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"l'enfer, c'est les autres"
Hell is other people?

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"l'enfer, c'est les autres"

softtarget
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Posted 07/17/05 - 09:18 AM: Subject: "l'enfer, c'est les autres"	#1
Is hell other people? According to existentialist Sartre, man, as an autonomous individual, will experience the fullness of liberty and free choice, when separated from others. Consequently, hell is "other people," as famously stated in his one act play, No Exit. Now I can't deny the point that he is making. There is much to be said about the hell of others, as people often serve as mirror, reflecting each other's personal torment. Hell might very well be a place of miserable people, constantly making one another miserable. But I find this to be a bit extreme. I think that an identical expression of hell might be found in isolation. When the mind is confined to an environment devoid of feedback or interaction of any kind, an individual will find that they are not as free as they think. After all, what satisfaction can one have when they have no connections- as a social creature, only the biggest recluse yearns for complete isolation. Without some form of contact with other beings, we would be confined to a hell perhaps greater than that of other people. Edited by softtarget on 07/17/05 - 09:29 AM
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PhilW
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Posted 07/17/05 - 09:37 PM:	#2
Well I have to completely disagree with Satre. Freedom is meaningless if one has nothing to relate to--I think that you are right to say (as I think you are saying) that when someone is cut of socially they lose the primary thing that makes them free. But I don't believe a being in Hell is totally isolated--though he may want to be. A person in Hell wants to forget others, and his relationship and reliance on them--I remember CS Lewis quoting MacDonald as saying: "The one principle of hell is: I am my own."
"This is all I have known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love, that I believe, and whoever believes that is not mistaken." --Kierkegaard "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." --GK Chesterton

Lorixnt2
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Posted 07/18/05 - 01:40 AM:	#3
Yes, but remember also what Ines says besides "l'enfer c'est les autres" "Indeed I'm bad.I mean I need* for my life other people's pain. I need to be a torch, a torch inside other people's hearts. When I'm alone I die down"* Sartre never really escapes from necessity of relationship and connection but it's indeed other persons malevolent gaze making us know ourselves, revealing us the absolute extraneousness and the essential alienation of the human life. A life coinciding with nil as a possibility of annihilation of any fact and planning of any possible new situation. And you can equate it to liberty. The liberty of denying any limit or bareer exhibited by the world. Maybe now maieutic will say we have used many not alethic words. Et, naturellement, à la Sartre, je vais le mettre en pièces. J/K softarget. This is my actual gaze---> I'd like to hear your more in depth opinion about Sartre's limits. If you like it of course.
Fèstina lente

Cuthbert
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Posted 07/19/05 - 11:43 PM:	#4
When someone looks at me, I am a physical object in their world. The same happens when I look at someone else. When we look into each others' eyes, each is an object for the other. At the same time each is aware that the other is a person in his own right, able to perceive and to act. This recognition that my world contains objects that are persons in their own right, each of whom has his own world in which I am an object, is supposed to be profoundly disturbing. Maybe I've got it wrong, but I don't find any of this at all disturbing.

philosophy
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Posted 07/20/05 - 09:05 PM:	#5
It strikes me that the exact opposite is true: hell is being alone. We are social creatures, as Aristotle notes. For us to be alone would be like an ant living without his colony – his life would be meaningless, lacking its purpose and a means by which to find self-expression. Why are children scared to walk in the woods alone at night, even in the most familiar of woods – and yet when a parent or friend joins them their fear vanishes? Hell is to be left to your own resources; hell is to be entirely alone.
There is no more pleasant food for the soul than the knowledge of truth. - Lactantius

select
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Posted 07/20/05 - 10:23 PM:	#6
As I understand it, Sartre is using his own phenomenological method to come to this conclusion, which is really in the final analysis just another expression of his introversion. As an introvert, I can identify with it to some extent. I feel more empowered and in control when I'm away from other people. But of course, as philosophy points out, no one would want to be entirely alone——unless one were a beast or a God
"To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add sheep was a tautology." Mark Twain

softtarget
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Posted 07/20/05 - 11:14 PM:	#7
Sometimes when I imagine the greatest hells of human misery here in the living world, I can see that much of it is undoubtedly at the hands of other peole. Other people can create an almost literal hell on earth. Picture the vastness of human misery. Look at the Nazi's, or Pol Pot's killing fields. Or even small miseries we face every day; which, often we blame on others while sufering alone. But being alone while with others, that is the hell I am talking about. Internal isolation that causes a misery which is so often expressed in subtle loathing and loneliness; but also expressed in the hatred of others. I'd like to hear your more in depth opinion about Sartre's limits. If you like it of course. In a way, I am saying exactly what Sartre is saying, as you pointed out in your post. He leaves an alternative, which is a hell unto itself. Perhaps what he really meant is Hell is life. But even then, we are talking in the extreme; because while hell might be in others, as well as isolation, I think most of us will attest that hells come and go.
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Lorixnt2
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Posted 07/21/05 - 10:03 PM:	#8
softtarget wrote: In a way, I am saying exactly what Sartre is saying, as you pointed out in your post. He leaves an alternative, which is a hell unto itself. Perhaps what he really meant is Hell is life. But even then, we are talking in the extreme; because while hell might be in others, as well as isolation, I think most of us will attest that hells come and go. I agree. Satre's time is Auschwitz time. Let me add with Sartre a common attitude of occidental philosophy is maybe reversed to its extreme consequences. The conception that a thought - often naming itself "rational" - can penetrate and investigate a reality in an exhaustive way. But probably, after Auschwitz, the course we should go through send us back to antilogiai and dussoi logoi in trying to understand how we can be pardise and hell, how we can build paradises and hells.
Fèstina lente

iamtheoverman
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Posted 07/22/05 - 12:06 PM:	#9
i dont think the point of No Exit was to elaborate what hell is, but merely to explore Sartre's philosophical concepts of The Other, The Look of the Other, forlorness, anguish, and despair, in a way that is more easily interpreted than philosophical text. Sartre was a good playwright, novelist, and dramatist, i think you guys are missing the point of what he was trying to say and concentrating on a possible metaphysical hellish atmosphere that may await you, and questioning if it really may be so. Talk about objectification in the Look of the Other ( this case the Other is Sartre as the writer of No Exit )
Nietzsche gives me the hots. -z00mz Sometimes Truth is Stranger than Fiction! - Bad Religion I saw my boots and my hair as reflected in the mirror; revealed a streetkid named desire... -Bad Religion

Utter Cunt
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Posted 08/01/05 - 10:04 PM: Subject: quoting the quote-meister	#10
select wrote: ....unless one were a beast or a God leaving out the third case - one must be both: a philosopher.
The sum of the entire history of civilization is thus: Man invented God in order not to kill himself.

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