Jean-Paul Sartre

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Full name Jean-Paul Sartre

21 June 1905
Born
Paris, France
15 April 1980 (aged 74)
Died
Paris, France
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
Existentialism, Continental philosophy,
School
Marxism
Main Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics,
interests Phenomenology, Ontology
Notable Existence precedes essence, Bad faith,
ideas Nothingness
Influenced by[show]
Influenced[show]

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (French pronunciation: [saʁtʁ], English: /ˈsɑrtrə/; 21 June

1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist,
screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading
figures in 20th century French philosophy, existentialism, and Marxism, and his work
continues to influence fields such as Marxist philosophy, sociology, critical theory and
literary studies. Sartre was also noted for his long polyamorous relationship with the
feminist author and social theorist, Simone de Beauvoir. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel
Prize in Literature but refused the honour.

Contents
[hide]
 1 Biography
o 1.1 Early life and thought
o 1.2 Sartre and World War II
o 1.3 Politics
o 1.4 Late life and death
 2 Thought
o 2.1 Authenticity and Individuality
o 2.2 La Nausée and existentialism
o 2.3 Sartre and literature
o 2.4 Sartre as a public intellectual
 3 Selected bibliography
 4 See also
 5 Sources
 6 References
 7 Further reading
 8 External links
o 8.1 By Sartre

o 8.2 On Sartre

[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life and thought

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of
the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin and the
first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. (Her father, Charles Schweitzer,
was the older brother of Albert Schweitzer's father, Louis Théophile.)[2] When Sartre was
15 months old, his father died of a fever. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house
in Meudon, where Sartre was raised with help from her father, a professor of German,
who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early
age.[3] At twelve his mother remarried and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he
was frequently bullied.[4]

As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri
Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.[5] He studied and earned a
doctorate in philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher
education that was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and
intellectuals.[6] It was at ENS that Sartre began his life-long, sometimes fractious,
friendship with Raymond Aron.[7] Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western
philosophy, absorbing ideas from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger,
among others. In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at
the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The
two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship,[8]
though they were not monogamous.[9] Sartre served as a conscript in the French Army
from 1929 to 1931 and he later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible
for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence.[10]

Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and
expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and
thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise
foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme
of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le
Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943).[11] Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his
work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture.

[edit] Sartre and World War II

In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist.[12]
He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux,[13] and he spent nine months as a
prisoner of war — in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D, Trier, where he wrote his first
theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. It was during
this period of confinement that Sartre read Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time),
later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology.
Because of poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight and exotropia affected his
balance) Sartre was released in April 1941. Given civilian status, he recovered his
position as a teacher at Lycée Pasteur near Paris, settled at the Hotel Mistral near
Montparnasse in Paris, and was given a new position at Lycée Condorcet, replacing a
Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law.

French journalists visit General George C. Marshall at his office in the Pentagon
building,(1945)

After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the
underground group Socialisme et Liberté with other writers Simone de Beauvoir,
Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti and his wife Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa,
and École Normale students. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French Riviera
seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux
were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and
discouragement. Socialisme et liberté soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write, instead
of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies,
and No Exit, none of which was censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both
legal and illegal literary magazines.

After August 1944 and the Liberation of Paris, he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew. In the book
he tries to explain the etiology of "hate" by analyzing so-called antisemitic hate. Sartre
was a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created during the clandestine
period by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and
Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, after the publication of Camus' The
Rebel. Later, while Sartre was labeled by some authors as a resistant, the French
philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political
commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for
liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who
resisted, not a resistor who wrote.

After the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a quarterly
literary and political review, and started writing full-time as well as continuing his
political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels,
Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).

[edit] Politics

Jean Paul Sartre (middle) and Simone de Beauvoir (left) meeting with Che Guevara
(right) in Cuba, 1960

The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943),
gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948
work Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being both an
intellectual at the same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He embraced Marxism
(but didn't join the Communist Party) and took a prominent role in the struggle against
French rule in Algeria. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the FLN in the
Algerian War and was one of the signatories of the Manifeste des 121. Furthermore, he
had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965. He
opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a
tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell
Tribunal in 1967.

His major defining work after 1955, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of
Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960 (a second volume appeared posthumously). In
Critique, Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had
received up until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an
objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early
works of Marx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the 1960s,
Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively
superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx.

Sartre went to Cuba in the '60s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che"
Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual
but also the most complete human being of our age"[14] and the "era's most perfect
man."[15] Sartre would also compliment Che Guevara by professing that "he lived his
words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel."[16]

During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction leader
Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of
imprisonment.[17]

[edit] Late life and death

Hélène de Beauvoir's house in Goxwiller, where Sartre tried to hide from the media after
being awarded the Nobel Prize.

In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years
of his life, Les mots (Words). The book is an ironic counterballast to Marcel Proust,
whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the
model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded,
functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In
October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it. He
was the first Nobel Laureate to voluntarily decline the prize,[18] and he had previously
refused the Légion d'honneur, in 1945. The prize was announced on 22 October 1964; on
14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from
the list of nominees, and that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went
unread;[19] on 23 October, Le Figaro published a statement by Sartre explaining his
refusal. He said he did not wish to be "transformed" by such an award, and did not want
to take sides in an East vs. West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a
prominent Western cultural institution.[19] After the prize award he tried to escape the
media by hiding in the house of Simone's sister Hélène de Beauvoir in Goxwiller in
Alsace.

Though his name was then a household word (as was "existentialism" during the
tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with few possessions, actively
committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the student revolution strikes in
Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience.
President Charles de Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't
arrest Voltaire."[20]

Sartre's and de Beauvoir's grave in the Cimetière de Montparnasse

In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied:

I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the
Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one,
Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet...If these are
remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more. As a man, if a
certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or
historical situation in which I lived,...how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations
which I tried to gather up within myself.

Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work
(and using drugs for this reason, e.g., amphetamine) he put himself through during the
writing of the Critique and a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert (The
Family Idiot), both of which remained unfinished. Sartre became almost completely blind
in 1973.

He died 15 April 1980 in Paris from edema of the lung.

Sartre lies buried in Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was well attended,
with estimates of the number of mourners along the two hour march ranging from 15,000
to over 50,000.[21][22]

[edit] Thought
This section's factual accuracy is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the
talk page. (April 2010)

The basis of Sartre's existentialism can be found in The Transcendence of the Ego in
which he says that the thing-in-itself is infinite and overflowing. Sartre refers to any
direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself as a "pre-reflective consciousness." Any
attempt to describe, understand, historicize etc. the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective
consciousness." There is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-
reflective, and so reflection is fated to a form of anxiety, i.e. the human condition. The
reflective consciousness in all its forms, (scientific, artistic or otherwise) can only limit
the thing-in-itself by virtue of its attempt to understand or describe it. It follows,
therefore, that any attempt at self-knowledge (self-consciousness—a reflective
consciousness of an overflowing infinite) is a construct that fails no matter how often it is
attempted. Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a
transcendent object.

The same holds true about knowledge of the "Other". The "Other" (meaning simply
beings or objects that are not the self) is a construct of reflective consciousness. A
volitional entity must be careful to understand this more as a form of warning than as an
ontological statement. However, there is an implication of solipsism here that Sartre
considers fundamental to any coherent description of the human condition.[23] Sartre
overcomes this solipsism by a kind of ritual. Self consciousness needs "the Other" to
prove (display) its own existence. It has a "masochistic desire" to be limited, i.e. limited
by the reflective consciousness of another subject. This is expressed metaphorically in the
famous line of dialogue from No Exit, "Hell is other people."[24]

Sartre stated that "In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own
life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to
any determined existence—as not-bound to life", meaning the value of the Other's
recognition of me depends on the value of my recognition of the Other. In this sense to
the extent that the Other apprehends me as bound to a body and immersed in life, I am
myself only an Other as Ego.[25]
The main idea of Jean-Paul Sartre is that we are, as humans, "condemned to be free."[26]
This theory relies upon his belief that there is no creator, and is formed using the example
of the paper knife. Sartre says that if one considered a paper knife, one would assume that
the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have
no essence before their existence because there is no Creator. Thus: "existence precedes
essence".[27] This forms the basis for his assertion that since one cannot explain their own
actions and behaviour by referencing any specific human nature, they are necessarily
fully responsible for those actions. "We are left alone, without excuse".

[edit] Authenticity and Individuality

Sartre maintained that the concept of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but
not learned. We need to experience death consciousness so as to wake up ourselves as to
what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not
knowledge.[28]

[edit] La Nausée and existentialism

Jean Paul Sartre by Reginald Gray. Paris 1965

As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du 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. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement,
he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that
novels and plays can well describe such fundamental experiences, having equal value to
discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories such as existentialism.
With such purpose, this novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town
similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and
situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves
to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them.

This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-
in-itself" in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the
freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds
situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the
"nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is
suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste — specifically, his freedom. The book
takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is used in the
context of the often nauseating quality of existence. No matter how much Roquentin
longs for something else or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing
evidence of his engagement with the world. The novel also acts as a terrifying realization
of some of Kant's fundamental ideas; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will
(that morality is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability to choose being
derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying "Condemned to be free")
as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant
exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately
useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas proves to be bitterly rejected.

[edit] Sartre and literature

Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus in the popular imagination. In
1948, the Roman Catholic Church placed his complete works on the Index of prohibited
books (The Church opposed Marxism at this time and many Christians consider the
precepts of Marxism to be fundamantally blasphemous). 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."[24]

Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major contribution to literature was The Roads
to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's
ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical
approach to existentialism.

[edit] Sartre as a public intellectual

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Balzac Memorial

While the broad focus of Sartre's life revolved around the notion of human freedom, he
began a sustained intellectual participation in more public matters in 1945. Prior to this—
before the Second World War—he was content with the role of an apolitical liberal
intellectual: "Now teaching at a lycée in Laon [...] Sartre made his headquarters the Dome
café at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards. He attended plays, read
novels, and dined [with] women. He wrote. And he was published" (Gerassi 1989: 134).
Sartre and his lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, existed, in her words, where "the
world about us was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out" (de
Beauvoir 1958: 339).

Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist in
The Age of Reason, which was completed during Sartre's first year as a soldier in the
Second World War. By forging Mathieu as an absolute rationalist, analyzing every
situation, and functioning entirely on reason, he removed any strands of authentic content
from his character and as a result, Mathieu could "recognize no allegiance except to
[him]self" (Sartre 1942: 13), though he realized that without "responsibility for my own
existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing" (Sartre 1942: 14). Mathieu's
commitment was only to himself, never to the outside world. Mathieu was restrained
from action each time because he had no reasons for acting. Sartre then, for these reasons,
was not compelled to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and it took the invasion of his
own country to motivate him into action and to provide a crystallization of these ideas. It
was the war that gave him a purpose beyond himself, and the atrocities of the war can be
seen as the turning point in his public stance.
The war opened Sartre's eyes to a political reality he had not yet understood until forced
into continual engagement with it: "the world itself destroyed Sartre's illusions about
isolated self-determining individuals and made clear his own personal stake in the events
of the time" (Aronson 1980: 108). Returning to Paris in 1941 he formed the "Socialisme
et Liberté" resistance group. In 1943, after the group disbanded, Sartre joined a writers'
Resistance group,[29] in which he remained an active participant until the end of the war.
He continued to write ferociously, and it was due to this "crucial experience of war and
captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it
through literature" (Thody 1964: 21).

The symbolic initiation of this new phase in Sartre’s work is packaged in the introduction
he wrote for a new journal, Les Temps Modernes, in October 1945. Here he aligned the
journal, and thus himself, with the Left and called for writers to express their political
commitment (Aronson 1980: 107). Yet, this alignment was indefinite, directed more to
the concept of the Left than a specific party of the Left.

Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being a public intellectual. He envisaged culture as a
very fluid concept; neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished; instead, in true
existential fashion, "culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and
re-invention". This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as a pragmatist, willing to move and
shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause other than the
belief in human freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity. It is this over-arching
theme of freedom that means his work "subverts the bases for distinctions among the
disciplines" (Kirsner 2003: 13). Therefore, he was able to hold knowledge across a vast
array of subjects: "the international world order, the political and economic organisation
of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks that
regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that
control and disseminate information. Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about
what he saw as inequalities and injustices in the world" (Scriven 1999: xii).

Sartre always sympathized with the left, and supported the French Communist Party
(PCF) until the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Following the Liberation the PCF were
infuriated by Sartre's philosophy, which appeared to lure young French men and women
away from the ideology of communism and into Sartre’s own existentialism (Scriven
1999: 13). From 1956 onwards Sartre rejected the claims of the PCF to represent the
French working classes, objecting to its authoritarian tendencies. In the late 1960s Sartre
supported the radical left, then known as "Maoists," a movement that rejected the
authority of established communist parties (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/).

In the aftermath of a war that had for the first time properly engaged Sartre in political
matters, he set forth a body of work which "reflected on virtually every important theme
of his early thought and began to explore alternative solutions to the problems posed
there" (Aronson 1980: 121). The greatest difficulties that he and all public intellectuals of
the time faced were the increasing technological aspects of the world that were outdating
the printed word as a form of expression. In Sartre's opinion, the "traditional bourgeois
literary forms remain innately superior", but there is "a recognition that the new
technological 'mass media' forms must be embraced" if Sartre's ethical and political goals
as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: the demystification of
bourgeois political practices and the raising of the consciousness, both political and
cultural, of the working class. (Scriven 1993: 8). The struggle for Sartre was against the
monopolising moguls who were beginning to take over the media and destroy the role of
the intellectual. His attempts to reach a public were mediated by these powers, and it was
often these powers he had to campaign against. He was skilled enough, however, to
circumvent some of these issues by his interactive approach to the various forms of
media, advertising his radio interviews in a newspaper column for example, and vice
versa. (Scriven 1993: 22).

The role of a public intellectual can lead to the individual placing himself in danger as he
engages with disputed topics. In Sartre's case, this was witnessed in June 1961, when a
plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building. His public support of
Algerian self-determination at the time had led Sartre to become a target of the campaign
of terror that mounted as the colonists' position deteriorated. A similar occurrence took
place the next year and he had begun to receive threatening letters from Oran. (Aronson
1980: 157).

[edit] Selected bibliography

Plays, screenplays, novels, Philosophic essays Critical essays
and short stories  Imagination: A  Anti-Semite and Jew /
 Nausea / La nausée Psychological Réflexions sur la
(1938) Critique / question juive (1943)
 The Wall / Le mur L'imagination (1936)  Baudelaire (1946)
(1939)  The Transcendence of  Situations I: Literary
 Bariona / Bariona, ou the Ego / La Critiques / Critiques
le fils du tonnerre transcendence de litteraires (1947)[30]
(1940) l'égo (1937)  Situations II: What Is
 The Flies / Les  Sketch for a Theory of Literature? / Qu'est-
mouches (1943) the Emotions / ce que le literature?
 No Exit / Huis clos Esquisse d'un théorie (1947)
(1944) des émotions (1939)  "Black Orpheus" /
 Typhus, wr. '44, pub.  The Imaginary / "Orphée noir" (1948)
'07; adapted as The L'imaginaire (1940)  Situations III (1949)
Proud and the  Being and  Saint Genet, Actor
Beautiful Nothingness / L'étre and Martyr / S.G.,
 The Age of Reason / et le néant (1943) comédien et martyr
L'âge de raison  Existentialism is a (1952)
(1945) Humanism /  The Henri Martin
 The Respectful L'existentialisme est Affair / L'affair Henri
Prostitute / La putain un humanisme (1946) Martin (1953)
respecteuse (1946)  Search for a Method /  Situations IV:
 The Victors / Morts Question de méthode Portraits (1964)
san sépulture (1946) (1957)  Situations V:
  The Chips Are Down /  Critique of Colonialism and
Les jeux sont fait Dialectical Reason / Neocolonialism
(1947) Critique de la raison (1964)
 The Reprieve / Le dialectique (1960,  Situations VI:
sursis (1947) 1985) Problems of
 In the Mesh /  Notebooks for an Marxism, Part 1
L'engrénage (1948) Ethics / Cahiers pour (1966)
 Dirty Hands / Les une morale (1983)  Situations VII:
mains sales (1948) Problems of
 Troubled Sleep / La  Truth and Existence / Marxism, Part 2
mort dans l'âme Vérité et existence (1967)
(1949) (1989)  The Family Idiot /
 The Devil and the L'idiot de la famille
Good Lord / Le (1971-2)
diable et le bon dieu  Situations VIII:
(1951) Autour de 1968
 Kean (1953) (1972)
 Nekrassov (1955)  Situations IX:
 The Condemned of Melanges (1972)
Altona / Les
séquestrés d'Altona  Situations X:
(1959) Life/Situations:
 The Trojan Women / Essays Written and
Les Troyennes (1965) Spoken / Politique et
Autobiographie
 The Freud Scenario / (1976)
Le scénario Freud
(1984)
Autobiographic
 Sartre By Himself / Sartre par lui-mème (1959)
 The Words / Les mots (1964)
 Witness to My Life + Quiet Moments in a War / Lettres au Castor et à quelques
autres (1983)

 War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War / Les carnets de la drole de guerre
(1984)

[edit] See also

France portal
Biography portal
 Situation (Sartre)
 Existentialism
 Wilfrid Desan
 Sartre and bad faith
[edit] Sources
 Aronson, Ronald (1980) Jean-Paul Sartre - Philosophy in the World. London:
NLB
 Gerassi, John (1989) Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century.
Volume 1: Protestant or Protester? Chicago: University of Chicago Press
 Judaken, Jonathan (2006) "Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-
antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press
 Kirsner, Douglas (2003) The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Lang.
New York: Karnac
 Scriven, Michael (1993) Sartre and The Media. London: MacMillan Press Ltd
 Scriven, Michael (1999) Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar
France. London: MacMillan Press Ltd
 Thody, Philip (1964) Jean-Paul Sartre. London: Hamish Hamilton

[edit] References
1. ^ "Sartre's Debt to Rousseau" (PDF).
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Fa92/sartD.pdf. Retrieved
2010-03-02.
2. ^ "x x". Roglo.eu. http://roglo.eu/roglo?lang=fr;i=1676681. Retrieved 2010-03-02.
3. ^ Brabazon, James (1975). Albert Schweitzer: A Biography. Putnam. p. 28.
4. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre, by Andrew N. Leak, (London 2006), page 16-18
5. ^ Jean-Paul, Sartre; Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, Jonathan Webber (2004) [1940]. The
Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Routledge. pp. viii.
ISBN 0-4152-8755-3.
6. ^ Schrift, Alan D. (2006). Twentieth-century French Philosophy: Key Themes and
Thinkers. Blackwell Publishing. p. 174. ISBN 1-4051-3217-5.
7. ^ Memoirs: fifty years of political reflection, By Raymond Aron (1990)
8. ^ Humphrey, Clark (28 November 2005). "The People Magazine approach to a literary
supercouple". The Seattle Times.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2002648627_teteatete28.html. Retrieved
2007-11-20.
9. ^ Siegel, Liliane (1990). In the shadow of Sartre. Collins (London). p. 182.
ISBN 000215336X.
10. ^ Le Sueur, James D.; Pierre Bourdieu (2005) [2005]. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and
Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria. University of Nebraska Press.
p. 178. ISBN 0-8032-8028-9.
11. ^ McCloskey, Deirdre N. (2006). The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of
Commerce. University of Chicago Press. p. 297. ISBN 0-2265-5663-8.
12. ^ Van den Hoven, Adrian; Andrew N. Leak (2005). Sartre Today: A Centenary
Celebration. Andrew N. Leak. Berghahn Books. pp. viii. ISBN 1-8454-5166-X.
13. ^ Boulé, Jean-Pierre (2005). Sartre, Self-formation, and Masculinities. Berghahn Books.
p. 114. ISBN 1-5718-1742-5.
 14. ^ "Remembering Che Guevara", 9 October 2006, The International News, by Prof
Khwaja Masud
15. ^ "Amazon Review of: ''The Bolivian Diary: Authorized Edition''". Amazon.com.
http://www.amazon.com/Bolivian-Diary-Authorized-Guevara-
Publishing/dp/1920888241. Retrieved 2010-03-02.
16. ^ HeyChe.org - People about Che Guevara[dead link]
17. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre (1974-12-07). "The Slow Death of Andreas Baader". Marxists.org.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1974/baader.htm. Retrieved 2010-03-
02.
18. ^ "Nobel Prize in Literature 1964 - Press Release". nobelprize.org.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1964/press.html. Retrieved 2009-
02-11.
19. ^ a b Histoire de lettres Jean-Paul Sartre refuse le Prix Nobel en 1964, Elodie Bessé
20. ^ "Superstar of the Mind", by Tom Bishop in New York Times 7 June 1987
21. ^ "Sartre Cortege Plus Thousands End In Crush At The Cemetery". Boston Globe.
Agence France-Presse (Globe Newspaper Company). April 20, 1980.
http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/nobel/1980/1980ag.html. Retrieved 2009-
05-09.
22. ^ Singer, Daniel (June 5, 2000). "Sartre's Roads to Freedom". The Nation. Archived from
the original on June 2, 2008.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080602061137/http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000605/si
nger/single. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
23. ^ Sartre, 1936 Transcendence of the Ego, Williams and Kirkpatrick, 1957 pp. 98-106
translation from "La transcendence de l"ego...
24. ^ a b Woodward, Kirk (July 9, 2010). "The Most Famous Thing Jean-Paul Sartre Never
Said". Rick on Theater. Blogger (Google: blogspot.com).
http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing-jean-paul-sartre.html.
Retrieved January 8, 2010.
25. ^ Being and Nothingness, p. 237
26. ^ Existentialism and Humanism
27. ^ Existentialism and Humanism, page 27
28. ^ Being and Nothingness, p. 246
29. ^ Aronson, Ronald (2004). Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel
That Ended It. University of Chicago Press. p. 30. ISBN 0-226-02796-1,
9780226027968.
30. ^ http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/sartrebio.html

