## Metadata - Author: [[Sarah Bakewell]] - Full Title: At the Existentialist Café - Category: #books ## Highlights - In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ — a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend, meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=741)) - Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality — provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades. With all of human existence awaiting their attention, how could they ever run out of things to do? ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=764)) - If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them. ([Location 1237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=1237)) - In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’. ([Location 1397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=1397)) - Sartre’s talent for combining personal gut responses with philosophical reasoning was one he cultivated deliberately. It sometimes took work. In a TV interview of 1972, he admitted that he had never spontaneously experienced nausea in the face of contingency himself. Another interviewee was sceptical, saying that he once saw Sartre staring at fronds of algae in water with a disgusted expression. Wasn’t that ‘nausea’? Perhaps the truth was that Sartre was staring at the algae precisely so as to whip up the feeling and observe what it was like. ([Location 1680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=1680)) - In her 1945 lecture ‘The Novel and Metaphysics’, Beauvoir observed that novels by phenomenologists were not as dull as those of some other philosophers because they described instead of explaining or putting things in categories. Phenomenologists take us to the ‘things themselves’. One might say that they follow the creative-writing mantra, ‘show, don’t tell’. ([Location 1711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=1711)) - the Melancholia manuscript in the mid-1930s, she read his drafts and urged him to inject some of the suspense they enjoyed so much in films and detective stories. He obeyed. He also appropriated this principle as his own, remarking in an interview that he had tried to make the book a whodunnit in which the clues lead the reader towards the guilty party — which was (and this is no great spoiler) ‘contingency’. ([Location 1716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=1716)) - For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good, because they stimulate people to self-questioning. He suspected that philosophy started in ancient Greece not, as Heidegger would imagine, because the Greeks had a deep, inward-looking relationship with their Being, but because they were a trading people (albeit sometimes a warlike one) who constantly came across alien-worlds of all kinds. ([Location 2092](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=2092)) - Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense. ([Location 2511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=2511)) - Human existence means ‘transcendence’, or going beyond, not ‘immanence’, or reposing passively inside oneself. It means constant action until the day one runs out of things to do — a day that is unlikely to come as long as you have breath. For Beauvoir and Sartre, this was the big lesson of the war years: the art of life lies in getting things done. ([Location 2552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=2552)) - When something is placed ‘on call’ or in ‘standing-reserve’, says Heidegger, it loses its ability to be a proper object. It is no longer distinguished from us and cannot stand up to us. Phenomenology itself is thus threatened by modern humanity’s challenging, devastating way of occupying the earth. This could lead to the ultimate disaster. If we are left alone ‘in the midst of objectlessness’, then we ourselves will lose our structure — we too will be swallowed up into a ‘standing-reserve’ mode of being. We will devour even ourselves. Heidegger cites the term ‘human resources’ as evidence of this danger. ([Location 2906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=2906)) - Letting-be became one of the most important concepts in the later Heidegger, denoting a hands-off way of attending to things. It sounds straightforward. ‘What seems easier’, asks Heidegger, ‘than to let a being be just the being that it is?’ Yet it is not easy at all, because it is not just a matter of turning indifferently away and letting the world get on with its business. We must turn towards things, but in such a way that we don’t ‘challenge’ them. Instead, we allow each being to ‘rest upon itself in its very own being’. ([Location 2924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=2924)) - Note: Makes me think of NVC. - The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one the young Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs. ([Location 2946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=2946)) - Reading the late Heidegger requires a ‘letting-go’ of one’s own usual critical ways of thinking. Many consider this an unacceptable demand from a philosopher, even though we are willing to do it for artists. In order to appreciate Wagner’s Ring cycle or Proust’s fiction one has to subscribe temporarily to the creator’s own terms of entry or not attempt it at all. The same may be true of Heidegger’s late works — and I have only quoted some relatively approachable sections here. ([Location 2990](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00Z3E2KEC&location=2990))