̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - existentialism

Risky business

zs332 — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 15:16:50 +0000

Launched during Open Cambridge, a new self-guided trail, created by researchers at Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), takes the public on an altogether different tour of the city.

Mind Over Chatter: What would a more just future look like?

ns480 — Thu, 27 May 2021 12:57:12 +0000

Season 2, episode 4

Our society is more unequal than ever, as the top 1% control over 44% of the world’s wealth while 689 million people are living on less than $1.90 per day, according to the World Bank.

In this episode of Mind Over Chatter, we asked our guests what the future of fairness, justice, and equality should look like, and how their research can help to bring about a fairer society.

We cover topics ranging from distributive justice, the virtues and vices of empathy, and the role AI will play in shaping equality in the years to come.

Subscribe to Mind Over Chatter

Dr Alexa Hagerty, whose research looks at the global societal impacts of emerging technologies and Dr Natalie Jones, who focuses on global injustice and the rights of (indigenous) peoples, shared how injustice can be thought of as an existential risk to humanity.

Anthropologist, Professor Esra Ozyurek, who seeks to understand the tension between politics and religion in Turkey and in Europe, introduced us to the importance of understanding that different people have different needs, making equality insufficient to bring about justice.

Key points

[02.07]- what do we mean by fair when it comes to societies?

[06:45]- the difference between fairness, justice, and equality

13:13]- cognitive empathy and emotional empathy distinction

[13:50]- Time for recap 1: summary so far

[20:21]- how to link global injustice and different voices to existential risk

[20:44]- participatory futures intro

[21:21]-global justice causing existential risk

Mind Over Chatter: ̽��ֱ��Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Podcast

Opinion: Brexistentialism: Britain, the drop out nation in crisis, meets Jean-Paul Sartre

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:07:29 +0000

̽��ֱ��greatest philosophical one-liner of the 20th century – or anti-EU theme tune? “Hell is other people” began life as a snappy soundbite in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, a short, harsh, brilliant meditation of a play, written in the midst of World War II. It may actually have been delivered first, in rehearsal, by Sartre’s friend and antagonist Albert Camus. Huis Clos is a difficult title to translate – the norm used to be: “No Exit”, stressing some notion of inescapable interdependence. I guess, in the current fissionary climate, it could be rewritten as “Brexit”, or possibly “Brexistentialism”.

I have to ask the unpleasant question of this nation: are we being xenophobic? I am fairly sure Sartre would reply, in his confrontational way: we are not being anywhere near xenophobic enough. Yet. We are not following the Brexistentialist argument where it leads. We have to understand and assume responsibility for the consequences of our own attitudes.

Shortly after the referendum result, I received a message from a young Danish friend: “So you don’t like us any more”, she said. I replied: “We’re not prejudiced. We don’t like anyone”. I was proposing, in other words, an even-handed hostility, an all-round, egalitarian phobia of the other. But I was probably, in the Sartre view of the world, being prematurely utopian, I admit. I suspect that we are still being overly selective in our resentments and revulsion.

Existentialism is usually thought of as a form of radical individualism. There is no “society” in Sartre. Everyone is Shane or Jack Reacher or Lisbeth Salander. Your closest relationship is with your horse or folding toothbrush or computer. In Being and Nothingness, the longer essay Sartre wrote alongside Huis Clos, he makes clear that the core of the self (not that it has a core) is its nexus with other people.

How do I define myself, sitting in this West Village cafe in New York right now? Like so many philosophical answers, it is obvious and yet far-reaching in its implications. I am not this keyboard that I have under my fingers, I am not this cup of black coffee, I am not this woman in sunglasses who is sitting opposite me. I am defined, in short, by a series of negations.

