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Jean Paul Sartre
1905 - 1980
The French philosopher and man of letters Jean Paul Sartre ranks
as the most versatile writer and as the dominant influence in
three decades of French intellectual life.
Jean
Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. His father, a
naval officer, died while on a tour of duty in Indochina before
Sartre was two years old. His mother belonged to the Alsatian
Schweitzer family and was a first cousin to Albert Schweitzer.
The young widow returned to her parents' house, where she and
her son were treated as "the children." In the first volume of
his autobiography, The Words (1964), Sartre describes his
unnatural childhood as a spoiled and precocious boy. Lacking any
companions his own age, the child found "friends" exclusively in
books. Reading and writing thus became his twin passions. "It
was in books that I encountered the universe."
Sartre entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924 and after
one failure received first place in the agrégation of philosophy
in 1929. The novelist Simone de Beauvoir finished second that
year, and the two formed an intimate bond that endured
thereafter. After completing compulsory military service, Sartre
took a teaching job at a lycée in Le Havre. There he wrote his
first novel, Nausea (1938), which some critics have called the
century's most influential French novel.
From 1933 to 1935 Sartre was a research student at the Institut
Français in Berlin and in Freiburg. He discovered the works of
Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and began to philosophize in
the phenomenological vein. A series of works on the modalities
of consciousness poured from Sartre's pen: two works on
imagination, one on self-consciousness, and one on emotions. He
also produced a first-rate volume of short stories, The Wall
(1939).
Sartre returned to Paris to teach in a lycée and to continue his
writing, but World War II intervened. Called up by the army, he
served briefly on the Eastern front and was taken prisoner.
After nine months he secured his release and returned to
teaching in Paris, where he became active in the Resistance.
During this period he wrote his first major work in philosophy,
Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology
(1943).
After the war Sartre abandoned teaching, determined to support
himself by writing. He was also determined that his writing and
thinking should be engagé. Intellectuals, he thought, must take
a public stand on every great question of their day. He thus
became fundamentally a moralist, both in his philosophical and
literary works.
Sartre had turned to playwriting and eventually produced a
series of theatrical successes which are essentially
dramatizations of ideas, although they contain some finely drawn
characters and lively plots. The first two, The Flies and No
Exit, were produced in occupied Paris. They were followed by
Dirty Hands (1948), usually called his best play; The Devil and
the Good Lord (1957), a blasphemous, anti-Christian tirade; and
The Prisoners of Altona (1960), which combined convincing
character portrayal with telling social criticism. Sartre also
wrote a number of comedies: The Respectful Prostitute (1946),
Kean (1954), and Nekrassov (1956), which the critic Henry Peyre
claimed "reveals him as the best comic talent of our times."
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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80). Best known as a philosopher, Sartre
was also a novelist, dramatist, critic, moralist, and
biographer. He contributed to aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis,
politics, phenomenology, and Marxism. Within this immense
diversity, a unity of purpose can none the less be detected:
Sartre's central focus is the relationship between liberty and
situation, his aim to reconcile a radical view of human freedom
with a recognition of human limitations and facticity and the
constraints of the world. The works which reveal the most
concerted attempt to synthesize an Existentialist conception of
liberty with a Marxist theory of conditioning are the Critique
de la raison dialectique (1960) and L'Idiot de la famille
(1971-2), but the preoccupation is present in Sartre's writing
from the outset.
He was born in Paris, where he spent most of his life apart from
a few years in Meudon and La Rochelle as a child, and in Le
Havre as a philosophy teacher in a lycée in the early 1930s. He
attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1924-9, where he
failed the agrégation in 1928, and then took first place the
following year; at this time he met his lifelong partner, Simone
de Beauvoir, and formed a close friendship with Paul Nizan. In
1933 he went to Berlin to study phenomenology. The late 1930s
constitutes the first phase of Sartre's philosophical career, in
which a phenomenological and existential orientation is evident,
but during which Sartre still defines himself in a fairly
academic way in relation to the philosophers.
La Transcendance de l'Ego (1936) argues against Husserl that the
self is not an inner core of character, source of our actions,
feelings, and beliefs, but rather a synthesis or construct which
we falsely imagine to be such a core. Similarly, the historical
study L'Imagination (1936) and the later, more creative
L'Imaginaire (1940) criticize previous theories of imagination
on the grounds that they hold an erroneous view of the image as
something immanent to consciousness. In Sartre's view,
imagination is rather a relation, one of the modes in which
consciousness relates to something outside itself. His Esquisse
d'une théorie des émotions (1939) carries out an analogous
demystification of the emotions, arguing that they are, on a
deep level, chosen reactions to situations which are difficult
to deal with rationally, quasi-‘magical’ retreats from
problematic areas of experience, rather than themselves being
the source of the feelings which accompany them. The
phenomenological, existentialist novel La Nausée (1939), which
explores its hero's reactions to the realization of the
contingency and absurdity of the world, is the chief literary
work of this period, together with the remarkable collection of
stories and novellas published in 1939 under the title Le Mur.
In 1939, Sartre was conscripted into the army in Nancy, where he
kept the diary later published as Carnets de la drôle de guerre
(1983), and was subsequently taken prisoner, escaping in 1941.
