Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life on the Other Side of Despair.
In an age of modern pessimism and inauthentic, insignificant existence, Jean-Paul Sartre clearly stands out amongst the masses as a leading intellectual, a bastion of hope in the twentieth century. Confronting anguish and despair, absurdity and freedom, nihilism and transcendence, "Sartre totalized the twentieth century... in the sense that he was responsive with theories to each of the great events he lived through" as Arthur C. Danto commented (Marowski and Matuz 371). As a philosopher, dramatist, novelist, essayist, biographer, short story writer, journalist, editor, scriptwriter, and autobiographer, his impact is simply undeniable. Between his expansive body of literary work and the philosophical ideas expressed within his words, Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the leading minds of recent times and perhaps the father of existentialism as we know it.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. Due to his father’s early death, he and his mother lived with his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer. As Sartre notes in his 1964 autobiography Les mots (The Words), Schweitzer was a professor of German and instilled in him a great passion for literature in his early years (Marowski and Matuz 371). Growing up as the only child in a household where the adults doted on him, historians explain that, "Sartre perceived hypocrisy in his middle-class environment as manifested in his family’s penchant for self-indulgence and role-playing" and he therefore "held anti-bourgeois sentiments throughout his life" (Marowski and Matuz 371).
While attending the Écôle Normale Supériuere in Paris, Sartre met fellow philosophy student Simone de Beauvoir and then formed what was to be a lifelong personal and intellectual relationship with her (Marowski and Matuz 371). Sartre was further educated at both the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the French Institute in Berlin. From 1929 until he was called into military service at the outbreak of World War II, Sartre taught philosophy at various lycées. He also spent this time period deeply studying the works of German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl and working on writing of his own (Marowski and Matuz 371).
During World War II, Sartre served in the French Army. For nine months ranging from 1940 to 1941, he was held captive after being taken prisoner by the Germans. Sartre’s experiences during this time spent with fellow inmates deeply impacted him and his subsequent writing reflected an increased awareness of both history and politics (Marowski and Matuz 371). Following his release, he taught in Neuilly, France and later in Paris as well; however, he was also quite active in the French Resistance during this time ("Jean-Paul Sartre"). It was during this time period that Sartre composed his major philosophical opus, Being and Nothingness.
In 1945, Sartre quit teaching and co-founded Les temps moderns (of which he became editor-in-chief), a leftist political magazine and literary review. After 1947, Sartre was also active as an independent Socialist. During the so-called Cold War years, he was critical of both the USSR and the United States; later on, he did support Soviet positions but still was frequently critical of Soviet policies ("Jean-Paul Sartre").
In the 1950s and 1960s, Sartre devoted his energies to world affairs, participating in political demonstrations and espousing Marxist solutions to social problems (Marowski and Matuz 371). His fusing of his own existentialist beliefs with Marxist tenets attempted to provide a new approach to historical analysis. With his 1960 Critique de la raison dialectique, Volume I: Théorie des ensembles practiques (Critique of Dialectical Reason: Theory of Practical Ensembles), Sartre condemns capitalism and Western democratic institutions, calling for "a synthesis of personal freedom and moral duty within a neo-Marxian context in order to create the foundation for social revolution" (Marowski and Matuz 371).
Even in the 1970s, Sartre continued his active intellectual career. He helped found the left-wing daily publication Liberation and wrote a biography of Gustave Flaubert, amongst other things. He continued his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir and was known to frequent a local café with her "every Sunday, chain-smoking, drinking scotch, and discussing the state of things" as a resident of his local area remarked at his funeral ("Sartre Cortege..."). At the age of seventy-four, Sartre died in the Parisian Broussais-Hospital on April 15, 1980.
During Jean-Paul Sartre’s early philosophical work, it is quite evident just how influential Edmund Husserl and the conceptuality of phenomenology was upon his philosophical ideologies. Husserl’s work supported the idea of phenomenology, or the science of the conscious mind that attempts to understand how our minds make meanings (Turnbull 151). This time period, Sartre’s early philosophy, saw the publication of four philosophical works: L’Imagination (1936, Imagination: A Psychological Critique); La Transcendance de l’ego (1936, The Transcendance of the Ego); Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (139, Sketch for a Theory of Emotions); and L’Imaginaire, psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (1940, The Psychology of the Imagination). L’Imagination is essentially a history of the theories of imagination up to the theory of Edmund Husserl; the remaining three titles, then, comprise the major early philosophical works (Howells 475).