Staring at the void (and seeing nothing)

Anecdotal allegory: I was once at a conference in Geneva where one of the speakers dropped out through illness. I offered to step in to fill the breach. Thank you, replied my good friend Philippe who was overseeing the conference, “Mais on ne peut pas remplir un trou par un vide”. Loosely translated: “You can’t fill a hole with a void”. Funny how certain lines stick in the mind (this was 25 years ago). But, to come to the point (not that there is a point in the entire universe), this is exactly what Sartre proposes we are doing every second of every day: I am a void which I am attempting to fill up with a series of negations. Popeye, on this basis: “I am what I am and that’s all what I am” – is clearly guilty of “bad faith” or delusion. And even he needs a tin of spinach to fully inflate.

Perhaps it was not so surprising in Occupied France in the 1940s that Sartre would conclude that, in our relations with others, we really only have two fundamental options: sadism and masochism. Or (situation normal) some combination of both. There is no third way. As true today as it was then. Which explains why, all too often in the current debates, we refer back to World War II (say, for example, Cameron being accused of “appeasement”), as if we were all retired Spitfire pilots (the “Few” have multiplied to become the many).

Groucho wasn’t much of a joiner, either. MGM/Ted Allan, CC BY

Of course the theory omits the crucial question of the collective. Sartre resorted to Marx (Karl) for the answer. But Marx (Groucho) had already defined the problem: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me for a member.” Sartre wanted to abolish clubs entirely. He dreamed of a system of evenly distributed particles floating free in the meaningless void. A beautiful concept for sure. Perhaps, ultimately, a form of nostalgia. But, rather like particles in the early universe, we have an irresistible tendency to agglomerate, to clump together. Our particular local clump, or club, can only define itself by opposition to other clubs.

̽��ֱ��great French utopian philosopher, Charles Fourier (who provided Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with the notion of the “pivotal” or significant other) analysed humans in terms of their passions – which he equated with Newtonian gravity, causing us to band together. But the “butterfly” passion also causes us to fly apart and split up.

Freedom’s just another word

We are “condemned to be free” in the sense that all our clubs are strictly provisional (except, in my own case, West Ham United). I am aligning myself with one really quite powerful club even by virtue of writing this article: it is in English, so I am implicitly asserting some measure of competence in English and association with other English speakers.

I try not to get too excited by this sense of belonging, however, because I know that English itself splits into a multiplicity of idiolects. In fact, having in the course of drifting around acquired a fairly strange accent, I no longer know where I belong, geographically or socially.

Neither does anyone else. Unless, of course, they are guilty of bad faith.

We (and I am conscious when I write the word of how fictional, how hypothetical, how mythic it is) have chosen (mythically speaking) the path of “anomie” or singularity, to be governed by no rule. “Romantic anomie” was the sociologist Emile Durkheim’s phrase, in his analysis of the causes of suicide (the first philosophical question, as Camus called it).

Whole countries can have an existential crisis, not just lonely, drifting outsiders. We can be a drop-out too. Driven by a sense of the nausea of existence itself. But equally it will not be too surprising if this drop-out mentality catches on. And “we” just ceases to exist. Maybe it already died. I already feel a certain nostalgia for Brexistentialism.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) discusses existentialism and the EU referendum.

Chris Devers

Banksy in Boston: Portrait from the F̶O̶L̶L̶O̶W̶ ̶Y̶O̶U̶R̶ ̶D̶R̶E̶A̶M̶S̶ CANCELLED piece in context on Essex St, Chinatown, Boston

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Locked in combat: two French thinkers slog it out

amb206 — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:21:12 +0000

There are no goals in boxing and no red corner in football. Andy Martin’s ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre Vs Camus (Simon & Schuster, 6 June 2012) is a story about two philosophers and their intellectual tussling in the Paris of the 1940s and 1950s. They are an odd pair, mismatched. Sartre was famously ugly, Camus was in comparison an Adonis; Sartre was a Parisian insider while Camus, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Outsider’, came from a poor family in Algeria. But they had much in common: both highly competitive, both richly creative, both prone to angst or ‘Nausea’.

Spiked with seminal moments in author Andy Martin’s own life, the book opens with a small but delicious act of felony committed by the writer as a teenager in suburban Essex, and the creeping guilt that ensued: to give any more away would spoil the narrative. Suffice it to say that Martin, today a languages lecturer at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a poet-cum-screenwriter, was a boy with big questions and a vivid imagination.

