Read only if you are ready for some heavy dope!

Read this only and only if you have enough time and you are ready for some more ponderables in your already complex life! 

 

I was re-reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Just thought I'd punch a few views here and give some people some food for thought.  

1. Choice represents a limit on freedom within an otherwise unbridled range of thoughts. Subsequently, humans seek to flee our anguish through action-oriented constructs such as escapes, visualizations or visions (dreams) designed to lead us toward some meaningful end, such as necessity, destiny, determinism (God), etc. Thus, in living our lives, we often become unconscious actors — Bourgeois, Feminist, Worker, Party Member, Frenchman, Canadian or American — each doing as we must to fulfill our chosen characters' destinies.

2. Many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. "The look" of the other found the person's own being. The consequence is conflict. In order to keep the persons own being the person must control the other but must control the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a profound manifestation of "bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the others freedom. The purpose of the participants is not to exist but to keep the other participant looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called love but is in fact nothing more than emotional alienation and a denial of freedom through conflict with the other. 

(I have read this book twice and it has helped me detach myself in a somewhat escapist way. Though against my school of thought, it has helped me gain perspective. It has helped me affirm my own views by discarding the philosophy. I would recommend it if you are ready for some serious reading and microspection.)