[edit] Further reading

 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905-80, 1985.
 Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, New York: Pantheon Books,
1984.
 Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective
Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
 John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Volume 1:
Protestant or Protester?, University of Chicago Press, 1989. ISBN 0-226-28797-1.
 R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's
Philosophy, 1950-1960, New York: Pantheon, 1971.
 Suzanne Lilar, A propos de Sartre et de l'amour, Paris: Grasset, 1967.
  Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir
and Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
 Heiner Wittmann, L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, translated from
the German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar, Éditions L'Harmattan (Collection
L'ouverture philosophique), Paris 2001.
 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre,
Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York,
2008.
 Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by
Adrian van den Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
 P.V. Spade, Class Lecture Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness.
1996.
 Jonathan Webber The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Routledge,
2009
 H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien von Tintoretto bis
Flaubert, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996.
 H. Wittmann, Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics. The Challenge of Freedom.Ed. by
Dirk Hoeges. Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens und Frankreichs,
vol. 13, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang 2009 ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8
 Wilfrid Desan, The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the philosophy of Jean-Paul
Sartre (1954)
 BBC (1999). "The Road to Freedom". Human, All Too Human.
 Pink Floyd and Philosophy "Careful with that Axiom Eugene" by George A.
Reisch Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2007.
 This page was last modified on 23 January 2011 at 06:49.
 Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;
additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-
profit organization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre
26 January 2011

Jean-Paul Sartre
First published Thu Apr 22, 2004

Sartre (1905-1980) is arguably the best known philosopher of the twentieth century. His
indefatigable pursuit of philosophical reflection, literary creativity and, in the second half
of his life, active political commitment gained him worldwide renown, if not an
admiration. He is commonly considered the father of Existentialist philosophy, whose
writings set the tone for intellectual life in the decade immediately following the Second
World War. Among the many ironies that permeate his life, not the least is the immense
popularity of his scandalous public lecture “Existentialism and Humanism,” delivered to
an enthusiastic Parisian crowd October 28, 1945. Though taken as a quasi manifesto for
the Existentialist movement, the transcript of this lecture was the only publication that
Sartre openly regretted seeing in print. And yet it continues to be the major introduction
to his philosophy for the general public. One of the reasons both for its popularity and for
his discomfort is the clarity with which it exhibits the major tenets of existentialist
thought while revealing Sartre's attempt to broaden its social application in response to
his Communist and Catholic critics. In other words, it offers us a glimpse of Sartre's
thought “on the wing.”

After surveying the evolution of Sartre's philosophical thinking, I shall address his
thought under five categories, namely, ontology, psychology, ethics, political
commitment, and the relation between philosophy and the fine arts, especially literature,
in his work. I shall conclude with several observations about the continued relevance of
his thought in contemporary philosophy both Anglo-American and “Continental.”

 1. Philosophical Development
 2. Ontology
 3. Psychology
 4. Ethics
 5. Politics
 6. Art and Philosophy
 7. Sartre in the Twenty-First Century
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related entries

1. Philosophical Development
Sartre was born in Paris where he spent most of his life. After a traditional philosophical
education in prestigious Parisian schools that introduced him to the history of Western
philosophy with a bias toward Cartesianism and neoKantianism, not to mention a strong
strain of Bergsonism, Sartre succeeded his former school friend, Raymond Aron, at the
French Institute in Berlin (1933-1934) where he read the leading phenomenologists of the
day, Husserl, Heidegger and Scheler. He prized Husserl's restatement of the principle of
intentionality (all consciousness aims at or “intends” an other-then-consciousness) that
seemed to free the thinker from the inside/outside epistemology inherited from Descartes
while retaining the immediacy and certainty that Cartesians prized so highly. What he
read of Heidegger at that time and how much is unclear, but he deals with the influential
German ontologist explicitly after his return and especially in his masterwork, Being and
Nothingness (1943). He exploits the latter's version of Husserlian intentionality by
insisting that human reality (Heidegger's Dasein or human way of being) is “in the
world” primarily via its practical concerns and not its epistemic relationships. This lends
both Heidegger's and Sartre's early philosophies a kind of “pragmatist” character that
Sartre, at least, will never abandon. It has been remarked that many of the Heideggerian
concepts in Sartre's existentialist writings also occur in those of Bergson, whose “Les
Données immediates de la conscience” (Time and Free Will) Sartre once credited with
drawing him toward philosophy. But it is clear that Sartre devoted much of his early
philosophical attention to combating the then influential Bergsonism and that mention of
Bergson's name decreases as that of Heidegger grows in Sartre's writings of the “vintage”
existentialist years. Sartre seems to have read the phenomenological ethicist Max Scheler,
whose concept of the intuitive grasp of paradigm cases is echoed in Sartre's reference to
the “image” of the kind of person one should be that both guides and is fashioned by our
moral choices. But where Scheler in the best Husserlian fashion argues for the
“discovery” of such value images, Sartre insists on their creation. The properly
“existentialist” version of phenomenology is already in play.

Though Sartre was not a serious reader of Hegel or Marx until during and after the war,
like so many of his generation, he came under the influence of Kojève's Marxist and
protoexistentialist interpretation of Hegel, though he never attended his famous lectures
in the 1930s as did Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. It was Jean Hyppolite's translation of and
commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that marked Sartre's closer study of the
seminal German philosopher. This is especially evident in his posthumously published
Notebooks for an Ethics written in 1947-48 to fulfill the promise of an “ethics of
authenticity” made in Being and Nothingness. That project was subsequently abandoned
but the Hegelian and Marxist presence became dominant in Sartre's next major
philosophical text, the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and in an essay that came to
serve as its Introduction, Search for a Method (1957). Dilthey had dreamt of completing
Kant's famous triad with a fourth Kritik, namely, a critique of historical reason. Sartre
pursued this project by combining a Hegelian-Marxist dialectic with an Existentialist
“psychoanalysis” that incorporates individual responsibility into class relationships,
thereby adding a properly Existentialist dimension of moral responsibility to a Marxist
emphasis on collective and structural causality-what Raymond Aron would later criticize
as an impossible union of Kierkegaard and Marx. In the final analysis, Kierkegaard wins
out; Sartre's “Marxism” remains adjectival to his existentialism and not the reverse. This
becomes apparent in the last phase of his work.

Sartre had long been fascinated with the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. In what some
would consider the culmination of his thought, he weds Existentialist biography with
Marxian social critique in a Hegelian “totalization” of an individual and his era, to
produce the last of his many incompleted projects, a multi-volume study of Flaubert's life
and times, The Family Idiot (1971-1972). In this work, Sartre joins his Existentialist
vocabulary of the 1940s and early '50s with his Marxian lexicon of the late '50s and '60s
to ask what we can know about a man in the present state of our knowledge. This study,
which he describes as “a novel that is true,” incarnates that mixture of phenomenological
description, psychological insight, and social critique that have become the hallmark of
Sartrean philosophy. These features doubtless contributed to his being awarded the Nobel
prize for literature, which he characteristically refused along with its substantial cash
grant lest his acceptance be read as approval of the bourgeois values that the honor
seemed to emblemize.
In his last years, Sartre, who had lost the use of one eye in childhood, became almost
totally blind. Yet he continued to work with the help of a tape recorder, producing with
Benny Lévy portions of a “co-authored” ethics, the published parts of which indicate that
its value is more biographical than philosophical.

After his death, thousands spontaneously joined his funeral cortège in a memorable
tribute to his respect and esteem among the public at large. As the headline of one
Parisian newspaper lamented: “France has lost its conscience.”

2. Ontology
Like Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre distinguished ontology from metaphysics and favored
the former. In his case, ontology is primarily descriptive and classificatory, whereas
metaphysics purports to be causally explanatory, offering accounts about the ultimate
origins and ends of individuals and of the universe as a whole. Unlike Heidegger,
however, Sartre does not try to combat metaphysics as a deleterious undertaking. He
simply notes in a Kantian manner that it raises questions we cannot answer. On the other
hand, he subtitles Being and Nothingness a “Phenomenological Ontology.” Its descriptive
method moves from the most abstract to the highly concrete. It begins by analyzing two
distinct and irreducible categories or kinds of being: the in-itself (en-soi) and the for-itself
(pour-soi), roughly the nonconscious and consciousness respectively, adding a third, the
for-others (pour-autrui), later in the book, and concludes with a sketch of the practice of
“existential psychoanalysis” that interprets our actions to uncover the fundamental project
that unifies our lives.

