A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to the others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own … Whether he speaks up or hardly whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his ‘ideas’, but also with his obsessions, his secret history.

We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control.

In Being and Nothingness, he went on to say that the placid old ethical principles based on mere tolerance did not go far enough any more. ‘Tolerance’ failed to engage with the full extent of the demands others make on us. It is not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt. We must learn to give each other more than that. Now

Nothing stops us but our own free choosing.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’.

for Camus, we must decide whether to give up or keep going. If we keep going, it must be on the basis of accepting that there is no ultimate meaning to what we do.

Here she drew on her wartime reading of Hegel, who had analysed how rival consciousnesses wrestle for dominance, with one playing ‘master’ and the other ‘slave’. The master perceives everything from his own viewpoint, as is natural. But, bizarrely, so does the slave, who ties herself in knots trying to visualise the world from the master’s point of

Husserl’s philosophy became an exhausting but exciting discipline in which concentration and effort must constantly be renewed. To practise it, he wrote, ‘a new way of looking at things is necessary’ — a way that brings us back again and again to our project, so as ‘to see what stands before our eyes, to distinguish, to describe’. This was