Jean-Paul Sartre

Introduction

Jean-Paul Sartre is the central French philosopher of the mid-twentieth century and the public figure most associated with existentialism in the popular and academic imagination. His major philosophical work Being and Nothingness (1943) gave existentialism its most systematic theoretical formulation; his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism gave the movement its name and its most accessible introduction; his decades as a public intellectual (novelist, playwright, journal editor, political activist) defined the mid-twentieth-century image of the engaged philosopher.

Sartre's career divides into two major phases. The early phase, organized around Being and Nothingness, develops a phenomenological-existentialist analysis of consciousness, freedom, and the structures of human existence. The later phase, organized around Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960; second volume left unfinished at his death), attempts to integrate the existentialist framework with Marxist analysis of historical and political conditions. The relation between the two phases has been continuously debated.

Life

Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. His father, a naval officer, died when Sartre was two; he was raised by his mother and her family, especially his maternal grandfather Charles Schweitzer (uncle of Albert Schweitzer), whose extensive library shaped Sartre's early intellectual formation. He attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (1924–1929), where he placed first in the agrégation in philosophy on his second attempt; Simone de Beauvoir placed second.

The lifelong partnership with de Beauvoir began at the École Normale and continued until Sartre's death in 1980 — a relationship outside conventional marriage that included substantial intellectual collaboration and other romantic relationships on both sides. De Beauvoir and Sartre's intellectual relationship was one of the most consequential in twentieth-century philosophy; many of the central existentialist concepts were developed in conversation between them.

Sartre studied phenomenology in Berlin (1933–1934) under the supervision of Raymond Aron, returning to France with a deep engagement with Husserl and Heidegger that would shape Being and Nothingness. He was conscripted at the outbreak of World War II, captured by the German army in June 1940, and spent nine months in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he read Heidegger's Being and Time extensively and began writing the philosophical work that would become Being and Nothingness.

After his release in 1941, Sartre returned to Paris and to teaching while completing the manuscript of Being and Nothingness (published 1943). The post-war years saw Sartre become a major public figure: the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945), the founding of the journal Les Temps Modernes (1945), the novels and plays of the late 1940s, and increasing political engagement with the French Communist Party (though Sartre never joined) and various left-wing causes.

The 1950s and 1960s saw Sartre's increasing engagement with Marxism (Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960), his vocal opposition to French policy in Algeria, his support for the May 1968 student uprisings, and his refusal of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature on the grounds that a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution. His later years included declining health, near-blindness, and continuing political activism. He died in Paris in 1980; an estimated fifty thousand people attended his funeral procession.

The problem he worked on

Sartre's philosophical project, especially in Being and Nothingness, was the development of a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of human consciousness and existence. The starting point is the distinction between two fundamental modes of being: being-in-itself (être-en-soi; the mode of being characteristic of non-conscious things) and being-for-itself (être-pour-soi; the mode of being characteristic of consciousness). The relation between these two modes, and the structures that arise from consciousness's distinctive relation to itself and to the world, organize the analysis throughout.

The specific philosophical themes that received extended treatment: the structure of consciousness as fundamentally a self-relation; the doctrine of radical human freedom (Sartre's famous formulation: we are condemned to be free); the analysis of bad faith as the mode in which consciousness flees its freedom; the phenomenology of interpersonal experience, especially the analysis of the look of the Other; the relation between body and consciousness; the project of self-creation under conditions of facticity.

The later project organized around the Critique of Dialectical Reason extends the existentialist framework to historical and social analysis, attempting to articulate how individual free projects can be understood within the larger structures of class, history, and material conditions that Marxist analysis emphasizes.

Contributions

Existence precedes essence

The famous Sartrean formulation, given its most accessible articulation in Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945). For everything other than human beings, essence precedes existence — the thing is what it is (a knife, a tree, a planet) before it exists, in the sense that what makes it the kind of thing it is is given prior to its particular existence. For human beings alone, existence precedes essence: we exist first, and then make ourselves into what we are through our free choices. There is no human nature given in advance; what each human is is the product of the choices that human has made.

The doctrine has been continuously misread as licensing pure self-creation without constraint. Sartre's actual position is more careful: humans are always embedded in facticity (the situation, body, history, and circumstances that constitute the conditions of any actual choice). The point is that this facticity does not determine what one becomes; the freedom to take up one's facticity in this way rather than that is the distinctive feature of human existence.

Bad faith

One of Sartre's most influential single contributions, developed extensively in Being and Nothingness Part I, Chapter 2. Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the mode in which consciousness flees its own freedom by treating itself as if it were a fixed thing (a being-in-itself) rather than the free activity it actually is. The famous examples in Being and Nothingness (the waiter who plays at being a waiter; the woman on a date who pretends not to understand the man's intentions; the homosexual man who insists on his identity as fixed in nature) illustrate the structure: bad faith is not lying to others but lying to oneself in a way that requires simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same thing.

The concept has been substantially influential in subsequent philosophy, psychology, and social theory. The phenomenology of self-deception that Sartre articulated remains a continuing reference in moral psychology and the philosophy of mind.

The look of the Other

Being and Nothingness Part III's analysis of interpersonal experience is one of the most-engaged single sections of the work. The encounter with another consciousness is not, on Sartre's analysis, primarily a cognitive recognition (where I recognize you as another mind like mine); it is the experience of being looked at, of being made an object of another's consciousness in a way that constitutes a fundamental dimension of my own self-experience.

