To start this chapter we have a response from the journalist Hippie and friend who uses the name Eternum1 on the web. He was a part of the founding of web logs as these journalists went to the hot spots of the world and kept in touch with each other. I think he sees where I am going with this book.
Dear Robert:
I agree with Sartre in that each being has complete freedom if he will only believe it and I agree with Camus on how the absurd man becomes a rebel. Sartre had de Beauvoir to keep him honest in his musings because most left wing sympathizers had yet to recognize women as the barometer of society's evolution. As a result Sartre was more of an anarchist in his existential writings while Camus remained a sympathizer to Marxist rebellion, he didn't quite link Engels statement "judge a society by the position of its women" to the rebellion of his time.
I understand your link to Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin? btw I followed up on Rubin's "student is nigger" with my own catchy title 'the lumpenproletariat and the revolutionary youth movement'... I know its a real page turner judging by the title.... but it was re-printed in all the new left magazines of the day and translated into French, German and Italian..... it was an analysis of why white middle class youth was dropping out into a sub-proletarian mode of existence... i.e.? the hippy movement..... I explained in more human terms than Rubin... how white middle class and bourgeois children linked the limits on their freedom to racial minorities and the poor, which kind of shook up the socialists of the day who thought labor unions were the radical institutions still..... the idea that lumpys or otherwise dclass citizens were the future great unwashed disturbed them more than the capitalists it appeared.
I agree that true freedom is the ability to accept or reject all things or as Sartre says psychologically in each one of us this amounts to trying to take the causes and motives as things. We try to confer permanence upon them. "We attempt to hide from ourselves that their nature and their weight depend each moment on the meaning which I give to them"; I find this statement very important, but not original since a similar thing was said by Nietzsche a hundred of years before, because it allows a different view of the things in the world. It reveals the potential of the thoughts. When everything depends on the meanings we give, then, we should think positively and we should give the meanings that we want, however unusual they are, not the ones we are expected to give and this would bring us closer to reaching our purposes.
How often have we seen our motives and causes co-opted and their meanings distorted into what you refer to hole (ass) istic babble. Too often. As we discussed in Babble on Babylon the separation of beings continues without the need for foreign tongues, our own language is used against us.
To the point where words like patriotism, love, freedom all become things not qualities.... but things we attach to like clothing labels.
Sartre makes an attempt to describe what freedom exactly is in Part 4, chapter 1 of his book Being and Nothingness. However, he says, he finds it difficult since describing something is looking for its essence. And "freedom has no essence"? "Freedom makes itself an act, and we ordinarily attain it across the act which it organizes with the causes, motives and ends which the act implies". That is to say that freedom is revealed by the act, we can experience the freedom only through act. It is not possible to describe freedom that is valid both for me and for the Other, thus no essence of freedom may be concluded. The freedom in one individual is different from the freedom of any other individual; there is nothing in common which can be named essence. Freedom is beyond essence since it is "the foundation of all essences".
So that is why I say freedom is an individual act but the combined acts of freedom compose rebellion and that is how rebels become existent? not that each finds a particular idealology but each exercises his freedom not to attach to the system or its ideaology. We know that Communism was never practiced by those who called us comrades... 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his need' ... possibly because the true anarchistic nature of freedom needs people sophisticated enough to implement socialist ideas.
Sartre often speaks of "bad faith" when we surrender our freedom to become soldiers for a cause.... to profess to "love anything" more than our responsibility to freedom is acting in "bad faith". And when you hand that freedom to a Presi
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