I've been reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness again - it's very interesting!
I read it last year, but since then, all the ideas have become muddled in my mind - also I have a tendency to jump back and forth between the concepts I am struggling with, rather than read linearly and absorb at the author's intended pace, so I'm attempting to give it a much fuller read this time.
I just really want to share how cool I think this book is! Occasionally I get stuck and have to draw out his arguments in predicate logic. Thinking about it, it would be cool to encode his ontology into prolog maybe - then you could question details of his thought directly. Also to retrieve quotations.
Occasionally I find myself in bad faith - I work a lot sometimes to create cool things - and I feel that somehow that makes me cooler, but this is bad faith because I am seeking to escape what I am to be what I am not, and simultaneously to escape what I am not to be what I am.
So cheers to Sartre for letting me figure that one out :)
28 August 2009
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neon purple blog hurts my fuckin' eyes, quoth the king of withdrawal.
ReplyDeleteSartre is kinda cool, anyway. if you get stuck on him, sometimes it makes more sense in French; you are reading a translation, right? (sometimes i see it as Being and Unbeing as well.)
i don't agree with the whole bad faith thing though, being pretty much against faith. it's good for your Prolog, i guess.
What can I say? I'm in the pink ;)
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I never learned French! I'm reading Hazel E. Barnes' translation.
The whole searchable ontology in Prolog would be cool, but I'm never going to get around to it :)
Now you must correct me if I am wrong, but I thought Sarte's discussion of bad faith in Being and Nothingness wasn't really an argument about morality and religous faith; it was to introduce a non-trivial problem regarding consciousness - that I might think I am a thing, but the fact that I have to even think that I am that thing is surely illustration that I'm not that thing, and I am instead a consciousness.