I’ve been reading Existentialism is a humanism (you can read the whole thing here) by Jean-Paul Sartre which is a lecture, now in book form but not only that it also has a review, or perhaps more; an analyses by Jean-Paul Sartre on a book called The Stranger by Albert Camus (amazingly it seems you can find the whole of this essay here, the Internet rules) and completing the book, of only 108 pages, is a preface by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre and an introduction by Annie Cohen-Solal. The latter claiming that the two main works of this book, the lecture and the analyses, is a good way of getting started with Sartre, I’m not so sure.
Since I am a philosophy student I’m a little ashamed to say that I haven’t, prior to this, read any of Sartre’s work. So this is what I am going to do: I am going to read a bit of Sartre’s work, work that lead up to this lecture and I am going to read Camus The Stranger. Then I an going to return to Existentialism is a humanism and read it again. (To be honest I haven’t read the analyses of The Stranger since I thought it’d be best for me to read the work itself first.)
What I am going to take with me, and think about for a bit, after reading the lecture for the first time is the thoughts on, or concept/thought of, intersubjectivity which to me seem like the way to go. If I understand it correctly, which I’m sure I don’t, it could help to wipe out all thoughts on objectivity which is good since I don’t think objective truth exists. By this I mean that I don’t think that anything can be true in itself, regardless of anything else. If there are ten people eating a cake and they all agree on that it was a really good tasting cake, some saying it was the best cake they had ever had, some saying it was a good tasting cake; no more no less, can it then have been a bad tasting cake? Ten people thought it was good tasting, and finished it, but it really was a bad tasting cake; can this be? (I know I’m involving judgement here and perhaps this is what I’m getting at; that a judgement can’t be objectively true, maybe other things can be… I’m confusing myself here…)
Ok, so since I in writhing this post, wanting to be kind to you in finding links to everything so that you would know what I am talking about, myself found Albert Camus The Stranger in a nice printable, legal, version I guess I’ll just have to print away and read… dilemma, because I really need to finish my Aesthetics exam…
Until tomorrow, this is Tomas signing of on a lighter note than this post presumes:
Hasta la vista (from The Terminator part 2) and Talk to the hand (the catch phrase which didn’t really catch on the way the producers might have intended from Terminator 3).
