Reviews and Comments

It feels quite inappropriate to provide a 'rating' to a collection of philosophical works which so entirely changed the direction and character of western philosophy. Descartes' methods were revolutionary and, in the form of the Principles of First Philosophy, perhaps their most developed methodological elaboration since the Greeks. Descartes wrote with a clarity and humility which is rare to find in philosophers, particularly those who so radically questioned not just the truth of doxa but its very conceptual foundations. Any rating lower than five stars does not do justice to how important this work is.

It is impossible to understand the last 370 years of western philosophy without understanding that is rooted in Plato and then routed through Descartes. An understanding cannot proceed without a familiarity with Descartes. The great philosophers and thinkers of the last few centuries - Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and many others - have to be understood as responding as much to Descartes as to Plato, compared to whom every other philosopher is often called 'a footnote'.

I want to say two brief things about Kant and Heidegger in this context. Descartes wrote that philosophy can, properly speaking, only proceed through introducing radical doubt into all preconceived beliefs (often referred to as doxa) and from beginning afresh from first principles. In this way, Descartes concluded that the first thing I can be certain of is that I exist, because in order to think there must be something that thinks. He then proceeds, having constructed certain foundations, to reason the existence of free will, of God, and of our ability to largely trust our senses. He distinguishes between two substances: mind (characterised by thought, not extended in space) and body (characterised by extension, bu does not think).

Kant wanted to go deeper than that and to ask something like this question: What things must be the case such that we can experience the world at all? Kant developed a highly sophisticated metaphysical system which outlined both what makes thought possible, and what limits it. A key concern of Kant's, then, was to try to understand how our use of reason can go wrong, and to be used in 'impermissible ways'. Kant concludes (not without thorough elaboration of course, I just don't have time to go into it here) that we cannot use reason to prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, or the existence of free will; these are essentially practical presuppositions for Kant. It is quite clear therefore that Kant must be understood as engaging as directly with Descartes as his famous rival and inspiration David Hume.

I will say even less of Heidegger, but one way of understanding his masterpiece [b:Being and Time|92307|Being and Time|Martin Heidegger|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298438455l/92307.SX50.jpg|1309352] (1927) is to see it as an attempt to correct some of the errors of thought which Heidegger thought had been introduced into philosophical thought, by Descartes and by his predecessors and successors in philosophy. In particular, what many like Heidegger see arising out of Descartes' method is what is often called the 'subject-object' relation: the subject (me, the unique thinking substance) and the object (the physical, corporeal world beyond or 'outside' of me) are held to be two distinct and opposed categories. Such a distinction introduces an approach which necessarily tends towards a view kind of methodological individualism and subjectivism, a view of ourselves as disconnected, almost disembodied free agents, separate from and undetermined by the world going on around us.

For Heidegger (as with, for example, Hegel), the task is to collapse such a distinction entirely such that there is no longer any strong distinction made. For Heidegger, the 'subject' (what he refers to as Dasein) is always already 'thrown into' the world, to be what we are is to be 'Being-in-the-world. Our very being and capacity for agency is always historically conditioned. Descartes could no more have chosen to be an astronaut than Sartre could have chosen to be a Samurai. Heidegger criticises Descartes for claiming that our primary way of engaging with the world is through 'knowing'; to the contrary, for Heidegger our existence is characterised both by moods and by a fundamental interconnectedness and embeddedness. Frankly you'd be better off reading Being & Time to really see how Heidegger goes to town on Cartesianism.

There are many reasons to read Descartes, aside from the merit of his clarity, precision and prose, and foremost among them being the huge contributions he made and to better understand the history and context of the history of western philosophy up to this day. Descartes' influence did not end in the century in which he died: his influence can be felt and seen to this day.

I think I can see glimmers of what must have been amazing about this book at the time. The wild joy and mystery of adventure following the second world war, and the rapid development of industrial capitalism in America, must have been an oppressive atmosphere for many young men not suited (or not desiring of) a traditional life. The celebration of travel, joy, music, and guilt-free hedonism must have been refreshing. I can still see something in that, and the variety of colourful characters and their escapades in this book were often fun and enjoyable to read about.

But it didn't do so much for me. Partly because of the style of writing. The narrative voice, and approximately half of the dialogue, take on a 50s American drawl, all lingo and slang. And yet the other half of the dialogue would not have seemed out of place in a novel by Proust or Turgenev. It felt strange and at odds with itself. The structure is quite repetitive as well - each chapter seems to have much the same as its antecedent: Dean Moriarty hurtles out of the mist, bursting back into the lives of our protagonist, and again the chaos begins. Everything goes to hell in a handcart, and they have to speed off home again leaving carnage in their wake.

