Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

A book I acquired and grimly took out to read ("I'll do a few pages a day..if I can manage it") ..and read the whole thing in three days. And it's BRILLIANT, though I can't pretend I "got" all of it...and even as you finish it, you realise you could reread it and study it for years....
But as a bog standard, lowbrow reader...this is a pretty accessible work, considering the subject matter. In a diary, our narrator records his daily life. Nothing outstanding- he writes a biography in a show more library, mooches about, recalls an old love...
But the diary is purely a vehicle to get the reader contemplating existentialism. And here one has to try and slide into another dimension. Though many of Sartre's musings may well be familiar...Theyre the kind of things that occur to us but we never mention them. Theyre too hard to explain...
Ever stared hard at an everyday word and thought it looked ...weird? Looked at a photo of a distant place and thought "I was there once! At a specific time ...I'm not now." You look at a wave crashing...gone...gone where? A particular group of people coming together on the bus...theyll never replicate that pattern again. Photos of long-dead people...so alive...where are they? You do something wrong...if I could go back and re-live it, do it different....Time travel, death, the ephemerality of life...

Sartre does crank it up to visions of a Salvador Dali type of world by the end, and he'd pretty much lost me by then. I kept thinking one could make the jump from existentialism to religion, though I don't think that's what the author was aiming for.

I'm glad I read it. I shall keep it, along with two other challenging, must-try-it-again-one-day books (Kafka and "Linguistics: A Hallidayan Approach ") and MAYBE have another crack at it sometime. show less

¿Existe el Bien o es sólo una manifestación del Mal? ¿Se puede hacer algún bien realizando lo que "esta mal"? ¿Se puede destrozar una vida por hacer el bien? ¿El ser humano esta hecho para hacer el Bien o esta destinado a perecer en el infierno en la Tierra?

Esta dualidad es presentada constantemente durante la obra, a pesar de que los personajes son odiosos no se puede decir que los puedas odiar. Muestran el lado más aberrante de la naturaleza humana, en algunos casos exagerados (de show more hecho esta misma exageración es la que provoca que algunas partes de la historia se sientan un tanto pesadas) pero imposible decir que no sea en cierto modo realista más aun hoy en día con los tiempos que corren y la desesperación de las personas en algunas partes del mundo.

Sartre fue un pesimista, sus historias son crudas y sin sentimentalismos, reniegan de la religión y la bondad humana pero aun así atrapan. Ese mismo estilo hace que, una vez iniciado, sea dificil abandonarlo.

Cómo es fácil hacer spoiler de esta historia, es muy cíclica dado que, aun cuando algunos sucesos cambian al final llevan a un conflicto igual o muy similar al inicial así que sólo dejare algunas citas de está obra.

Citas:

"Cuando los ricos se declaran la guerra, son los pobres los que mueren"

"Para ganar el cielo es preciso matar"

"Un elegido es un hombre al que el dedo de Dios arrincona contra un muro"

"-¿Por qué querer destruirla?
- Porque todo el mundo quiere que la salve"

"Los pobres sólo tenemos dos manera de morir. Los que se resignan, mueren de hambre; a los que no se resignan, los ahorcan"

"Dios ha querido que el bien fuese imposible sobre la tierra. ¡Imposible el amor! ¡Imposible la justicia! ¡Anda, trata de amar a tu prójimo y cuentáme luego lo que sucede!" show less

Statue of Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris

Essays in Aesthetics by Jean-Paul Sartre is a collection of five superbly written essays penned in the style of an art historian or art critic, worlds away from academic writing, containing no references to other aestheticians and only several footnotes for the purpose of historical exactitude. There is one long essay in four parts on the fifteenth century renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto, two essays on Alberto Giacometti, one on Robert Lapoujade, and show more one on Alexander Calder. A reader will find plenty of ideas on art and artists, on creativity and freedom, on beauty and space, but the ideas are always formulated in the context of the artist and historical period being addressed. To provide a modest taste, below are four Sartre quotes with my brief comments.

