A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes by Witold Gombrowicz, Benjamin Ivry Read Free Book Online Page B

ask, for instance, how can I be absolutely free to choose myself, if, born short, I want to be tall?Now the choice is not the choice of a fact, it is the choice of a value.I cannot freely choose my height, but that depends on my considering smallness as a quality or a defect.
    There are still other impossibilities for our freedom, deriving from what one calls man’s facticity .We must not forget that man by his body, by his mechanism, belongs to the world dictated by causality, since if we are stabbed, evidently we are going to bleed, like every other animal.Freedom manifests itself only in existence, in that specific being which is the Being for itself.
    Anguish is anguish before myself, such that I am not yet, since I must choose myself.It comes from the consciousness of freedom and it is the fundamental structure of man.Most people do not feel it, because they flee from these problems and in fleeing it they affirm it.
    Sartre defines this as an act of bad faith , which is, according to him, an act by which we want to deceive (distort) ourselves, to lie to ourselves, and these people reject will, but this act of rejection is also free, and they know it.From there, the reassuring myth which lets us forget our terrible solitude, and our responsibility to ourselves.Sartre calls that man who hides from this responsibility a “bastard.”
    There is a famous short story by Sartre, L’Enfance d’un chef , in which a young man, panicked in the face of his homosexual tendencies, in ordernot to choose to be homosexual, chooses to be anti-Semitic, and he becomes anti-Semitic for everyone.This is his characteristic, his duty, etc. In fleeing from our fundamental responsibility, we choose to be another character, or we choose absolute values such as God, the laws of nature, etc. So now, Sartre defines what his own morality consists of.
    It is choosing freedom and affirming freedom.
    This is the basis of Sartre’s communism.One could wonder why Sartre, in choosing communism, a system defined by values, is not a bastard.It is that every other social system signifies the exploitation of man by man, thus a limitation on freedom.In choosing communism, we choose freedom.
    Wednesday, May 7, 1969
    The View of Others
    We are subject to other people’s point of view.Naturally it is necessary to recognize the existence of others.It is an obvious fact .Sartre does not find any philosophical reasons to justify it.This view of otherstakes away our freedom, defines us.For the other, we are a thing, an object, we have a character, etc. This view of others is contrary to our freedom, but it is only in recognizing the other’s freedom that I free myself from his gaze.All of Sartrean morality consists of recognizing and of affirming freedom .
    Consequently, Sartre naturally insists that every writer be engaged, that he belong to the left, and that he be subject to its rigorous rules!In other, less successful works, Sartre tries above all (in The Critique of Dialectical Reason ) to reconcile existentialism with Marxism, which naturally is nonsense.
    Sunday, May 11, 1969
    Heidegger
    Before Sartre there was Martin Heidegger, who is undoubtedly more creative.Born in 1889, professor at Freiburg, and author of the book Being and Time , 1927.
    It should be said right away that Heidegger was supposed to write a second volume, but he ultimatelynever managed to organize his thinking.His thinking is difficult and tortured.
    Existentialism quite simply means to describe the rapport of our consciousness with our existence, in other words, what are for man the most profound, the most definitive aspects of existence.We proceed by the elimination of the more superficial lateral aspects, and we reach the deeper, more authentic concepts regarding our existence.This phenomenological method is not concerned with God, etc., but only with what is in our consciousness, when it confronts our specific being, our existence.It is phenomenological ontology.
    Ontology means the