But there's no real character development here. There is a point in the story where Dean appears to have reached a point where age and his past mistakes were catching up with him, and it would have been interesting to see this explored in more depth. The protagonist, Sal Paradise, is ostensibly an amateur novelist during the first chapter, but little to nothing is later made of this. His hanging-on to Dean, but his reservations about his behaviour and the path on which they journeyed, appear from time to time throughout the book, but again nothing is made of this. At times Kerouac comes close to articulating a kind of existentialist angst - the character ask themselves 'Where are we going?, but this thought is no sooner touched upon before discarded in favour of another raunchy episode. Paradise in particular seemingly learns nothing from any of his adventures. Perhaps this was deliberate, and Kerouac was making a point here which I missed. If so: Missed it I surely did.

I can see why a generation of young men must have read this and dreamt of the romance and excitement of just buying a car and them and all their 'buddies' launching off 'On the Road', with no clear end in sight: 'there is only the road'. How else to escape from the monotony of 'ordinary' life in the hey-day of American capitalism? And yet all they do is cavort around causing chaos, leaving misery in their past. It would be hard to say that Kerouac condones the actions of these fellow-travellers, but he doesn't entirely condemn them either. Instead, he sympathises with them - their wild, youthful energy and chaotic, winding path through life. Perhaps that's the best attitude he could have taken. Nevertheless, it seems underdeveloped in its ideas, themes, and characters, and as a result, I found it quite difficult to get through. Worth reading at least once, but I'm not sure I feel any desire to return to it.

Perhaps out of a sense of morbidity, I decided that now - in the midst of a pandemic which has exiled almost all of us to the confines of our homes - would be as good a time as any to return, and finally to finish, Camus' The Plague. I had started the book a couple of years ago, but alas the writing of my Masters' thesis tore me away, and from then other distractions thrust themselves upon me.

I absolutely adored it. The strange, occasionally detached style of narration makes the experience slightly rough going at the start, but as the narrative begins to unfurl and the characters involved in this story more fully develop, the narrator allows himself to talk somewhat more 'subjectively' about these experiences. I found myself in love with the richness of these characters - particularly Jean Tarrou, who becomes Rieux's closest friend and confidant in this book.

The parallels with France under Nazi occupation are clear, but we can nevertheless take much from it today. This is a bleak, tragic book but not without optimism or hope. The danger we face today, at a time when Fascism is returning to us again, is that we lose our 'sense' of the true cost of Fascism. Like the plague, it will always be with us as long as the will-to-fascism within us is not driven out. In a powerful and moving speech by Tarrou, he says that "Yes, indeed, Rieux, it is very tiring to be a plague victim. But it is still more tiring not to want to be one. This is why everyone appears tired, because nowadays everyone is a little infected. But this is why a few, who want to cease to be victims, experience an extreme form of tiredness from which nothing except death will deliver them."

Only eight years after Camus' untimely and tragic death, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari published [b: Anti-Oedipus|118317|Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Gilles Deleuze|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347698453l/118317.SY75.jpg|113899] (1968). In a now-famous preface to the book, their friend Michel Foucault wrote that their book should be understood as a 'guide to anti-fascist life', and that "the major enemy [of the book] is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."

This is the plague which Camus believes infects us and which, without constant struggle against it, will always risk re-emerging from the sewers of society. It is not enough merely to oppose Fascism in its historical form, we must oppose and root out those elements of fascism - the love of power, of violence, of superiority - in our own minds which give birth to it. "I know that we must constantly keep a watch on ourselves to avoid being distracted for a moment and find ourselves breathing in another person's face and infecting him." If not, then "perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city." This book speaks profoundly and beautifully to the universal desire for peace on this earth and what it might take to make it a reality.

"That is why this epidemic has taught me nothing except that it must be fought at your side. I have absolute knowledge of this - yes Rieux, I know everything about life, as you can see - that everyone has inside it himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune. [...] All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims - and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence."

I’ve always found Sartre a better writer (novelist, playwright, and so on) than a philosopher. Certainly, Being and Nothingness is an impressive work – an intelligent, thorough, analytic tome inquiring into the roots and nature of human subjectivity. And yet this text, at least, is a mixed bag for me. I’m not entirely sure why I decided to return to this text for the first time in God knows how many years and to read it afresh. But I did, and I wanted to collect some thoughts I had reading through it. I came away with quite a mixed impression. Let’s start with some of the negatives. At times, it’s almost sloppy: For example, with one hand he rejects Kant’s moral framework for its abstract and universal nature. It cannot, as Sartre says, provide us with any reliable answers in concrete moral situations because moral situations are always unique their specificity. Granted.

