A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

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Book: Read A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes for Free Online
Authors: Witold Gombrowicz, Benjamin Ivry
Tags: General, Reference, Philosophy, History & Surveys
someone, nor active or passive (since these are human ideas).
    The Being in itself is opaque .
    He is as he is , that is all one can say, he is immobile .He is not subject to creation and temporality, and cannot be inferred from something (like created by God).
    The Being in itself is a being about which nothing can be asserted, except that it is IN ITSELF such as it is (a little like God).
    Curious thing, the Being for itself , human existence, is somehow inferior to the Being in itself.It is in itself the void, nothingness , formed so to speak in two parts.As if it were cut in two, and it is this which permits it to be conscious of itself.
    So it is a secondary being, compared to the Being in itself.
    Curious thing: this rudimentary comparison that I have managed to do can seem naïve.Yet it leads to real concepts, for example, that the human being is empty because of the well-known intentionality of consciousness.If a chair is a chair, then consciousness is never identical to itself because one must always be conscious of something.One cannot imagine empty consciousness.The well-known identity principle, A equals A (chair is chair), is not carried out here.The Being of consciousness is, in this sense, an imperfect being.But let us go further.
    The Being in itself cannot disappear.It is independent of time and space.It is as it is, nothing more.While existence, the Being for itself , is a limited being, with an end, which dies.(This is at least how our existence appears to our consciousness.Existence must be sustained like a flame.)For Einstein, an object is nothing more than a “curvature of space.”A chair stands for an amountof energy, and this energy can transform itself into another object, or remain unchanged energy, while human existence begins and ends (birth and death).
    But then, what is man, as Being for itself or existence?
    1.Man is a thing because he has a body, which is the only way, as body, that he can be in the world.Here Sartre launches into some very subjective reactions: he says that man as body is excessive .It provokes nausea, thus the title: Nausea .
    2.Man is a thing because he is a fact (facticity).For example: I have my past, I am already made, defined, achieved.But when I head toward the future, I leave the world of things in order to enter into the fulfillment of myself.
    3.Man is a thing by his situation , which takes away his freedom.
    Here is the well-known question of freedom which makes us responsible for ourselves.Evidently, we have two perfectly contradictory feelings.On the one hand, we are merely the effect of a cause.Example: if I drink, it is because I am thirsty.If, according to Freudianism, I have a complex, it is the result of a shock.On the other hand, we are absolutelysure of being free.No one can take away from me the feeling that it is I myself who decides whether I have to move my hand or not.Indeed, when we contemplate other people, they appear to us as the consequence of a cause.
    For a physician, there is no doubt that a patient’s illnesses obey causes.This feeling of freedom, which is so strong within us, concerns only ourselves, while we see others as mechanisms.Therefore the Being in itself always has its cause as it appears, it has neither beginning nor end.Freedom is uniquely the particularity of the Being in itself .There is a rupture here of course between the feelings of universal causality and our feeling of freedom, which is due to the essential difference between scientific knowledge and existential knowledge.This is very important because it defines the limits of science, which can never be the foundation for philosophy, because only consciousness can be conscious of science, whereas science can never be based on consciousness.Moreover, science sees man from the outside, as one object among others.
    The difference between the appendix operation from the point of view of the physician, who treats the patient as a mechanism, and the point ofview of the

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