Do other people exist, could they simply disappear leaving just their shoes and socks behind, does the boy Andy himself exist? These are the musings that lead Martin – and lead readers of ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – to discover the works of Sartre and Camus. Along the way, he realises – and we too come to realise - that the clever, coffee-drinking, café-frequenting thinkers and their friends were locked in petty squabbles that subsumed their intellectual arguments in a contest of sheer bitchiness – and yet which remain resonant for us now.

̽��ֱ��guts of the book is a study of two heavyweights of 20^th century philosophy and literature – both winners of the Nobel prize, although Sartre famously rejected his. Whether or not we have read ̽��ֱ��Outsider or delved into Being and Nothingness, we quickly get to grips with the contrasting backgrounds and characters of the two protagonists and the mind-blowing ideas about the meaning of life and love that they kicked about as they sought to out-general one another intellectually.

Martin unravels the tricky concepts of the savage and the symbolic, in the process taking creative leaps of the imagination that he says may annoy his fellow academics. He talks about visiting the barber in Cambridge to tame his mad professor hairstyle. This leads him into a description of the cutting of Sartre’s own blond curls which severed him from a condition of angelic childishness into a state of being Sartre, a transformation that sees his mother rush upstairs in floods of tears. This neatly introduces us to ideas about beauty and ugliness, and the possibility of self-transcendence.

Philosophers are supposed to be gentle, cerebral beings: Martin’s double act is anything but. Sartre was a natural pugilist who wondered: “Can I take him or can he take me?” “I fought constantly,” he wrote of his schooldays in La Rochelle. He learnt to box and, as a teacher of philosophy, he sparred with his students and got into a fist-fight with another teacher over a sarcastic remark. He wanted to win – a boxing bout, he argued, was the “the incarnation of pre-existing violence”. Camus also got into fights but he was a footballer in love with the game. Growing up in Algeria, he played in goal but, despite the urban myth, he was never goalkeeper for Algeria. ̽��ֱ��goalkeeper is not quite part of the team – though vital to it.

Sartre and Camus met in Paris in 1943 where they were both friends of Simone de Beauvoir. They sat in cafes and wrote. Their friendship turned sour and their rivalry travelled far beyond the world of ideas. Late one night in Paris, they are spotted racing on all fours across the boulevard St Germain between two of their favourite bars. Though they disliked each other, they are locked together. After Camus’s death in a car crash in 1960, Sartre wrote: “We had a falling-out, he and I: but a falling-out means nothing – even if we were doomed never to see each other again – but another way of living together and without ever losing sight on what the other is up to in the small world that has been given to us.”

In weaving together anecdote and incident ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper introduces some of the basic concepts of philosophy, encouraging the reader to think about what makes us human – and especially what makes us behave badly. This is not a book that requires any specialist knowledge. ̽��ֱ��only real puzzler of a phrase is the dedication at the start: the book is dedicated not to mum or dad but to “a binary praxis of non-antagonistic reciprocity”. This line modifies Sartre’s original, with the emphasis more on the antagonistic – all of which is unfolded in the book.

What does all this mean today? Martin thinks that in the present context of a kind of nationalistic hysteria about winning (the Euros, the Olympics, standing on the podium) we need to think long and deep about failure. After all, most of us fail most of the time. “ ̽��ֱ��two great philosophers of failure were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success and resign ourselves to failure and discontent. I think everyone would be a lot happier that way, by becoming truly philosophical.”

“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. His rival on the stage of occupied and post-war Paris was Albert Camus (“I am the world”). ̽��ֱ��two fell out but remained entangled. A book by Cambridge academic Andy Martin – ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – is an excursion into the worlds of the Frenchmen synonymous with existentialism and absurdism.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success.

Dr Andy Martin

Antanas Sutkus, 2012

Jean Paul Sartre on the beach

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