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Letters
Letters
Existential Epistles • Responsibility Reviewed • Modern Moral Positions • Dancing Around Lyotard • Protesting About Protesting • Art & Morality Don’t Mix • Fun With Values
Existential Epistles
Dear Editor: With regard to the existentialism theme of Issue 145, Jean-Paul Sartre was famously asked how he could stand by his view that we are unconditionally free, in a world in which for example a French Resistance fighter might he forced to give up their secrets as a result of physical torture. Sartre’s view was that the torture victim was free to choose the precise moment at which they talk. This is consistent with the freedom that Sartrean existentialism is built on, while carrying no criticism of the theoretical victim of the abuse. At a time when belief in free will is under intense philosophical and scientific scrutiny, Sartre’s ground-breaking deployment of phenomenology as the guarantor of personal freedom in all its gory reality, remains compelling.
In Sartre’s analysis, as our conciousness looks at itself it become its own object, and at that instant we become a blank sheet of paper, rather like Patrick MacGoohan’s Prisoner tearing the mask off No1 to reveal the village’s overlord to be none other than Patrick MacGoohan himself – leading to the unavoidable question ‘Who am I then?’ and more to the point, ‘What do I do now?’
Paul Franklin
Dear Editor: I should like to congratulate Greg Artus for his article in the Existentialist theme of Issue 145.
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