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To: Bushbacker
Your critical terminology in dealing with Sartre---who won the Nobel Prize even though he refused it...is juvenile and crass.

Whether or not he won a Nobel Prize is immaterial - the Nobel Prize is often awarded to forgettable authors who accomplished little in real terms.

My terminology is "crass" and "juvenile" - I'd call it blunt and unpretentious, but to each his own.

Here's your hero Sartre's assessment of Camus:

Your combination of dreary conceit and vulnerability always discouraged people from telling you unvarnished truths… . Tell me, Camus, for what mysterious reasons may your works not be discussed without taking away humanity’s reasons for living? How serious you are, and yet, to use one of your old words, how frivolous! And suppose you are wrong? Suppose your book simply attested to your ignorance of philosophy? Suppose it consisted of hastily assembled and secondhand knowledge? … Are you so afraid of being challenged? … But I don’t dare advise you to consult Being and Nothingness. Reading it would seem needlessly arduous to you: you detest the difficulties of thought.

I see you have begun your rhetoric with your master's.

Camus' offense, like mine, was to disagree with the trite, faux-profonde pretensions of L'Etre - but, in Sartre's mind (like yours) anyone who called Sartre on his thought's derivativeness and failure to address fundamental issues rigorously must not have read or must be incapable of reading his magnum opus.

Anyone who fails to be impressed by Sartre's self-indulgent posing is simply unintelligent.

52 posted on 06/22/2005 10:03:28 AM PDT by wideawake (God bless our brave troops and their Commander-in-Chief)
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To: wideawake

Here's your hero Sartre's assessment of Camus

____He broke with Camus, so what..it was a family quarrel on the French left...and Sartre is not a hero of mine. Your tendency address the issues in these terms is evidence of intellectual immaturity.


56 posted on 06/22/2005 2:57:16 PM PDT by Bushbacker (f)
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