tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/jean-paul-sartre-7650/articlesJean-Paul Sartre – The Conversation2023-11-10T15:20:02Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2155682023-11-10T15:20:02Z2023-11-10T15:20:02ZCzesław Miłosz: what the Polish poet tells us about the ‘westsplaining’ of eastern and central Europe<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558370/original/file-20231108-27-uwo3r1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Czesław Miłosz (third row, fourth from the left) at the Stefan Batory University of Vilna in 1930.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Mi%C5%82osz#/media/File:Jacek_Dehnel_collection_-_Czes%C5%82aw_Mi%C5%82osz_i_studenci_Uniwersytetu_Stefana_Batorego_w_Wilnie_P-1158_01.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1931, when the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was 20 years old, he spent a summer travelling across Europe with friends. At the French border, as he later wrote in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/187456/native-realm-by-milosz-czeslaw/9780141392288">Native Realm</a>, they saw a sign that “Prohibited <a href="https://theconversation.com/social-care-how-gypsy-roma-and-traveller-children-face-discrimination-across-europe-and-the-uk-170312">Gypsies</a>, Poles, Rumanians and Bulgarians from entering the country”. </p>
<p>This experience was a vivid reminder that travellers from eastern and central Europe were often unwelcome in the western part of the continent. </p>
<p>Fifty years later, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1980/milosz/lecture/">in his Nobel lecture</a>, Miłosz pointed out that it was still difficult to speak of a single Europe. There were in fact “two Europes”: western Europe and what he referred to as “the Other Europe”.</p>
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<p>The perceived “otherness” of eastern and central Europe is a complex phenomenon, which Miłosz continued to examine in his writings until his death in 2004. As the literature scholar Eva Hoffman notes in her new book, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691212692/on-czeslaw-milosz">On Czeslaw Milosz: Visions from the Other Europe</a> (Princeton University Press), his oeuvre is, to a large extent, an exploration of this region that shaped him as a person and a poet. </p>
<p>As Hoffman observes, however, this same region was “imagined as inferior, obscure and altogether insignificant by the inhabitants of what was considered Europe <em>tout court</em>: Europe, which stood for civilization itself.” </p>
<p>The Other Europe that Miłosz wrote about was deeply marked by <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/timothy-snyder/bloodlands/9780465032976/?lens=basic-books">the excesses</a> of Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarian regimes. Miłosz witnessed much of this violence first-hand. </p>
<p>He spent the second world war in Poland under Nazi and then Soviet occupation. In 1951, he defected from the Soviet-controlled Polish People’s Republic and became an exile in France. </p>
<p>His writings from the period are an attempt to make sense of the increasing appeal of political ideologies such as fascism and communism, at a time when religion, as <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-61530-7">my research shows</a>, had ceased to offer a shared frame of reference. </p>
<h2>The othering of eastern and central Europe</h2>
<p>Miłosz’s 1953 book, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/57403/the-captive-mind-by-czeslaw-milosz-trans-jane-zielonko/9780141186764">The Captive Mind</a>, provides an incisive critique of Soviet communism. Miłosz was ostracised not only in Poland as a traitor to the New Order, but also in France by intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre. </p>
<p>In his youth, Miłosz had sympathised with communist ideals. In France, however, he found himself in the unenviable position of an eastern European exile whose experiential knowledge of an oppressive political regime was rejected because it challenged left-wing intellectuals’ uncritical admiration for the Soviet project. </p>
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<img alt="An archival black and white photograph of refugees marching." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558372/original/file-20231108-27-jadsg0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">People displaced during the German occupation of Poland in 1939.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Poland_(1939%E2%80%931945)#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_R_49_Bild-0131,_Aussiedlung_von_Polen_im_Wartheland.jpg">Wilhelm Holtfreter|Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>Hoffman, who herself became an exile from Poland in 1959, recounts the not dissimilar experience of being treated with “patronizing scorn” as a graduate student at Harvard in the 1960s because she dared to challenge what she describes as her fellow students’ “naïve idealization of ‘the workers’”. </p>
<p>Her peers, she writes, perceived Soviet communism to be “a radically progressive philosophy” rather than what she knew it actually to be, “an exceptionally repressive, reactionary ideology and form of governance”. </p>
<p>As both Miłosz and Hoffman point out, to be framed as the “other” is to occupy a position of marginality. This is a shared experience of many exiles. Hoffman uses the term “immigrant rage” to describe the feelings that she experienced when she was ignored, misunderstood and marginalised. </p>
<p>Miłosz and Hoffman rejected dominant western narratives of eastern and central Europe, whether they came from the left or the right. This chimes with the long-standing resistance among eastern and central European writers to what political analyst Edward Lucas has called the <a href="https://cepa.org/article/its-time-to-stop-westsplaining/">“westsplaining” of the region</a>.</p>
<p>The perception of eastern and central Europe as a place of essential otherness continues to shape the experiences of migrants from the region today. The discrimination they face, however, often remains invisible. </p>
<p>While eastern Europeans’ whiteness places them in a position of privilege, it is, as sociologist Kasia Narkowicz has said, “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2154913">peripheral whiteness</a>”. Research shows that <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380261221121218">eastern Europeans are often racialised</a> and perceived through the lens of their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23793406.2019.1584048">linguistic otherness</a>. </p>
<p>What’s more, sociologist Aleksandra Lewicki <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2154910">points out</a> that this racialisation reflects and contributes to the marginalisation of the region in both political and economic terms.</p>
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<p>All this has serious political implications. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-must-stop-looking-at-eu-migrants-as-coming-from-two-europes-the-east-and-everywhere-else-58007">racialised vilification</a> of eastern Europeans played <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-993520200000027012">a central role</a> in the unofficial Leave.EU Brexit campaign. It continues to shape eastern European migrants’ <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2085678">post-Brexit experiences</a>. </p>
<p>More recently, the perceived otherness of eastern Europe has set the tone for the public debates that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some antiwar campaigns have presented the war as a clash between, as Stop the War has put it, <a href="https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/a-win-for-peace-ucu-opposes-the-war-in-ukraine/">“Russian and US imperialism”</a>, rather than an <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/a-letter-to-the-western-left-from-kyiv/">entirely unprovoked aggression</a> against a sovereign state. (Stop the War’s motion <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2023/06/26/the-lecturers-union-and-the-betrayal-of-the-intellectuals/">was endorsed</a> by the UK’s largest union of university staff, the University and College Union).</p>
<p>The discourse that such campaigns have employed frames Ukraine as a place of essential otherness. It denies Ukrainian people both a voice and a right to self-determination. </p>
<p>As political economist Yuliya Yurchenko aptly points out, westsplaining of the conflict has resulted in <a href="https://www.stopwar.org.uk/peace-now-stop-the-war-in-ukraine-add-your-name-to-our-letter-to-rishi-sunak/">calls</a> for what she terms a “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13684310231172721">phoney peace</a>”. By this, she refers to peace as “confused and conflated with faux international stability – peace for some nations at the expense of localised wars for others”. </p>
<p>In practice, Yurchenko states, this amounts to condoning the mass murder of Ukrainians.</p>
<p>Having witnessed crimes against human rights, Miłosz argued that poets who hailed from the Other Europe were in a unique position to be “bearer[s] of memory”. In his Nobel lecture, he mentioned two of his contemporaries, the poets Władysław Sebyła and Lech Piwowar, who were murdered by the Soviet secret police in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203447048">Katyń Massacre</a> of 1940. </p>
<p>Their deaths were obfuscated by a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-13507-2_6">conspiracy of silence</a> for almost half a century. The Russian government would only acknowledge Soviet responsibility for the crime in the 1990s. </p>
<p>Today, Ukrainian poets and writers bear witness to the suffering of the victims of the Russian aggression in occupied Ukraine. Their testimonial voices – such as that of the author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/03/poem-about-a-crow-a-work-by-the-killed-ukrainian-writer-victoria-amelina">Victoria Amelina</a>, who was killed in a Russian missile strike in July 2023 – offer an important counterpoint to the public debates that continue to take for granted the otherness of eastern Europe. </p>
<p>Listening to them would be an important step in mending the rift between “two Europes” that Miłosz’s writings confront us with.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215568/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Rzepa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The perceived “otherness” of eastern and central Europe is a complex phenomenon, which a new book on the Polish Nobel laureate’s oeuvre brings to light.Joanna Rzepa, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2043642023-08-21T20:17:35Z2023-08-21T20:17:35ZWhat makes a good life? Existentialists believed we should embrace freedom and authenticity<p>How do we live good, fulfilling lives?</p>
<p>Aristotle first took on this question in his <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/">Nicomachean Ethics</a> – arguably the first time anyone in Western intellectual history had focused on the subject as a standalone question. </p>
<p>He formulated a teleological response to the question of how we ought to live. Aristotle proposed, in other words, an answer grounded in an investigation of our purpose or ends (<em>telos</em>) as a species. </p>
<p>Our purpose, he argued, can be uncovered through a study of our essence – the fundamental features of what it means to be human. </p>
<h2>Ends and essences</h2>
<p>“Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good;” Aristotle states, “and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.”</p>
<p>To understand what is good, and therefore what one must do to achieve the good, we must first understand what kinds of things we are. This will allow us to determine what a good or a bad function actually is. </p>
<p>For Aristotle, this is a generally applicable truth. Take a knife, for example. We must first understand what a knife is in order to determine what would constitute its proper function. The essence of a knife is that it cuts; that is its purpose. We can thus make the claim that a blunt knife is a bad knife – if it does not cut well, it is failing in an important sense to properly fulfil its function. This is how essence relates to function, and how fulfilling that function entails a kind of goodness for the thing in question.</p>
<p>Of course, determining the function of a knife or a hammer is much easier than determining the function of <em>Homo sapiens</em>, and therefore what good, fulfilling lives might involve for us as a species. </p>
<p>Aristotle argues that our function must be more than growth, nutrition and reproduction, as plants are also capable of this. Our function must also be more than perception, as non-human animals are capable of this. He thus proposes that our essence – what makes us unique – is that humans are capable of reasoning. </p>
<p>What a good, flourishing human life involves, therefore, is “some kind of practical life of that part that has reason”. This is the starting point of Aristotle’s ethics. </p>
<p>We must learn to reason well and develop practical wisdom and, in applying this reason to our decisions and judgements, we must learn to find the right balance between the excess and deficiency of virtue. </p>
<p>It is only by living a life of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason”, a life in which we flourish and fulfil the functions that flow from a deep understanding of and appreciation for what defines us, that we can achieve <em>eudaimonia</em> – the highest human good.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C0%2C3988%2C3000&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C0%2C3988%2C3000&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543630/original/file-20230821-29-3qny0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">School of Athens – Raphael (1509).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
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Read more:
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<h2>Existence precedes essence</h2>
<p>Aristotle’s answer was so influential that it shaped the development of Western values for millennia. Thanks to philosophers and theologians such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Thomas-Aquinas">Thomas Aquinas</a>, his enduring influence can be traced through the medieval period to the Renaissance and on to the Enlightenment.</p>
<p>During the Enlightenment, the dominant philosophical and religious traditions, which included Aristotle’s work, were reexamined in light of new Western principles of thought. </p>
<p>Beginning in the 18th century, the Enlightenment era saw the birth of modern science, and with it the adoption of the principle <em>nullius in verba</em> – literally, “take nobody’s word for it” – which became the motto of the <a href="https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/">Royal Society</a>. There was a corresponding proliferation of secular approaches to understanding the nature of reality and, by extension, the way we ought to live our lives. </p>
<p>One of the most influential of these secular philosophies was existentialism. In the 20th century, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Paul-Sartre">Jean-Paul Sartre</a>, a key figure in existentialism, took up the challenge of thinking about the meaning of life without recourse to theology. Sartre argued that Aristotle, and those who followed in Aristotle’s footsteps, had it all back-to-front.</p>