La Transcendance de l’ego is fitting with Sartre’s fundamental existentialist tenet that existence precedes essence; it is, indeed, hostile to any kind of essentialism of the self (Howells 474). Where Husserl believed the ego to be transcendental, an inner core of being, a source of one’s actions, emotions and character, Sartre disagrees. In La Transcendance de l’ego, Sartre argues against Husserl that the ego is not transcendental but rather transcendent; as author Christina Howells notes, it is "rather a construct, a product of my self-image and my image in the eyes of other, of my past behaviors and feelings" (474). Maintaining that consciousness is not essentially first-person but impersonal, as well as being characterized by intentionality—consciousness is, then, always directed at something other than itself. As Howells explains, "in this context Sartre positions himself in relation to the Kantian ‘unity of apperception’, arguing that although the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all of my representations, it does not always do so, at least explicitly" (474). According to Sartre, one may turn one’s attention, at any moment, away from the task at hand and direct it towards oneself as an agent; however, this reflexivity is not a permanent feature of consciousness. In La Transcendance de l’ego, Sartre wholly argues against consciousness identifying with self-hood (Howells 475).
In Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, Sartre yet again shows us that existence precedes essence by examining human emotions which, he says, cannot be described in essentialist terms. According to Sartre, emotions are chosen as opposed to being caused. One’s emotions are, then, a ‘magical’ attempt to transform reality by altering what one has the ability to alter (one’s own feelings) instead of trying to change what is obviously far less easily malleable, the outside world (Howells 475). An example of such a transformation of reality using emotions is evident in a situation where one is facing grave danger, such as being attacked. If one faints from fear, the danger and the attacker are still present, but one is no longer conscious of them. Also, it is very important to note that Sartre claims that emotion is not sustainable continuously throughout time; instead, emotion is always subject to fluctuations of intensity and may even, at times, be replaced by alternate feelings (Howells 475). For example, there is no "essence of love" which is a static, continuous emotional state. Instead, Howells uses Sartre’s theory to say love is:
an amalgam of affection, desire, passion, as well as, perhaps, jealousy, resentment, and even occasionally hatred; love is not the permanent, compelling state we may like to imagine: it is the product of a decision and a commitment. (475)
The last major philosophical work that Sartre produced in these early years was his L’Imaginaire, psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, a phenomenological psychology exploration of the imagination. In this 1940 work, Sartre takes the basics of Husserl’s theory of imagination and further develops them to show how phenomenological psychology works in practice (Howells 475). One must remember, though, that phenomenological psychology is quite different from traditional empirical psychology. Whereas traditional empirical psychology is based on a positivist methodology, relying on an accumulation of examples for evidence, scholars explain that phenomenological psychology
Operates through a particular type of introspection or intuition in which the phenomenologist examines a single example, or series of examples, of the phenomenon to be analyzed (here imagination) and deduces from the example the general principles and features of the phenomenon. (Howells 475)
Using this method, in L’Imaginaire, psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, Sartre discusses the concept of the ‘poverty’ of the image; in other words, the image carries with it a certain intrinsic poverty because one can never see any more in it than one has already put there. However, on the other side of the coin, Sartre describes that the image also intrinsically carries with it profound freedom. That is to say, in imagination one is not constrained as one is constrained in perception by the material world surrounding oneself (Howells 475). The grand truth in all of this, Sartre contends, is that imagination is not merely image formation; indeed, it is constitutive of the freedom of consciousness—a fundamental component in existentialist philosophy. Furthermore, without imagination, Sartre explains that we would be stuck in the ‘real’, trapped within our immediate environment and circumstances, unable to escape from the present moment. Imagination, then, permits us to step back and view the world, to distance ourselves from it and in turn, to totalize it and see it as a world with order and pattern (Howells 475).