Being-in-itself and being-for-itself have mutually exclusive characteristics and yet we

(human reality) are entities that combine both, which is the ontological root of our
ambiguity. The in-itself is solid, self-identical, passive and inert. It simply “is.” The for-
itself is fluid, nonself-identical, and dynamic. It is the internal negation or “nihilation” of
the in-itself, on which it depends. Viewed more concretely, this duality is cast as
“facticity” and “transcendence.” The “givens” of our situation such as our language, our
environment, our previous choices and our very selves in their function as in-itself
constitute our facticity. As conscious individuals, we transcend (surpass) this facticity in
what constitutes our “situation.” In other words, we are always beings “in situation,” but
the precise mixture of transcendence and facticity that forms any situation remains
indeterminable, at least while we are engaged in it. Hence Sartre concludes that we are
always “more” than our situation and that this is the ontological foundation of our
freedom. We are “condemned” to be free, in his hyperbolic phrase.

One can see why Sartre is often described as a Cartesian dualist but this is imprecise.
Whatever dualism pervades his thought is one of spontaneity/inertia. His is not a “two
substance” ontology like the thinking thing and the extended thing (mind and matter) of
Descartes. Only the in-itself is conceivable as substance or “thing.” The for-itself is a no-
thing, the internal negation of things. The principle of identity holds only for being-in-
itself. The for-itself is an exception to this rule. Accordingly, time with all of its
paradoxes is a function of the for-itself's nihilating or “othering” the in-itself. The past is
related to the future as in-itself to for-itself and as facticity to possibility, with the present,
like “situation” in general, being an ambiguous mixture of both. This is Sartre's version
of Heidegger's “Ekstatic temporality,” the qualitative “lived” time of our concerns and
practices, the time that rushes by or hangs heavy on our hands, rather than the
quantitative “clock” time that we share with physical nature.

The category or ontological principle of the for-others comes into play as soon as the
other subject or Other appears on the scene. The Other cannot be deduced from the two
previous principles but must be encountered. Sartre's famous analysis of the shame one
experiences at being discovered in an embarrassing situation is a phenomenological
argument (what Husserl called an “eidetic reduction”) of our awareness of another as
subject. It carries the immediacy and the certainty that philosophers demand of our
perception of other “minds” without suffering the weakness of arguments from analogy
commonly used by empiricists to defend such knowledge.

The roles of consciousness and the in-itself in his earlier work are assumed by “praxis”
(human activity in its material context) and the “practico-inert” respectively in the
Critique of Dialectical Reason. Praxis is dialectical in the Hegelian sense that it surpasses
and subsumes its other, the practico-inert. The latter, like the in-itself, is inert but as
“practico-” is the sedimentation of previous praxes. Thus speech acts would be examples
of praxis but language would be practico-inert; social institutions are practico-inert but
the actions they both foster and limit are praxes.

The Other in Being and Nothingness alienates or objectifies us (in this work Sartre seems
to use these terms equivalently) and the third party is simply this Other writ large. The
“us” is objectified by an Other and hence has the ontological status of being-in-itself but
the collective subject or “we,” he insists, is simply a psychological experience. In the
Critique another ontological form appears, the “mediating” third, that denotes the group
member as such and yields a collective subject without reducing the respective agents to
mere ciphers of some collective consciousness. In other words, Sartre accords an
ontological primacy to individual praxis while recognizing its enrichment as group
member of a praxis that sustains predicates such as command/obedience and right/duty
that are properly its own. The concepts of praxis, practico-inert and mediating third form
the basis of a social ontology that merits closer attention than the prolix Critique
encourages.

3. Psychology
Sartre's gifts of psychological description and analysis are widely recognized. What made
him so successful a novelist and playwright contributed to the vivacity and force of his
phenomenological “arguments” as well. His early studies of emotive and imaging
consciousness in the late 1930s press the Husserlian principle of intentionality farther
than their author seemed willing to go. For example, in The Psychology of Imagination
(1940), Sartre argues that Husserl remains captive to the idealist principle of immanence
(the object of consciousness lies within consciousness), despite his stated goal of
combating idealism, when he seems to consider images as miniatures of the perceptual
object reproduced or retained in the mind. On the contrary, Sartre argues, if one insists
that all consciousness is intentional in nature, one must conclude that even so-called
“images” are not objects “in the mind” but are ways of relating to items “in the world” in
a properly imaginative manner, namely, by what he calls “derealizing”them or rendering
them “present-absent.”

Similarly, our emotions are not “inner states” but are ways of relating to the world.; they
too are “intentional.” In this case, emotive behavior involves physical changes and what
he calls a quasi “magical” attempt to transform the world by changing ourselves. The
person who gets “worked up” when failing to hit the golf ball or to open the jar lid, is, on
Sartre's reading, “intending” a world where physiological changes “conjure up” solutions
in the problematic world. The person who literally “jumps for joy,” to cite another of his
examples, is trying by a kind of incantation to possess a good “all at once” that can be
realized only across a temporal spread. If emotion is a joke, he warns, it is a joke we
believe in. These are all spontaneous, preflective relations. They are not the products of
reflective decision. Yet insofar as they are even prereflectively conscious, we are
responsible for them. And this raises the question of freedom, a necessary condition for
ascribing responsibility and the heart of his philosophy.

The basis of Sartrean freedom is ontological: we are free because we are not a self (an in-
itself) but a presence-to-self (the transcendence or “nihilation” of our self). This implies
that we are “other” to our selves, that whatever we are or whatever others may ascribe to
us, we are “in the manner of not being it,” that is, in the manner of being able to assume a
perspective in its regard. This inner distance reflects not only the nonself-identity of the
for-itself and the ekstatic temporality that it generates but forms the site of what Sartre
calls “freedom as the definition of man.” To that freedom corresponds a coextensive
responsibility. We are responsible for our “world” as the horizon of meaning in which we
operate and thus for everything in it insofar as their meaning and value are assigned by
virtue of our life-orienting fundamental “choice.” At this point the ontological and the
psychological overlap while remaining distinct as occurs so often in phenomenology.

Such fundamental “choice” has been criticized as being criterionless and hence arbitrary.
But it would be better to speak of it as criterion-consituting in the sense that it grounds
the set of criteria on the basis of which our subsequent choices are made. It resembles
what ethicist R. M. Hare calls “decisions of principle” (that establish the principles for
subsequent decisions but are themselves unprincipled) and what Kierkegaard would
describe as “conversion.” In fact, Sartre sometimes employed this term himself to denote
a radical change in one's basic project. It is this original sustaining “choice” that
Existential psychoanalysis seeks to uncover.

Sartre's use of intentionality is the backbone of his psychology. And his psychology is the
key to his ontology that is being fashioned at this time. In fact, the concept of imaging
consciousness as the locus of possibility, negativity and lack emerges as the model for
consciousness in general (being-for-itself) in Being and Nothingness. That said, it would
not be an exaggeration to describe Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, so important
a role does imaging consciousness or its equivalent play in his work.
4. Ethics
Sartre was a moralist but scarcely a moralizer. His earliest studies, though
phenomenological, underscored the freedom and by implication the responsibility of the
agent of phenomenological method. Thus his first major work, Transcendence of the Ego,
in addition to constituting an argument against the transcendental ego (the
epistemological subject that cannot be an object) central to German idealism and
Hussserlian phenomenology, introduces an ethical dimension into what was traditionally
an epistemological project by asserting that this appeal to a transcendental ego conceals a
conscious flight from freedom. The phenomenological reduction that constitutes the
objects of consciousness as pure meanings or significations devoid of the existential
claims that render them liable to skeptical doubt-such a reduction or “bracketing of the
being question” carries a moral significance as well. The “authentic” subject, as Sartre
will later explain in his Notebooks for an Ethics, will learn to live without an ego,
whether transcendental or empirical, in the sense that the transcendental ego is
superfluous and the empirical ego (of scientific psychology) is an object for
consciousness when it reflects on itself. We are responsible for our egos as we are for any
object of consciousness. Sartre's subsequent works takes pains either to ascribe moral
responsibility to agents individually or collectively or to set the ontological foundations
for such ascriptions.

It is now common to distinguish three distinct ethical positions in Sartre's writings. The
first and best known, existentialist ethics is one of disalienation and authenticity. It
assumes that we live in a society of oppression and exploitation. The former is primary
and personal, the latter structural and impersonal. While he enters into extended polemics
in various essays and journal articles of the late 1940s and ‘50s concerning the systematic
explanation of people in capitalist and colonialist institutions, Sartre always sought a way
to bring the responsibility home to individuals who could in principle be named. As
Merleau-Ponty observed, Sartre stressed oppression over exploitation, individual moral
responsibility over structural causation but without denying the importance of the latter.
In fact, as his concept of freedom thickened from the ontological to the social and
historical in the mid ‘40s, his appreciation of the influence of factical conditions in the
exercise of freedom grew apace.

Sartre's concept of authenticity, occasionally cited as the only existentialist “virtue,” is

often criticized as denoting more a style than a content. Admittedly, it does seem
compatible with a wide variety of life choices. Its foundation, again, is ontological-the
basic ambiguity of human reality that “is what it is not” (that is, its future as possibility)
and “is not what it is” (its past as facticity, including its ego or self, to which we have
seen it is related via an internal negation). We could say that authenticity is
fundamentally living this ontological truth of one's situation, namely, that one is never
identical with one's current state but remains responsible sustaining it. Thus, the claim
“that's just the way I am” would constitute a form of self-deception or bad faith as would
all forms of determinism, since both instances involve lying to oneself about the
ontological fact of one's nonself-coincidence and the flight from concomitant
responsibility for “choosing” to remain that way.
Given the fundamental division of the human situation into facticity and transcendence,
bad faith or inauthenticity can assume two principal forms: one that denies the freedom or
transcendence component (“I can't do anything about it”) and the other that ignores the
factical dimension of every situation (“I can do anything by just wishing it”). The former
is the more prevalent form of self deception but the latter is common to people who lack
a sense of the real in their lives.

Sartre sometimes talks as if any choice could be authentic so long as it is lived with a
clear awareness of its contingency and responsibility. But his considered opinion
excludes choices that oppress or consciously exploit others. In other words, authenticity
is not entirely style; there is a general content and that content is freedom. Thus the
“authentic Nazi” is explicitly disqualified as being oxymoronic. Sartre's thesis is that
freedom is the implicit object of any choice, a claim he makes but does not adequately
defend in his Humanism lecture.