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<span class="caption">Jean Paul Sartre (1967)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Existentialists see us as going about our lives making seemingly endless choices. We choose what we wear, what we say, what careers we follow, what we believe. All of these choices make up who we are. Sartre summed up this principle in the formula “existence precedes essence”.</p>
<p>The existentialists teach us that we are completely free to invent ourselves, and therefore completely responsible for the identities we choose to adopt. “The first effect of existentialism,” Sartre wrote in his 1946 essay <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm">Existentialism is a Humanism</a>, “is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.”</p>
<p>Crucial to living an authentic life, the existentialists would say, is recognising that we desire freedom above everything else. They maintain we ought never to deny the fact we are fundamentally free. But they also acknowledge we have so much choice about what we can be and what we can do that it is a source of anguish. This anguish is a felt sense of our profound responsibility. </p>
<p>The existentialists shed light on an important phenomenon: we all convince ourselves, at some point and to some extent, that we are “bound by external circumstances” in order to escape the anguish of our inescapable freedom. Believing we possess a predefined essence is one such external circumstance. </p>
<p>But the existentialists provide a range of other psychologically revealing examples. Sartre tells a story of watching a waiter in a cafe in Paris. He observes that the waiter moves a little too precisely, a little too quickly, and seems a little too eager to impress. Sartre believes the waiter’s exaggeration of waiter-hood is an act – that the waiter is deceiving himself into being a waiter. </p>
<p>In doing so, argues Sartre, the waiter denies his authentic self. He has opted instead to assume the identity of something other than a free and autonomous being. His act reveals he is denying his own freedom, and ultimately his own humanity. Sartre calls this condition “bad faith”. </p>
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<h2>An authentic life</h2>
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<span class="caption">Michel de Montaigne – artist unknown c.1570.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Contrary to Aristotle’s conception of <em>eudaimonia</em>, the existentialists regard acting authentically as the highest good. This means never acting in such a way that denies we are free. When we make a choice, that choice must be fully ours. We have no essence; we are nothing but what we make for ourselves.</p>
<p>One day, Sartre was visited by a pupil, who sought his advice about whether he should join the French forces and avenge his brother’s death, or stay at home and provide vital support for his mother. Sartre believed the history of moral philosophy was of no help in this situation. “You are free, therefore choose,” he replied to the pupil – “that is to say, invent”. The only choice the pupil could make was one that was authentically his own.</p>
<p>We all have feelings and questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives, and it is not as simple as picking a side between the Aristotelians, the existentialists, or any of the other moral traditions. In his essay, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0019">That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die</a> (1580), Michel de Montaigne finds what is perhaps an ideal middle ground. He proposes “the premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty” and that “he who has learnt to die has forgot what it is to be a slave”. </p>
<p>In his typical style of jest, Montaigne concludes: “I want death to take me planting cabbages, but without any careful thought of him, and much less of my garden’s not being finished.”</p>
<p>Perhaps Aristotle and the existentialists could agree that it is just in thinking about these matters – purposes, freedom, authenticity, mortality – that we overcome the silence of never understanding ourselves. To study philosophy is, in this sense, to learn how to live.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204364/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Oscar Davis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jean-Paul Sartre broke with Aristotle’s essentialism, but both philosophers would agree that to philosophise is to learn how to live.Oscar Davis, Indigenous Fellow - Assistant Professor in Philosophy and History, Bond UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1989112023-02-01T16:07:00Z2023-02-01T16:07:00ZWhy I believe the truth to be like an onion<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507350/original/file-20230131-26-81dhpo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C7%2C2389%2C1588&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Truth is a fact coated in many layers.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/es/fotos/0_fkPHulv-M">K8 / Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since the dawn of philosophical knowledge, the existence of truth has been debated. We all talk about the truth. We all ask for the truth. We demand it, even if we sometimes deny its existence. This article will attempt to give another view of what, for now, I believe to be the truth.</p>
<p>In journalism, truth is often equated with the facts: “There was an accident on such-and-such a corner, on such-and-such a day at such-and-such an hour and so many people were injured.” This is a purely informative conception of truth, based on the rule of “the 5 ‘W’s”, which frame the story: “Who, what, when, where, why.”</p>
<p>But we cannot take a fact as the truth. What if someone comes along and says: “It was not an accident. One of the drivers was drunk”? Here we enter into the world of interpretations.</p>
<h2>There is no truth</h2>
<p>In his <a href="https://abadaeditores.com/filosofia/fragmentos-postumos-.html">Posthumous Fragments</a>, the German philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-Nietzsche">Friedrich Nietzsche</a> wrote his most famous phrase: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” </p>
<p>The phrase is as interesting as it is controversial and misinterpreted. It has been used to decree the death of truth and to indicate that everyone can have their own interpretation, i.e. their own truth. </p>
<p>Paradoxically, Nietzsche’s phrase fell into its own interpretative trap. When he says that there are interpretations, he is not seeking to relativise the concept of truth, but rather to say that when something happens, people find different interpretations of the event.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475453/original/file-20220721-12930-3szi3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Portrait of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) French philosopher. Ink and watercolour.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michel_Foucault.jpg">Nemomain / Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The French philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Foucault">Michel Foucault</a> supports Nietzsche’s theory, but adds his trademark: power. According to Foucault, there are multiple interpretations of the facts, but power is in charge of imposing its interpretation (its truth) and totalising it. When we imagine power, we often think of gentlemen in expensive suits sitting around a table thinking “what can we arrange now?”.</p>
<p>But for Foucault, power is simply the capacity to position one’s own interpretation as general truth. It can be a citizen from a social network, a politician of any sign and ideology, a businesswoman or even a neighbour who starts a rumour in the neighbourhood and establishes it as absolute truth. This is also how the concept of <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535045/post-truth/">post-truth</a> is born.</p>
<h2>Truth is an onion</h2>
<p>Nevertheless, I would like to propose a simpler, but no less sophisticated, way of understanding the very concept of truth.</p>
<p>First of all, all theories are partly right. Truth as a concept in itself is broad. Truth is the sum of all interpretations, of facts, past and present. And one may wonder what the past has to do with the truth of the present. A quote from the existentialist philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Paul-Sartre">Jean-Paul Sartre</a> explains it well: “We are not lumps of clay; what is important is not what people make of us, but what we ourselves make of what they have made of us.” The present cannot be separated from the past, as we are its consequence. Without understanding the past, it is impossible to understand the present.</p>
<p>To make it clearer, let us imagine the concept of truth as an onion. Onions are vegetables made up of several layers that cover a core. If we make the parallel, the core would be a concrete fact: the accident on the street corner, for example. The layer that covers it would be the vision of the witnesses and the protagonists of that accident. The next layer would be the past of those involved. And so the layers overlap, moving further and further away from the event itself.</p>
<p>But inevitably, in one way or another, all the layers are involved in the fact we are analysing. Therefore, truth is that onion. Truth is that set of interpretations and macro-views that make a global and complete picture of all the facts possible.</p>
<h2>The truth is not within our reach</h2>
<p>So, is there such a thing as truth? The answer I can give is yes. Is it possible to possess the truth? My answer is a resounding no. Unless one is God or an omnipresent, omnipotent, omnitemporal being, it is impossible to possess or attain it. </p>
<p>But belief in the existence of a truth is fundamental. In his work <a href="https://archive.org/details/modernthemeorte">The modern theme</a>, the Spanish philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Ortega-y-Gasset">José Ortega y Gasset</a> explains why this is important: “Life without truth is not livable. In such a way, then, truth exists, which is reciprocal with man. Without man there is no truth, but vice versa, without truth there is no man. Man can be defined as the being that absolutely needs truth and, conversely, truth is the only thing that man essentially needs, his only unconditional need.”</p>
<p>This makes the concept of truth a utopia. And what is a utopia? Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRpIBj5xho">explains</a> it in an exceptional way by paraphrasing a friend:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Utopia is on the horizon. I walk ten paces and she walks ten paces away. So what is utopia for? That’s what it’s for, to give us a reason to be walking.”</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
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<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198911/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Agustín Joel Fernandes Cabal no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.</span></em></p>Truth is fundamental to our lives. Human beings cannot exist without truth, but this concept is more complex than we think.Agustín Joel Fernandes Cabal, Investigador predoctoral en Filosofía, Universidade de Santiago de CompostelaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1918432022-10-30T19:02:26Z2022-10-30T19:02:26ZAre you haunted by ghosts of the past and phantoms of your future? Welcome to the spooky realm of hauntology<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491153/original/file-20221023-12577-4tyc12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C18%2C6310%2C5969&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alasdair Macintyre, Ghost Kid on Stairs 2, 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/185141588@N06/52446584517">aecap/flickr</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Do you believe in ghosts? Every year, Halloween serves up the usual images of spooks, skeletons and witches – but these ideas aren’t just the domain of fiction or trick-or-treating. There is also a philosophical concept that embraces ghosts. </p>
<p>It is called “hauntology”, and it might just make you a believer.</p>
<p>The word hauntology was invented by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for his 1993 lecture <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specters_of_Marx">Spectres of Marx</a>. </p>
<p>Derrida was a whimsical guy, and the words “hauntology” and “ontology” both sound identical when spoken in French. </p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology">Ontology</a> is the philosophical study of existence and being, dating back as far as ancient Greece. In Derrida’s mind, ontology was shadowed by hauntology, a state of non-being. </p>
<p>Hauntology is that eerie zone where time collapses and our past memories and associations haunt our minds, like a ghost. </p>
<h2>Haunted by past and future</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1054&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1054&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1054&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1325&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1325&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491245/original/file-20221024-23-r9fw6s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1325&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pedro Américo’s Visão de Hamlet (Hamlet’s Vision), painted 1893.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In his lecture, Derrida invoked Shakespeare’s Hamlet, both through the phantom of Hamlet’s father and particularly the phrase “time is out of joint”. </p>
<p>Not only does hauntology look back to your past experiences, it looks forward. You are haunted by the future – or, at least, haunted by futures that did not eventuate.</p>
<p>Are you in the job you planned to have ten years ago? Do you live in the house you dreamed of when you were younger? Do these unfulfilled dreams weigh on your mind? Dare I ask, do these unmet expectations haunt you? </p>
<p>English theorist Mark Fisher called this concept “cancelled futures” and associated it with cultural stagnation. In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ">2014 lecture</a> he bemoaned little forward progress in music and films: an endless repetition and recycling of old ideas, just in high definition.</p>
<p>Fisher was an important catalyst in the transformation of ghosts. Along with music journalist Simon Reynolds, Fisher appropriated Derrida’s hauntology by analysing pop culture, music and movies through a hauntological lens: considering how contemporary culture is haunted by our pasts and impossible futures.</p>
<p>This area of “spectral studies” developed in the new millennium mainly through blogs. The traditional idea of ghosts evolved from a supernatural phenomenon (fictional or otherwise) into a philosophical concept, discussed vigorously in the digital realm. </p>
<p>Those studying spectral studies turned to sources as diverse as Freud’s observations of the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny">uncanny</a>” and <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/DAVSAT-2">Sartre’s suggestion</a> that, although invisible, the dead survive and are all around us.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-black-death-to-covid-19-pandemics-have-always-pushed-people-to-honor-death-and-celebrate-life-170517">From Black Death to COVID-19, pandemics have always pushed people to honor death and celebrate life</a>
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</em>
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<h2>Haunted popular cultures</h2>
