A Guide To Philosophy In Six Hours And Fifteen Minutes (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
Literally, A 'Self-Help' Book Witold Gombrowicz’s ‘Cours de philosophie en six heures un quart” began as lectures to his wife and his good friend Dominique de Roux. Apparently, in a fit of depression, Gombrowicz once asked de Roux to get him a gun or some poison so that he could kill himself.De Roux, hoping to take his friend’s mind off the heart problems that were eventually to kill him, asked Gombrowicz for lessons in philosophy. According to Rita Gombrowicz, “Dominique understood full well that only philosophy, in this moment of physical decadence, had the power to mobilize his spirit.”It was thus conceived as a “self-help” book, in the most literal sense in which I have yet encountered that term.This first published English translation of A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes retains the anonymous footnotes and textual gaps of the original French publication.And this complete lack of reference to any sources, the entirely perambulatory nature of the lectures and the infuriating textual gaps makes this book an ordeal to read through without mounting frustration and occasional rants at the dearly departed.A Sampling: For us, the Cosmos must have a cause because [sentence incomplete] internally contradictory idea.***This will to live, in order to be seen as phenomenon, must assume [sentence incomplete].***Structuralism is a difficult thing to define because it originates in different regions of thought. It is both the fruit of mathematical thought, like the linguistic studies of Saussure, and [sentence incomplete] and in the sociology of Lévi-Strauss and even [the text breaks off here].The entire exercise is a loosely strung collection of very personal almost-notes on philosophy. I am pretty sure Rita and De Roux humored Witold through the whole 16 odd hours. One of the more interesting thoughts were the ones on Kant’s [sentence incomplete].It is also sometimes poised on great insight but incomplete, not just in execution, but also in scope. It needs a thoroughly well-read student of philosophy, especially one of [sentence incomplete], to have the erudition and experience to fill in the gaps left by Witold in his scribblings. I would recommend it only to [text indecipherable here].In good conscience, It has to be admitted that sometimes these ‘[incomplete]’s are fun too since they make you pause in the flow and think - maybe even beyond the original thoughts of the author, perhaps? This could be a valuable tool to use in teaching philosophy, almost Platonic in conception - to break the comfortable reading of philosophy and move towards the uncomfortable formulation of self-made thoughts - fill-in-the-blanks-philosophy, if I may I call it so.In any case, I would still say that the book is [text breaks off here].
This is the book you get when you get a very smart person who has read and thought a lot about philosophy and its consequences talks about it colloquially to a good friend. When you are talking to a friend, you talk in a way that can be understood - you don't care to be consistent, to formulate logical proofs, or to encompass everything about the subject. If you want that - go to a philosophy textbook. But you still probably won't come away with the understanding that you get from this book.Gombrowicz starts with Kant and works his way through Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Marx. His emphasis is on the relation of thinking/consciousness to our world. A very authorly viewpoint as he admits. He is very good on the break of the existentialists from classical philosophy when they formulated their viewpoint on the "choice" of the free individual in their actions. Rather then get bogged down in the reduction of forms and consciousness, the existentialists essentially threw that away and said, "Hey, it's what we actually do and choose that matters in this life!" Of course, there are inconsistencies with that as well, which Gombrowicz goes into.On his chapter on Marx (written in 1969), he writes "I imagine in 20 or 30 years they will discard Marxism." HA! I don't think anyone else then was that pessimistic - this was in the midst of the Vietnam and Cold wars! But he was right - Marxism as a political system is deader looking than Lenin in his tomb.
What do You think about A Guide To Philosophy In Six Hours And Fifteen Minutes (2004)?
Gombrowicz is one of my favorite writers, he was so smart and really had a way of teaching his ideas to the reader through his novels. This sounds good, It'd be nice to see his thoughts on philosophy as the bare bones philosophical ideals.
—Maria Carmo
a gallows humor tour of some of the West's major philosophers from Descartes to Sartre, Heidegger--the book is from 1969, the lectures delivered to Gombrowicz's wife Rita and a friend of theirs; the author was in the last year of his life--Rita and the friend thought engaging in a project would help WG with a depression from illness--and it did--a very funny and incisive book--WG is a Polish Pessimist (like Joseph Conrad)--subjecting the philosophers to a ruthless and gaily gallows questioning of their works via paring them down to fundamentals--the Giacometti skeletal figure inside the weighty garb of the Philosopher's New Clothes in a sense, while at the same being a display of love for the subject--
—david-baptiste
It's a walkthrough inside modern philosophy with a special attention over the insidiousness surrounding Marxism i.e. the "fifteen minutes". Beyond the relevant differences on topics, Gombrowicz identifies reduction as a common tendency of thought (which is something that is expressed in the very thinness of the book) along its development centered into consciousness throughout time (this seems to be the outcome of the occurrent blank spaces that occurred here and there when things went too much complex while death approached without rest).
—Renan Rogero