In addition to the aforementioned philosophical works during the early phase of his intellectual career, Sartre also produced La Nausée (Nausea) in 1938, a novel exploring the nature of necessity and contingency in life. In La Nausée, Sartre presents us with the diaries of Roquentin, an existentialist hero. As writer Hayden Carruth explains, "Roquentin is a man living at an extraordinary pitch... offer[ing] many shrewd perceptions of life in our world that we appropriate, as parts of cultural equipment, in defining our own attitudes" (xi). Throughout his self-doubt and metaphysical anguish, Roquentin deals with his crisis of despair, finding that reality reduced to pure existence is both fearsome and disgusting. As Carruth summarizes,
The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning—this is its self-defining cause—and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea. (xi)
Ultimately, Sartre shows us through the character of Roquentin that we all have a responsibility to use our freedom and make our lives meaningful; however, due to the fact that free choice inevitably harms others, sentiments of guilt and remorse will always pervade one’s existence (Turnbull 159). La Nausée can be considered not only a predecessor to but also a rather embryonic form of Sartre’s subsequent philosophical opus, L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), published five years later in 1943.
Although written fairly early in his career, in 1943, L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) is overwhelmingly considered to be Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical masterpiece. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology takes effect precisely as the title states, an exploration of existence in a manner that takes a phenomenological approach to metaphysics. With Being and Nothingness, Sartre has essentially given us a primer for existentialism.
By combining technical philosophical terminology and specific, fixed scenarios that occur in human life, Sartre systematically—and thoroughly—examines the "en-soi" or "being-in-itself", the world of things, and the "pour-soi" or "being-for-itself", the world of human consciousness (Marowski and Matuz 372). "Being-in-itself" is a fixed, complete, wholly given, absolutely contingent state with no reason for its being. Being-in-itself refers roughly to the inert world of objects and things. "Being-for-itself", on the other hand, is an incomplete, fluid, indeterminate state and corresponds to the world of human consciousness. Sartre very clearly distinguishes between these two entities of being and explains that human existence is characterized by nothingness, the capacity to negate and rebel ("Jean-Paul Sartre"). "Being-for-itself", then, is dependent upon "being-in-itself" for its origin; "being-for-itself" is derived when one undergoes "an act of nihilation, for ‘being-for-itself’ is a nothingness in the heart of being" ("Being and Nothingness" 2270).
While Sartre does continually illustrate the absurdity of existence, in Being and Nothingness he urges us to challenge this absurdity through our freedom, which is then naturally both our condemnation and our liberation (Crosby 3). Sartre instructs us that we are to invent meanings for our lives through sheer acts of freedom, creating those meanings out of nothing, almost as the traditional western God would do. Indeed, as scholars have surmised from Sartre’s work,
Freedom is the nature of man. In anxiety, man becomes aware of his freedom, knows himself responsible for his own being by commitment, seeks the impossible reunion with "being-in-itself", and in despair knows himself forever at odds with the "others" who by their glances can threaten a man, turning him into a mere object. ("Being and Nothingness" 2270)
This sense of freedom is usually, in practice, much easier to deny than employ. Many people see the range of possibilities which freedom opens up as quite daunting and therefore flee from freedom in what Sartre refers to as "bad faith" (Howells 476). Ideally, people desire only the positive facets of freedom, such as a lack of constraints and free choice, along with the comfort and security of a static nature or fixed character. However, such concepts are highly incompatible and one’s desire to combine them is what Sartre calls "a useless passion" (Howells 476).
Throughout all of Being and Nothingness, which even Sartre later considered to be overly simplistic, freedom is secured against a background of constraints. These limitations arise from the constraints of the modern world, from other people, from our own bodily existence, and even from our fear of freedom in and of itself (Howells 476). As Being and Nothingness depicts through Sartre’s scenarios accompanying the technical statement of philosophy, freedom is always within and starting from situation. As his later writings increasingly reflect this, Sartre continues to show how the determinants and conditional power of situation relate to freedom (Howells 476).
