On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:56:22 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> M-TH: Life Is Beautiful
> Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
> Wed Mar 3 07:07:16 MST 1999
>
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> I'm thinking that as between Sartre and Althusser, Sartre. Sartre
> was
> in the Resistence and in a concentration camp. He was in the
> struggle
> for real.
Actually, Sartre was never in a concentration camp.
He was in a POW camp after having been caputured
by the Germans following the defeat of the French
in 1940. He eventually escaped from the camp,
and returned to Paris. He was in the Resistance
but the group that he was in, as far I can tell,
was mainly a "talking shop." They didn't do anything
concrete. Althusser too was held capitve in a POW
camp, where he spent the entirety of the war.
Apparently, he lacked the opportunities and
the inclination to escape.
Sartre's real activism came after the war,
when he took the lead in supporting a variety
of progressive movements, including the
Vietnamese struggle against French colonialism
(and later against the Americans), the struggle
for Algerian independence , which Sartre supported
when that position was unpopular even on the
far left. Later on Sartre supported the student
movement, and most of the movements for
emancipation of one kind or another that
sprung up during the 1960s. By then he
was considered to be the very model
of an engagé intellectual in the tradition
of Voltaire and Zola.
> The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian
> subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no
> longer
> in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process
> of
> natural history". Rather we must be activating working class
> subjects.
> The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in
> a
> Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for
> fighting
> back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working
> class
> subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual
> confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's
> revolutionary elan and anti-fascism.
>
> Charles Brown
>
>
>
>
> >>> "James Lawler" <james.lawler at sympatico.ca> 02/28/99 05:20PM
> >>>
> Here is a review of the film I wrote for the Sartre listserve.
> Sartre,
> I
> think, would say that Marx would agree with this.
>
> --Jim Lawler
>
> I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a title for
> a
> film
> centered on life in a Nazi concentration camp. And yet, it is
> convincing.
> Life can be beautiful even in the horrors of the death camp.
> One of my favorite passages in Sartre's Being and Nothingness is
> from
> his
> discussion of the nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude
> with
> respect to values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in
> a
> world
> of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained in
> being
> by my
> freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. The immediate is
> the
> world
> with its urgency; and in this world where I engage myself, my acts
> make
> values spring up like partridges."
> In the middle of a thick book of disturbing philosophy, Sartre
> gives
> us
> partridges. I thank him for that.
> Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to spring
> up,
> wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as reassuring,
> rigid
> facts
> of life. Existential anguish arises when one discovers that the
> values
> one
> accepts only work as values because of one's own free, creative
> complicity
> with them. We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are
> the
> values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want to
> create.
> There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond the initial
> experience
> of anguish. Such a recognition opens up the possibility of creating
> values
> freely, like an inspired artist.
> Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is able
> consciously
> to
> make the values of his choice spring up like partridges. He is a
> moral
> magician, who sees and creates beauty in the worst ugliness.
> Why does the sign say, "No Jews or Dogs Allowed"? his five or
> six-year-old
> son asks him. Guido, a Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes
> everybody
> or everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There,
> you
> see?
> And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign on our store:
> No
> Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.*
> Those who know Sartre's book may find special significance in
> Guido's
> occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of
> being-a-waiter
> would make a wonderful film clip to accompany Sartre's description
> of
> the
> waiter whose "being a waiter" is inevitably a playing at being a
> waiter. The
> waiter creates himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least
> Parisian
> waiter takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as
> stern
> facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates himself as he
> goes
> along, in all the roles he is forced to play as well as the ones he
> is
> free
> to make up himself, as when he plays prince to his beautiful
> princess.
> Central to Sartrean existentialism is the idea that individuals
> freely
> create their own values. This does not mean that all values are
> equal.
> It's
> not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created values:
> those
> that
> are freely created but in the *bad faith* that they are determined
> by
> outside forces--nature, tradition, a god, the Leader. And there are
> the
> values created by people who know they are creating values, and
> whose
> values
> must therefore reflect this knowledge.
> Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness of the ordinary,
> conformist
> majority who have fallen under the self-induced spell of the first
> type
> of
> values. He asks the new employer of a friend what his politics are.
> The
> man
> is momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely
> nearby.
> "Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" Guido
> tactfully
> drops his question. He had just seen the values of that other
> person
> jumping
> up and down, almost partridge-like, in the form of two very large
> round
> boys.
> The absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he
> takes on
> the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another meeting
> with
> Dora,
> his *princess.* After going through a ludicrous inspection to
> Dora*s
> amusement, he finds that he has to give a lecture on the superiority
> of
> the
> Aryan race. By the time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has
> stripped
> down to his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly
> button.
> The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to maintain
> their
> roles
> of admiring audience for the supposedly higher wisdom they are
> receiving.
> The power of human freedom, in the form of bad faith or
> self-deception,
> apparently knows no bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of
> such
> power
> on behalf of honesty and freedom?
> Sartre's formulated his theory of existentialist freedom under the
> Nazi
> occupation. We are free even in prison, he said. This concept of
> "absolute
> freedom" has frequently been criticized as indicating a problem
> with
> this
> philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be
> meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration
> camp.
> Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around us
> like
> partridges.
> The film suggests the question: if there can be such a possibility
> of
> creative freedom in under the worst conditions of human
> degradation,
> what
> are we not capable of in better conditions?
> Naziism has helped us to see how far down the human being can go
> when
> the
> idea of egotistical power over others is taken to its ultimate
> conclusion.
> Sartre's existentialist theory of the free creation of values
> explores
> the
> crevasses and caverns of this underground world of self-imposed
> darkness. He
> takes us on a modern tour of Plato's cave where people take
> concocted
> images
> seriously even though they have disturbing glimpses of their
> delusion.
> But
> the point of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all
> that
> exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this
> condition, we
> can also take ourselves out of it.
> Life Is Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest
> depths of
> the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the
> recognition
> that it
> is up to us to create, cultivate and protect it.
>
> _______________________________________
> Dr. James Lawler
> Philosophy Department
> SUNY at Buffalo
> Buffalo, NY
> USA 14260
> Base e-mail: jlawler at acsu.buffalo.edu
> forwards to: james.lawler at sympatico.ca
>
>
>
>
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