Pictured above: Jean Paul Sartre (existentialism), “Saint Max” Stirner (egoism/young Hegelian), Marcus Aurelius (stoicism)

I LOVE INDIVIDUALISM I LOVE ABSTRACTIONISM troll

  • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    2 months ago

    I’m not sure what “radical” philosophers even means in this context. Marcus Aurelius was the literal emperor of the Roman Empire, writing in his diary about Stoicism, a philosophy co-opted by the Roman ruling class to basically say “don’t revolt just be content with your lot you filthy proles,” so I don’t know how “radical” you can expect him to be. Also the Sartre one seems unfair, is the meme supposed to be about living in Bad Faith? Because that’s a very valid critique of like the impossibility of living “normally” in this liberal capitalistic hellscape where you have to ignore so much suffering and horrors just to get on with daily life, no? How we lie to ourselves about our true freedom and ability of action, how if we were to overcome our Bad Faith together we would realise we have the power and ability to change our world for the better through collective action. His entire philosophical project in his later years was about trying to unify his understanding of existential individualism with Marxist collective struggle and action.

    • QueerCommie [she/her, fae/faer]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      A lot of people think they really “go against the grain” because they’re stoics. Seneca was exiled and later killed himself after being accused of plotting political assassination. Epictetus was a slave and “preached to the women and poors.” The virtues are virtues good leftists should have or something.

      For Sartre, I’m riffing on existential comics. I haven’t personally read him, but according to that guy, De Bouviour kept him good and Marxist but later on he was less so. He was also very mainstream in Fr*nce.

      • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        19·
        2 months ago

        I think a lot of the “original” Stoics were fine, yeah, but as a philosophy it was very easy for those in power to co-opt and codify, and it served those purposes perfectly. It’s not really revolutionary in any sense.

        Also I like Existential Comics but it’s definitely playing up a caricature of Sartre more than engaging with his actual work. Also I think you have it entirely opposite here. I really like de Beauvoir but Sartre was absolutely far more Marxist and engaged in actual Marxist political practice than de Beauvoir; if anything, he was pulling her more to the left. He was very outspoken in his support of the independence struggle of Algeria, and marched with the students during 1968. He decryed Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” against Stalin and said that every French person was responsible for the horrible crimes commited in places like Vietnam and Algeria. He met with Castro, and called Che the “most complete human of the twentieth century.” He was deeply engaged in actual Marxist theory, and he became more Marxist as he grew older, not less. His early existential works like Being and Nothingness are mostly centred on the individual, whilst his later works like Critique of Dialectical Reason explicitly reject his earlier work in favour of collective praxis. He was almost certainly a sex pest, but he was Fr*nch so not entirely surprising there.