Whilst a soldier and later a captive he worked on L'Âge de
raison, the first volume of the unfinished trilogy set in
wartime France, Les Chemins de la liberté. He also composed and
directed Bariona, a nativity play which, like the later and
better-known Les Mouches (1943, a reworking of the Electra
story), used a mythical drama to communicate a politics of
resistance in a form sufficiently far from contemporary events
to evade German censorship. He also spent some time during this
period working on his best-known philosophical text L'Être et le
néant (1943), which explores the relationship of consciousness
to the world and to other consciousnesses. But although Sartre
takes over in it the Hegelian model of human relations as
conflictual, rather than espousing the more positive
Heideggerian notion of Mitsein (being-with-others), he does not
explore the moral consequences of his position. He reserves
these for a later work on ethics, never to be published in his
lifetime.
L'Être et le néant is descriptive rather than committed: Sartre
later declared that it was the experience of war that had led
him to political commitment. Certainly, after his escape he took
some part in the French Resistance [see Occupation And
Resistance], and in the post-war period he participated in
founding the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, a
radical left-wing alternative to the Communist Party. In 1945 he
founded the journal Les Temps modernes at the same time as
publishing the play Huis clos (produced 1944, the famous
portrayal of three characters fated to remain together for ever
after death in a Second Empire salon, unable to escape from each
other's gaze, and source of the much misinterpreted slogan:
‘L'Enfer, c'est les autres’). Les Chemins de la liberté (1945-9)
and L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946, a public lecture
in which Sartre attempted to draw more positive, quasi-Kantian
ethical consequences from the basic tenets of Existentialism)
also appeared in the years immediately following the war. The
same fertile period saw the performance of the plays Morts sans
sépulture (1946), La Putain respectueuse (1946), and Les Mains
sales (1947), and the publication of the screenplays Les Jeux
sont faits (1947) and L'Engrenage (1948) and of the essays
Réflexions sur la question juive (1947), Qu'est-ce que la
littérature? (1947, see Engagement), and Baudelaire (1947),
together with the first of the mainly political essays published
over a number of years in 10 volumes as Situations (1947-76).
In 1951 Le Diable et le Bon Dieu and Saint Genet, comédien et
martyr were published. Both are concerned to attack notions of
moral absolutes in favour of a human, situational, relativist
ethics; it was on these grounds that in the same year Sartre
finally broke with his formerly close associate, Albert Camus.
Saint Genet gives a full-scale existential analysis of the
novelist and poet Jean Genet, in terms which relate his life as
thief and homosexual to his internalization of the hostile
judgements passed on him by others in his childhood and
adolescence in a foster-home and later a reformatory. Sartre
describes Genet as setting a trap for the bourgeois reader
through the evocative and seductive lyricism of evil.
Ultimately, however, he turns the tables on Genet by
interpreting this trap in terms of its paradoxical moral utility
to the reader, who is forced to imagine from the inside the life
and experience of a social and moral outcast. Genet is reported
to have been so traumatized by reading this lengthy
psychoanalysis of his works that he abandoned writing for
several years. For the rest of the 1950s Sartre's activities
were primarily political, and in particular concerned with
trying to ease relations between Western Europe and the USSR.
This attempt came to an abrupt end in 1956 with the Soviet
invasion of Hungary. Sartre then turned his attention to the
question of French relations with Algeria, in particular the
violation of human rights. This preoccupation was given dramatic
form in Les Séquestrés d'Altona (1959), which generalizes the
ethical problems of torture by situating the action in post-war
Germany, whilst calling the major protagonist Frantz.
In 1960 Sartre also published his second major philosophical
work, the Critique de la raison dialectique, a 700-page attempt
to reconcile Existentialism and Marxism. The radical philosophy
of freedom was finally to earn its historical-materialist
credentials through its insertion into an equally radical theory
of social and historical conditioning. Sartre also attempted to
save Marxism from what he saw as its current sclerosis by
rejuvenating it, taking it back to the more complex and subtle
of Marx's own ideas, and freeing it from the naïvely causal
theories of determinism in which it had become entrenched. It is
here that he proposes his theory of totalization as a necessary
but impossible goal: the unrealizable dream of the Critique is
to transcend inevitable human heterogeneity and found a total
historical truth. It is symptomatic that the practice of such a
totalizing project was destined to remain (in Volume II,
posthumously published in 1985) in the form of unfinished notes.
Apart from the beautifully written, brief, allusive, and
tantalizing autobiography of his early years, Les Mots (1964),
the 1960s start and end with politics for Sartre. After the
Critique came the publication of several volumes of essays in
Situations, of primarily political rather than literary
criticism. The decade ends with his support of the student
movement in May 1968, and with his taking over the editorship of
the Maoist journal La Cause du peuple. But Sartre did not see
his increased politicization as incompatible with very different
kinds of writing, and he defended L'Idiot de la famille
(1971-2), a mammoth 3, 000-page biography of Flaubert, as a
politically committed text, despite its apparently aesthetic
subject-matter, on the grounds that its dialectical methodology
and epistemology were themselves revolutionary. In the 1970s
Sartre's health deteriorated, his eyesight failed, and he turned
to taped discussions as an alternative to writing, using his
public prestige to intervene in a wide variety of political
issues, particularly the Arab-Israeli question. He died on 15
April 1980 of oedema of the lungs, and was buried in
Montparnasse cemetery attended by a huge funeral procession.