<p>Many creatives have embraced the motif and connotations of the ghost. Richard Littler’s blog <a href="https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/">Scarfolk</a> (2013-) imagines a fictional English village stuck forever looping on 1979. The retro electronica musicians of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Box_Records">Ghost Box Records label</a> (2004-), seem to capture the <a href="https://soundcloud.com/ghost-box">soundtrack</a> of a parallel world outside of time. </p>
<p>Hauntology also describes a post-traumatic-like disquiet of those born in the 1960s and ‘70s. Dubbed by Bob Fisher as “<a href="https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/2019/04/22/thehauntedgeneration/">the haunted generation</a>”, Fisher says kids of this era grew up in an age of “cosy wrongness”, consuming lots of media – especially television. </p>
<p>Not all of it was suitable for children. </p>
<p>Think of films like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078480/">Watership Down</a> (1978) with its blood-soaked fields and scary rabbits, or those fuzzy Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker-era episodes of Doctor Who. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/l3w-BHsXt4I?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>Are you of an age where the memory of those grainy black and white ghost photographs you saw as a child in Usborne’s <a href="https://usborne.com/au/the-world-of-the-unknown-ghosts-9781474976688">World of the Unknown: Ghosts</a> (1977) still freak you out? Does the recollection of the shrill screams in Disney’s read-along book and record of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJcpZeISmFk">The Haunted Mansion</a> (1970) still send shivers down your spine?</p>
<p>Much hauntological writing discusses popular culture artefacts such as these, and the way they haunt our minds through recurring memories that return again and again.</p>
<h2>Walking with ghosts</h2>
<p>Films like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), especially its setting at the vast and secluded Overlook hotel, strongly reflect key features of hauntology. The emotional disintegration of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) mirrors the very hauntological collapsing of time within the walls of the hotel. </p>
<p>People and events from decades past appear and influence his behaviour. Then, of course, there are the ghosts of those two little girls in their blue dresses.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CMbI7DmLCNI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>This depiction of ghosts we knew returning to us dressed in the attire they wore in life reflects a long tradition. Hamlet’s father returns dressed in battle armour. The ghosts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol are decked out in their burial suits.</p>
<p>It was not until the 20th century that ghosts began to appear in their ubiquitous white sheets, most notably in the works of MR James. In James’ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Oh,_Whistle,_and_I%27ll_Come_to_You,_My_Lad%27">Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad</a> (1904), a holidaying academic inadvertently conjures up a terrifying entity swathed in linen bedsheets.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A sheetly-like ghost." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Illustration by James McBryde for MR James’s story, Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So in a sense, hauntology has brought us full circle, returning to these ideas of ghosts we knew from our lives returning once more to haunt us.</p>
<p>Now you know it, hauntology is a name you can give to those slightly eerie memories from your childhood, or that nagging feeling that you took a wrong turn in life somewhere along the road. </p>
<p>Whether ghosts be the Scooby Doo-style spooks chasing us around old castles, or the psychological phantoms gatecrashing our own minds, hauntology is all around.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/looking-for-love-on-a-dating-app-you-might-be-falling-for-a-ghost-128626">Looking for love on a dating app? You might be falling for a ghost</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191843/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alasdair Macintyre lectures in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Australian Catholic University.</span></em></p>Ghosts aren’t just the domain of fiction or trick-or-treating. Hauntology is a philosophical concept that embraces ghosts.Alasdair Macintyre, Associate lecturer visual arts, artist, PhD, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1877262022-08-18T19:58:22Z2022-08-18T19:58:22ZStop dissing pessimism — it’s part of being human<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479426/original/file-20220816-10934-oq2vva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C1021%2C6582%2C4293&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Philosophical pessimism isn't all doom and gloom: it's about explaining and confronting the origins, prevalence and the ubiquity of suffering.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In today’s society, being happy and having an optimistic attitude are social expectations that weigh heavily on how we live and the choices we make. </p>
<p>Some psychologists have pointed out how happiness has evolved into an <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/you-are-not-meant-be-happy/202107/the-happiness-myth">industry</a>. In turn, this has created what I call a <em>happiness imperative</em>, the social expectation that we should all aspire to happiness. </p>
<p>But this can be an obstacle to happiness. This is why, as a researcher in philosophical pessimism, I argue that if we actually want to live better lives, <a href="https://gradcastradio.podbean.com/e/383-i-m-not-a-pessimist-i-m-philosophical/">pessimism is the philosophical system</a> that can help us achieve it. </p>
<p>While pessimism in the psychological sense is a <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/is-it-safer-to-be-a-pessimist-3144874">tendency to focus on bad outcomes</a>, philosophical pessimism isn’t fundamentally about outcomes. Rather, it’s a system that purports to explain the origins, prevalence and ubiquity of suffering. </p>
<p>Even if I adopt a cheerful and positive attitude towards life (thereby <em>not</em> making me a psychological pessimist) I can still be a philosophical pessimist because I can continue to believe that existence is <em>generally</em> filled with suffering.</p>
<h2>All about angst?</h2>
<p>French philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/">Jean-Paul Sartre</a> is sometimes seen as a gloomy philosopher who deals with existential angst, dread and generally dark, depressive topics. He’s also been <a href="https://thewire.in/books/the-outrageous-optimism-of-jean-paul-sartre">associated with pessimism</a>, but this is largely due to misunderstandings of his work.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black and white photo of a man in a study with pipe." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479432/original/file-20220816-16-gkgj0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">French author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, seen here in his Paris study in 1948, wanted people to assume responsibility for the lives they create.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1945 Sartre wanted to dispel these mistaken impressions. In a <a href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/15/A_students_guide_to_Jean-Paul_Sartres_Existentialism_and_Humanism">public lecture called <em>Existentialism is a Humanism</em></a>, he argued that existentialism, properly understood, is a philosophy about freedom and assuming responsibility for our choices and for the lives we create. We are free — <a href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/53/Sartres_Being_and_Nothingness_The_Bible_of_Existentialism">or in existentialist terms, we are condemned to be free</a>. </p>
<p>Sartre believed we have no essence, and therefore must create and build one for ourselves. So while all this can certainly cause feelings of angst and despair in some, this needn’t be the case. </p>
<h2>Compassion for living beings</h2>
<p>And as in the case of existentialism, despair and angst are not necessarily defining aspects of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/28192377-weltschmerz">philosophical pessimism</a>. </p>
<p>Pessimism has a long history in philosophy, dating back to the ancient Greeks. An early myth tells us that <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Midas-Greek-mythology">the satyr Silenus</a> <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg076.perseus-eng1:27">revealed to King Midas</a> that the greatest thing any human could hope for was to never have been born and that the second best thing was an early death. </p>
<p>But the German 19th-century philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/">Arthur Schopenhauer</a> is considered by philosophers to be the first modern western writer who treated pessimism systematically in his work. </p>
<p>Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism is motivated by compassion and concern for all humans — though to be precise, this <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62947-6_14">compassion extends to all living beings, not just humans</a>. This is one of the important differences with existentialism. </p>
<h2>Condemnation of existence</h2>
<p>In Schopenhauer’s pessimism, we find a clear condemnation of existence. As he put it, “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/schopenhauer-parerga-and-paralipomena/parerga-and-paralipomena-volume-2/A17236D62777A545FE0C1641A63F441F">work, worry, toil and distress are indeed the lot of almost all human beings</a> their whole life through,” and “one can also conceive of our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful calm of nothingness.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Oil painting of a man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479431/original/file-20220816-11206-nioe5y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479431/original/file-20220816-11206-nioe5y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479431/original/file-20220816-11206-nioe5y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479431/original/file-20220816-11206-nioe5y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479431/original/file-20220816-11206-nioe5y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479431/original/file-20220816-11206-nioe5y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479431/original/file-20220816-11206-nioe5y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Schopenhauer, circa 1815.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Schopenhauer_Portrait_by_Ludwig_Sigismund_Ruhl_1815.jpeg">(Wikipedia)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And in case he is not clear enough on his condemnation of existence, he also says “the world is simply hell, and human beings are on the one hand its tortured souls and on the other hand its devils.” </p>
<p>As a consequence, for Schopenhauer, nonexistence is preferable to existence. This means that given the option of existing or not existing, not coming to be is the best choice. In this he echoes Silenus, but — and this is important — once we are here, the best we can do is adopt a life attitude that keeps us away from desires and wants. It is in our interest to stop pursuing <em>things</em>, including happiness. </p>
<h2>Not about destroying life</h2>
<p>In no case would he, or any other pessimist philosopher, advocate anything like <a href="https://theconversation.com/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-the-universe-the-dubious-philosophy-of-human-extinction-149331">crazy omnicide</a> — actively and directly taking steps to destroy all life — as some mistakenly believe.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the pessimism of Schopenhauer depends entirely on his metaphysical views about the nature of existence itself — <a href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/86/Schopenhauer">the essence of which is what he called <em>will</em></a>. </p>
<p>For our purposes, it’s enough if we understand <em>will</em> as a sort of <em>force</em> that underlies, conditions and motivates everything that exists. As such, everything that is, exists to want endlessly — and never attain any durable satisfaction. </p>
<h2>The bright side</h2>
<p>Given that the world we live in forces us to deal with pandemics, economic problems, wars and climate change it can seem overwhelming that we are supposed to be happy. It’s unrealistic to think we should always look at the bright side of events. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A sunny sky." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479433/original/file-20220816-11082-5ffk8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">It’s unrealistic to think we should always look at the bright side.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And even if we choose to do so, it is still the case that, according to pessimism, we exist to want and desire endlessly. In light of this, the <em>happiness imperative</em> comes into conflict with the essence of existence (Schopenhauer’s <em>will</em>) because satisfaction isn’t possible. The expectation to be happy therefore becomes a struggle against the very nature of life.</p>
<p>This is why when society expects us to be happy, and blames us if we are not, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliawuench/2021/11/01/toxic-positivity-in-the-workplace/?sh=f2a511d1e6f8">positivity becomes toxic</a>.</p>
<p>If we find ourselves unable to live up to the <em>happiness imperative</em>, we can feel inadequate and like failures. </p>
<p>Pessimism can offer philosophical tools to better understand our place within existence. It can help us come to terms with the idea that refusing to relentlessly pursue happiness is perhaps the most reasonable attitude.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187726/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ignacio L. Moya does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Pessimism, as explored by the philosopher Schopenhauer, offers tools to come to terms with the idea that refusing to relentlessly pursue happiness is perhaps the most reasonable attitude.Ignacio L. Moya, PhD candidate, Philosophy, Western UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1874482022-07-21T15:02:38Z2022-07-21T15:02:38ZAngola’s Dos Santos failed to provide a moral example and stop the plunder of the state<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475377/original/file-20220721-1369-hfxt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Manuel de Almeida</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Silence is what comes to define the life and the death of the former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos (1942-2022), who died recently <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/angolas-former-president-dos-santos-dies-79-2022-07-08/">at a hospital in Barcelona</a>, Spain, at the age of 79. Putting it slightly differently, his control of what he said and what he left unsaid defined not only how he lived and governed, but also how he managed the last years of his solitary life.</p>
<p>I previously worked as a journalist in Angola and Portugal. My subsequent <a href="https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8HM5GFD">PhD in anthropology</a> focused on the interplay between politics, urbanism and kinship in Luanda. I have also published a <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-skin-of-the-city">monograph</a> on the urban transformation of Luanda, the capital city of Angola.</p>
