Jean-Paul Sartre

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)

In addition to being one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre was also an essayist, novelist, playwright, and editor. His name has become synonymous with existentialism, a movement that exploded beyond the boundaries of the academy to enter virtually every area of Western culture. Sartre himself became as famous as the philosophy he taught, and at his death in 1980 almost fifty thousand people accompanied his casket to Paris's Montparnasse Cemetery.

Jean-Paul-Charles-Aymard Sartre was born in Paris in 1905, the only child of naval officer Jean-Baptiste Sartre and his wife Anne-Marie Schweitzer Sartre. Barely a year after his birth, his father died. Jean-Paul and his mother moved in with her parents. Sartre's maternal grandfather, a German-language teacher, had a study filled with books; this room fascinated the young Sartre. He taught himself to read, and by the age of eight he had read such French classics as Madame Bovary. While still a boy, his devotion to books overwhelmed all other devotions—including that to religion. From about the age of twelve, Sartre said that he was a confirmed atheist. He did exceptionally well in his studies, exhibiting a clear independence of mind. One of his teachers noted on his report card: "Excellent student: mind already lively, good at discussing questions, but needs to depend a little less on himself."

In 1924, Sartre enrolled at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. Over the next four years, he studied for the agrégation in philosophy (the highest degree except for the doctorate in the French system), but surprisingly he failed the written examination on his first attempt. He retook the examination a year later and placed first.

The person who took second in that 1929 examination was his study partner, Simone de Beauvoir. That same year Sartre suggested to her that they take "a two-year lease" on each other. Though neither believed in the bourgeois institution of marriage, and each had a variety of lovers, the two remained "companions" for life.

Over the next ten years, Sartre served briefly in the army, studied in Berlin, taught at a number of lycées, and began writing. Among his early publications were the philosophical novel Nausea (1938) and the collection of short stories The Wall (1939).

In 1939, Sartre was called up for active duty by the French army. Within the year, he was captured by the Germans. Released a few months later, he seemed to return to a quiet life of teaching and writing. But Sartre was secretly a member of the French resistance. He was never involved in the armed resistance but worked with the intellectual resistance group Socialism and Liberty. Even during the war, Sartre continued his writing, and in 1943 he published his most important philosophical text, Being and Nothingness. Three years later, Existentialism Is a Humanism, his most widely read philosophical work, was published.

Sartre and deBeauvoir.

After the war, Sartre retired from teaching and, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir, founded the influential journal Les Temps modernes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 but refused to accept it. Together with de Beauvoir, he spent the rest of his life writing and promoting revolutionary political causes. Frequently joining students or union workers in demonstrations, Sartre even served as president of the International War Crimes Tribunal, which condemned U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He was attracted to Marxist thought—though he frequently criticized the French Communist Party for its inadequacies. The discrepancies between the determinism of Marxist theory and Sartre's existentialist emphasis on radical freedom have been the subject of many books. (See the suggested readings.)

Throughout his life, Sartre preferred the pleasures of the café over the joys of the hearth. For years he and de Beauvoir were fixtures at La Coupole, a restaurant on the Left Bank of Paris frequented by artists. But eventually his health deteriorated, exacerbated by his frequent use of amphetamines, and he was forced to retire to his apartment. After an agonizingly slow decline, Sartre died in 1980.

BASIC THOUGHT

Like Heidegger before him, Sartre was fascinated with "being." According to Sartre, there are two categories of being: "being-in-itself" (étre en-soi) and "being-for-itself" (étre pour-soi). Being-in-itself is complete in itself, "solid," fixed, and totally given: "Uncreated, without reason for being, without connection with any other being, being-in-itself is superfluous for all eternity." Like Parmenides' One, being-in-itself simply is. This is the being of rocks and trees. This being-in-itself has no sufficient reason for being, no purpose or meaning—it is "absurd."

Being-for-itself, on the other hand, is incomplete and fluid and without a determined structure. Being-for-itself is the being of human consciousness that at every moment is freely choosing its future. This consciousness arises by virtue of its power of negation, based on freedom: "[Consciousness] constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility. For that reason it must arise in the world as a Not." Individual consciousness constitutes itself by freely rejecting all roles that others try to force upon it. It is precisely in the act of saying "No" to all attempts to make me into a being-in-itself that I create myself as a being-for-itself.

In creating myself, I do not choose what I will become on the basis of preexisting values. There are no eternal values, no givens for me to use. Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov had claimed, "If there is no God, all things are lawful." Sartre agreed and added that since there was no God, all things are, indeed, lawful. In fact, there is no possible justification for any choice I might make, since justification implies an appeal to given values. I am free to choose my values without any external justification.

Although this freedom is complete, it is not absolute. In the first place, as a free being, I encounter other free beings. My world is interrupted when the "other" gives me "the look." By looking at me, the other objectifies me, makes me a part of his or her world, part of his or her freedom: "Thus being-seen constitutes me as a being without defenses for a freedom which is not my freedom." But I can regain my freedom by looking back and by an act of will transforming the other into an object for me. (This world of people-objects led Sartre to exclaim, "Hell is other people.")

Second, I must acknowledge the "facticity" found in existence. I cannot change the fact that this tree is in front of me or that I cannot walk through it. But even here my freedom still prevails. I freely create the meaning of this tree as an object to climb or as a source of lumber or as a thing to be preserved or as a biological specimen. In creating these meanings, I create the world in which I live.

Some people are unwilling to face up to this radical freedom and turn their power of negation inward upon consciousness itself. In Being and Nothingness Sartre calls this negative turn "bad faith." To live in bad faith is to deny oneself as a being-for-itself in order to become a being-in-itself; it is to blame others or circumstances for what one has become. This mode of being is bad faith because it refuses to acknowledge that only the individual determines the meanings of externals. Furthermore, one always has alternatives (for example, no matter the circumstances, one could always commit suicide), and so one's choice is always free.

In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre expands on this freedom while defending the basic ideas of existentialism. He begins by discussing human artifacts, such as a book or a paper-cutter. An object like a paper-cutter begins as an essence, that is, as an "ensemble of both the production routines and the properties which enable it to be both produced and defined." One conceives of a paper-cutter (essentially) and how to make it and only then does one construct it. The essence of a paper-cutter precedes its existence. According to Sartre, theists believe that God does the same with human beings. First God conceives of humans and then creates them. But Sartre says that there is no God, and hence no preexisting human essence: "There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it." Instead, "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." For humans, existence precedes essence.

When one realizes the implications of this atheism and the primacy of freedom, one is brought to anguish and forlornness. But Sartre strongly denied that this state necessarily led to despair. Even though all my actions are indeed ultimately futile because of my eventual death, and existence is in fact absurd, I can still choose my actions and so give my life meaning. As Sartre concluded, "In this sense existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action."