Thoughts

 

Knowing people is what we do to them when they are not there.

(Adam Philips, On Flirtation, 1994, London: Faber and Faber, p. 82).

What is passivity? I am passive when I under-go a modification of which I am not the origin; that is, neither the source nor the creator. Thus my being supports a mode of being of which it is not the source. Yet in order for me to support, it is still necessary that I exist, and due to this fact my existence is always situated on the other side of passivity. ‘To support passively’, for example, is a conduct which I assume and which engages my liberty as much as to ‘reject resolutely’.

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 2003 [1943], p. 14)

One can conceive of a creation on condition that the created being recover itself, tear itself away from the creator in order to close in on itself immediately and assume its being; it is in this sense that a book exists against its author. But if the act of creation is to be continued indefinitely, if the created being is to be supported even in its inmost parts, if it does not have its own independence, if it is in itself only nothingness – then the creature is in no way distinguished from its creator; it is absorbed in him; we are dealing with a false transcendence, and the creator can not have even an illusion of getting out if his subjectivity.

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 2003 [1943], p. 14).

The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.

(Theodor Adorno, Education after Auschwitz, 1998 [1969])