<p>In my view, since its independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola has become for the most part a country known for its opacity or lack of transparency. </p>
<p>It might not be sound to attribute to one single man the making of a whole system of state operations. But if one can say so, Dos Santos’s personality was fundamental in the shaping of postcolonial Angola. Very few leaders in the world have achieved this. He loathed direct confrontation, abolished the death penalty and prevented the slaughter of the generals of the rebel movement <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03446/05lv03515.htm">National Union for the Total Independence of Angola</a> (Unita) in the wake of the killing of its leader Jonas Savimbi, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61426699">in February of 2002</a>. </p>
<p>Yet Dos Santos failed to provide a moral example and did very little to prevent those around him, including his family, from unmercifully plundering the country’s resources.</p>
<h2>The early years</h2>
<p>Born in Luanda in 1942, he joined the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the Congo in 1961 when he was 19. Soon afterwards, he was sent to the Soviet Union, where he studied oil engineering. The MPLA was confronted with a lack of capable cadres at that time, enabling him to move up its highest echelons. </p>
<p>Angola achieved independence from Portugal in 1975.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-leader-is-changing-angola-but-the-end-destination-isnt-clear-131063">New leader is changing Angola. But the end destination isn't clear</a>
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<p>Dos Santos became Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1975 and First Deputy Prime Minister in December 1978, nine months before the death of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/09/12/angolan-leader-neto-dies-in-moscow/e6bc2716-b3cc-44f4-af32-4909d4648d05/">Agostinho Neto</a>, the first president of a free Angola.</p>
<p>Good looking, soft spoken, and at the tender age of 37, he was chosen to replace <a href="https://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/agostinho-neto-1922-1979">Neto</a>. In his inauguration speech, he conceded that replacing Neto, to whom epithets such as <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/agostinho-neto-1922-1979/">Father of the Nation</a> and <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/201409091501.html">Immortal Guide</a> were given, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YvajZ1kIRw">was not</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>an easy substitution, let alone a possible substitution, but simply a necessary substitution.</p>
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<p>There are various versions of why he was nominated to succeed Neto. One is that it was because he was young, and therefore seen as easy to control. Another is that he became the president because the top structure of the party was dominated by whites and mixed-race militants. Most party members believed that only a black Angolan could govern the country.</p>
<h2>Oil and war</h2>
<p>But those who helped Dos Santos rise to the presidency and thought that they could use him as a puppet were soon disappointed. In the early 1980s, he started to push out Neto’s advisers and surround himself with younger ones who would be known as Futunguistas, in reference to the presidential headquarters he had transferred to Futungo de Belas, on the outskirts of the city.</p>
<p>In those years, he was concerned with two interrelated pressing issues that came to determine his presidency: oil and war. </p>
<p>On the oil front, he turned Angola into one of the largest producers on the continent, using oil to finance the war as well as to drive economic growth. Results became visible in the 2000s, when Angola become one of the countries with the highest economic growth in the world. The GDP growth rate of Angola <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/angola/gdp-growth">reached an all time high of 23.2% in the fourth quarter of 2007</a>. </p>
<p>He furthered military cooperation with Cuba, and with its help attempted to crush Unita militarily. In 1985 he ordered the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09592318.2018.1519312">Operation Second Congress</a>, with the goal of destroying Unita’s main logistical hub in Mavinga. </p>
<p>Unita survived thanks to support from <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4005928#metadata_info_tab_contents">apartheid South Africa and America’s CIA</a>. But the offensive – which culminated in a peace deal – had other consequences for democracy in the region by contributing to South Africa’s increased isolation. </p>
<p>This change in sentiment opened the way for the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/namibia-gains-independence">1990</a> independence of Namibia, which was still governed by the apartheid regime. Other events that shaped the region included the democratisation of South Africa in 1991 and the peace agreement signed between the Angolan government and Jonas Savimbi’s rebels <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/angola/peace-agreements-case-angola">in the same year</a>.</p>
<p>As part of the agreement Cuban troops were withdrawn from Angola.</p>
<p>Dos Santos ran against Savimbi in the general election of 1992. Dos Santos was <a href="https://www.eisa.org/wep/ang1992elect2.htm">declared the winner</a> but Savimbi refused to accept the results. This precipitated an even more destructive phase of the civil war, which ensued for ten more years. </p>
<p>In the late 1990s, frustrated with the possibility of negotiating peace, Dos Santos became increasingly convinced that war in Angola would only end with either Savimbi’s death or capture. But to achieve this he needed unrestricted power.</p>
<p>In 1998 he dissolved the cabinet and embarked on the overhaul of the Angolan constitution to enable him to take quick and expedient decisions without the approval of the National Assembly.</p>
<p>This weakening of state institutions was certainly behind <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-luandas-residents-are-asking-where-did-all-the-oil-riches-go-49772">the plunder of public resources by private interests</a>. This state of affairs was cemented with the adoption of constitutional changes in <a href="https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Angola_2010.pdf?lang=en">2010</a>.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/angolas-president-has-little-to-show-for-his-promise-of-a-break-with-the-authoritarian-past-167933">Angola's president has little to show for his promise of a break with the authoritarian past</a>
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<p>All of this Dos Santos did without, so to speak, opening his mouth. At least in public. He rarely sat with journalists. As far as I know he never granted an interview to an Angolan journalist, and only conceded three interviews to Portuguese channels. He rarely spoke off script, preferring to carefully read the speeches prepared by his collaborators. </p>
<p>For the duration of his presidency, people spent their time trying to interpret his silence. Many resorted to taking decisions in the anticipation of what they thought Dos Santos expected them to do.</p>
<h2>Legacy</h2>
<p>Dos Santos didn’t break his silence even after being replaced by <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/who-is-angolas-new-president-joao-lourenco/a-40218458">João Lourenço</a>, who won the general election in 2017. </p>
<p>Lourenço made the fight against corruption – deemed to be the main legacy of Dos Santos’s 38 years in power – the cornerstone of his presidency. He pursued Dos Santos’s main collaborators, including the former president’s family. </p>
<p>Dos Santos made only a single public attempt – and a timid one at that – to clear his record on the issue of corruption. For the rest he kept his silence, failing to intervene even when his children were pursued. His son <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-angola-dossantos-idUSKCN25A1T6">Zenu dos Santos</a> was jailed in Angola. His daughter <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/angola-dossantos-portugal-idUSL8N29S2IQ">Isabel dos Santos</a> remains abroad.</p>
<p>Dos Santos promised to give a tell-all interview. But it never happened. He died as he had lived and governed: in silence. His silence, and what he accomplished with it, is for me the most enduring legacy of José Eduardo dos Santos.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187448/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>António Tomás does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dos Santos died as he had lived and governed: in silence. His silence, and what he accomplished with it, is his most enduring legacy.António Tomás, Associate Professor, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1447542020-08-21T09:13:28Z2020-08-21T09:13:28ZLeprosy of the soul? A brief history of boredom<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353872/original/file-20200820-14-cjob8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2480%2C1643&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'God, I'm just so bored.'</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">JeniFoto via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We all respond to boredom in different ways. Some may find a new hobby or interest, others may instead rip open a bag of crisps and binge watch a new Netflix show. Boredom may seem to you an everyday – perhaps even trivial – experience. Surprisingly, however, boredom has undergone quite a metamorphosis over the past couple of centuries. </p>
<p>Well before the word “boredom” cropped up in the English language, one of the earliest mentions of boredom is in a Latin <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23064068?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">poem by Lucretius</a> (99–55BC), who writes of the boring life of a rich Roman who flees to his country house … only to be find himself equally bored there.</p>
<p>The first recorded mention of the word “boredom” in the English language seems to be in the British newspaper <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-50769-5_1">The Albion in 1829</a>, in the (frankly impenetrable) sentence: “Neither will I follow another precedental mode of boredom, and indulge in a laudatory apostrophe to the destinies which presided over my fashioning.” </p>
<p>But the term was popularised by Charles Dickens, who famously used the term in Bleak House (1853) where the aristocrat Lady Dedlock says she has been “bored to death” by, variously, the trying weather, unremarkable musical and theatrical entertainment, and familiar scenery.</p>
<p>In fact, boredom became a popular <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boredom-Literary-History-State-Mind/dp/0226768546">theme in English Victorian writing</a>, especially in describing the life of the upper class, whose boredom may reflect a privileged social standing. Dickens’ character James Harthouse (Hard Times, 1854), for example, seems to cherish perpetual boredom as indicative of his high breeding, declaring nothing but boredom during his life as military dragoon and on his many travels.</p>
<h2>The existentialists’ boredom</h2>
<p>In the second part of the 19th century and during the early 20th century, boredom gained notoriety <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/boredom/">among existentialist writers</a>. Their view of boredom was often less than flattering, and one that confronted all of humanity, not just the upper class with its presumably empty existence. </p>
<p>The early existentialist Danish philosopher <a href="https://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/">Søren Kierkegaard</a>, for example, wrote: “The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.” This was, according to him, only the beginning of the trouble with boredom. It would eventually lead Adam and Eve to commit their original sin. </p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Kierkegaard declared boredom to be the root of all evil. Several other existentialists shared this unfavourable view. Jean-Paul <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1191/1478088706qrp066oa">Sartre called boredom</a> a “leprosy of the soul”, and <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/HOLNHA">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>, agreeing with Kierkegaard, remarked that: “The boredom of God on the seventh day of creation would be a subject for a great poet.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir surrounded by people in front of a plane." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir: often bored, but never boring.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Photo Collection of Israel</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Arthur Schopenhauer took the cake when it came to being gloomy about boredom. According to him, the human capacity for boredom was nothing less than direct evidence for life’s ultimate lack of meaning. In his fittingly titled essay, Studies on Pessimism, <a href="https://books.google.ie/books?id=5eWCI1UjvikC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">he wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy, and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A world of boredom, the existentialists seemed to warn, is a world without purpose.</p>
<h2>The science of boredom</h2>
<p>The 20th century witnessed the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline. While our understanding of many emotions slowly increased, boredom was surprisingly left alone. What little psychological work on boredom existed was rather speculative, and more often than not excluded empirical data. </p>
<p>These accounts hardly painted a more positive picture of boredom than the existentialists. As recently as 1972, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm blatantly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/27/archives/fromms-theory-of-aggression-the-young-have-rejected-the-consuming.html">denounced boredom</a> as “perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today”.</p>
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<p>During the past few decades, however, the image of boredom has changed once more, and with it has come an appreciation of the hitherto discredited emotion. Development of better measurement tools allowed psychologists to examine boredom with greater accuracy, and experimental methods allowed researchers to induce boredom and examine its actual, rather than presumed, behavioural consequences. </p>
<p>This work reveals that boredom can indeed be problematic, as the existentialists assured us. Those who bore easily are more likely to be <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691930217X">depressed and anxious</a>, have a tendency to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886919301412">be aggressive</a>, and <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-26395-9_2">perceive life as less meaningfull</a>. </p>
<p>Yet, psychology uncovered also a much brighter side of boredom. Researchers found that boredom encourages a <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2012-30613-001.html">search for meaning in life</a>, propels <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-26395-9_3">exploration</a>, and inspires <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-12206-001">novelty seeking</a>. It shows that boredom is not only a common but also a functional emotion that makes people reconsider what they are currently doing in favour of more rewarding alternatives, for example increasing <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2014.901073">creativity</a> and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15298868.2016.1218925">prosocial tendencies</a>. </p>
