor of language. That is, we can understand language as a system, or structure, which defines itself in terms of itself. There is no language ‘behind’ language with which we understand it, no metalanguage to explain what language means. Instead it is a self-referential system. Words explain words explain words (as in a dictionary), and meaning is present as a set of structures... John Mann, Philosophy Now

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A fun new book on the post-Existential era of French thought:

The Frenchmen:
Or, My Life in Theory

by Emily Eakin

From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture

When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding—and perhaps even changing—the world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of being—a heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.

The Frenchmen is the story of Eakin’s youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. What’s more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous—at times criminal!—lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.

As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmen’s enduring legacy but some of today’s deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmen’s ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today. g'r

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**...In his final book, Habermas spoke of the need to “institutionalize the anarchic power of saying ‘no.’ ” The force of refusal, of Melville’s “I would prefer not to,” is potentially absolute: slop ceases to exist when we stop clicking on it. Europe, where the Enlightenment first arose and where it met its first demise, is the likeliest place for a concerted rebellion. State funding for media and culture means that the public sphere remains partly intact, and the E.U. has taken steps to regulate the internet and A.I. Moreover, as Habermas saw at the time of the Iraq War, a pan-European sensibility is being bolstered by a cumulative loathing for a long century of American imperialism—military, economic, technological, cultural. Perhaps there could even be a real shudder of self-disgust on these shores—a recognition that our national pursuit of material happiness has immiserated much of the rest of the world and is now devouring itself. Such, at least, is the vibe of our squalid semiquincentennial summer.

Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress. This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope. ♦
   --Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age/The great German philosopher, who died in March, understood how much depended on a principled public sphere. Published in the print edition of the June 22, 2026, issue, with the headline “The Dream of Reason.”

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***"When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness,—this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it,—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational." --The Sentiment of Rationality

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Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology
by Megan Craig

"Bringing to light new facets in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and William James, Megan Craig explores intersections between French phenomenology and American pragmatism. Craig demonstrates the radical empiricism of Levinas's philosophy and the ethical implications of James's pluralism while illuminating their relevance for two philosophical disciplines that have often held each other at arm's length. Revealing the pragmatic minimalism in Levinas's work and the centrality of imagery in James's prose, she suggests that aesthetic links are crucial to understanding what they share. Craig's suggestive readings change current perceptions and clear a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers." g'r