main German networks in theology and philosophy, as pupil of Windelband at
Strasbourg and of Harnack, Simmel, Paulsen, and Stumpf at Berlin. Like his
younger cousin, Schweitzer was a hybrid across fields, combining academic schol-
arship with eminence as a musician and as a medical missionary.- “There were those idiots who came to tell you about will-power and the struggle
for life. Hadn’t they ever seen a beast of a tree? This plane-tree with its scaling
bark, this half-rotten oak, they wanted me to take them for rugged youthful
endeavour surging towards the sky... Impossible to see things that way. Weak-
nesses, frailties, yes. The trees floated. Gushing towards the sky? Or rather a
collapse; at any instant I expected to see the tree-trunks shrivel like weary wands,
crumple up, fall on the ground in a soft, folded, black heap. They did not want to
exist, only they could not help themselves... For every existing thing is born
without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance” (Sartre, [1938]
1964: 133). - The balance between unbelief and religion comes off best in Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot, a popular production in 1956 when existentialism was dying. Beckett, who
came from the old anglophone émigré circle of James Joyce, suppressed existen-
tialist political resonances in favor of religious nostalgia. Sartre’s protégé Genet
exploited Camus’s track in the other direction, making metaphysical rebellion a
primarily political theme in The Balcony (1958), The Blacks (1959), and The
Screens (1961), which plays up the Algerian rebellion, a subject that Camus had
avoided. - Camus ([1951] 1956: 22). He comments (p. 8) that the experience of the absurd
is “the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’ methodical doubt.” - Separation between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, too, came ultimately from divergent
interests in intellectual space. Both discovered the same cultural capital, Husserlian
phenomenology; in extracting opposite uses from it they were able to create
distinctive pathways for themselves. “One day, [Merleau-Ponty] discovered what
he had been looking for, intentionality... The same year, in Berlin, I also came
across intentionality in [Husserl’s] Ideen, but what I wanted from it was more or
less the opposite of what Merleau-Ponty had been looking for: I wanted it to rid
consciousness of all its slags, of all its ‘states’” (Sartre, quoted in Cohen-Solal,
1987: 343). Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, used intentionality as grounds for his own
conception of human spontaneity, a rival to what would become Sartre’s dialectic
of freedom through negation. Merleau-Ponty’s chief phenomenological works were
published in 1942 and 1945, very close to the appearance of Sartre’s masterwork
in 1943. Merleau-Ponty came into fully independent standing in the attention space
only after he ceased collaborating with Sartre in editing Les Temps Modernes, with
his Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) and Signs (1960).
15. Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas
- Dharmakirti describes a student learning philosophy by reading a text at his
teacher’s house, repeating it, and learning it by heart (Stcherbatski, [1930] 1962:
1026 •^ Notes to Pages 779–794