Though critical of its bourgeois variety, Sartre does support an existentialist humanism
the motto of which could well be his remark that “you can always make something out of
what you've been made into.” In fact, his entire career could be summarized in these
words that carry an ethical as well as a critical message. The first part of his professional
life focused on the freedom of the existential individual (you can always make something
out of…); the second concentrated on the socioeconomic and historical conditions which
limited and modified that freedom (what you've been made into), once freedom ceased to
be merely the definition of “man” and included the possibility of genuine options in
concrete situations. That phase corresponded to Sartre's political commitment and active
involvement in public debates, always in search of the exploitative “systems” such as
capitalism, colonialism and racism at work in society and the oppressive practices of
individuals who sustained them. As he grew more cognizant of the social dimension of
individual life, the political and the ethical tended to coalesce. In fact, he explicitly
rejected “Machiavellianism.”

If Sartre's first and best known ethics corresponds to the ontology of Being and
Nothingness, his second, “dialectical” ethics builds on the philosophy of history
developed in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. In a series of unpublished notes for
lectures in the 1960s, some of which were never delivered, Sartre sketched a theory of
ethics based on the concepts of human need and the ideal of “integral man” in contrast
with its counter-concept, the “subhuman.”What this adds to his published ethics is a more
specific content and a keener sense of the social conditions for living a properly human
life.

Sartre's third attempt at an ethics, which he called an ethics of the “we,” was undertaken
in interview format with Benny Lévy toward the end of his life. It purports to question
many of the main propositions of his ethics of authenticity, yet what has appeared in print
chiefly elaborates claims already stated in his earlier works. But since the tapes on which
these remarks were recorded are unavailable to the public and Sartre's illness at the time
they were made was serious, their authority as revisionary of his general philosophy
remains doubtful. If ever released in its entirety, this text will constitute a serious
hermeneutical challenge.

5. Politics
Sartre was not politically involved in the 1930s though his heart, as he said, “was on the
left, like everyone's.” The War years, occupation and resistance made the difference. He
emerged committed to social reform and convinced that the writer had the obligation to
address the social issues of the day. He founded the influential journal of opinion, Les
Temps modernes, with his partner Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Merleau-Ponty,
Raymond Aron and others. In the “Présentation” to the initial issue (October, 1945), he
elaborated his idea of committed literature and insisted that failure to address political
issues amounted to supporting the status quo. After a brief unsuccessful attempt to help
organize a nonCommunist leftist political organization, he began his long love-hate
relationship with the French Communist Party, which he never joined but which for years
he considered the legitimate voice of the working class in France. This continued till the
Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956. Still, he continued to sympathize with the
movement, if not the Party, for some time afterwards. He summarized his disillusionment
in an essay “The Communists are afraid of Revolution,” following the “events of May,”
1968. By then he had moved toward the radical Left and what the French labeled “les
Maos,” whom he likewise never joined but whose mixture of the ethical and the political
attracted him.

Politically, Sartre tended toward what the French call “libertarian socialism,” which is a
kind of anarchism. Ever distrustful of authority, which he considered “the Other in us,”
his ideal was a society of voluntary eye-level relations that he called “the city of ends.”
One caught a glimpse of this in his description of the forming group (le groupe en fusion)
in the Critique. There each was “the same” as the others in terms of practical concern.
Each suspended his or her personal interests for the sake of the common goal. No doubt
these practices hardened into institutions and freedom was compromised once more in
bureaucratic machinery. But that brief taste of genuine positive reciprocity was revelatory
of what an authentic social existence could be.

Sartre came to recognize how the economic conditions the political in the sense that
material scarcity, as both Ricardo an Marx insisted, determines our social relations. In
Sartre's reading, scarcity emerges as the source of structural and personal violence in
human history as we know it. It follows that liberation from such violence will come only
through the counter violence of revolution and the advent of a “socialism of abundance.”

What Sartre termed the “progressive/regressive method” for historical investigation is a

hybrid of historical materialism and existentialist psychoanalysis. It respects the often
decisive role of economic considerations in historical explanation (historical materialism)
while insisting that “the men that History makes are not the men that make history”; in
other words, he resists complete economic determinism by implicit appeal to his
humanist motto: “You can always make something out of…”
Never one to avoid a battle, Sartre became embroiled in the Algerian War, generating
deep hostility from the Right to the point that a bomb was detonated at the entrance to his
apartment building by supporters of a French Algeria. Sartre's political critique conveyed
in a series of essays, interviews and plays, especially The Condemned of Altona, once
more combined a sense of structural exploitation (in this case, the institution of
colonialism and its attendant racism) with an expression of moral outrage at the
oppression of the Muslim population and the torture of captives by the French military.

Mention of the play brings to mind the role of imaginative art in Sartre's philosophical
work. This piece, whose chief protagonist is Frantz “the butcher of Smolensk,” though
ostensibly about the effect of Nazi atrocities at the Eastern front on a postwar industrialist
family in Hamburg, is really addressing the question of collective guilt and the French
suppression of the Algerian war for independence raging at that time. Sartre often turned
to literary art to convey or even to work through philosophical thoughts that he had
already or would later conceptualize in his essays and theoretical studies. Which brings
us to the relation between imaginative literature and philosophy in his work.

6. Art and Philosophy

The strategy of “indirect communication” has been an instrument of “Existentialists”
since Kierkegaard adopted the use of pseudonyms in his philosophical writings in the
early nineteenth century. The point is to communicate a feeling and an attitude that the
reader/spectator adopts in which certain existentialist themes such as anguish,
responsibility or bad faith are suggested but not dictated as in a lecture. Asked why his
plays were performed only in the bourgeois sections of the city, Sartre replied that no
bourgeois could leave a performance of one of them without “thinking thoughts traitorous
to his class.” The so-called aesthetic “suspension of disbelief” coupled with the tendency
to identify with certain characters and to experience their plight vicariously conveys
conviction rather than information. And this is what existentialism is chiefly about:
challenging the individual to examine their life for intimations of bad faith and to
heighten their sensitivity to oppression and exploitation in their world.

Sartre's early work Nausea (1938) is the very model of a philosophical novel. Its
protagonist, Roquentin, works through many of the major themes of Being and
Nothingness that will appear five years later. It can be read as an extended meditation on
the contingency of our existence and on the psychosomatic experience that captures that
phenomenon. In his famous meditation on a tree root, Roquentin experiences the brute
facticity of its existence and of his own: both are simply there, without justification, in
excess (de trop). The physicality of this revelatory “sickly sweet” sensation should not be
overlooked. Like the embarrassment felt before the Other's gaze in the voyeur example
cited earlier, our bodily intentionality (what he calls “the body as for-itself”) is revealing
an ontological reality.

The case at hand is an artistic way of conveying what Sartre in Being and Nothingness
will call “the phenomenon of being.” He agrees with the tradition that “being” or “to be”
is not a concept. But if not that, how is it to be indexed? What does it mean “to be”?
Sartre's existential phenomenology appeals to certain kinds of experience such as nausea
and joy to articulate the “transphenomenal” character of being. Pace Kant, “being” does
not denote a realm behind the phenomena that the descriptive method analyzes. But
neither is it the object of an “eidetic” reduction (the phenomenological method that would
grasp it as an essence). Rather, being accompanies all phenomena as their existential
dimension. But this dimension is revealed by certain experiences such as that of utter
contingency like that of Roquentin. This is scarcely rationalism, but neither is it
mysticism. Anyone can experience this contingency and, once brought to reflective
awareness, can reflect on its implications. What this novel does imaginatively, Being and
Nothingness, subtitled “A Phenomenological Ontology,” pursues conceptually, though
with the aid of phenomenological “arguments,” as we have seen.

In a series of essays published as What is Literature? (1947), Sartre expounds his notion
of “committed” literature, a turn in his thought first indicated in the inaugural issue of
Les Temps modernes two years earlier. Though steeped in the polemics of the day, this
continues to be a seminal text of criticism. It underscores what I have called the
“pragmatist” dimension of Sartre's thought: writing is a form of acting in the world; it
produces effects for which the author must assume responsibility. Addressing the
problem of “writing for our time,” Sartre underscores the harsh facts of oppression and
exploitation that were not erased by the upheaval of world war. Ours remains “a society
based on violence.” Accordingly, the author is responsible for addressing that violence
with a counter-violence (for example, by his choice of topics to discuss) or sharing in it
by his silence. Drawing a distinction between prose, which can be committed, and
“poetry” (basically nonrepresentational art such as music and poetry properly speaking),
which cannot-a distinction that will return to haunt him — Sartre proceeds to urge that
the prose-writer reveal that man is a value to be invented each day and that “the questions
he raises are always moral” (203). A clear rejection of “art for art's sake,” Sartre insisted
on the social responsibility of the artist and the intellectual in general.

The artwork, for Sartre, has always carried a special power: that of communicating
among freedoms without alienation or objectification. In this sense, it has stood as an
exception to the objectifying gaze of his vintage existentialist texts. That relation between
artist and public via the work of art Sartre calls “gift-appeal.” In his The Psychology of
Imagination, he speaks of the portrait “inviting” the viewer to realize its possibilities by
regarding it aesthetically. By the time he gathers his thoughts in What is Literature? and
Notebooks for an Ethics, the concept of writing as an act of generosity to which the
reader responds in an act of “re-creation” that respects the mutuality of these freedoms-
this model assumes political significance. And, in fact, it anticipates the “free alterity” of
the group member as analyzed in the Critique. In other words, Sartre's political and
ethical values and concerns conjoin in the concept of committed literature.

Before concluding with a prognosis of Sartre's philosophical relevance in the twenty-first

century, let me note the several “biographies” that he produced of important literary
figures in addition to his autobiography, Words. Each of these studies constitutes a kind
of existential psychoanalysis. The subject's literary production is submitted to a kind of
“hermeneutic” in which the underlying life-project is uncovered. He begins to employ the
progressive-regressive method in the late ‘50s whereby the historical and socioeconomic
conditions of the subject are uncovered in a “regressive” argument from biographical and
social facts to the conditions of their possibility followed by a “progressive” account of
the subjects process of “personalization.” The most extensive, if not the most successful,
of these “biographies” is his analysis of the life and times of Gustave Flaubert, The
Family Idiot.

But these biographies, almost exclusively about literary men, are also object lessons in an
“existentialist” theory of history. Their hallmark is an attempt to reconstruct the subject's
project as his manner of dialectically “totalizing” his epoch even as he is being totalized
by it. While connecting impersonal historical phenomena in their dialectical necessity
(for example, the unintended consequences ingredient in any historical account), these
narratives are intent on conveying the subject's sense of the anguish of decision and the
pinch of the real. In effect, biography is an essential part of an existentialist approach to
history and not a mere illustrative appendage.