Then, with the other hand, he smuggles back in Kant’s three formulations of the categorical imperative as the underlying axiom of free human acts. “When I affirm that freedom, under any concrete circumstance, can have no other aim than itself, and once a man realizes, in his state of abandonment, that it is he who imposes values, he can will but one thing: freedom as the foundation of all values.” (p. 48) For Sartre, one should always ask oneself, “What would happen if everyone did what I am doing?” (p. 25) Kant returns to take vengeance upon Sartre! Sartre also vascillates wildly on the question of whether and how we might evaluate or form a judgement about how an individual seeks to act; is it a moral judgement, an aesthetic criticism, a logical indictment? The second one is perhaps the most interesting, but again he’s

That said, there are many moments of brilliance. There is no doubting his skill as a writer, and his discussions of the constitutive conditions of anguish and abandonment are powerful and precise. He is at his best when he draws equally on Heidegger and Nietzsche; and yet at the decisive moment he always recoils from both. Pushed to the stage where it seems as if he is about to contruct a radical existentialism around human freedom and a Nietzschian ‘aesthetic’ life (there is much to be said about what such a project might look like), he pulls back and rejects such a project as a slight against Existentialism.

I think more broadly, my concern with Existentialism – at least in the form presented here by Sartre – is the radical freedom he attributes to the human subject. Sartre writes that when an existentialist describes a coward, “he says that the coward is responsible for his own cowardice. He is not the way he is because he has a cowardly heart, lung, or brain. He is not like that as a result of his physiological makeup; he is like that because he has made himself a coward through his actions.” (p. 38) Powerful stuff, and I certainly grant Sartre that he decisively defeats the objection that Existentialism is pessimistic and powerfully demonstrates its quite radical optimism towards the subject.

Yet he seems to nevertheless overstate the case. We needn’t posit a ‘hard determinism’ on the basis of physical causality, genetic determinism etc. in order to ask difficult questions about whether man is really so free. We might, as Foucault does, inquire into the social and historical conditions which give rise to determinate social configurations and subjectivities – why do we believe x rather than y? What historical forces gave rise to contemporary images of thought? How does discourse and power inform and produce subjects under determinate conditions? Heidegger (whose work of course exercised a profound influence over Sartre) attends to these questions in detail – man is not just thrust into existence, he is always-already thrown into an existing historical situation, plunged into a web of social relations which existed and developed before his birth and will continue long after he dies. Part of our becoming-human is learning to navigate these forces. For Heidegger, we cannot choose just anything; if I am born in Paris in 1789, I cannot choose to become a Feudal lord or an astronaut. I have choice, yes, but it is always historically and socially conditioned. For Deleuze, the possibilities for how an infant brain might develop through its lifetime are not infinite, but neither are they pre-determined; they exist in a virtual field of difference, always carried forward into the future in an endless and complex process of becoming.

I’ve also never entirely accepted that Heidegger’s Being and Time is truly the anti-humanistic work that Heidegger later labelled it. In Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, of care, embodied existence, thrown-ness, Being-towards-death, Dasein’s temporality, and so on, I think it is impossible not to discern elements of a humanistic philosophy, at least insofar as it is an attempt to provide account of the nature of Being through the lens of Dasein. Maybe this is one reason why Heidegger never finished writing the book – examining it in this way was bound to lead to such results. Sartre instead seems to reproduce the Subject-Object distinction (inevitably given his starting-point is the Cartesian subject) in almost violent terms; so radically does he resist the world of objects that he has to radically free the subject from all causal forces.

Something of the complexity of the varied forces which simultaneously structure, enable, and limit our freedom gets lost in Sartre’s thought. A fascinating debate between Sartre and Pierre Naville is documented as an appendix in the book and it is a fascinating read. Naville seems to really pin down Sartre for the way in which his account of subjectivity and radical freedom seems to return to a kind of bourgeois pre-modern liberal idealism. And yet… And yet. If Existentialism continues to exert such a profound influence over not just academic but the public imagination, it is because it touches on matters which deeply concern all of us. As Heidegger said, we are defined by care; we necessarily take an interest in how things are with Being. If you like, we are all plagued by huge, profoundly important questions: What kind of being am I? Am I free? Is there a God? I am, but how should I be? Moreover, in the absence of a God, we should ask Deleuze’s question: not ‘How should I live?’ but ‘How might one live?’ What rich and diverse possibilities exist to be experienced?

Contemporary analytic philosophy not only cannot answer such questions; it not only has no interest in answering them; it broadly says that such questions are meaningless. At best, they are questions which arise out of linguistic confusion: meaning, after all, is a predicate of a proposition; a life is not a proposition in the formal sense; so to ask after a ‘meaning’ of life is a mistaken endeavour right from the start. And where it does take the question to at least be a meaningful and valid question, all of the humanity and complexity of life inevitably gets lost in the pursuit of analytic rigour. Questions of meaning and purpose are reduced to answers to concrete questions: the conditions for a meaningful life are either subjective, objective, or a hybrid of the two. As always, all the life of philosophy is drained away in such an endeavour.

Existentialism is right to bring such questions to the fore, and in many ways it truly does capture in a stark light what is so tragic and beautiful about ‘the human conditon’. A wonderful writer and a profound thinker, Sartre is still worth reading and taking seriously, even though I think he was often mistaken. But, where he was mistaken, it was at least for the right reasons. Ultimately it mostly makes me want to plunge back into his plays and novels, and to return again to Being and Time.