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LIBERATION OF HUMANITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN FEMINIST CAUSES
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- THE LIBERATION OF WORKING PEOPLE IS VITAL
- JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
- Existentialism and the Priority of the Individual
LIBERATION OF HUMANITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN FEMINIST CAUSES1. WE MUST FIRST LIBERATE EVERYONE BEFORE ADDRESSING WOMEN’S OPPRESSION George Sand, Writer, in Dennis O’Brian, “George Sand and Feminism,” THE GEORGE SAND PAPERS, 1976, pp. 80-1 The people are hungry; let our leading lights allow us to think of providing bread for the people before thinking of building temples for them. Women cry out against slavery; let them wait till man is free, for slavery cannot engender liberty.
George Sand, Writer, in Naomi Schor, GEORGE SAND AND IDEALISM, 1993, p. 196 And still further, there is this for those strong in anatomy: there is only one sex. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing, that one hardly understands the mass of distinctions and of subtle reasons with which society is nourished concerning this subject. I have observed the infancy and development of my son and my daughter. My son was myself, therefore much more woman, than my daughter, who was an imperfect man.
George Sand, Writer, in Dennis O’Brian, “George Sand and Feminism,” THE GEORGE SAND PAPERS, 1976, pp. 76-7 I have often heard women of talent say that household work, and needlework particularly, were mind- numbing and insipid and part of the slavery to which our sex has been condemned. I have no taste for the theory of slavery, but I deny that these chores are its consequence. They have always seemed to me to have a natural, invincible attraction for us, for I have felt it in all periods of my life and they have sometimes calmed great agitations of the mind. Their influence is mind-numbing only for those who spurn them and who don’t know how to look for what can be found in everything--skillful work, well done.
George Sand, Writer, in Dennis O’Brian, “George Sand and Feminism,” THE GEORGE SAND PAPERS, 1976, pp. 78-9 Too proud of their recently acquired education, certain women have shown signs of personal ambition. The smug daydreams of modem philosophies have encouraged them, and these women have given sad proof of the powerlessness of their reasoning. It is much to be feared that vain attempts of this kind and these ill-founded claims will do much harm to what is today called the cause of women. If women were rightly guided and possessed of the same ideas, they would be better placed to complain of the rigidity of certain laws and the barbarism of certain prejudices. But let them enlarge their souls and elevate their minds before hoping to bend the iron shackles of custom. In vain do they gather in clubs, in vain do they engage in polemics, if the expression of their discontent proves that they are incapable of properly managing their affairs and of governing their affections.
1. LIBERATION OF COMMON WORKERS IS IMPORTANT Marylou Graham, “The Politics of George Sands Pastoral Novels,” in David A. Powell (Ed.), GEORGE SAND TODAY, 1989, p. 174 In representing peasant history, Sand both praises and protests on behalf of the laborer, valuing his skill and, at the same time, denouncing the injustice of his toil and unemployment. 2. OPPONENTS USE THE FEAR OF “COMMUNISM” TO SCARE US George Sand, Writer, in Joseph Barry, INFAMOUS WOMAN: THE LIFE OF GEORGE SAND, 1978, p. 288 The great fear--or pretext--of the aristocracy at this hour is communism. By the word “communism” they really mean the people, their needs, their hopes. Let us not be confused--the people are the people, communism is the calumniated, misunderstood future of the people. The ruse is useless: it is the people who upset and worry you. JEAN-PAUL SARTREPHILOSOPHER 1905 - 1980Life and Work Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris. He graduated from France’s most distinguished university, the Ecole Normale Supeneure, with a doctorate in philosophy in 1929. From then until the end of his life he was to write with an almost superhuman proliferation on subjects such as literature, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, at the same time earning a reputation as a writer of superb fiction and drama. In novels such as Nausea and plays such as The Flies and No Exit, Sartre found the freedom to create worlds and characters that reflected his philosophical judgments found in books such as Being and Nothingness and Existentialism and Human Emotions. In 1964, Sartre won the Nobel Prize for Literature but rejected it for political reasons.
“discovered” that his notion of responsibility was equally applicable to collective conditions. In short, he discovered Marxism. His odd, uncomfortable dialogue with the Marxists would last the rest of his life. Existentialism proceeds from certain assumptions about human nature and the world. Whereas classical philosophy saw human nature as fixed and universal, existentialism held that we make our “nature” through our choices and rejections. I may be a thief, but prior to my choice of stealing there was nothing essential about me that made me a thief. And if I choose to stop stealing, then I am no longer a thief. Similarly, Sartre, who lived in Nazi-occupied France and spent some time as a prisoner of war in Germany, could not forgive those Nazis who, after the war, claimed they were forced to commit atrocities by their superiors. To the SS guard who said “I was only following orders,” Sartre replied: “You chose to follow those orders. You could have said no.” This simple revelation was a philosophical revolution. It refuted psychoanalysis, sociology and history. All that mattered was my own conscience. I was condemned to make choices, and moreover, none of those choices could be proven to be the “right” one. Sarure coined the phrase “bad faith” to describe people who denied the reality of their freedom. The SS guard who says he was only following orders, the religious fanatic who claims God told her to kill people, even the revolutionary who kills for the sake of some distant utopian objective, all have committed a double crime: not only have they hurt other people, but they have denied that they willingly chose to do so. Naturally, this view of freedom as absolute and limitless met with considerable criticism from those who believed that our relationship to our external environment is more complicated. In particular, Marxists criticized Sartre’s thinking as something that could only come from a privileged, upper-class scholar who unwittingly applied his own situation of relative comfort and freedom to the rest of humanity, even though most of humanity had neither comfort nor freedom. Moreover, to take the lone individual as the starting point of a philosophy is to ignore the constant, dialectical shaping of one’s consciousness by the people and structures around him or her. The very fact that Satire claims it’s “wrong” to have bad faith implies, of course, that he has a sense of right and wrong; but this sense could only come from the world he inherited. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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