The famous example: I am peering through a keyhole, absorbed in what I see, when I hear footsteps in the corridor. The recognition that I am being seen transforms my experience: I become, for the Other, the kind of person who peers through keyholes; this objectification by the Other becomes part of how I experience myself. The structure of interpersonal experience is therefore fundamentally one of mutual objectification — a conflict between consciousnesses each of which is the subject of its own experience and an object in the experience of the other.

The analysis shaped subsequent French philosophy substantially (especially through Lacan's psychoanalytic transformation) and remains a continuing reference in phenomenology and feminist theory.

Radical freedom

The doctrine that human beings are condemned to be free runs through Being and Nothingness. Even when one feels compelled, coerced, or determined, one is choosing to take up the situation in the way one does. The soldier who fights is choosing to fight rather than to desert or refuse; the worker who works is choosing to work rather than to quit; the prisoner is choosing the conditions of their captivity (Sartre's famous claim, which has been continuously controversial). The point is not that freedom is unlimited — facticity is real and constrains the options — but that the responsibility for how one responds to one's facticity is always the agent's.

The doctrine has been criticized as too abstract — it does not adequately distinguish among the very different conditions of constraint people actually face. Sartre's later Marxist engagement was partly an attempt to address this criticism by integrating the analysis of structural constraint into the framework.

The engaged intellectual

Sartre's lifelong public role as engaged intellectual is one of his major non-philosophical contributions. The journal Les Temps Modernes (founded 1945), the novels and plays through which Sartre presented existentialist themes to broader audiences, the political activism on Algeria, Vietnam, and other causes, and the decades of public commentary on French political and cultural life together constituted a model of philosophical engagement that shaped the post-war image of the philosopher in France and beyond.

Key works

• Nausea (La Nausée, 1938). The early philosophical novel through which many readers first encountered Sartre's themes.
• Transcendence of the Ego (1937). Early phenomenological essay.
• Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939). Early phenomenological essay.
• The Imaginary (1940). Phenomenological analysis of the imagination.
• Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). The major philosophical work.
• No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944). The famous play, source of hell is other people.
• Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946). The accessible lecture-format introduction.
• Saint Genet, Comedian and Martyr (1952). The biographical-philosophical study of Jean Genet.
• Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume I, 1960; Volume II unfinished at Sartre's death). The major attempt to integrate existentialism and Marxism.
• The Words (Les Mots, 1964). The autobiography for which Sartre was awarded (and refused) the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• The Family Idiot (L'Idiot de la famille, 1971–1972). The vast multi-volume biographical-philosophical study of Flaubert, unfinished.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Kierkegaard (the existentialist predecessor whose analysis of anxiety and the existing individual Sartre extends); Nietzsche (the genealogical critic of inherited values); Husserl (the phenomenologist whose methodological framework Sartre adopted and modified); Heidegger (whose Being and Time, especially the analysis of Dasein and authenticity, shaped Being and Nothingness); Hegel (whose master-slave dialectic shaped Sartre's analysis of interpersonal experience, mediated through Kojève's 1930s seminars); Marx (the increasing reference of the later work); Simone de Beauvoir (the lifelong intellectual partner).

Influenced: the entire mid-twentieth-century French philosophical and literary tradition; existentialism as a popular movement; subsequent French phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty); the founding of Les Temps Modernes and the broader engaged-intellectual tradition; the post-war American and European literary engagement with existentialist themes; contemporary phenomenology of self-deception, freedom, and interpersonal experience.

Reception

Sartre's reception in his lifetime was extraordinary by any standard. The post-war existentialist moment in France made him perhaps the most prominent intellectual in Europe; his books, plays, and political interventions were major cultural events; the journal Les Temps Modernes was a defining venue of post-war French intellectual life.

The reception cooled in the 1960s with the rise of structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, the early Foucault) which presented the existentialist focus on the free individual subject as outdated. Foucault's famous remark that Sartre is a man of the nineteenth century trying to think the twentieth captured the structuralist critique.

The contemporary reception has been more measured but substantial. The major recent scholarly work has restored serious engagement with Being and Nothingness and the broader existentialist project; the recent recovery of de Beauvoir as a major philosopher in her own right has reframed the Sartre-Beauvoir collaboration; the Critique of Dialectical Reason and the late biographical works have been the subject of continuing scholarly attention.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café (2016, accessible introduction to the broader movement), Gary Cox's Sartre and Fiction (2009) and The Sartre Dictionary (2008), Christina Howells's Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (1988), and the substantial work of David Detmer, Thomas Flynn, and Iris Murdoch. The new English translation of Being and Nothingness by Sarah Richmond (Routledge, 2018) replaces the older Hazel Barnes translation as the standard scholarly reference. Active scholarly debates concern the relation between the early Sartre of Being and Nothingness and the later Sartre of Critique of Dialectical Reason, the proper interpretation of bad faith, the integration of existentialism and Marxism, and the contemporary applicability of Sartrean freedom.

Further reading

• Existentialism — the tradition
• Kierkegaard — the religious-existentialist predecessor
• Heidegger — the major phenomenological predecessor whose Being and Time shaped Being and Nothingness
• Being and Nothingness — the major philosophical work
• Authenticity — the existentialist value at issue throughout the work
• Free Will — the metaphysical condition Sartre's radical freedom presupposes

The central French philosopher of the mid-twentieth century. The public figure most associated with existentialism in twentieth-century intellectual life.