Sartre – Observations and Misunderstandings

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s being distracted from the current book I’m reading with another. I envy these fast readers who can sit down and complete a book in a few days. I’m more of a few weeks to a few months depending on the distractions around me type of person. There’s one book I’ve been reading for nearly a year now, I really enjoy reading it too so it’s not as simple as it may seem at first. I wonder if I’m a victim of how we process entertainment these days. I’m not sure I like calling myself a victim but more I’ve allowed myself to get caught up in the culture of short bitesize moments of pleasure.

I love a website called Aeon – which I’ve written a piece on here about before – that has some incredibly interesting articles. They’re not always a light read, not difficult but sometimes they require more effort than something on a website devoted to football. The articles on there are usually about three to four thousand words and despite knowing they’re interesting and that I can learn from them; a combination of the effort involved in the length and with the mental effort required slightly above minimum, I’ll not always bother. I prefer fiction books to non-fiction even if the topic in the non-fiction is potentially really interesting. Partly this is because I genuinely enjoy stories and the way meaning and message can evolve in this style.

The more I write about this I suspect I’m just lazy and ill disciplined. Aeon requires a bit more effort than football news and non-fiction potentially more than a story to follow and get into. I am leaping from one extreme to the other though, this is never a black and white argument unless I generalise which I seem to have been doing. This piece today was going to be another review and as seems to be a bit of a trend it was going to be a play. Dario Fo‘s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay to be precise. I’ve mentioned Dario Fo in a previous review of one of his plays, Accidental Death Of An Anarchist. He wrote political and social plays on the whole and this is a large part of what has drawn me to him. Take into consideration everything I have mentioned and you can see what leads me to a play. Something that’ll take me one to two hours to read followed by that rosy sense of accomplishment.

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay is the story of two couples caught up in different situations in which people push the boundaries of stealing. The prices in the supermarket increase once more so the women riot and take what they want, only paying a minimum compensation to the shop. “I paid half price for half my goods”. While the husbands get caught up in similar as the canteen at work increases the prices and the workers simply serve themselves. Unlike the wives though the husbands take a stance against this seeing it as stealing. What ensues is a comedy involving fake pregnancies, avoiding the law and hypocrisy, all as Fo dissects the moral arguments behind whether there can be such a thing as justifiable theft.

The varying levels of hidden meaning in stories is what draws me to fiction. We can analyse what the playwright or the author intended with certain bits. I may not have appreciated it much at school but it is something I certainly enjoy now. For example, despite not having the most flamboyant of styles, I enjoy Sartre’s fiction far more than his non-fiction, even though they’re both variants of his philosophical discourse. Maybe lazy and ill disciplined is in itself a lazy understanding of something which as I’ve already mentioned is not a black and white issue. Interpretation for me is everything, and can’t pay won’t pay, I suspect I know what I would do.

First surmountable challenge…my laptop isn’t working. It is fixable which is why it’s also surmountable but in the meantime this is being written using a phone. Expect lots of error and a lack of flow, it’s good to get the excuses in early. The question then is whether that is the kind of person I am, someone who’s a waster full of excuses or someone who never let’s an obstacle prevent him reaching his goal. There may be more but these are two ways of looking at this, presupposed narrative will play an enormous part of which one you think I am. What kind of character you think I have will have potentially already been decided before you’ve even finished reading the sentence. What though is it that leads us to seeing events through whichever prism we have been programmed to look through. Are we who we are because of previous events, similar things which we experienced in the past and played out a particular way, our subconscious now presupposes every event similar will play out the same way. Alternatively is how we view this something innate within us, dare I saw, where we born that way. Importantly too, ‘we have been programmed’ already implies an assumption of sorts and it would be worth mentioning how that sentence was toyed with before being settled upon.

John Paul Sartre may not be seen as the father of existentialism but it isn’t too far fetched to refer to him as it’s most famous and important proponent. He believed existence precedes essence, simply put we create our own character through our experiences and our actions, and are not born this way. To put it crudely would be to hurtle into the frame of nature versus nurture. What happened in my life then that led me to feel the need to qualify what I was about to say with an excuse on the off chance that what was to come would in some ways not be to the required standard. Have I failed too often in the past, do I lack confidence or self belief, have I learnt that over explaining everything is necessary, am I in some perverse way just too polite. On the other hand Scorpios don’t try anything unless they know they’re going to succeed, perhaps that was a way of preempting failure. The Chinese Ox just plods through and gets on with it, perhaps the laptop issue was nothing more than something to be plodded over. Really though who knows, ultimately which ever way you lean on this particular issue has most likely already been decided in your mind long before you started reading this.

Tag: Sartre

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay

An Existential Nature