<p>In doing so, it seems that boredom helps to regulate our behaviour and prevents us from getting stuck in unrewarding situations for too long. Rather than merely a malady among the upper classes or an existential peril, boredom seems, instead, to be an important part of the psychological arsenal available to people in the pursuit a fulfilling life.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144754/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wijnand Van Tilburg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over two centuries. the notion of boredom has shifted from an upper-class malady, through existential peril, to a functional emotion.Wijnand Van Tilburg, Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1024262018-09-04T14:07:10Z2018-09-04T14:07:10ZWhat Fanon still teaches us about mental illness in post-colonial societies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234762/original/file-20180904-45143-whtofy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Frantz Fanon challenged traditional views about mental illness.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The contemporary turn towards decolonial thinking is frequently cited in literature from the late 1990s and early 2000s. But this lens through which to understand the world has been around for a much longer time. It has an impressive lineage among Latin American, Caribbean, African and other Southern scholars. But it’s the scholar <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/frantz-fanon">Frantz Fanon</a> who stands head and shoulders above them all. </p>
<p>He is often being incisively referenced as a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.42.3-4.0003?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">key thinker</a> by many current writers. His seminal texts included Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Posthumously, Toward the African Revolution (1964) was published. All continue to be read voraciously.</p>
<p>But there’s often a failure to recognise that much of Fanon’s seminal
thinking stemmed from his experiences working with mental illness in North
Africa as a <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/frantz-fanon-psychiatry-and-politics/">psychiatrist</a>. It’s in these early experiences that we see many of his most revered ideas being incubated, only to become consolidated in his later texts. </p>
<p>Fanon was influenced by writings from Negritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1964/sartre/biographical/">Jean-Paul Sartre</a>. It is in his critique of colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb that Fanon’s conceptual clarity emerges with a robustness that has remained influential for over five decades. </p>
<p>My first encounter with Fanon’s work was more than two decades ago as
a young trainee psychologist at the University of the Western Cape in South
Africa. I was encouraged by a group of black psychologists to engage with the
emancipatory potential of Fanon’s approach to mental illness. His texts were not considered mainstream at the time. But these mentors had the
foresight to appreciate the importance of his thinking in this field. Then and now. </p>
<h2>Oppression and mental illness</h2>
<p>Fanon recognised mental illness as a real experience that people endure. But he also offered an understanding of it as being influenced by society as well as culture. It opened up the possibilities of linking madness to the intractable contradictions of colonial and post-colonial societies. In doing so, Fanon tackled the quintessential question of the relationship between the individual and social structure – especially when the social structure itself is oppressive. </p>
<p>These oppressive conditions are still encountered today, and so Fanon’s ideas remain relevant. </p>
<p>His experiences with non-Francophone, North African patients and the
barriers to understanding their world views because of an inability to engage
with them in the vernacular, also introduced the importance of language as a
central feature of cultural revitalisation and agency. Not only does language structure the psyche, but we make meaning through language. Being understood through our home language is crucial to mental well-being.</p>
<p>He directed his critique at the crude colonial interpretations of psychosomatic illnesses. These suggested that colonised peoples were primitive because they experienced mental illness through their bodily symptoms. Because of his tutelage under French philosopher <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-4744-8_5">Maurice Merleau-Ponty</a> and his critique of the founding father of psychoanalysis, <a href="https://www.sigmundfreud.net/">Sigmund Freud</a>, Fanon didn’t simply consider the body as a site for regressed psychological functioning. Instead, he suggested that the body plays a pivotal role in the expression and structuring of the mind, and helps to constitute us as human beings. </p>
<p>Fanon ultimately viewed institutionalised care as a mode of disciplinary power in the regulation of people. He saw it as a proxy mechanism of control directed at those who displayed an inability to manage the double-bind nature of oppressive colonial contexts.</p>
<h2>Limitations of psychology and psychiatry</h2>
<p>There are many taken-for-granted critiques that undergraduate students in psychology and psychiatry are exposed to today. These include a recognition of cultural bias in psychological assessments and the limitations of pharmaceuticals in treating mental health conditions. They also include the importance of not reducing mental health conditions to a set of psychological origins without considering the impact of the environment or context. </p>
<p>These were in fact foremost in Fanon’s critique. And they continue to propel psychologists and psychiatrists of my generation to circumvent the pitfalls of earlier generations. </p>
<p>Of course, on the matter of violence, Fanon’s experiences with patients
who had been subjected to state repression, brutality and torture revealed the
limitations of psychology and psychiatry in addressing problems in the social structure of society. </p>
<p>It also prompted a consideration of revolutionary violence as a way of “disintoxifying” the colonised minds of the oppressed. But his ideas on violence have probably been most misinterpreted, often conspicuously by those who have characterised him as an apostle of violence.</p>
<p>Fanon’s experience with violence and counter-violence in fact led him to be deeply ambivalent about it. He recognised that the distinction between perpetrator and victim becomes blurred. Also, the residual brutality of violence and counter-violence remains a dominant feature in post-colonial societies. </p>
<p>That is a feature that is perhaps all too common today. It requires a much more fine grained analysis, as we attempt to understand and address the scourge of violence that pervades all spheres of contemporary living.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited version of the foreword to Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce’s book <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/frantz-fanon-psychiatry-and-politics/">Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics</a> (Wits University Press).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102426/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Garth Stevens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Frantz Fanon recognised mental illness as a real experience and offered an understanding of it being influenced by society and culture.Garth Stevens, Professor of Psychology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1005462018-07-26T09:05:29Z2018-07-26T09:05:29ZElin Ersson: plane protestor’s brave solo stand for human rights proves the power of action<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229286/original/file-20180725-194131-1qme2dl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Facebook</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Now, perhaps more than ever, the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/burke_edmund.shtml">Edmund Burke</a> seems clearly to have been right when he said that the forces of evil will triumph, if good women and men do nothing. The recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/25/swedish-plane-protester-elin-ersson-interview-afghanistan">dramatic protest</a> by Swedish student Elin Ersson, who delayed a flight in a bid to prevent an Afghan man from being deported to a perilous future in the country he had fled, is an excellent illustration of how to act responsibly – and shows us why there is no excuse for passivity.</p>
<p>When challenged by a fellow passenger who told her to not to delay the flight she replied: “It is not right to send people to hell … What is more important? A life or your time?”</p>
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<p>Ersson is a student activist from Gothenburg University. On July 24 she managed to postpone an Afghan asylum seeker being deported back to the perils of his home country. With the help of some student colleagues she bought a ticket for a flight from Sweden to Turkey. She knew an Afghan asylum seeker would be on the plane, about to be deported. </p>
<p>She also knew that the Swedish elections in September will be fought chiefly on <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-election/anti-immigration-sweden-democrats-poll-record-high-ahead-of-september-election-idUSKCN1IO0TA">immigration and asylum</a>. Hence, she was aware that the Swedish Migration Board’s decision that <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/10/the-death-of-the-most-generous-nation-on-earth-sweden-syria-refugee-europe/">Afghanistan is a safe country</a> for potential deportees could have been influenced politically. </p>
<p>She staged a protest by refusing to take her seat on her flight from Gothenburg airport to Turkey preventing the plane from taking off. She live-streamed her protest – mainly in the “selfie” mode, to avoid capturing images of anybody who may not be happy to be filmed. She knew the pilot had the power to decide not to take off until the Afghan asylum seeker was removed from the plane. </p>
<p>She knew flight attendants were likely to be sympathetic – they helped her retrieve her phone from an angry passenger who at one point had stolen it from her. She kept calm throughout even when fighting back her tears. And she was successful – the Afghan asylum seeker was escorted off the flight. And, just as importantly, her video received more than half a million hits within 24 hours – highlighting her cause to the world.</p>
<h2>Do the right thing</h2>
<p>It’s usually easier to realise something is wrong than to know what the right thing to do is. An important distinction is often drawn in ethics between a justified action and a person being justified in performing an action. A justified action is right, since it is an action supported by good and sufficient reasons. But a person who is justified in acting does not always know the right thing to do. </p>
<p>We may have done our best to make sure we do the right thing. But in some cases we can do nothing to prevent, say, getting the wrong information and misjudging a situation. So it follows that we cannot guarantee that the action we perform is the right thing to do. But by preparing carefully and making an intelligent choice of action we can make it much more likely that we make the right choice of action. This is what it means to act responsibly – and acting responsibly is crucial, especially when it is a matter of protesting against current laws or policies.</p>
<h2>If not me, who? If not now, when?</h2>
<p>One excuse which is often used in support of doing nothing to prevent evil is that others may be in a better position to act. But as moral agents we are all free and responsible. The French philosopher of freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism that we are “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm">condemned to be free</a>”.</p>
<p>Circumstances cannot deprive us of our freedom – we are responsible for our actions and for the world. So it follows that if I know something is wrong that I can put right, then I should act. Especially when the wrong concerns a law or policy currently in force, being a citizen of that particular state is in most cases a sufficient qualification for appropriate agency.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229394/original/file-20180726-106514-a4sriy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jean-Paul Sartre with his partner Simone de Beauvoir and Che Guevara in 1960.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another excuse often given for not acting is that it is not the right moment. But as free agents who know something is wrong – and know how it can be made right – we should have sufficient motivation to act now. As the German philosopher <a href="http://www.philosophers.co.uk/immanuel-kant.html">Immanuel Kant</a> argued, the thought that a particular action is the right thing to do should be strong enough to overcome contrary motivations, such as laziness and conformism. We have all it takes to act – so no further delay is needed. In short, if we know something is wrong and we can make it right, then we should act now – why wait?</p>
<h2>Courageous and intelligent</h2>
<p>Ersson would have had various excuses not to stage her dramatic protest or to postpone it, or to abandon it at any point. Her courageous act is a very good illustration of what it means to overcome weakness of will and conformism, and to assert freedom and active citizenship. </p>
<p>But, apart from courage, her actions also reflect careful planning – probably with the help of other student activists – and an intelligent choice of the form of protest. These were crucial elements in this case. She chose something that she could carry out on her own which was likely to have consequences sufficiently significant to require a response from the authorities. She also kept calm throughout her protest.</p>
<p>Her relatively small act of rebellion not only bought some time for the asylum seeker but also cast light on <a href="https://www.thelocal.se/20180626/in-depth-the-shifting-sands-of-swedens-immigration-debate">Sweden’s tough immigration policies</a> and politically charged context, making more than half a million people aware of the relevant issues. It shows us not only that acting carefully and intelligently is part of what it means to be a responsible moral agent, but, at the same time, that there is no excuse for passivity and procrastination.</p>
<p>Always act responsibly – but remember the words of first-century Jewish sage <a href="http://www.aish.com/sp/pg/48893292.html">Hillel the Elder</a>: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sorin Baiasu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The young activist acted morally and intelligently when staging her protest against the deportation of asylum seekers from Sweden.Sorin Baiasu, Professor of Philosophy, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/694532016-11-26T15:27:59Z2016-11-26T15:27:59ZFidel Castro: Cuban conundrum fought for freedom but entrenched state power<p>As a historical figure, Fidel Castro presents some juicy conundrums: justice and injustice, revolution and state power, citizens’ rights and state authority, artistic freedom and restriction, high literacy rates and censorship, communist economics and private enterprise, socialism and tourism.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/26/fidel-castro-obituary">news of his death</a> at the age of 90 brings many of these thorny questions to mind. And there are many anecdotes to illustrate them. I would like to draw on one in particular – the case of Jean-Paul Sartre and his observations of the Cuban leader as they toured <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/cuba-2759">Cuba</a> in the back of Castro’s car in the spring of 1960.</p>
