jadagul:

sigmaleph:

jadagul:

kurloz38:

annabellioncourt:

daddynietzsche:

throwback to that time in my existentialism class where the professor asked ‘who thinks hell is other people’ and half the class slowly and meekly put their hand up

then the prof was like ‘…i mean who originally said it’

there are some posts that sound utterly made up for the joke or for the notes, but this one I whole heartedly believe 

Sounds right to me…

That quote is amazing to me in that it’s quoted completely accurately and yet in a way that means something completely different from what it meant in context.

(Sartre was claiming that Hell was other people. He was not claiming that other people were hell.)

…I can’t actually tell what distinction you’re drawing there. Can you expand?

The line comes from No Exit, which is set in Hell. Spoilers for No Exit follow

In particular, three people who have been condemned to hell are trapped eternally in a room together. And at first they think they got off easy without any pitchforks or fiery lakes or anything. But over the course of the play they discover that they have been chosen very specifically to have neuroses and character flaws that interact with and torment each other.

Each one needs the approval of a second in an unstable RPS cycle so that any time one of them might be satisfied by a second, the third swoops in and ruins it.

And when they figure this out, one of the characters expresses his understanding, that hell isn’t physical torture. “Hell is just—other people.”

So the point isn’t that other people, generically, are hellish; it’s rather that you can build a hell out of other people.

But when I hear people quote it, it’s usually sort of an introvert-pride thing. “Other people are hell; you should spend time alone.” And that’s not the point at all. It’s a statement about how bad unhealthy relationships can be, not a statement about how all relationships are unhealthy!

See also Sartre’s own comment here:

“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.

Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences.

– Sartre, The Problem of Method

Albert Camus. Shouting is not an argument, denunciation and diffamation an act of treachery to the truth.

happy early valentines kids

“Chapi Chapo” (肖皮查波)

Where did all the people go? How often do you get an entire beach to yourself? My oh my, oo lala. What do you do when your world is a playground, open to all possibility? Why, you make your dreams come true of course! It’s just that sometimes your dreams are simple, like lounging around in a bathing suit while warm air breezes off the water and around your body. Simple isn’t always easy though. Example: Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing”, an artwork through which Rauschenberg completely erased one of de Kooning’s original drawings, framed it, and presented it as his own work. Simple? Yes. Easy? For no one. de Kooning liked his drawing; Rauschenberg burned through 15 erasers and one month to get the job done. The point here is that for security (and especially for security through freedom) sacrifices must be made. Sartre would say that freedom is necessary, that it is just another word for existence. But he would also agree that it is damning, carrying with it responsibilities for all the world. When Sartre gets into your head, playing on the beach feels less like a holiday and more like possibilities being consumed.

102*102cm

Price inquiry: camilla@island6.org

island6.org/chapichapo

Aries:“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.“ - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Taurus:“Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell.” - Jorge Luis Borges

Gemini: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..” - John Milton

Cancer:“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Leo: “I am still blazing in my golden hell.” - Sylvia Plath

Virgo: “There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

Libra: “I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.” - Arthur Rimbaud

Sagittarius: “And the hell is not the torture of pain! It is the torture of a joy.” - Clarice Lispector

Scorpio: “Hell is—other people!” - Jean-Paul Sartre

Capricorn:“Each of us bears his own Hell.” -Virgil

Aquarius: “Life to them was a rat’s hell—they could flee it only with each other.” - Julia Kristeva

Pisces:“Hell has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth without any limits.” - James Joyce

boykeats:

did you guys know that the robot genre of science fiction sprung up as a critique of the way in which industrialization reduced workers to taking up monotonous, unskilled factory jobs in order to earn profit, jobs which in turn alienated them from their own humanity? did you know that the theory of the alienation of the self under capitalistic mode of production is a core principle of marxism? did you know that robot itself comes from a czech playwright who, for a science fiction play, coined the word as a derivative of the czech term robota, meaning forced labor? did you know that the robot genre is rooted in anti-capitalist sentiment?

Well, yeah, amongst other things.

But then, robots are kind of my thing.

Although Marx’s theory of alienation, self v other, and sublimation of the other through labour is actually derived from Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, which is a theory of the interdependency of self-conscious beings, which he casts in a struggle for dominance that can never be resolved as each depends on and desires to obliterate the other. THIS IS A GROSS SIMPLIFICATION (and yes, it really is called that, I don’t know what to tell you) but the point is that trying to reduce a genre to any one philosophical idea is kind of a mistake, and relying on etymology can get you involved in a can of worms.

Like, the Nazis really liked Hegel, which is not to say that Hegel would have agreed with the Nazies - I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t, but he was kind of a radical writing in a time of heavy censorship and it’s kind of hard to say exactly what he was getting at half the time - but the robot genre is no more inherently Marxist than it is inherently Fascist. Can it be used to support that? Sure. There’s some very Marxist robot fiction out there. There’s also some really dodgy robot fiction too. And as long time readers will know, The first two Terminator movies are woven with existentialism and nigh-on quote Sartre in places.

I say this not to harsh on OP, but more because I’ve seen people react strongly and judgementally about robot fiction increasing over the last few years, projecting belief systems, prejudices, and philosophies onto the genre as a whole, and it’s… a problem.

Robot fiction is not inherently pro-enslavement and people are often unpacking the power structures of this world, rather than living out enslavement fantasies, when they write it.

Robot fiction isn’t fundamentally sexist just because a bunch of Hollywood types who make sexist things in every genre have made some creepy movies about robot women being exploited.

But nor is robot fiction inherently Marxist or existentialist or queer or about freedom of religion just because some robot fiction is about these things and the genre (like most science fiction) does lend it well towards exploration of the self and encounters with the other.

Genres aren’t about anything. They’re kinds into which stories can be fitted. STORIES are about many things, and despite what you’ve heard in writing class, they’re rarely about just one thing at a time, and different stories can be about completely opposed things.

“For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but - ” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However - ” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord. Wednesday as I stood speaking to Eddie Lovell, I felt my eye closing in a broad wink.

After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library - where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown; all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”