Jack’ Winning Words 10/25/07
“In love, one and one are one.” (Jean-Paul Sartre) Do the math and send this to someone who is very important in your life. I was going to save it until Valentine’s Day, but that’s too long to wait. J-P was a French existential philosopher. His writings make for interesting reading. ;-) Jack
FROM E.A. IN MICHIGAN: Very very true after 55 years of married life.
FROM P.O. IN MICHIGAN: I truly like this one. What a nice way to start the day!
FROM REV. J.S. IN MICHIGAN: Only a true idealist would buy into that one! When couples lit the wedding candles, I always had them leave their individual candles burning along with the mrriage candle because life is not so idyllic as the aboe person believes. Only in the essential I/Thou relationship do we begin to "approach" anything like that. I think it is a greater miracle that two "individuals" can work together as one as often as some couples do. That is to me a better view of what is really happening in this world.
FROM N.K. IN THE U.P.: HOW FITTING !!!! ( for yesterday) Kal and I cellebrated our 54 th. And describing our conditions- Kal says WE HAVE BECOME ONE
FROM B.S. NEAR ORLANDO: I think I told all my children to be very carefull when falling in love. It is such a strong force that it will hold you for a life time, and teamwork bonded by love is so strong a bond that real success is assured. and it will spill over into the lives of the children.
MORE FROM B.S.: Wow, what a bright gent, he must have been a real pleasure to know
FROM MOLINER, C.F.: Leave it to a Frenchman to have nothing but love on his mind.
FROM J.L. IN MICHIGAN: Glad you didn't wait until Valentine's Day. It's perfect for everyday too!
FROM GOOD DEBT JON: “If you want to read about love and marriage, you’ll have to buy two books.” Says Alan King.
Marriage can mean two becoming one, hopefully “of one purpose” not one brain. I have often seen couples that appear to be sharing one brain. In Good Debt, Bad Debt I wrote about marriage, mostly, from the financial perspective but I like what this early 20th century author had to say: “Marriage may make or mar your entire life. It can build you up or tear you down. It can ennoble every phase of your character, or it can make you a cringing failure. It is a perilous mistake that so few men or women receive any sort of correct instruction about the problems of married life.” So wrote Bernarr MacFadden in his 1937 book Be Married and Like It. You might say that marriage imitates a Dickens passage with equal chance of becoming the best of times or the worst of times. Marriage and personal finance require considerable research, forethought, and planning (p.210).
MORE FROM GOOD DEBT JON: My beautiful wife will graduate from Capital Law School just a month before our 25th anniversary. I am very proud of her.
FROM J.D. IN MINNESOTA: I THINK IT WAS SARTRE WHO SAID "I WOULD BECOME A CHRISTIAN IF I EVER MET ONE" OR SOMETHING TO THAT EFFECT. HE ALSO SAID, "LIFE IS MEANINGLESS AND DEATH IS THE FINAL ABSURDITY."
REPLY TO THIS FROM GOOD DEBT JON: I have heard the “never met a Christian quote before,” and my reply is: you cannot meet a finished one, only a work-in-progress, at least, according to the Bible. Perhaps Sartre meant reading his work [life]is worthless—though far more thought provoking than an IRS pamphlet. It would be instructive to all us occasional doubters to know if Sartre’s absurdity was final—or if he indeed made a whore of his soul that is paying the price of nihilism.
2 comments:
Jerry and I are still two individuals but deep down I believe our "sight" is one as in "I was blind but now I see". Over the years we've been discovering how much our ideals and goals and vision of what things should really be like is all matching together. And I attribute that to our being in a faith community where there is a goal to grow spiritually in loving God and our neighbors as ourselves.
Mr. Sartre was a brilliant man who wrote some of the best stuff that I ever read about Freedom, Responsibility, Death, and the other "givens" of existence! He was also a playwrite, amongst other things. I saw one of his plays, No Escape; which was about one's accountability for his/her responses in life and the relentless freedom through which one made them -- there is no escape from oneself. He was also an atheist. Kierkegaard also emphasized the existential philosophy, and yet, he was certainly not an atheist. It seems that the quote would be more expected from Kierkegaard, not Sartre. It's more difficult for me to see Sartre in the light of a sentimentalist.
The existential perspective for oneself requires intensely honest introspection, and it becomes easy to see our inauthentic nature and our frequent attempts to cover up our own self-deceptions with rationalizations and simple fantasies. Sartre might have been pointing to this when he refers to the Christian he hadn't met. I once heard a Gideon say, "I'd much rather see a good sermon than hear one anyday!" Behaving one's Christianity is obviously much different from talking about it.
Life just might be inherently meaningless, but it is also our nature to give meaning to an otherwise meaningless life and all its circumstances. Hence, Death is not an absurdity, but a meaningful phenomenon that allows for the ultimate meaning that eludes us here on Earth. As brilliant as Sartre was, he missed this --- and he would say I'm nuts.
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