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yourkiddingme3
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25 Aug 2016, 11:24 am

Thinking about the famous phrase, "l'enfer c'est les autres," roughly meaning "hell is the presence of others," I have begun to wonder whether Sartre was an Aspie.

Roughly summarizing Sartre's own explanation of what he meant by that quote: the biggest part of our self-definition comes from others, and, to the extent that our relations with others are poor/inauthentic/misunderstanding, those others create hell for us. (see exposition in French at http://www.philo5.com/Les%20philosophes ... Autres.htm )

I dunno about you, but that sounds awfully Aspie to me.



Fnord
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25 Aug 2016, 4:08 pm

yourkiddingme3 wrote:
Was Sartre an Aspie?
Nobody knows.

No one can possibly know for certain, either.

***

T minus 34 and counting.



yourkiddingme3
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25 Aug 2016, 4:47 pm

After your comment, which implied that others have asked this question, I googled Sartre and Asperger's, and found that Sartre believed that both he and Flaubert shared similar Aspie tendencies. Oh well, so my thought was not original.

So maybe I should rephrase the topic to ask, who else thinks "l'enfer c'est les autres?"



EzraS
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26 Aug 2016, 1:18 am

yourkiddingme3 wrote:
After your comment, which implied that others have asked this question, I googled Sartre and Asperger's, and found that Sartre believed that both he and Flaubert shared similar Aspie tendencies. Oh well, so my thought was not original.

So maybe I should rephrase the topic to ask, who else thinks "l'enfer c'est les autres?"


It's not that anyone has asked specifically if Sartre is autistic, but "is/was [insert name of famous person] autistic?" has been asked a lot. And so that kind of question has become a pet peeve of some folks. But others like to speculate about such things, so that type of question is not unwelcome to everyone here.