I have just finished Andrew Leak's critical biography, Jean-Paul Sartre; and like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I consumed the whole book in one day, shortly after sunset in Paris. I picked it up to begin reading last night, a few minutes before going to bed and finished three whole chapters while on the Metro, to and from Musée d'Orsay. By the end of the last chapter, on the importunate battles for meaning on the death of Sartre, I have agreed with Michel Foucault that the man "was a 19th century thinker thinking in the 20th". But since we are now well into the 21st, I seem to realize the concreteness of Foucault's remark, even though a century belated in reference: all those images of "my friend Pierre", Roquentin's chesnut tree, the letter-opener, the waiter and the cafe...have passed on as artifacts from another age. The "here-and-now" described by Sartre is already but a few sentences in Wikipedia: it is gone.
More and more I sensed the distance between our worlds fissure and drift apart. Sartre did not take to liking to use a typewriter while my everyday reality is tapping on an invisible keyboard on my Ipad. He met Che Guevara in person and extolled him as an exemplar; he exists for me only as a print design on a T-shirt. He wrote about anxiety and the anxiety to be in solidarity with others; this was solved ingeniously by Facebook although I have long parted with this kind of solidarity. In other words, when I had more information of his humanness,Sartre and his own historicity, took on the form of an old room mate from my teens. At best happy to have made my acquaintance, but not quite relevant to my own concerns today. But I cherish what I have received from the encounter and meeting, and taking his own advice, I am exercising my freedom to move out of his shadow and allow him to rest in peace.
No. Sartre feels to me like an old teacher in high school, magnetic for his intelligence while I was looking for a model upon which to form my life. Then, after 20 years, I do not even know why I was attached in the first place, yet I can fondly remember the unabashed idolatry, the same way teens give prominence to their favorite stars. Nietzsche (also another idol in decline) said that it is unfortunate the a student must seek to surpass his teacher or else the mentorship is a failure. But Sartre has never been my teacher, but I was an ardent student. So it may come as no love lost if I now declare, I am quitting this relationship of reverence. But the lesson has been passed and understood: but it was phenomenology after all that what I needed most, and the one that I understood best. Funny that this scene seems like the closure of seeing a former flame and to end up the episode with "who was that?" when you have parted ways.
This seems like an old pattern in my life. Enchanted by the prospect of something radical, I go forth into an enterprise - an author, an essay, a career, a religion, or even a street in a foreign country - until I find myself knee-deep in its mechanics and its territory. Then something feels WRONG, and I know I have walked too far, studied too much, and excessively given up myself that I HAVE TO TURN BACK and exit whence I came. I feel I have gone into Sartrean reverence far too deep that I must have conceived of this time as HIS. At this juncture this is me saying, adieux mon chez profesor! I have just twirled at the end of this street and I am slowly but quite surely, walking out of the maze.
The reverence ends but the thinking that has started with the discovery of consciousness, being, of en-soi and pour-soi and of Being for Others in his Being and Nothingness continues. But it has taken a more sculptural, more concrete response: I am after all better in arguing with my chisel and my hands. So like with all my other "idols" - Jesus, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Kazantzakis - I can rest easy to shelve Sartre's words into the boxes destined for the attic of the mind.
As the Buddha would say, you do not carry the raft on your back once it has ferried you across. Thank you Monsieur Sartre, you have ferried me across the large sea of my mind, but pardon my leave. I shall be going on my way.
More and more I sensed the distance between our worlds fissure and drift apart. Sartre did not take to liking to use a typewriter while my everyday reality is tapping on an invisible keyboard on my Ipad. He met Che Guevara in person and extolled him as an exemplar; he exists for me only as a print design on a T-shirt. He wrote about anxiety and the anxiety to be in solidarity with others; this was solved ingeniously by Facebook although I have long parted with this kind of solidarity. In other words, when I had more information of his humanness,Sartre and his own historicity, took on the form of an old room mate from my teens. At best happy to have made my acquaintance, but not quite relevant to my own concerns today. But I cherish what I have received from the encounter and meeting, and taking his own advice, I am exercising my freedom to move out of his shadow and allow him to rest in peace.
No. Sartre feels to me like an old teacher in high school, magnetic for his intelligence while I was looking for a model upon which to form my life. Then, after 20 years, I do not even know why I was attached in the first place, yet I can fondly remember the unabashed idolatry, the same way teens give prominence to their favorite stars. Nietzsche (also another idol in decline) said that it is unfortunate the a student must seek to surpass his teacher or else the mentorship is a failure. But Sartre has never been my teacher, but I was an ardent student. So it may come as no love lost if I now declare, I am quitting this relationship of reverence. But the lesson has been passed and understood: but it was phenomenology after all that what I needed most, and the one that I understood best. Funny that this scene seems like the closure of seeing a former flame and to end up the episode with "who was that?" when you have parted ways.
This seems like an old pattern in my life. Enchanted by the prospect of something radical, I go forth into an enterprise - an author, an essay, a career, a religion, or even a street in a foreign country - until I find myself knee-deep in its mechanics and its territory. Then something feels WRONG, and I know I have walked too far, studied too much, and excessively given up myself that I HAVE TO TURN BACK and exit whence I came. I feel I have gone into Sartrean reverence far too deep that I must have conceived of this time as HIS. At this juncture this is me saying, adieux mon chez profesor! I have just twirled at the end of this street and I am slowly but quite surely, walking out of the maze.
The reverence ends but the thinking that has started with the discovery of consciousness, being, of en-soi and pour-soi and of Being for Others in his Being and Nothingness continues. But it has taken a more sculptural, more concrete response: I am after all better in arguing with my chisel and my hands. So like with all my other "idols" - Jesus, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Kazantzakis - I can rest easy to shelve Sartre's words into the boxes destined for the attic of the mind.
As the Buddha would say, you do not carry the raft on your back once it has ferried you across. Thank you Monsieur Sartre, you have ferried me across the large sea of my mind, but pardon my leave. I shall be going on my way.
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