<p>Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had accepted an invitation to visit and arrived in Havana during the festivities of <em>Carnaval</em>. They listened to Castro’s speeches, they met Che Guevara, ministers, writers, artists, university students, factory workers and cane-cutters.</p>
<p>Sartre spent long hours locked in conversation with Castro, many of which he recorded in the series of articles he later published with <em>France-Soir</em> entitled <a href="http://www.cairn.info/revue-les-temps-modernes-2008-3-page-5.htm">Hurricane over the Sugar</a>. He was praised and condemned in equal measure for his admiration of Castro and the revolution. But although he did write quite breathlessly about Castro – and was absolutely clear in his support – there is a subtle tension in his writing that reveals something troubling him about the bearded <em>comandante</em>.</p>
<p>They visit a now-public beach being developed for internal tourism. They are given warm soft drinks. Castro asks why there is no ice. Because, replies one of the three slightly dazed workers, the refrigerators do not work. Castro cannot tolerate such un-revolutionary lethargy and bangs around the machines trying to get them to work, animating the workers to take the initiative. Sartre figures out Castro’s essential dynamic: “He is an agitator, thought I for the first time.” And yet, Sartre observes, he cannot animate them to oppose the system that is failing them, which is his own ministry of tourism, the INIT. Castro is aware that he can agitate against the old system, but cannot agitate against his own.</p>
<p>Castro, talking with the woman about the fridges, “calmly invited her to join the rebellion” and attempts to instil in her some revolutionary consciousness. But Castro’s parting words to the woman on the beach are less amicable and more threatening:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tell your people in charge that if they don’t take care of their problems, they will have problems with me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Don’t fuck with Fidel, Sartre seems to understand. Sartre’s assessment is reminiscent of Oliver Stone many years later in his movie <em>Comandante</em>, picking Castro’s pistol off the back shelf of the state car as they drive down a Havana street and asking him: “Do you still know how to use this, Fidel?” Like Stone, Sartre admires the man while tacitly acknowledging the severity of his power, recognising that power and violence are always bedfellows.</p>
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<span class="caption">De Beauvoir and Sartre meet Che Guevara on their trip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beauvoir_Sartre_-_Che_Guevara_-1960_-_Cuba.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>They later leave the coast and drive into the hilly interior. They pull up before a group of labourers standing around a stationary tractor, scratching their heads. “Castro saluted seriously; the campesinos said, ‘Hello Fidel’. And immediately he began his questions. ‘How much? When? Why hadn’t they done more? Why weren’t they going any faster?’” There is another problem like the broken fridges. This time the tractor is not broken but the wrong man has been assigned to the task of driving it, while the experienced driver has been given another job. The experienced driver is bursting with revolutionary fervour and initiative: “‘Let someone give me a tractor,’ he said to Fidel, ‘and I will have you see right away what I know’.” This is fine, one might imagine – here is a problem and here is a worker proposing the solution. But here, as Sartre points out, the problem is with the INRA, the ministry of the agrarian reform.</p>
<p>What a perfect tangle – and what a prescient observation by Sartre. He watches the tension rise visibly in Castro’s expression. The great upsetter cannot upset his own order. As a result he becomes a bureaucrat of his own state power. And he knows it, and “from that moment” Sartre observes, “I felt that he wanted to leave.”</p>
<p>When they finally get away, Castro is in a funk, and he remains in this funk as more villagers and agricultural workers flock around him demanding this and demonstrating that.</p>
<h2>The great contradiction</h2>
<p>Sartre was hopeful that the revolution would be organic, free from ideology, inspired by those foundational principles of <em>liberté, égalité, fraternité</em>, which he expressed passionately in the Cuba articles. Beneath his panegyric, though, there is a subtle, almost unconscious, awareness that the line between revolutionary zeal and tyranny would likely be crossed and that emerging structures of state across the island would soon become structures of state power.</p>
<p>These episodes with Sartre and Castro are, to me, emblematic of tensions and contradictions at the heart of Castro’s many years’ rule of Cuba. Castro inspired revolutionary consciousness in Cubans whilst condemning such consciousness when used to criticise state authority.</p>
<p>He clamoured for sovereignty of his people while encouraging citizens to betray neighbours for counter-revolutionary activities. He spoke of brotherhood and fellowship yet roused the rabble to abuse those who tried to leave, calling them <em>gusanos</em> – worms. He spoke out against the oppression of the <em>imperialistas</em> yet remained sanguine about oppression in his own state. He railed against colonialism and imperialism yet did not denounce the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He demanded justice yet permitted injustice. Nelson Mandela publicly thanked Castro for his support in the anti-apartheid struggles and yet Castro condemned many political prisoners to sentences similar to Mandela’s.</p>
<p>These are the riddles at the centre of Fidel Castro, resolved conventionally by taking opposing sides: Fidel the saviour, Castro the monster. Reality is more complex; some riddles are not to be solved.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69453/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Rowlandson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The former Cuban leader, as seen through the eyes of Jean-Paul Sartre.William Rowlandson, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/620732016-07-08T15:17:19Z2016-07-08T15:17:19ZBrexistentialism: Britain, the drop out nation in crisis, meets Jean-Paul Sartre<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129871/original/image-20160708-24101-1g7katl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alone, destination unknown.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/4602804480/in/photolist-81JzpW-nRYyNo-h7RAYR-J8og5o-h7T5Nz-5fABJZ-h7RTTG-5H97Jo-RecwG-81GSQw-mXXxZg-5H4QBT-5H4RXi-8MCUGP-vVLxB-6gRf4i-h7STzH-JKURh-c3WDK-azz8tP-h7RVfE-c3WCG-6UKAXh-a5aL9o-48srZG-smcGr6-81JzLb-9Qnzf5-nKiL3P-8367w1-5Axiq4-tEsAP-9VmvZ2-3UN759-9m2bfs-7BLdBR-c3WBt-qFKgNG-hXhuko-bA9RcQ-azz8Ac-pyV3u5-oe9aJ-kp1gCg-8Gw5pX-3me988-o8AfE-eQdqHk-c2neRy-dsitDT">Chris Devers</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 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 <a href="https://archive.org/stream/NoExit/NoExit_djvu.txt">Huis Clos</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/01/uk-brexit-brexistential-vote-leave-eu-britain">“Brexistentialism”</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Shortly after the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/eu-referendum-2016">referendum result</a>, 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.</p>
<p>Existentialism is usually thought of as a form of radical individualism. There is no “society” in Sartre. Everyone is Shane or <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-man-with-no-plot-how-i-watched-lee-child-write-a-jack-reacher-novel-51220">Jack Reacher</a> or Lisbeth Salander. Your closest relationship is with your horse or folding toothbrush or computer. In <a href="http://pvspade.com/Sartre/pdf/sartre1.pdf">Being and Nothingness</a>, 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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Staring at the void (and seeing nothing)</h2>
<p>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, <em>“Mais on ne peut pas remplir un trou par un vide”</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129737/original/image-20160707-30680-1q8jmrp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129737/original/image-20160707-30680-1q8jmrp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129737/original/image-20160707-30680-1q8jmrp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129737/original/image-20160707-30680-1q8jmrp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129737/original/image-20160707-30680-1q8jmrp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129737/original/image-20160707-30680-1q8jmrp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129737/original/image-20160707-30680-1q8jmrp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Groucho wasn’t much of a joiner, either.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MGM/Ted Allan</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The great French utopian philosopher, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Fourier">Charles Fourier</a> (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.</p>
<h2>Freedom’s just another word</h2>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Neither does anyone else. Unless, of course, they are guilty of bad faith.</p>
<p>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. “<a href="http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Essays/Durkheim1.htm">Romantic anomie</a>” was the sociologist Emile Durkheim’s phrase, in his analysis of the causes of suicide (the first philosophical question, as Camus called it).</p>
<p>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.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62073/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andy Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Just what on earth is going on in Britain? A researcher of French philosophers called upon some ‘friends’ to think it through.Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/529992016-01-11T14:58:08Z2016-01-11T14:58:08ZSouth Africa’s ANC at 104: its rhetoric is no longer connected to reality<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107743/original/image-20160111-6992-i9214h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Supporters of South Africa's governing ANC at the party's 104 anniversary celebration in Rustenburg.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When language is alive and searches for new ways to illuminate reality and possibility, it can attain real power. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=TPHtpmeyL4AC&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=Jean-Paul+Sartre:+:Words+wreak+havoc+.+.+.%22&source=bl&ots=85pd_OmyP4&sig=qsBM60jwVCDVgTAoVDjEzY06ftc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjUndbH4KHKAhUEWxQKHZ3OCgcQ6AEIKjAF#v=onepage&q=Jean-Paul%20Sartre%3A%20%3AWords%20wreak%20havoc%20.%20.%20.%22&f=false">wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Words wreak havoc … when they find a name for what had … been lived namelessly. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But when language is dead and takes the form of deliberately making statements that no-one believes to be true, it is often little more than a worn and dreary mask for power. The same is true when it repeats concepts and clichés that have lost any meaningful connection to reality.</p>
<p>For more than 100 years there have often been moments when South Africa’s governing African National Congress <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/">(ANC)</a> and its leaders have been able to speak to and for the nation with the resonance and moral authority that can come from matching the right words with the right actions at the right time.</p>
<p>And when the ANC has not been at the forefront of political innovation, its organisational strength has often enabled it to eventually absorb much of what has been achieved by independent initiative. This has allowed the party to renew itself and to sustain its vitality, connection to the present and moral authority.</p>
<h2>Loss of credibility</h2>
<p>But at the end of 2015 the ANC’s credibility and its claim to represent the nation were <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2014-05-11-the-partys-over-anc-sees-decline-in-support">rapidly eroding</a>. In many quarters Jacob Zuma had become a particular liability. He was <a href="https://www.enca.com/south-africa/zuma-booed-heckled-crowd">booed</a> at Nelson Mandela’s memorial. He is regularly <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/Politics/Malema-Zuma-scared-of-white-people-20140618">insulted</a> by Julius Malema from the radical <a href="http://effighters.org.za/about-us/">Economic Freedom Fighters</a> and is increasingly condemned in <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/gauteng/students-chant-zuma-must-fall-1.1934747">popular protest</a>.</p>
<p>At the end of last year the debacle around the firing of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-removal-of-south-africas-finance-minister-is-bad-news-for-the-country-52170">Nhlanhla Nene</a> as finance minister led many to conclude that Zuma was unashamedly willing to place his <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-zumas-actions-point-to-shambolic-management-of-south-africas-economy-52174">own interests</a> before those of the nation.</p>
<p>As the new year began, the reaction to estate agent <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/its-just-the-facts-penny-sparrow-breaks-her-silence-20160104">Penny Sparrow’s</a> racist obscenities relieved some of the pressure on both the ANC and Zuma. But the ANC cannot afford complacency – not with a <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-south-africas-economy-is-likely-to-grow-more-slowly-than-its-potential-46158">floundering economy</a>, escalating <a href="https://theconversation.com/protests-soar-amid-unmet-expectations-in-south-africa-42013">popular protests</a>, <a href="http://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/publications/Dispatches/ab_r6_dispatchno66_south_africa_zuma_trust_and_performance_24112015.pdf">declining trust</a> in the president, entrenched <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2012-07-19-darkness-visible-in-jacob-zumas-kingdom-by-the-sea">conflict within the party</a> and upcoming <a href="http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/2016-municipal-elections-20140610">local elections</a>.</p>
<p>Despite this, the <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=11874">anniversary statement</a> by the party’s National Executive Committee, read out by Zuma in a half-empty stadium in Rustenburg, showed no sign of any willingness to venture an honest assessment of the state of the party and the country.</p>
<p>As usual it sought to place today’s ANC in a heroic lineage and present it as the principle actor in the grand drama of the people. But <a href="http://www.southafrica.net/za/en/articles/entry/article-southafrica.net-rustenburg">Rustenburg</a> is not too far from the scene of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/marikana-massacre-how-south-african-journalism-failed-the-test-51130">Marikana massacre</a> where 34 striking miners were killed by the South African police. And it’s not been long since students, mostly organised outside of the ANC, seized the political initiative and embarked on <a href="http://kafila.org/2015/10/24/south-african-student-protests-and-re-emergence-of-peoples-power-camalita-naicker/">protests</a> against racism and rising university fees.</p>