7. Sartre in the Twenty-first Century

Foucault once dismissed Sartre testily as a man of the nineteenth century trying to think
the twentieth. Presumably, he had more in mind than the fact that all of Sartre's
“biographies,” except his own, were of nineteenth-century figures. With his emphasis on
consciousness, subjectivity, freedom, responsibility and the self, his commitment to
Marxist categories and dialectical thinking, especially in the second part of his career,
and his quasi Enlightenment humanism, Sartre seemed to personify everything that
structuralists and poststructuralists like Foucault opposed. In effect, the enfant terrible of
mid century France has become the “traditionalist”of the following generation. A classic
example of philosophical parricide.

In fact, some of this criticism was misdirected while other portions exhibit a genuine
philosophical “choice” about goals and methods. Though Sartre resolutely insisted on the
primacy of “free organic praxis” methodologically, ontologically, and ethically, on which
he based the freedom and responsibility that define his humanism, he respected what his
critic Louis Althusser called “structural causality” and made allowance for it with his
concept of the practico-inert. But it is the primacy awarded consciousness/praxis in this
regard that strikes structuralist and poststructuralist critics as naive and simply wrong.
Added to this is Sartre's passion for “totalizing” thought, whether individually in terms of
a life project or collectively in terms of dialectical rationality, that counters the
fragmenting and anti-teleological claims of poststructuralist authors. And then there is his
famous denial of the Freudian unconscious and his neglect of semiotics and the
philosophy of language in general.

One should note that Sartre's suspicion of Freudian psychoanalysis became quite nuanced
in his later years. His appeal to “the lived” (le vécu) and to pre-theoretical
comprehension, especially in his Flaubert study, for example, incorporated many features
of the “unconscious” drives and relations proper to psychoanalytic discourse. And while
he was familiar with Saussure and structural linguistics, to which he occasionally
referred, he admitted that he had never formulated an explicit philosophy of language but
insisted that one could be reconstructed from elements employed throughout his work.

But at least three features of Sartre's thought seem particularly relevant to current
discussions among philosophers both Anglo-American and Continental. The first is his
concept of the human agent as not a self but a “presence to self.” This cracking opening
of the Cartesian “thinking thing” supports a wide variety of alternative theories of the self
while retaining the features of freedom and responsibility that, one can argue, have been
central tenets of Western philosophy and law since the Greeks.

Emphasis on an ethics of responsibility in contrast to one of rules, principles or values in

recent years that led to a wide-spread interest in the work of Levinas as a necessary
complement to so-called “postmodern” ethics. But Sartrean “authenticity” is equally
relevant in this regard, as Charles Taylor and others have pointed out. And its location
within a mundane ontology may resonate better with philosophers of a more secular bent.

Finally, the recent revival of the understanding of philosophy as a “way of life” as

distinct from an academic discipline focused on epistemology or more recently on the
philosophy of language, while renewing an interest in Hellenistic ethics as well as in
various forms of “spirituality,”can find in Sartrean existentialism forms of “care of the
self” that are in fruitful conversation with contemporary ethics, aesthetics and politics
without devolving into moralism, aestheticism or fanaticism. From a philosopher
suspicious of moral recipes and focused on concrete, lived experience, this is perhaps as
much as one could expect or want.

Bibliography
Bibliographies

For a complete annotated bibliography of Sartre's works see Michel Contat and Michel
Rybalka (eds.), The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), updated in Magazine littéraire 103-4 (1975), pp. 9-49, and by Michel
Sciard in Obliques, 18-19 (May 1979), pp. 331-47. Michel Rybalka and Michel Contat
have complied an additional bibliography of primary and secondary sources published
since Sartre's death in Sartre: Bibliography, 1980-1992 (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy
Documentation Center; Paris: CNRS Editions, 1993).

Primary Sources: Works by Sartre

 1962, Transcendence of the Ego, tr. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick ,
New York: Noonday Press, [1936-37].
 1948, The Emotions. Outline of a Theory, tr. Bernard Frechtman, New York:
Philosophical Library, [1939].
 1948, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical
Library, [1943].
  1948, Anti-Semite and Jew, tr. George J. Becker, New York: Schocken, [1946].
 1962, “Materialism and Revolution,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, tr.
Annette Michelson, New York: Crowell-Collier, [1946].
 1956, “Existentialism Is A Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to
Sartre, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, Meridian Books, [1946].
 1988, What is Literature? And Other Essays, tr. Bernard Frechtman et al., intro.
Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, [title essay 1947, Les
Temps modernes, and 1948, Situations II]
 1968, The Communists and Peace, with A Reply to Claude Lefort, tr. Martha H.
Fletcher and Philip R. Berk respectively, New York: George Braziller, [1952].
 1968, Search for a Method, tr. Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Random House,
Vintage Books, [1958].
 1959, Between Existentialism and Marxism, (essays and interviews, -70), tr. John
Mathews, London: New Left Books, 1974.
 1976, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, tr.
Alan Sheridan-Smith, London: New Left Books, [1960].
 1964, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Braziller, [1964].
 1981-93, The Family Idiot, tr. Carol Cosman 5 vols., Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, [1971-72].
 1976, Sartre on Theater, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, New York:
Pantheon.
 1977, Life/Situations: Essays Witten and Spoken, tr. P. Auster and L. Davis, New
York: Pantheon.
 1996, Hope, Now: The 1989 Interviews tr. Adrian van den Hoven, intro. Ronald
Aronson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1980].
 1992, Notebook for an Ethics, tr. David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, [1983].
 1984, The War Diaries, tr. Quentin Hoare,New York: Pantheon, [1983].
 1993, Quiet Moments in a War. The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de
Beauvoir, 1940-1963, ed.. Simone de Beauvoir, tr. and intro. Lee Fahnestock and
Norman MacAfee. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1983].
 1991, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, The Intelligibility of History, tr.
Quintin Hoare, London: Verso, [1985 unfinished].
 1992, Truth and Existence, tr. Adrian van den Hoven, intro. Ronald Aronson.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1989].

Selected Secondary Sources

 Anderson, Thomas C., 1993, Sartre's Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral
Humanity, Chicago: Open Court.
 Aronson, Ronald, 1987, Sartre's Second Critique,Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
 Barnes, Hazel E., 1981, Sartre and Flaubert, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
 Bell, Linda A., 1989, Sartre's Ethics of Authenticity, Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press.
  Busch, Thomas, 1990, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of
Circumstances in Sartre's Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 Catalano, Joseph, 1980, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and
Nothingness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 –––, 1986, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason,
vol. 1 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 de Beauvoir, Simone, 1964-1965, The Force of Circumstances, tr. Richard
Howard, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
 –––, 1984, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, tr. P. O'Brian, New York: Pantheon.
 –––, 1991, Letters to Sartre tr. and ed. Quentin Hoare, New York: Arcade.
 Detmer, David, 1988, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of
Jean-Paul Sartre, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.
 Dobson, Andrew, 1993, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Fell, Joseph P., 1979, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place, New
York: Columbia University Press.
 Flynn, Thomas R., 1984, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of
Collective Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 –––, 1997, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, vol. 1 Toward an
Existentialist Theory of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 Jeanson, Francis, 1981, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, tr. Robert Stone,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 McBride, William Leon, 1991, Sartre's Political Theory. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
 –––, ed., 1997, Sartre and Existentialism, 8 vols. New York: Garland.
 Santoni, Ronald E., 1995, Bad Faith, Good Faith and Authenticity in Sartre's
Early Philosophy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
 –––, 2003, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent, University Park, Penn.:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
 Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed., 1981, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, La Salle,
Ill.: Open Court.
 Schroeder, William, 1984, Sartre and His Predecessors (Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
 Silverman, Hugh J., 1987, Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and
Structuralism, London: Routledge.
 Stone, Robert and Elizabeth Bowman, 1986, “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at
Sartre's unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes,” Social Text nos. 13-14 (Winter-
Spring, 1986), 195-215.
 –––, 1991, “Sartre's ‘Morality and History’: A First Look at the Notes for the
unpublished 1965 Cornell Lectures” in Sartre Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and
Adrian van den Hoven, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 53-82.
 Taylor, Charles, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.

Other Internet Resources

  United Kingdom Society for Sartrean Studies

Related Entries
aesthetics: existentialist | Beauvoir, Simone de | existentialism | Heidegger, Martin |
Husserl, Edmund | intentionality | Kierkegaard, Søren | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice |
Nietzsche, Friedrich | nothingness | phenomenology | self-consciousness:
phenomenological approaches to | self-deception: collective

Copyright © 2004 by
Thomas Flynn <tflynn@emory.edu>
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
26 January 2011

Sartre’s Existentialism

The philosophical career of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) focuses, in its

first phase, upon the construction of a philosophy of existence known as existentialism.
Sartre’s early works are characterized by a development of classic phenomenology, but
his reflection diverges from Husserl’s on methodology, the conception of the self, and an
interest in ethics. These points of divergence are the cornerstones of Sartre’s existential
phenomenology, whose purpose is to understand human existence rather than the world
as such. Adopting and adapting the methods of phenomenology, Sartre sets out to
develop an ontological account of what it is to be human. The main features of this
ontology are the groundlessness and radical freedom which characterize the human
condition. These are contrasted with the unproblematic being of the world of things.
Sartre’s substantial literary output adds dramatic expression to the always unstable co-
existence of facts and freedom in an indifferent world.

Sartre’s ontology is explained in his philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness,

where he defines two types of reality which lie beyond our conscious experience: the
being of the object of consciousness and that of consciousness itself. The object of
consciousness exists as “in-itself,” that is, in an independent and non-relational way.
However, consciousness is always consciousness “of something,” so it is defined in
relation to something else, and it is not possible to grasp it within a conscious experience:
it exists as “for-itself.” An essential feature of consciousness is its negative power, by
which we can experience “nothingness.” This power is also at work within the self, where
it creates an intrinsic lack of self-identity. So the unity of the self is understood as a task
for the for-itself rather than as a given.

In order to ground itself, the self needs projects, which can be viewed as aspects of an
individual’s fundamental project and motivated by a desire for “being” lying within the
individual’s consciousness. The source of this project is a spontaneous original choice
that depends on the individual’s freedom. However, self’s choice may lead to a project of
self-deception such as bad faith, where one’s own real nature as for-itself is discarded to
adopt that of the in-itself. Our only way to escape self-deception is authenticity, that is,
choosing in a way which reveals the existence of the for-itself as both factual and
transcendent. For Sartre, my proper exercise of freedom creates values that any other
human being placed in my situation could experience, therefore each authentic project
expresses a universal dimension in the singularity of a human life.

