Sartre on the RPF

Bio

Sartre was born in Paris to Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, and Anne-
Marie Schweitzer, cousin of Albert Schweitzer. He was 15 months old
when his father died of a fever, and Anne-Marie raised him with help of
her father, Charles Schweitzer, who taught Sartre mathematics and
introduced him to classical literature at an early age.

As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon
reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
He studied in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure where, in 1929,
he met fellow student Simone de Beauvoir. The two became inseparable
and lifelong companions, though far from monogamous. Together they
challenged the assumptions and expectations of their bourgeois
upbringings. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive
conformity (bad faith/mauvaise foi) and an "authentic" state of "being"
became the dominant theme of Sartre's work, a theme which would
become embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Etre et le Néant
(Being and Nothingness) (1943). Sartre graduated from the Ecole
Normale Supérieure in 1929 with a doctorate in philosophy and served as
a conscript in the French Army from 1929 to 1931.

La Nausée and Le Mur
As a junior lecturer at the University of Le Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the
novel La Nausée (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto of
existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. He believed
that ideas always remained contingent upon real-life situations, and that
novels and plays had as much value as did discursive essays for the
expression of philosophical theories. The Kafka-influenced novel
concerns a dejected researcher in a town similar to Le Havre who
becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on
his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom. This
emphasis on the power of unconscious things over conscious, living
beings resonates with Karl Marx's criticism of the power of commodities
over people ("commodity fetishism"), giving an indication of Sartre's
coming turn to revolutionary liberation and dialectics.

The stories in Le Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of the
situations people find themselves in and the absurdity of their attempts to
deal rationally with them. A whole school of "absurd" literature
subsequently developed.

Sartre and World War II
1939 saw Sartre drafted into the French army, where he served as a
meteorologist. German troops captured him in 1940 in Padoux, and he
spent nine months in prison - later in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D,
Treves, until released in April 1941 due to poor health (he claimed that his
poor eyesight affected his balance). Given civilian status, he then
escaped to Paris where he became involved in the French Resistance,
and participated in the founding of the resistance group Socialisme et
Liberté. When the war ended he established Les Temps Modernes
(Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review, and started writing
full-time as well as continuing his political activism. He drew on his war
experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The
Roads to Freedom) (1945-1949), which charts the progression of how
World War II affected his ideas, presenting a less theoretical and more
pracitical approach to existentialism. The first book in the trilogy, L'age de
Raison (The Age of Reason) (1945), could easily be said to be the Sartre
work with the broadest appeal.

But possibly the best introduction of Sartre's philosophy can be found in
his lecture paper “Existentialism Is a Humanism” published in 1946. In
this work, Sartre defends existentialism against its detractors, and in
doing so explains his theories in clear, simple language. This makes it a
wonderful point of entry for anyone wanting to know more about Sartre's
ideas, but lacking sufficient background in philosophy to wade through
the ponderous Being and Nothingness.

During the 1940s and 1950s Sartre's ideas remained much in vogue, and
existentialism became a favoured philosophy of the beatnik generation.
Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus in the popular
imagination. In 1948, the Vatican placed his complete works on the Index
of Prohibited Books. Most of his plays are richly symbolic and serve as a
means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit),
contains the famous line: "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as
"Hell is other people".

Sartre and communism
The first period of Sartre's career gave way to a second period as a
politically engaged activist and intellectual. He embraced communism,
though he never officially joined the Communist party, and took a
prominent role in the struggle against French colonialism in Algeria. He
became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the Algerian war of
liberation. He had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his
adopted daughter in 1965. No orthodox Stalinist fellow-traveller, he spent
much of the rest of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas
about self-determination with communist principles, which taught that
socio-economic forces beyond our immediate, individual control play a
critical role in shaping our lives. His major defining work of this period, the
Critique de la Raison Dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason)
appeared in 1960.

Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in Marx, and the emphasis this
gave rise to on the early Marx, led to a famous dispute with the leading
Communist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, in which
Althusser attempted to redefine Marx's work into an early pre-Marxist
period, with essentialist generalizations about Mankind, and a mature,
scientific, authentically Marxist period (starting between the Grundrisse
and Capital). Some say this was the only public debate Sartre ever lost.

In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the
first six years of his life, Les Mots (Words). The book is an ironic
counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly
eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of literature
engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned
as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In the same
year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but, true to his views,
he resoundingly declined it. This rejection hurt the prestige of the Nobel
institution more than it did Sartre.

Sartre’s health declined sharply later in life, and by the time of his death at
the age of 74, he was nearly blind. He lies buried in Cimetière du
Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was attended by some 50,000 people.

Existentialism, Responsibility and Ethics
The biggest impact of Sartre’s ideas on human rights philosophy has to
do with the idea of responsibility and choice. It had long been maintained
by some (including Marx), that our choice was a by-product of the society
we lived in. Thus Marx says to the capitalist: “Your very ideas are but the
outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois
property” (Communist Manifesto). For Sartre, as sympathetic as he was
with communist principles in general, this was quite simply impossible.
Existentialism has to do with precisely the idea that each man must
encounter and confront himself and his situation in the world, and that
only he can act on it. What we choose to do in these moments in life quite
literally defines us: it determines our true essence, which follows from our
existence, meaning the way we choose to live:

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We
mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the
world — and defines himself afterwards. ...Man is nothing else but that
which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.”
(“Existentialism Is a Humanism”)

Imagine that we are confronted with any two possibilities of action: in
every such situation we, and only we, can choose our course of action.
Not only are we the only ones able to choose, but our choice is
inescapable. Even if we choose not to choose, to go with the flow for
example, that is still a choice. This is why “man is condemned to be free.
Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at
liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is
responsible for everything he does” (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”).

Such a philosophical stance obviously has major ramifications on rights
issues like crime and punishment, not to mention on underlying moral
and ethical questions regarding things like whether or not the “good” is
relative for individuals, or a singular truth.

(Excerpts adapted and portrait taken from the Wikipedia article on Sartre. Click here
for complete article.)

Works

Existentialism Is a Humanism [available online]

NOTE: As Sartre's work is not yet in the public domain, there is little available online.
The following sources are links to Amazon.com.

Nausea

Being and Nothingness

The Age of Reason