From the essay on Tintoretto, "I am aware of the tastes of his age. My aim here is not to judge him but to determine whether his age could identify itself with him without discomfort. And on this point the evidence is explicit: his conduct shocked his contemporaries and turned them against him. A little disloyalty would perhaps have been tolerated, but Tintoretto went too far, throughout Venice, a single complaint was voiced: "He goes too far!" Even in that commercial city such shrewdness in commerce is unique." --------- Sartre writes with the authority of an art historian; quite refreshing for a man who is a leading twentieth century philosopher and author of celebrated novels, plays and short stories.

"We are aware of the success of Arcimboldo - his jumbled vegetables and cluttered fish. Why do we find this artifice so appealing? Is it perhaps because the procedure has long been familiar to us? In their own way, have all painters been Arcimboldos? Have they not fashioned, day after day, face after face, each with a pair of eyes, a nose, two ears and thirty-two teeth? Wherein lies the difference? He takes a round cut of red meat, makes two holes in it, sets in each of them a white marble, carves out a nasal appendage, inserts it like a false nose under the ocular spheres, bores a third hole and provides it with white pebbles. Is he not substituting for the indissoluble unity of a face an assortment of heterogeneous objects?" ---------- Now these reflections on Arcimboldo are worth chewing on (no pun intended); matter of fact, one could delve into an entire phenomenology of perception based on what Sartre is saying here.

"The sculptor is supposed to imbue something immobile with movement, but it would be wrong to compare Calder's art with the sculptor's. Calder captures movement rather than suggest it; he has no intention of entombing it forever in bronze or gold, those glorious, asinine materials that are by nature immobile." ---------- Consider this Sartre quote in relation to Antoine Roquentin, first-person narrator of Sartre’s novel, Nausea, saying he is afraid of being in contact with objects as though they were living beasts. And also, at another point in the novel, Roquentin reflecting on how, when it is dark, both he and objects come out of limbo.

"By reversing classicism, Giacometti has restored to statues an imaginary, indivisible space. His unequivocal acceptance of relativity has revealed the absolute. The fact is that he was the first to sculpture man as he is seen - from a distance. He confers absolute distance on his images just as the painter confers absolute distance on the inhabitants of his canvas." ---------- Again, think of this quote coupled with the reflection of the narrator in Nausea when he says how, when looking in a mirror, his glance moves over his forehead and cheeks and finds nothing firm.. What would Antoine Roquentin find if he saw his reflection from a distance?

I'll let Jean-Paul Sartre have the last words here by citing two sentences from this collection worthy of appearing on a Sartre list of memorable quotes:

"Beauty is not the object of art but its flesh and blood, its being."

"No one paints to create art or to make it be. The artist simply paints." show less

Three strangers are escorted into hell. It's a living room, in a fussy antique style, with a few couches and knick-knacks but no windows or doors. Where are their tormentors and devices of torture? Each other.

A short one-act play. Truly classic right down to its famous line - "Hell is other people". Though, despite the characters' insistence that they are torturing each other, it becomes increasingly obvious that they are each their own torturer. They see themselves reflected in each others' show more eyes - literally, in one case - and hate what they see.

Although I'm not sure how much of this play I really understood, I was especially intrigued by the gender roles involved. Garcin feels he is not masculine enough because he deserted the military, but isn't much concerned about the real reason he's in hell - abusing his wife and blatantly cheating on her. Garcin wants to sleep with Estelle despite not being terribly attracted to her, because he thinks it'll make him feel more like a man. Estelle wants to sleep with Garcin because, as Inez points out, she is constantly looking for validation from men. Estelle is afraid when Inez hits on her because she's not a man. Garcin looks for validation from Inez because she's a woman who is uninterested in him. Fascinating stuff, if the whole "cold-hearted, cruel lesbian" trope is a little tired at this point. show less