Weekend Assignment #68 – Favorite Things French (Bastille Day)

I like the fact that Jean Paul Sartre is cool again. And this relates to my take on Bastille Day. Follow me here.

 

I’ve read ‘em all. Jung. Camus. Wittgenstein. Springsteen. Derrida. Kierkegaard. Yogi Berra…

 

Sure, they all have their relevance in our collective effort to fashion order from chaos. But Sartre, the Frenchman born late of Bastille, had this one little chestnut that applies to everything from the Middle East to the grocery store checkout line:

 

Hell is other people.

 

Charles Schulz, he the renowned artist of Charlie Brown comics, weighed in once with a more drawn out take:

 

I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand.

 

Their basic premise, as I see it, is that other people spend far too much time trying to shape everyone else into a reflection of themselves. When taken to extremes, other people will imprison those who do not march to their orders, think their sanctioned thought or voice their prescribed words.

 

The Bastille was a French prison for those who did not agree with the declarations of the king. The French stormed the Bastille to liberate thought.

 

Eventually this would lead to the archetypical smokey Left Bank Cafe' and existentialism. (Not, as is often claimed, the hideout of totalitarian apologists, but more the ever ephemeral ground of freedom having nothing to deny. But I digress.)

 

Without Sartre I never would have found Szasz, who deconstructs the dangerously accepted notion of locking people up because their thoughts are deemed to be too different than those of a placid society.

 

The irony of all this is that I was swept into the shadows of society once for making this very argument to those with the power to imprison. And I would not be entering these words into this vehicle of communication to others had it not been for that.

 

There is no such thing as objectivity, only intimidation. Happy Bastille Day, Mr. Sartre.

 

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6962