Sartre's influence on the social, moral, and political issues of
his day was indisputable and was generally positive in its
consequences, even if unpopular with the authorities of Church
and State. His literary works are varied and innovative.
Paradoxically, it is in the domain where his originality and
creativity were greatest that his fortunes have been at their
lowest ebb: that of philosophy. Structuralism in the 1960s,
deconstruction [see Derrida], and Post-Structuralism in the
1970s and 1980s owed an immense debt to him as one of the first
thinkers in France to draw the full consequences from the
instability of meaning (in art as in philosophy), the human
multiplicity of truths, and the important lessons to be learnt
from a renewed Marxism. But in their desire to claim originality
these currents of thought preferred parricide to acknowledgement
of affinities or influences. A decade after Sartre's death the
shadow began to lift, and his philosophical works are once more
starting to be treated with the seriousness they deserve.
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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80) French philosopher, novelist, and
dominant French intellectual of his time. Sartre was born in
Paris and educated at the École Normale Supérieure. From 1933 he
studied in Germany with Husserl and Heidegger. His first novel,
La Nausée, was published in 1938 (trs. as Nausea, 1949).
L'Imaginaire (1940, trs. as The Psychology of the Imagination,
1948) is a contribution to phenomenal psychology. Briefly
captured by the Germans, Sartre spent the war years in Paris,
where L’Être et le néant, his major purely philosophical work,
was published in 1943 (trs. as Being and Nothingness, 1956). The
lecture L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946, trs. as
Existentialism is a Humanism, 1947) consolidated Sartre's
position as France's leading existentialist philosopher. Sartre
was centrally interested in politics, becoming in his time a
symbol of all that was vigorous, and complex, in French
left-wing thought. Although a Marxist, he had strained relations
with the communist party. Together with de Beauvoir and
Merleau-Ponty he founded the journal Les Temps modernes in which
political and ideological questions were aired, and in 1951 he
attempted to found his own political party.
Sartre's philosophy is concerned entirely with the nature of
human life, and the structures of consciousness. As a result it
gains expression in his novels and plays as well as in more
orthodox academic treatises. Its immediate ancestor is the
phenomenological tradition of his teachers, and Sartre can most
simply be seen as concerned to rebut the charge of idealism as
it is laid at the door of phenomenology. The agent is not a
spectator of the world, but, like everything in the world,
constituted by acts of intentionality and consciousness. The
self thus constituted is historically situated, but as an agent
whose own mode of locating itself in the world makes for
responsibility and emotion. Responsibility is, however, a burden
that we frequently cannot bear, and bad faith arises when we
deny our own authorship of our actions, seeing them instead as
forced responses to situations not of our own making. Sartre
thus locates the essential nature of human existence in the
capacity for choice, although choice, being equally incompatible
with determinism and with the existence of a Kantian moral law,
implies a synthesis of consciousness (being for-itself) and the
objective (being in-itself) that is forever unstable. The
unstable and constantly disintegrating nature of free will
generates anguish. Sartre's ‘ontological’ works, including
L’Être et le néant, attempt to work out the implications of his
views for the nature of consciousness and judgement. For Sartre
our capacity to make negative judgements is one of the
fundamental puzzles of consciousness. Like Heidegger he took the
‘ontological’ approach of relating this to the nature of
non-being, a move that decisively differentiates him from the
Anglo-American tradition of modern logic (see being, nothing,
quantifier, variable). Sartre's work on other minds illustrates
by contrast a strength of the psychological approach, as he
explores in detail such experiences as being in the gaze of
another person, and connects them with the choices that then
result. Sartre's work is notoriously difficult, but emotionally
there is no question that he spoke powerfully to the sombre
post-war years, when questions of responsibility and its denial
held centre-stage in the political life of France.
During this same period Sartre also wrote a three-volume novel,
The Roads to Freedom (1945-1949); a treatise on committed
literature; lengthy studies of Charles Baudelaire and Jean
Genet; and a prodigious number of reviews and criticisms. He
also edited Les Temps modernes.
Though never a member of the Communist party, Sartre usually
sympathized with the political views of the far left. Whatever
the political issue, he was quick to publish his opinions, often
combining them with public acts of protest.
In 1960 Sartre returned to philosophy, publishing the first
volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason. It represented
essentially a modification of his existentialism by Marxist
ideas. The drift of Sartre's earlier work was toward a sense of
the futility of life. In Being and Nothingness he declared man
to be "a useless passion," condemned to exercise a meaningless
freedom. But after World War II his new interest in social and
political questions and his rapprochement with Marxist thought
led him to more optimistic and activist views.
Sartre has always been a controversial yet respected individual.
In 1964, Sartre was awarded but refused to accept the Nobel
prize in Literature. Sartre suffered from detrimental health
throughout the 1970s. He died of a lung ailment in 1980.
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