<p>The annual restatement of the ANC’s basic political catechism – <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-origins-of-non-racialism/">non-racialism</a>, the <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=2356">National Democratic Revolution</a>, and so on - carries very little weight in a moment in which the party’s ideas are routinely spurned in the public sphere, particularly by young intellectuals.</p>
<p>And everybody knows that to speak, say, of “the highest standards of revolutionary morality” in the wake of <a href="https://theconversation.com/marikana-shining-the-light-on-police-militarisation-and-brutality-in-south-africa-44162">Marikana</a> or the <a href="http://citizen.co.za/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2014/03/Nkandla-Statement-by-Public-Protector-19-March-2014.pdf?d580fc">Nkandla scandal</a> involving the spending of public money for Zuma’s private homestead, is simply not credible.</p>
<p>To affirm success in the project of “providing quality basic education”, as Zuma did in Rustenburg, is just <a href="http://www.equaleducation.org.za/file/2015-02-03-equal-education-shadow-report-1">not honest</a>. In the wake of the more or less complete abandonment of the party by intellectuals, no-one can believe that the mere statement of a call to “the intelligentsia” to “join hands with the ANC” carries the resonance of language forged on the anvil of reality.</p>
<h2>An era of profound cynicism</h2>
<p>When words become this radically disconnected from actions and the imperatives of the moment, politics enters a terrain constituted by a profound cynicism. </p>
<p>On this terrain it’s not even possible to campaign, reminisce or imagine a future in the energised language of inspiration. The stolid prose of the committee that must give a ritual nod to each constituency is almost all that there is.</p>
<p>So, as Zuma read out the <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/">NEC’s statement</a>, there was a nod to the economic mainstream via an utterance committing to reduce debt and attain growth, and a nod to the unions via a commitment to a minimum wage. The <a href="http://www.poa.gov.za/news/Documents/NPC%20National%20Development%20Plan%20Vision%202030%20-lo-res.pdf">National Development Plan</a>, the ANC government’s new long-term macroeconomic plan favoured by liberals, received a nod. So did the declaration of solidarity with Cuba, favoured by communists in the governing <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/kids/main.php?id=14">tri-partite alliance</a>. </p>
<p>But there was no sense that adequate measure had been taken of the country’s situation, difficult decisions made, and new commitments affirmed. In the main the statement is saturated with a sense of stasis and an unwillingness to think the now and the new.</p>
<p>Where there is some novelty it appears as concessions to new forms of political innovation, often well able to produce a language with real-life and genuine resonance, that have emerged at a distance from the ANC. </p>
<p>Space was made for the <a href="http://effighters.org.za/policy/on-land/">EFF’s</a> reframing of the land question in terms of colonial theft. Reference was also made to the necessity of increasing funding for tertiary education and the growing public refusal to tolerate overt expressions of racism. </p>
<h2>Following instead of leading</h2>
<p>But in each of these cases the ANC is following, because it has to, rather than leading. </p>
<p>The cynical conflation of state power with <a href="http://readingfanon.blogspot.co.za/2012/02/from-peoples-politics-to-state-politics.html">people’s power</a> was a clear indication that the ANC remains committed to containing the escalating crisis by centralising power rather than seeking to resolve it by dispersing power. The same applies to its equally cynical <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/democratic-culture-zuma-has-no-clue-1.1968836">framing</a> of legitimate forms of political engagement undertaken outside of the party as anti-democratic.</p>
<p>The only time Zuma’s comments carried any real life was when he departed from the script. His <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLnx4r7aprM&feature=youtu.be--">instruction</a> to the Youth League to defend the party was certainly a direct intervention into the heat of the moment.</p>
<p>The ANC has often spoken truth to power. But the statement was, at its core, a matter of speaking power to truth.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52999/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Pithouse has worked with a number of grassroots organisation that are strenuously critical of the ANC.</span></em></p>For more than 100 years South Africa’s ruling ANC and its leaders have often been able to speak to and for the nation with resonance and moral authority, their words matching actions. Not any more.Richard Pithouse, Associate Professor in Politics, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/360442015-01-09T16:11:16Z2015-01-09T16:11:16ZWe are all Charlie Hebdo – or are we?<p>In his 1998 novel, The Elementary Particles, <a href="https://theconversation.com/paris-attack-brings-focus-to-french-author-michel-houellebecq-36038">Michel Houellebecq </a>argued that Charlie Hebdo played a pivotal role in the redefinition of social values in post-1968 France. </p>
<p>For self-appointed troublemaker Houellebecq, Charlie Hebdo was more than a weekly newspaper devoted to the “contestation of capitalism.” It was also instrumental in importing the “North American hedonist-libidinal option,” which would lead to the “destruction of Judeo-Christian morals.” </p>
<p>It is not unlikely that the early contributors to Charlie Hebdo would have more or less welcomed this negative characterization. </p>
<p>Until the tragic events of this past Wednesday, Charlie Hebdo, with its irreverence, deliberate bad taste, and overt anti-capitalist politics had been a symbol of 1970s radicalism, including its anti-democratic variants. </p>
<p>This was, after all, the weekly whose founders mocked President Charles de Gaulle’s death, and who published the Marxist columns of crime novelist <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-mad-and-the-bad/">Jean-Patrick Manchette.</a> Indeed, I first began to study the history of Charlie Hebdo in an effort to better understand the context of Manchette’s virulent attacks on 20th-century capitalist politics and culture.</p>
<p>It is therefore surprising to find, in the aftermath of the murders of this past Wednesday, Charlie Hebdo celebrated as an embodiment of “French values” or, outside of France, of the more nebulous category of “our values.”</p>
<h2>What values exactly?</h2>
<p>Newspapers like Le Monde have limited themselves to brief and touching statements expressing solidarity with the magazine and decrying the attack on the “foundational values of our society.” But at the right-of-center Le Figaro, the rhetoric has already taken a much more disturbing turn with editorials arguing “<a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2015/01/07/31003-20150107ARTFIG00452-alexis-brezet-quand-la-guerre-est-la-il-faut-la-gagner.php">war has been declared</a>” and issuing a call to arms. </p>
<p>After the obligatory appeal for national unity, readers of Le Figaro are told that it is the duty of every citizen to prepare him or herself morally for the task ahead: <a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2015/01/07/31003-20150107ARTFIG00452-alexis-brezet-quand-la-guerre-est-la-il-faut-la-gagner.php">“How can we defend our values if we are not convinced of their preeminent dignity?”</a> </p>
<p>The main enemy that has been identified is, of course, Islamic terrorism, but journalists on the Right have wasted no time in identifying other enemies: “<a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2015/01/07/31003-20150107ARTFIG00452-alexis-brezet-quand-la-guerre-est-la-il-faut-la-gagner.php">perverted humanism</a>,” “<a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2015/01/07/31003-20150107ARTFIG00452-alexis-brezet-quand-la-guerre-est-la-il-faut-la-gagner.php">misplaced anti-racism</a>,” “<a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2015/01/07/31003-20150107ARTFIG00395-charlie-hebdo-cabu-est-mort-la-republique-vaincra.php">abject cultural relativism</a>,” and “<a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2015/01/07/31003-20150107ARTFIG00395-charlie-hebdo-cabu-est-mort-la-republique-vaincra.php">post-colonial guilt</a>” are just some of the terms that appear in two recent editorials in Le Figaro. </p>
<p>This response to the odious attack on Charlie Hebdo suggests that it will be a bloody gift to <a href="http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/contribution/1303530-attentat-a-charlie-hebdo-zemmour-et-le-pen-osent-deja-polemiquer-c-est-indigne.html">partisans of xenophobic sentiment in France</a>. </p>
<h2>Charlie Hebdo and free speech</h2>
<p>I cannot help but feel that there is something deeply worrisome about the marriage of Charlie Hebdo with the call to defend “our values” against the barbarians at the gate. The attack was barbaric, as Charlie Hebdo’s <a href="http://www.charliehebdo.fr/index.html">website</a> has suggested, but it was not aimed at “France,” but at a journal with a particular history.</p>
<p>Charlie Hebdo was, at its outset, a weekly whose editors’ erstwhile slogan – “stupid and vicious” – signaled their desire to play the role of barbarian to bourgeois French society. </p>
<p>Charlie Hebdo may be a chapter in a long French tradition of political satire, but it was always deeply opposed to a particular idea of “French values.” </p>
<p>The first point that I would like to make about this appeal to “our values” is that in France, as elsewhere in the world, free speech has been and continues to be a negotiation, often punctuated with explosions of violence. Let us not forget the attempts made on <a href="http://www.westminster.ac.uk/__data/assets/text_file/0010/247249/8-DRAKE.TXT">Jean-Paul Sartre</a>’s life after he spoke out against the French occupation of Algeria.</p>
<p>It is doubtful that many of the right-wing commentators who are lining up today to defend freedom of speech have taken the side of the numerous rap groups who have been accused, and even convicted, of inciting violence with their music. Likewise there are laws on the books in France which prohibit Negationism (or the denial of historical events like the Holocaust) and inciting suicide.</p>
<p>What seems to have been lost in the rush to defend “our values” is that at the beginning Charlie Hebdo stood not for some eternal French value of free speech, but for a particular form of free speech <em>against</em> France, its society and its politics. </p>
<p>The name Charlie Hebdo (hebdo meaning weekly) – which can be read as a reference to either Charles de Gaulle or Charlie Brown – was in fact adopted in order to get around the ban imposed by the French government on the weekly’s forerunner, Hara-Kiri Hebdo, which had had the temerity to mock the death of Charles de Gaulle. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68595/original/image-20150109-23810-1acmwlp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68595/original/image-20150109-23810-1acmwlp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68595/original/image-20150109-23810-1acmwlp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68595/original/image-20150109-23810-1acmwlp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68595/original/image-20150109-23810-1acmwlp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68595/original/image-20150109-23810-1acmwlp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68595/original/image-20150109-23810-1acmwlp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The very first edition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/paille-fr/6383608431/">Paille</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The very first cover of Charlie Hebdo bears the sardonic headline, THERE IS NO CENSORSHIP IN FRANCE. </p>
<p>Charlie Hebdo’s now-tragic history is thus bookended by two incommensurate acts of censorship, one at the hands of the government, the other at the hands of fanatics. </p>
<p>It is also, arguably, bookended by two incommensurate acts of free speech, one attacking the dominant political and social order of 1970s France, and the other mocking the beliefs of an economically and socially marginalized minority group (who can forget the 2013 cover with an image of bullets going through Koran, with the headline “The Koran is shit”). </p>
<p>The point is not to suggest some false equivalency between the censorship of the French government and a killing spree, but rather to suggest that we should stop to think about what we are saying when we argue that “our values” have been attacked. </p>
<p>These murders were, it appears, committed by French citizens; violent, radicalized French citizens, but citizens nevertheless. There are laws in place for the punishment of murders, laws that will be brought to bear if and when the perpetrators are caught. </p>
<p>It is reasonable to suggest that this is a moment when we can collectively engage in a dialogue about free speech in our societies. It is less reasonable to claim that values have already been agreed upon and must be defended in an unspecified war.</p>
<p>It might be more in keeping with the critical spirit of Charlie Hebdo to take seriously the idea that this violence was not just the doing of some wholly external malicious force, but also a consequence of the contradictions and divisions within France, a country that is home to a plurality of values.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36044/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucas Hollister does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In his 1998 novel, The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq argued that Charlie Hebdo played a pivotal role in the redefinition of social values in post-1968 France. For self-appointed troublemaker…Lucas Hollister, Assistant Professor of French , Dartmouth CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205732013-11-29T15:06:48Z2013-11-29T15:06:48ZThe US vs Sartre: what the hell is Existentialism anyway?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35906/original/ps88vkr9-1385118554.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C0%2C618%2C239&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sartre, Hoover and Camus.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On 7 February 1946 we find J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, writing a letter to “Special Agent in Charge” at the New York field office, to draw his attention to one ALBERT CANUS, who is “reportedly the New York correspondent of ‘Combat’.” </p>
<p>Hoover complains, “This individual has been filing inaccurate reports which are unfavorable to the public interest of this country”. He gives orders for the New York field division to “conduct a preliminary investigation to ascertain his background, activities and affiliations in this country.” </p>
<p>One of Hoover’s agents finally has the guts to correct the chief and tell him that “the subject’s true name is ALBERT CAMUS, not ALBERT CANUS”, but diplomatically hypothesised that “Canus” was an alias he had cunningly adopted.</p>
<p>The year before, the New York team had already sprung into action to keep an eye on the activities of visiting French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. It was a time when everyone was potentially a Communist, but especially ex-resistance French philosophers. So it was the Untouchables in pursuit of the unintelligible. </p>
