Continental Philosophy

Standing outside a restaurant at lunch time, the black-clad members of Electric Touch look like a rock band. And onstage the Austin-based band’s members move around like classic rockers, spindly limbs kicking and flailing around their instruments.

But the rock act sort of ends there. The expectation that bleary, red eyes are hidden behind sunglasses is quickly dashed. The four guys are chipper, chatty, clear-headed and in love with their jobs…

Leigh and Lawlor met in Austin through a mutual friend. “It wasn’t long before guitars came out and we started writing,” Lawlor says. “We had a blank canvas; we could make the band whatever we wanted. We decided it shouldn’t be too complicated and should include some positive messages about love and such. … We might read Sartre, but it’s not what we’re going to sing about.”

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It has taken a few days to realize what has been nagging at me about Plaxico Burress’ tragic situation. … That was it! High school ninth grade English class, when we spent a couple of months knitting our brows being forced to read the sparse, depressing tomes of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre — in translation, of course. (You can imagine how long ago I went to high school.)

I can see him now, our English teacher, Mr. Berman, a diminutive, bow-tied, bespectacled fellow, writing and underlining this long, foreign, unfamiliar word on the blackboard: “EXISTENTIALISM.” We dutifully scribbled into our looseleaf notebooks.

“It’s a post-World War II French philosophy, boys” he explained quite solemnly. “An existentialist is the author of his future. You, and you alone,” and he pointed to us, “determine the course of your fate.You are responsible for the decisions you make, and the path you take. Indeed, you construct your life.”

Sounds like the plot of one of those arcane but impressive books I read all those years ago, like The Stranger, or The Plague or No Exit: A young, multimillionaire football star with the all the promise of a glorious professional future ahead of him leaves the remote safety of his gated country mansion, and crosses the broad river, into the sinful city for a night on the town. He brings a handgun into a crowded nightclub. It accidentally discharges and he is wounded. He is bleeding, panicked. A calm friend drives him to a hospital where he signs in under an alias which, in the end, will not protect him.

Say What??

After the debate reference, here’s one even more absurd from the Times of London:

Hell, observed that relentlessly jolly fellow Jean-Paul Sartre, is “other people”. Obviously, he never had to endure triple French, grinding through that unputdownable masterpiece of his, Les Mains Sales – for which I sincerely hope he is discovering a whole new circle of damnation, and without anyone around to distract him from it. People, he might discover, have their uses. Even in hell.

In any case, judging by the increasing popularity of “single-unit living”, an awful lot of people must agree with him. I don’t – though there’s no doubt that people can be annoying, especially at breakfast, as discussed previously. And, of course, I wish they didn’t spill paint on the carpet or infect me with their wretched classroom nits. In an ideal world, I suppose, they would all sit stock still in another room, watching television with the volume off.

from Bloomberg news:

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) — As the world burned, the presidential candidates were sober, lucid, rarely off topic and always in character last night. Watching it was like having to read Sartre on the first day of spring.

What now?

Of often the Say What category comes from people who really don’t know much philosophy. Mansfield has no excuse though:

The early feminists were radicals inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, who thought it necessary to show that all sex differences were bourgeois conventions or stereotypes. They would show this not so much in regard to careers as in sex itself. They bought into the sexual revolution and decided that women could best show they are equal to men by becoming as predatory as the most wolfish men. This demonstration required the fallback assistance of ready abortion in case something should go wrong; and it gave new legitimacy to–this word is never used–spinsterhood. Single-parent families also gained respectability as women pressed their husbands with newly justifiable equality grievances, often leading to divorce.

As sex goes up in social estimation, love goes down. The trouble with love is that it narrows your options and endangers your independence. If you loved a man, you might actually want to put up with, or even admire, his ways. You may be sure that I am not the first one to notice that feminist women are unerotic.

…

Simone de Beauvoir had her guy in Jean-Paul Sartre, a high-strung couple if ever there was one.

Dandy warhols of Bohemian Rhapsodies:

Is Courtney Taylor the new bohemian? “That’s why I throw around names like Nietzsche, and Mohammed and shit. I don’t care. I studied enough Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Sartre, and it’s really about where the fuck did I park my car.”

Say what??

The Existentialist : Tamsyn Lewis is Australia’s best hope in the 800 meters. But it’s as if she’s been reading too much Sartre recently; she doesn’t see the point in competing, not with all the runners “to the left and right of me” doping. Australian Olympic officials have told her to snap out of it, keep her opinions to herself, and bring home something shiny from Beijing. But the funny (or absurdist point, as Camus would have it) is that they agree with Lewis.

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For a while, I have been meaning to have a less important category added to this site, devoted to strange uses, misuses and abuses of philosophy in the media. Sartre is often the one misquoted or very strangely cited. But I am pleased to start this category with a far broader case than the deranged use of a single philosopher.

From USA Today, Jonah Goldberg, author Liberal Fascism, gives us: Obama, the Postmodernist

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is “being out of alignment with my values.” Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn’t being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t be a sinner because his values hold that it’s OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama’s — unless he really is our Savior.

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

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Obama gives every indication of having evolved from this intellectual soup. As a student and, later, a law school instructor, Obama was sympathetic to Critical Race Theory, a wholly owned franchise of postmodernism.

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Say what??