After a brief summary of Sartre’s life, this article looks at the main themes characterizing
Sartre’s early philosophical works. The ontology developed in Sartre’s main existential
work, Being and Nothingness, will then be analysed. Finally, an overview is provided of
the further development of existentialist themes in his later works.

Table of Contents

1. Sartre’s Life
2. Early Works
1. Methodology
2. The Ego
3. Ethics
4. Existential Phenomenology
3. The Ontology of Being and Nothingness
1. The Being of the Phenomenon and Consciousness
2. Two Types of Being
3. Nothingness
4. The For-Itself in Being and Nothingness
1. A Lack of Self-Identity
2. The Project of Bad Faith
3. The Fundamental Project
4. Desire
5. Relations with Others in Being and Nothingness
1. The Problem of Other Minds
2. Human Relationships
6. Authenticity
1. Freedom
2. Authenticity
3. An Ethical Dimension
7. Other Contributions to Existential Phenomenology
1. Critique of Dialectical Reason
2. The Problem of Method
 8. Conclusion
9. References
1. Sartre’s works
2. Commentaries

1. Sartre’s Life
Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. After a childhood marked by the early death of his
father, the important role played by his grandfather, and some rather unhappy experiences
at school, Sartre finished High School at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. After two years of
preparation, he gained entrance to the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, where, from
1924 to 1929 he came into contact with Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and other notables. He passed the ‘Agrégation’ on his second attempt, by
adapting the content and style of his writing to the rather traditional requirements of the
examiners. This was his passport to a teaching career. After teaching philosophy in a
lycée in Le Havre, he obtained a grant to study at the French Institute in Berlin where he
discovered phenomenology in 1933 and wrote The Transcendence of the Ego. His
phenomenological investigation into the imagination was published in 1936 and his
Theory of Emotions two years later. During the Second World War, Sartre wrote his
existentialist magnum opus Being and Nothingness and taught the work of Heidegger in a
war camp. He was briefly involved in a Resistance group and taught in a lycée until the
end of the war. Being and Nothingness was published in 1943 and Existentialism and
Humanism in 1946. His study of Baudelaire was published in 1947 and that of the actor
Jean Genet in 1952. Throughout the Thirties and Forties, Sartre also had an abundant
literary output with such novels as Nausea and plays like Intimacy (The wall), The flies,
Huis Clos, Les Mains Sales. In 1960, after three years working on it, Sartre published the
Critique of Dialectical Reason. In the Fifties and Sixties, Sartre travelled to the USSR,
Cuba, and was involved in turn in promoting Marxist ideas, condemning the USSR’s
invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and speaking up against France’s policies in
Algeria. He was a high profile figure in the Peace Movement. In 1964, he turned down
the Nobel prize for literature. He was actively involved in the May 1968 uprising. His
study of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la Famille, was published in 1971. In 1977, he claimed no
longer to be a Marxist, but his political activity continued until his death in 1980.

2. Early Works
Sartre’s early work is characterised by phenomenological analyses involving his own
interpretation of Husserl’s method. Sartre’s methodology is Husserlian (as demonstrated
in his paper “Intentionality: a fundamental ideal of Husserl’s phenomenology”) insofar as
it is a form of intentional and eidetic analysis. This means that the acts by which
consciousness assigns meaning to objects are what is analysed, and that what is sought in
the particular examples under examination is their essential structure. At the core of this
methodology is a conception of consciousness as intentional, that is, as ‘about’
something, a conception inherited from Brentano and Husserl. Sartre puts his own mark
on this view by presenting consciousness as being transparent, i.e. having no ‘inside’, but
rather as being a ‘fleeing’ towards the world.

The distinctiveness of Sartre’s development of Husserl’s phenomenology can be

characterised in terms of Sartre’s methodology, of his view of the self and of his ultimate
ethical interests.

a. Methodology

Sartre’s methodology differs from Husserl’s in two essential ways. Although he thinks of
his analyses as eidetic, he has no real interest in Husserl’s understanding of his method as
uncovering the Essence of things. For Husserl, eidetic analysis is a clarification which
brings out the higher level of the essence that is hidden in ‘fluid unclarity’ (Husserl,
Ideas, I). For Sartre, the task of an eidetic analysis does not deliver something fixed
immanent to the phenomenon. It still claims to uncover that which is essential, but
thereby recognizes that phenomenal experience is essentially fluid.

In Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre replaces the traditional picture of the
passivity of our emotional nature with one of the subject’s active participation in her
emotional experiences. Emotion originates in a degradation of consciousness faced with a
certain situation. The spontaneous conscious grasp of the situation which characterizes an
emotion, involves what Sartre describes as a ‘magical’ transformation of the situation.
Faced with an object which poses an insurmountable problem, the subject attempts to
view it differently, as though it were magically transformed. Thus an imminent extreme
danger may cause me to faint so that the object of my fear is no longer in my conscious
grasp. Or, in the case of wrath against an unmovable obstacle, I may hit it as though the
world were such that this action could lead to its removal. The essence of an emotional
state is thus not an immanent feature of the mental world, but rather a transformation of
the subject’s perspective upon the world. In The Psychology of the Imagination, Sartre
demonstrates his phenomenological method by using it to take on the traditional view
that to imagine something is to have a picture of it in mind. Sartre’s account of imagining
does away with representations and potentially allows for a direct access to that which is
imagined; when this object does not exist, there is still an intention (albeit unsuccessful)
to become conscious of it through the imagination. So there is no internal structure to the
imagination. It is rather a form of directedness upon the imagined object. Imagining a
heffalump is thus of the same nature as perceiving an elephant. Both are spontaneous
intentional (or directed) acts, each with its own type of intentionality.

b. The Ego

Sartre’s view also diverges from Husserl’s on the important issue of the ego. For Sartre,
Husserl adopted the view that the subject is a substance with attributes, as a result of his
interpretation of Kant’s unity of apperception. Husserl endorsed the Kantian claim that
the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany any representation of which I am conscious, but
reified this ‘I’ into a transcendental ego. Such a move is not warranted for Sartre, as he
explains in The Transcendence of the Ego. Moreover, it leads to the following problems
for our phenomenological analysis of consciousness.

The ego would have to feature as an object in all states of consciousness. This would
result in its obstructing our conscious access to the world. But this would conflict with
the direct nature of this conscious access. Correlatively, consciousness would be divided
into consciousness of ego and consciousness of the world. This would however be at
odds with the simple, and thus undivided, nature of our access to the world through
conscious experience. In other words, when I am conscious of a tree, I am directly
conscious of it, and am not myself an object of consciousness. Sartre proposes therefore
to view the ego as a unity produced by consciousness. In other words, he adds to the
Humean picture of the self as a bundle of perceptions, an account of its unity. This unity
of the ego is a product of conscious activity. As a result, the traditional Cartesian view
that self-consciousness is the consciousness the ego has of itself no longer holds, since
the ego is not given but created by consciousness. What model does Sartre propose for
our understanding of self-consciousness and the production of the ego through conscious
activity? The key to answering the first part of the question lies in Sartre’s introduction of
a pre-reflective level, while the second can then be addressed by examining conscious
activity at the other level, i.e. that of reflection. An example of pre-reflective
consciousness is the seeing of a house. This type of consciousness is directed to a
transcendent object, but this does not involve my focussing upon it, i.e. it does not require
that an ego be involved in a conscious relation to the object. For Sartre, this pre-reflective
consciousness is thus impersonal: there is no place for an ‘I’ at this level. Importantly,
Sartre insists that self-consciousness is involved in any such state of consciousness: it is
the consciousness this state has of itself. This accounts for the phenomenology of
‘seeing’, which is such that the subject is clearly aware of her pre-reflective
consciousness of the house. This awareness does not have an ego as its object, but it is
rather the awareness that there is an act of ‘seeing’. Reflective consciousness is the type
of state of consciousness involved in my looking at a house. For Sartre, the cogito
emerges as a result of consciousness’s being directed upon the pre-reflectively conscious.
In so doing, reflective consciousness takes the pre-reflectively conscious as being mine. It
thus reveals an ego insofar as an ‘I’ is brought into focus: the pre-reflective consciousness
which is objectified is viewed as mine. This ‘I’ is the correlate of the unity that I impose
upon the pre-reflective states of consciousness through my reflection upon them. To
account for the prevalence of the Cartesian picture, Sartre argues that we are prone to the
illusion that this ‘I’ was in fact already present prior to the reflective conscious act, i.e.
present at the pre-reflective level. By substituting his model of a two-tiered consciousness
for this traditional picture, Sartre provides an account of self-consciousness that does not
rely upon a pre-existing ego, and shows how an ego is constructed in reflection.

c. Ethics

An important feature of Sartre’s phenomenological work is that his ultimate interest in

carrying out phenomenological analyses is an ethical one. Through them, he opposes the
view, which is for instance that of the Freudian theory of the unconscious, that there are
psychological factors that are beyond the grasp of our consciousness and thus are
potential excuses for certain forms of behaviour.

Starting with Sartre’s account of the ego, this is characterised by the claim that it is
produced by, rather than prior to consciousness. As a result, accounts of agency cannot
appeal to a pre-existing ego to explain certain forms of behaviour. Rather, conscious acts
are spontaneous, and since all pre-reflective consciousness is transparent to itself, the
agent is fully responsible for them (and a fortiori for his ego). In Sartre’s analysis of
emotions, affective consciousness is a form of pre-reflective consciousness, and is
therefore spontaneous and self-conscious. Against traditional views of the emotions as
involving the subject’s passivity, Sartre can therefore claim that the agent is responsible
for the pre-reflective transformation of his consciousness through emotion. In the case of
the imaginary, the traditional view of the power of fancy to overcome rational thought is
replaced by one of imaginary consciousness as a form of pre-reflective consciousness. As
such, it is therefore again the result of the spontaneity of consciousness and involves self-
conscious states of mind. An individual is therefore fully responsible for his
imaginations’s activity. In all three cases, a key factor in Sartre’s account is his notion of
the spontaneity of consciousness. To dispel the apparent counter-intuitiveness of the
claims that emotional states and flights of imagination are active, and thus to provide an
account that does justice to the phenomenology of these states, spontaneity must be
clearly distinguished from a voluntary act. A voluntary act involves reflective
consciousness that is connected with the will; spontaneity is a feature of pre-reflective
consciousness.

d. Existential Phenomenology

Is there a common thread to these specific features of Sartre’s phenomenological

approach? Sartre’s choice of topics for phenomenological analysis suggests an interest in
the phenomenology of what it is to be human, rather than in the world as such. This
privileging of the human dimension has parallels with Heidegger’s focus upon Dasein in
tackling the question of Being. This aspect of Heidegger’s work is that which can
properly be called existential insofar as Dasein’s way of being is essentially distinct from
that of any other being. This characterisation is particularly apt for Sartre’s work, in that
his phenomenological analyses do not serve a deeper ontological purpose as they do for
Heidegger who distanced himself from any existential labelling. Thus, in his “Letter on
Humanism”, Heidegger reminds us that the analysis of Dasein is only one chapter in the
enquiry into the question of Being. For Heidegger, Sartre’s humanism is one more
metaphysical perspective which does not return to the deeper issue of the meaning of
Being.