<p>The surprising outcome revealed by the FBI’s own files is that the G-men subtly morph into E-men, not just keeping philosophers under surveillance but pursuing their own philosophical investigations.</p>
<h2>Nausea in New York</h2>
<p>Sartre and his fellow journalists were actually invited by the Office of War Information, with a view to <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/sartre-and-camus-in-new-york/?_r=0">disseminating positive propaganda messages</a> about the American war effort in 1945. Sartre’s main champion was under-secretary of state, Archibald Macleish, now best-known as the author of the <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/6371">classic formulation of the modernist aesthetic</a>: “A poem should not mean/But be”. The author of Nausea and Being and Nothingness duly delivered a classically existentialist article about how he was suffering from “<a href="http://www.cmbellerive.com/2012/07/20/le-mal-de-new-york/">le mal de New York</a>” – New York sickness or Nausea in New York.</p>
<p>Sartre was interpreted as a slippery customer capable of evading surveillance. One agent, who is supposed to be keeping a tail on him, followed him to <a href="http://www.cityofschenectady.com/">Shenectady</a>, where Sartre was supposed to be singing the praises of the General Electric plant. But he ducked out and hopped on a train “on the afternoon of March 1, apparently bound for New York City”. In other words, the hapless agent – Special Agent Richard L Levy –- lost him. We don’t know if perhaps he just wasn’t all that keen on Schenectady, and preferred the pleasures of the big city, where he had a girlfriend, which Special Agent Levy also did not know about.</p>
<h2>Outsider in the Big Apple</h2>
<p>On March 25 1946, Albert Camus disembarked the SS Oregon at Pier 86, New York, where he was duly stopped and searched in line with Hoover’s stop notice. Despite which he proceeded to fall in love with New York and in New York, finding a girlfriend from Vogue magazine, Patricia Blake, who, noticing his extreme interest in death, bought him copies of Casket and <a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/VTG-MAY-1932-The-Sunnyside-MAGAZINE-funeral-undertaker-casket-hearse-embalming-/321234434939">Sunnyside</a>, the undertakers’ monthlies.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35904/original/pxztmpy6-1385117904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Will the real Albert Canus please stand up?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andy Martin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Camus was being hosted by <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079174/">Justin O’Brien</a>, professor of French literature at Columbia University. Like Archibald Mackenzie, O’Brien was also a member of the proto-CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. A celebrated translator of the journals of André Gide, he was also chief of the French desk at the OSS, concerned with “establishing intelligence networks behind German lines in France”.</p>
<p>The precursors of the CIA, Mackenzie and O’Brien, clearly had an aesthetic or philosophical sensibility. The FBI agents, having stolen papers from the French philosophers, were incapable of reading the original (“[it’s] all in French”, they complain) and had to draft in translators. But there is a curious rapprochement between wandering Existentialists and the agents. Communism doesn’t really make sense to the FBI. Why? Because nothing does.</p>
<p>I am indebted for this thought mainly to agent James E Tierney, of the New York field office, who in response to continued pestering from Hoover – what the hell is Existentialism anyway? – came up with several pages. He is the very archetype of the philosophical detective: a G-man poring over the pages of The Myth of Sisyphus. Here he is on Camus: “This philosophy recommends living with the absurd, enjoying life all the more fully because it has no meaning.”</p>
<p>Philosophically speaking, the FBI agents stake a claim as neo-Existentialists in the classic early Sartrian mould, or crypto-Absurdists. They, like the early Archibald Mackenzie, take the view that people, not just poetry, should not mean, but be. They certainly subscribe to the “hell is other people” school of thought. And they are anti-narrativists or, as agent Tierney would say, “painfully lucid in the face of life’s irrationality”.</p>
<p>The FBI echos Sartre’s classic modernist critique of narrative in Nausea. Narrative is teleological – it has a purpose – whereas life is anti-telos. The CIA believe in narratives, whereas Hoover’s FBI are quintessential Existentialists in refuting narrative. They would rather have contingency and chaos than telos. The FBI find Camus fundamentally their kind of guy: the Camus of the Absurd and the Outsider, according to which the individual will never really make sense of the world, nor hook up, in any kind of meaningful, long-term way, with others.</p>
<h2>Losing the plot</h2>
<p>We are apt to think of the FBI as the great conspiracy theorists, but the reality is more nuanced: they don’t really want to believe in plots. Was the assassination of JFK a conspiracy? The FBI won’t have it. Later on in their files, we find them, in their typically Existentialist way, intent on the Oswald lone-wolf story – or non-story. Naturally, when it comes to 9/11, it is understandable that the FBI really were not conspiratorial enough in their thinking. It’s not that they have lost the plot, they just don’t want to know about plots. They are plot-sceptics.</p>
<p>Narrative, philosophy, and espionage share a common genesis: they arise out of a lack of information. What happened, for example, to the elusive Albert Canus, the original cause of Hoover’s anxiety attack? One agent, James M Underhill, desperate to find someone actually called “Canus”, finally tracked him down on 18 March 1946. Canus, the agent reports, was in fact apprehended by Border Patrol in New Orleans, living at 1622 Jackson Avenue. </p>
<p>He “claimed” to be a “messboy” on the SS Mount Everest, which docked in New Orleans in 24 April 1943. The ship sailed away again on 3 May and he didn’t. Immigration officers were planning to put him on another ship but, says Underhill, existentially unconcerned with the telos: “the file does not show the final disposition”.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited version of an essay first published in <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/art-books/camus-sartre-fbi-hoover/#.UpirE8Txqvw">Prospect Magazine</a> based on a lecture given earlier this year at the <a href="http://news.columbia.edu/maison100">Maison française, Columbia University</a>, New York, as part of its centenary celebrations.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/20573/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andy Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>On 7 February 1946 we find J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, writing a letter to “Special Agent in Charge” at the New York field office, to draw his attention to one ALBERT CANUS, who is “reportedly…Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/195022013-10-25T13:39:00Z2013-10-25T13:39:00ZBecksistentialism: because man is a goal-seeking animal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33812/original/sc9wkj2p-1382703746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Man and superman.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A student came up to me after class the other day and said, “So what is this ‘Becksistentialism’ all about then?” I want to begin to answer that question by defining the negative: Sir Alex Ferguson is not a Becksistentialist.</p>
<p>Consider what he has been saying about Becks in the wake of his <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/sir-alex-fergusons-autobiography-david-beckham-thought-he-was-bigger-than-me-and-manager-blames-victorias-influence-for-their-falling-out-8896997.html">new (or revised) autobiography</a>: “David was the only player I managed who chose to be famous, who made it his mission to be known outside the game.” He has a whole variety of complaints, including, notably, that Beckham refused to take his beanie hat off at a dinner. And of course he has a go at just about everyone else too (for example, Roy Keane). But I want to zero in on his comments about Beckham, because they help us to understand not just the enigma that is Beckham but our own experience as human beings.</p>
<p>“He could have been a Manchester United legend.” But Beckham – just as he refuses to take the beanie hat off – revolts against the Ferguson vision. Ferguson wants him to become a god. Not just a footballer. But The Footballer. A living legend. But, of course, at the same time subordinate to Man U. So it is in part a power move – <em>Fergie rules</em>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=863&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=863&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=863&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1085&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1085&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33807/original/w2ns7tts-1382697947.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1085&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Becks: morally deregulated.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Yui Mok/PA Wire</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the Becksistentialist naturally refutes this simplistic and tyrannical thinking. I want to argue that Beckham – for all his visibility and connectedness - is in fact the great Outsider figure de nos jours. A rebel. And a champion of self-liberation. The beanie at the dinner table to me represents what <a href="http://criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/week8.htm">Emile Durkheim calls “anomie”</a> – the state of “normlessness” in which we float free from the rules of society.</p>
<p>It is not the case that David Beckham became an existentialist the day he joined Paris Saint-Germain at the beginning of this year. He was already an existentialist. It was in Paris that he became more self-aware. The existentialist is born out of crisis. Everyone has crises. Beckham’s tend to be a bit more visible and therefore susceptible to analysis. I happened to witness his primal crisis at close quarters.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ur5fGSBsfq8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘One surprise is the inclusion of Archimedes’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The red card in the 1998 World Cup in France – Le Mondial – when he was sent off for retaliation. England v Argentina. Beckham had been benched for the first two games by Glenn Hoddle, who suspected him of being distracted by (the then) Posh Spice and too much show-business. Like Ferguson, Hoddle is an essentialist who <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sport/football/270194.stm">believes in the soul and karma</a>: and thinks that Beckham has to be pure Footballer and nothing else and is duly punished for not being it. </p>
<p>And so we come to St Etienne and Argentina (a match also notable also for the miraculous Michael Owen solo goal). The two teams are level at 2-2. Then, a minute into the second half (I was just sitting down with a drink in my hand), Diego Simeone clatters into Beckham. And the foot famously goes up. And the red card comes out. But was it “intentional” or wasn’t it?</p>
<h2>To be is to do</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/24/boxer-goalkeeper-sartre-camus-martin-review">Jean-Paul Sartre</a> would say: of course that kick is intentional; there is no unconscious, everything we do is intentional, deliberate, voluntary. Including falling in love and jealousy. There is no such thing as a “crime passionnel” or “I couldn’t help myself, your honour”. Does Beckham take the easy way out? There is a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKA_jKdoSVQ">fascinating interview conducted by Zinedine Zidane</a> (asking the questions in French) in which Beckham offers a classic Becksistentialist commentary.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33809/original/xv9yzynh-1382698212.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Red card: being followed by nothingness.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">PA Archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of course, he argues, he could have <em>not</em> kicked Simeone. And perhaps England could then have gone on to win the World Cup as well. But he accepts and asserts responsibility for it. I am the author of my acts, says Beckham. I am what I do. (The French subtitles have: <em>je ne regrette rien</em>). He is in some paradoxical way proud of his mistakes. In other words, Beckham appears to be arguing – you have to act as if it were intentional – and the deed becomes part of your narrative.</p>
<p>As a result of this sending off, the great rule-breaker, Becks the rebel becomes Public Enemy no 1 for a spell. When he gets back to England he finds that he is held responsible for the World Cup exit. It is all his fault. The question he asks himself is – does everyone hate me? Am I the Bad Guy in all this. And he says, Yes, I am. He claims authorship. Go on, hate me.</p>
<h2>Football, without question</h2>
<p>His answer reminds me of <a href="http://www.glasgowreview.co.uk/articles/jeangenet.htm">Jean Genet</a>, the great writer and thief and <em>inverti</em> (or “queer” in French street slang). I chose to be a criminal. I am not going to ascribe responsibility to some faceless impersonal forces – genetic fate or determinism or social deprivation. You have to act as if it were intentional.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33805/original/zxgxbcjh-1382697370.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Death and life have determined appointments. Riches and honour depend.
upon heaven’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hobochi Chen</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But of course Beckham is not a pre-eminently verbal philosopher. A lot of his thinking is expressed through the medium of the tattoo (Confucius) and the haircut (inconstant). I see his career overall as in some ways like <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/01/candide-voltaire-rereading-julian-barnes">Voltaire’s Candide</a> – a critique of naïve optimism. The relationship of individual player to the team raises the ghost of the Sartre’s “group-in-fusion”. But maybe the final question to be asked is: “Whither Becks?” His fundamental Becksistential statement, “I am not what I am and am what I am not” suggests a career not just as “ambassador” but also as spy. Perhaps <a href="http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/4982736/victoria-beckham-david-beckham-should-be-next-james-bond.html">Victoria Beckham’s suggestion</a> that he would make a good James Bond is not so far off the mark.</p>
<p><em>Andy Martin is delivering a talk <a href="http://www.cam.ac.uk/festival-of-ideas/events-and-booking/becksistentialism">on Becksistentialism</a> as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, October 26, 11.30am-1pm, West Road, Cambridge.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19502/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andy Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A student came up to me after class the other day and said, “So what is this ‘Becksistentialism’ all about then?” I want to begin to answer that question by defining the negative: Sir Alex Ferguson is…Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.