The decade surrounding the publication of Being and Nothingness, the 1940s, clearly was the most prolific time period in Sartre’s literary production. The trilogy of novels known as Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) was published from 1945 to 1949 and included The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and Troubled Sleep. Les Chemins de la liberté portrays the ambivalence of a group of intellectuals in wartime Paris, caught between hiding their freedom from themselves and convincing themselves that it is their ultimate goal (Howells 476). Sartre also wrote several plays during this time period that were very well-received: Les Mouches (1943, The Flies), Huis Clos (1944, In Camera), and Les Mains Sales (1948, Dirty Hands or Crime Passionel).
It was not until 1960 that Sartre published another major philosophical work; which was, of course, his politically charged Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason). In this work, Sartre’s emphasis shows a shift from existentialist freedom and subjectivity to Marxist social determinism ("Jean-Paul Sartre"). In Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre attempts to reconcile existentialism and Marxism by reawakening Marxism’s awareness of subjectivity and bringing existentialism into a more material, historical context (Howells 477). In doing so, Sartre modifies his position on the extent of human freedom, as historian Christina Howells summarizes, " we are free agents, but agents who are profoundly and inescapably situated in specific social and material conditions" (477). Basically, material conditions are our environment within which we can exercise our freedom; they cannot causally determine our behavior, but they can prescribe our range of possibilities and thereby limit what we can actually accomplish, in practice, with our freedom. Thus, in contrast from his stance twenty years prior, Sartre is "as concerned with the restrictions imposed on freedom by the material world as he is with human liberty itself" (Howells 477).
Sartre’s two remaining major works were quite reflective of his preoccupation with the absolute and yet circumscribed nature of human freedom. In 1963, he published Les Mots (Words), a "brief and finely wrought masterpiece" that served as his autobiography (Howells 477). In 1972, L’Idiot de la famille (The Idiot of the Family), Sartre’s biography of French writer Gustave Flaubert, was published. In this account of Flaubert’s life, Sartre employs a variety of disciplines—existentialism, phenomenology, Marxist theory and method, psychoanalysis, sociology, history of literature, aesthetics, and anthropology—in an attempt to answer the question "What can one know of a man, today?" (Howells 477). Both Les Mots and L’Idiot de la famille portray the truth that while there is little space between destiny and choice, some space does indeed exist and human freedom is therefore still relevant.
Two years before his death, Sartre told a radio interviewer that, "I always want to remain an appeal for living" ("Sartre Cortege..."). Though much of his work remains difficult and unpleasant to interpret for some, the tenets of existentialism and the philosophical truth overall which he illuminated truly classify him as one of the great thinkers and an appeal for living as well. Sartre’s confrontation with anguish and despair, through existentialism, is indeed a philosophy of our age and holds phenomenal significance, especially today. As Sartre himself said, "Life begins on the other side of despair" (Carruth xi). After contributing his brilliant mind to existentialism and the pursuit of human freedom, many physically honored him with their presence at his funeral after traveling halfway around the world. Why? "We came because he was a free man," commented the cemetery crowd ("Sartre Cortege"). Yes, a free man, indeed.
Works Cited
"Being and Nothingness." World Philosophy. Ed. Frank N. Magill. 5 vols. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1982.
Carruth, Hayden. Introduction. Nausea/The Wall and Other Stories. By Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: MJF Books, 1975. v-xiv.
Crosby, Donald A. "Nihilism." Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward Craig. 8 vols. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
Howells, Christina. "Sartre, Jean-Paul." Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward Craig. 8 vols. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
"Jean-Paul Sartre". Connect.net Home Page. 2000 Online. Internet. Available http://www.connect.net/ron/sartre.html 19 July 2000.
Marowski, Daniel G. and Roger Matuz, eds. "Jean-Paul (Charles Aymard) Sartre." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 52. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989.
"Sartre Cortege Plus Thousands End in Crush at the Cemetery." The Boston Globe April 1980. The Boston Globe Online. Internet. 19 July 2000.
Turnbull, Neil. Get a Grip on Philosophy. Essex, UK: Ivy Press/Time Life Books, 1998.