My First (and Last) Meeting with the Sartre Society

Today I met with Aureliano Jose, the Central California Sartre Society’s (CCSS) representative, who would tell me what not to do, having claimed since January 25th that the Being & Nothingness Cam was the CCSS’s intellectual property and that I had to stop my project. I’ve gotten input from a wide variety of people (thanks, people!) and I have been assured that the CCSS has forgotten that this is the internet—not a private, delicate flower—and I’m not making a profit, so they can go pound sand.

I considered how to run the meeting while leaning back in my chair with my feet on my desk, clicking a pencil against my teeth. Okay, not really. I’ve never done that. Nobody does that. In any case,we could sit down to coffee on the newly spray-painted black lawn furniture in the yard, or we could sit down to coffee inside the gloomy, semi-torn up office, or I could have the B&NC Team over and we could have coffee. If he was one of those touchy, crazy philosophy bastards I would really need the B&NC Team around to distract him with quotes from Locke, Rousseau and Gettier. I decided, however, that it would be unkind to frighten a stranger with a small group of pale, sleepy-looking people in raspberry-colored berets presenting reasoned arguments about Justified True Belief. Too “Goodfellas.”

I offered him instead the opposite of what one would expect from a technology-dependent, intangible, concept-based project anchored by philosophers hired to make cognitive leaps between the factual world and the theories at the core of knowledge and being.* Or whatever. So it was tea on the lawn furniture.

Aureliano Jose (his mother loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez) was a slight, blonde man in his mid-thirties who I’m going to take a stab at being over-educated and unemployed. An unexpected twist to the meeting was that the sun had heated up the black lawn furniture to the point where it was sticky and intolerable to sit on, so our talk was short. Everything boiled down to “Are Not!” “Are Too!” or “Me first!’ or “I called dibs.’” The upshot was that everything is pointless, and there would be no resolution, but there wouldn't be any legal action. If only that was the answer to everything.

When he left he admonished me to not use Sartre as a plaything. I assured him that I don’t use dead guys as playthings.

* However enigmatic, this may be the only single sentence that will deal with the over-arching concept of the B&NC Project. Bookmark this page. I will, too.