№ 773. While We Were Sleeping

2. The Broken World and the Functional Person

In line with his preference for concrete philosophy that speaks in ordinary language, Marcel begins many of his philosophical essays with an observation about life. One of his central observations about life and experience, from which he is able to derive many of the philosophical distinctions that follow, is that we live in a “broken world.” A world in which “ontological exigence”—if it is acknowledged at all—is silenced by an unconscious relativism or by a monism that discounts the personal, “ignores the tragic and denies the transcendent” (Marcel 1995, p. 15). The characterization of the world as broken does not necessarily imply that there was a time when the world was intact. It would be more correct to emphasize that the world we live in is essentially broken, broken in essence, in addition to having been further fractured by events in history. The observation is intended to point out that we find ourselves hic et nunc in a world that is broken. This situation is characterized by a refusal (or inability) to reflect, a refusal to imagine and a denial of the transcendent (Marcel 1951a, pp. 36–37). Although many things contribute to the “brokenness” of the world, the hallmark of its modern manifestation is “the misplacement of the idea of function” (Marcel 1995, p. 11).

“I should like to start,” Marcel says, “with a sort of global and intuitive characterization of the man in whom the sense of the ontological—the sense of being, is lacking, or, to speak more correctly, the man who has lost awareness of this sense” (Marcel 1995, p. 9). This person, the one who has lost awareness of the sense of the ontological, the one whose capacity to wonder has atrophied to the extent of becoming a vestigial trait, is an example of the influence of the misapplication of the idea of function. 

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№ 750. Bill Watterson's Speech

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED

Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990

№ 748. The Ghost Month, Love & Other Monsters

Pacita Abad's 

MY LIFE AND YOUR LIFE, 2002

№ 743.Happy Habits

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№ 702. Six Feet Under

The pandemic and its disruptions are finally beginning to recede in the United States, but the vast scale of collective loss the country endured — and that some areas continue to endure — is hard to fathom. “Dying and grieving and losing and surviving are all experiences that we as a culture, as a people, as humanity, are grappling with in such an unrelenting way right now,” Robin said. “It feels like that aspect of the show, while always relevant, has become even more universally so.”

We have been shaken by the presence of death, but life still beckons to us, asking us to find a way to carry on. Ball sees the show as communicating a simple but profound message that remains as relevant now as ever. “The thing is, we die!” he said. “So deal with it, and live your life.”

“Don’t hold yourself back from fear,” he added. “Because you’re going to die anyway.”

№ 681. The Magicians of Thinking

When I was 20 a professor of philosophical logic informed me that “philosophy teaches you how to think.” Of course, I thought that was ridiculous; taking her class was proof enough that I already knew how to think. But she was right. Philosophy, the kind that actually matters, teaches us how to think about the world in genuinely novel ways, to see it with fresh eyes, especially at moments when it is tempting to either look away or assume that everything has already been seen clearly.

 

Listen Notes

 

“Time of the Magicians,” Wolfram Eilenberger’s group biography, smoothly translated by Shaun Whiteside, focuses on a decade of crisis in Europe — the interwar period between 1919 and 1929 — and argues compellingly that a small cadre of thinkers responded to their turbulent times by reinventing philosophy, an intellectual task that effectively conjured a new world. Philosophy is born not of leisure (as Thomas Hobbes once suggested) but of struggle — a spontaneous generation in the midst of personal, political, economic and natural disaster. When it arises, according to Eilenberger, it does so suddenly, originally — as if by magic.

Eilenberger explains that philosophers in 1920 faced a common task: to “draw up a plan for one’s own life and generation, which moves beyond the determining ‘structure’ of ‘fate and character’ … to break away from the old frameworks (family, religion, nation, capitalism) … finding a model of existence that made it possible to process the intensity of the experience of war, transferring it to the realm of thought and everyday existence.”

№ 538. Journey through the Looking Glass

 

Modernist Controversy

Writing in his (Albert Camus) notebook in 1942, he observed: “Calypso offers Ulysses a choice between immortality and the land of his birth. He rejects immortality. Therein lies perhaps the whole meaning of the Odyssey.” In Camus’ reading, Homer teaches us to embrace a life of limits, a life in which we are not yearning for either immortality or the afterlife. Our love for this earth is necessarily brief, and death is the price of admission, the final limit. Camus could not believe in God because to do so, as he put it in “Summer in Algiers,” is to “sin against life” by hoping for another, thus “evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.”

 

№ 475. Lost in Translation

The Stranger

For the modern American reader, few lines in French literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Nitty-gritty tense issues aside, the first sentence of “The Stranger” is so elementary that even a schoolboy with a base knowledge of French could adequately translate it. So why do the pros keep getting it wrong?