M. J.’s Reviews > At the Existentialist Café > Status Update

Sartre writes his first play, "the flies". People of a city live under tyranny and they are too paralyzed by humiliation to be capable of rebelling. A plague of flies represent their demoralization and shame.
The parallels with 1943 situation of France was easy to see. The audience could recognize the debilitating effects of the compromises they had to make and the humiliation that came from living under tyranny.

Jean-Paul talks about diffuculty of freedom, and discusses that we should take responsibility and do not show bad faith. Je doesn't mean that context and boindary conditions are not important at all but he means that we are still free to act responsibly. And also he doesn't mean poor people should take responsibility for their situation.

Sartre argues that freedom terrifies us, yet we cannot escape it, because we are it. He divides all of the being into two reals, pour-soi et en-soi. Pour-soi is us, humans, our consciousness which has no real being, we are nothing. We are nothing, therefore, we are free. We are free to define ourselves. We are nothing beyond what we decide to be.

Albert Camus writes about absurdity of life and the solution is to live with accepting this absurdity. Sartre thinks that we can give meaning to life because we are free.

Parisiennes keep warm in cafes and as a result writers, pholosophors and artist meet each other. Camus writes the stranger(outsider) and meets Jean-paul in the play The flies. People especially jews disappear.

War begins, Simone occupies herself with Hegel and Kierkegaard which have opposite ideas and this becomes the begining of writing l'invité. Sartre arrested works on l'etre et néant and when he xomes back to Paris, he has a strange feeling, feels that the burgois laws are confining and affecting the interaction between people who he has been woth in the camp.

It's 1939: Jean-paul goes to war, and works 12hours a day on his philosophicals ideas and writes the notes that end as "being and nothingness" . Simone works on her l'invité, and has affairs with two of her female students who later will have affair with jean-paul. Albert Camus writes his stranger, myth of sisyphus, and Galipula in Paris.

War is tereible.

Cross-cultural encounters are good because they stimulate people to question themselves. Husserl suspected that philosophy started in Greece, not because they had a deep relationship with their Being, but because they were a trading people.

'They also agreed two long-term conditions. One was that they must tell each other everything about their other sexual involvements: there must be honesty. The other was that their own relationship must remain primary.'