Gombrowicz

"Life is nothing more than a fact of consciousness," Witold Gombrowicz writes in his sweet book, "A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Mintues." 

By the time he gets to existentialism, all that you can see is what you see yourself seeing.

Husserl: there is the desk as it really is (noumena) and the desk as we see it (phenonmena). The only thing one can speak of is "the phenonmena," the desk we see, not the desk as it is.

Classical philosophy (Aristotle, Plato) was a philosophy of things "where even man was treated somewhat like a thing," while existentialism is supposed to be a "philosophy of being."

The history of philosophy is a history of man gradually putting himself more and more at the center of things, and trying to puzzle out what being in the center might mean.

Gombrowicz's book is constructed out of informal lectures to his wife and his best friend, who were trying to take his mind away from the heart problems that would eventually kill him. It takes longer to read than it might have taken him to write it, as the reader might wish to read some of the passages more than once.