SARTRE AND ABNORMALITY
GARY C. MOORE |
Gary.C.Moore.
3rd of March 2003.
INTRODUCTION
Dear Jud and Sunthar,
I was going to make this much more elaborate,
overdoing it as usual, and had most of this
typed up Saturday. But the old lady said
Friday she had the intestinal flu and by
god she was right. So I'll just try to edit
it and complete the response to various letters,
especially Sunthars and Juds. One must remember
that in treating popular bestselling authors
like Tony Hillerman and Thomas Harris that
Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky was a popular
bestselling author too. Trying to convey
things clearly and simply, obviously too
simply to many highly sophisticated scholars,
is actually a philosophical commitment to
the proposition that all human beings have
a fundamental grasp of what is the truth
of the case as Ludwig Wittgenstein would
put it. And he would be the first to agree.
Mystery novels utterly fascinated him, and
Dostoyevskys greatest novels, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT,
THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED or THE DEMONS, and,
most of all, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, all
were primarily murder mysteries revolving
around not only how the murderer will be
caught or who the murderer is but, even more
so, why there was a murder in the first place
as if murder is a fundamental act that basically
reveals, at least in one fashion, what human
nature is and, this is certainly true of
Dostoyevsky, Harris, and Hillerman, how all
human beings have something in common nature
with the murderer.
Ludwig Wittgenstein him! self certainly contemplated
murdering real people though just in fantasy
. . . or maybe he just never was caught?
And one must remember he was a highly trained
and terribly experienced killer. Neither
Sartre nor Heidegger nor even Dostoyevsky
(?) looked a man straight in the eye and
killed them, but Wittgenstein did numerous
times. And one must always remember a successful
murderer, in the criminal sense of the term,
is not even suspected much less caught. And
one must remember especially in THE BROTHERS
KARAMAZOV motives and passions for murder
are so amply spread around that even the
innocent begin to wonder if they really did
it. And remember the prosecutors interrogation
of Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov. The prosecutor
knows he cannot prove Raskolnikov committed
the murders, so the only way he can catch
him is to demonstrate to Raskolnikov he thoroughly
understands his thinking and motives so that
Raskolnikov can no longer think of himself
as unique and a superman. That polite discussion
between equals was a great demonstration
of Sartres understanding of the dialectic.
The facts are there. In fact, that is just
the problem they are just there, lying there,
not making any connections all of their own.
They are just this and this and this and
this . . . . just like in daily, trivial,
dreary everyday reality. A human being has
got to come along and connect them, i. e.,
incorporate them into their universe to give
them meaning which is always and only can
be human meaning.
Meaning and human being are synonymous. That
utterly destroys the absoluteness of meaning
--- it can no longer have anything to do
with God or reality as something outside
of human being --- but it does place absoluteness
in its proper and only place. God is always
in human being by contextual definition,
i. e., It is always the case. Human being
can never be in God.! The whole cannot be
in the part. I think I shall have to break
this letter into parts.
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