Sartre sets up his own picture of the individual human being by first getting rid of its
grounding in a stable ego. As Sartre later puts it in Existentialism is a Humanism, to be
human is characterised by an existence that precedes its essence. As such, existence is
problematic, and it is towards the development of a full existentialist theory of what it is
to be human that Sartre’s work logically evolves. In relation to what will become Being
and Nothingness, Sartre’s early works can be seen as providing important preparatory
material for an existential account of being human. But the distinctiveness of Sartre’s
approach to understanding human existence is ultimately guided by his ethical interest. In
particular, this accounts for his privileging of a strong notion of freedom which we shall
see to be fundamentally at odds with Heidegger’s analysis. Thus the nature of Sartre’s
topics of analysis, his theory of the ego and his ethical aims all characterise the
development of an existential phenomenology. Let us now examine the central themes of
this theory as they are presented in Being and Nothingness.

3. The Ontology of Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness can be characterized as a phenomenological investigation into the
nature of what it is to be human, and thus be seen as a continuation of, and expansion
upon, themes characterising the early works. In contrast with these however, an ontology
is presented at the outset and guides the whole development of the investigation.

One of the main features of this system, which Sartre presents in the introduction and the
first chapter of Part One, is a distinction between two kinds of transcendence of the
phenomenon of being. The first is the transcendence of being and the second that of
consciousness. This means that, starting with the phenomenon (that which is our
conscious experience), there are two types of reality which lie beyond it, and are thus
trans-phenomenal. On the one hand, there is the being of the object of consciousness, and
on the other, that of consciousness itself. These define two types of being, the in-itself
and the for-itself. To bring out that which keeps them apart, involves understanding the
phenomenology of nothingness. This reveals consciousness as essentially characterisable
through its power of negation, a power which plays a key role in our existential
condition. Let us examine these points in more detail.

a. The Being of the Phenomenon and Consciousness

In Being and Time, Heidegger presents the phenomenon as involving both a covering and
a disclosing of being. For Sartre, the phenomenon reveals, rather than conceals, reality.
What is the status of this reality? Sartre considers the phenomenalist option of viewing
the world as a construct based upon the series of appearances. He points out that the
being of the phenomenon is not like its essence, i.e. is not something which is
apprehended on the basis of this series. In this way, Sartre moves away from Husserl’s
conception of the essence as that which underpins the unity of the appearances of an
object, to a Heideggerian notion of the being of the phenomenon as providing this
grounding. Just as the being of the phenomenon transcends the phenomenon of being,
consciousness also transcends it. Sartre thus establishes that if there is perceiving, there
must be a consciousness doing the perceiving.

How are these two transphenomenal forms of being related? As opposed to a

conceptualising consciousness in a relation of knowledge to an object, as in Husserl and
the epistemological tradition he inherits, Sartre introduces a relation of being:
consciousness (in a pre-reflective form) is directly related to the being of the
phenomenon. This is Sartre’s version of Heidegger’s ontological relation of being-in-the-
world. It differs from the latter in two essential respects. First, it is not a practical relation,
and thus distinct from a relation to the ready-to-hand. Rather, it is simply given by
consciousness. Second, it does not lead to any further question of Being. For Sartre, all
there is to being is given in the transphenomenality of existing objects, and there is no
further issue of the Being of all beings as for Heidegger.

b. Two Types of Being

As we have seen, both consciousness and the being of the phenomenon transcend the
phenomenon of being. As a result, there are two types of being which Sartre, using
Hegel’s terminology, calls the for-itself (‘pour-soi’) and the in-itself (‘en-soi’).

Sartre presents the in-itself as existing without justification independently of the for-
itself, and thus constituting an absolute ‘plenitude’. It exists in a fully determinate and
non-relational way. This fully characterizes its transcendence of the conscious
experience. In contrast with the in-itself, the for-itself is mainly characterised by a lack of
identity with itself. This is a consequence of the following. Consciousness is always ‘of
something’, and therefore defined in relation to something else. It has no nature beyond
this and is thus completely translucent. Insofar as the for-itself always transcends the
particular conscious experience (because of the spontaneity of consciousness), any
attempt to grasp it within a conscious experience is doomed to failure. Indeed, as we have
already seen in the distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness, a
conscious grasp of the first transforms it. This means that it is not possible to identify the
for-itself, since the most basic form of identification, i.e. with itself, fails. This picture is
clearly one in which the problematic region of being is that of the for-itself, and that is
what Being and Nothingness will focus upon. But at the same time, another important
question arises. Indeed, insofar Sartre has rejected the notion of a grounding of all beings
in Being, one may ask how something like a relation of being between consciousness and
the world is possible. This issue translates in terms of understanding the meaning of the
totality formed by the for-itself and the in-itself and its division into these two regions of
being. By addressing this latter issue, Sartre finds the key concept that enables him to
investigate the nature of the for-itself.

c. Nothingness

One of the most original contributions of Sartre’s metaphysics lies in his analysis of the
notion of nothingness and the claim that it plays a central role at the heart of being
(chapter 1, Part One).

Sartre (BN, 9-10) discusses the example of entering a café to meet Pierre and discovering
his absence from his usual place. Sartre talks of this absence as ‘haunting’ the café.
Importantly, this is not just a psychological state, because a ‘nothingness’ is really
experienced. The nothingness in question is also not simply the result of applying a
logical operator, negation, to a proposition. For it is not the same to say that there is no
rhinoceros in the café, and to say that Pierre is not there. The first is a purely logical
construction that reveals nothing about the world, while the second does. Sartre says it
points to an objective fact. However, this objective fact is not simply given independently
of human beings. Rather, it is produced by consciousness. Thus Sartre considers the
phenomenon of destruction. When an earthquake brings about a landslide, it modifies the
terrain. If, however, a town is thereby annihilated, the earthquake is viewed as having
destroyed it. For Sartre, there is only destruction insofar as humans have identified the
town as ‘fragile’. This means that it is the very negation involved in characterising
something as destructible which makes destruction possible. How is such a negation
possible? The answer lies in the claim that the power of negation is an intrinsic feature of
the intentionality of consciousness. To further identify this power of negation, let us look
at Sartre’s treatment of the phenomenon of questioning. When I question something, I
posit the possibility of a negative reply. For Sartre, this means that I operate a nihilation
of that which is given: the latter is thus ‘fluctuating between being and nothingness’ (BN,
23). Sartre then notes that this requires that the questioner be able to detach himself from
the causal series of being. And, by nihilating the given, he detaches himself from any
deterministic constraints. And Sartre says that ‘the name (…) [of] this possibility which
every human being has to secret a nothingness which isolates it (…) is freedom’ (BN, 24-
25). Our power to negate is thus the clue which reveals our nature as free. Below, we
shall return to the nature of Sartre’s notion of freedom.

4. The For-Itself in Being and Nothingness

The structure and characteristics of the for-itself are the main focal point of the
phenomenological analyses of Being and Nothingness. Here, the theme of
consciousness’s power of negation is explored in its different ramifications. These bring
out the core claims of Sartre’s existential account of the human condition.

a. A Lack of Self-Identity

The analysis of nothingness provides the key to the phenomenological understanding of

the for-itself (chapter 1, Part Two). For the negating power of consciousness is at work
within the self (BN, 85). By applying the account of this negating power to the case of
reflection, Sartre shows how reflective consciousness negates the pre-reflective
consciousness it takes as its object. This creates an instability within the self which
emerges in reflection: it is torn between being posited as a unity and being reflexively
grasped as a duality. This lack of self-identity is given another twist by Sartre: it is
posited as a task. That means that the unity of the self is a task for the for-itself, a task
which amounts to the self’s seeking to ground itself.

This dimension of task ushers in a temporal component that is fully justified by Sartre’s
analysis of temporality (BN, 107). The lack of coincidence of the for-itself with itself is
at the heart of what it is to be a for-itself. Indeed, the for-itself is not identical with its
past nor its future. It is already no longer what it was, and it is not yet what it will be.
Thus, when I make who I am the object of my reflection, I can take that which now lies
in my past as my object, while I have actually moved beyond this. Sartre says that I am
therefore no longer who I am. Similarly with the future: I never coincide with that which
I shall be. Temporality constitutes another aspect of the way in which negation is at work
within the for-itself. These temporal ecstases also map onto fundamental features of the
for-itself. First, the past corresponds to the facticity of a human life that cannot choose
what is already given about itself. Second, the future opens up possibilities for the
freedom of the for-itself. The coordination of freedom and facticity is however generally
incoherent, and thus represents another aspect of the essential instability at the heart of
the for-itself.

b. The Project of Bad Faith

The way in which the incoherence of the dichotomy of facticity and freedom is
manifested, is through the project of bad faith (chapter 2, Part One). Let us first clarify
Sartre’s notion of project. The fact that the self-identity of the for-itself is set as a task for
the for-itself, amounts to defining projects for the for-itself. Insofar as they contribute to
this task, they can be seen as aspects of the individual’s fundamental project. This
specifies the way in which the for-itself understands itself and defines herself as this,
rather than another, individual. We shall return to the issue of the fundamental project
below.

Among the different types of project, that of bad faith is of generic importance for an
existential understanding of what it is to be human. This importance derives ultimately
from its ethical relevance. Sartre’s analysis of the project of bad faith is grounded in vivid
examples. Thus Sartre describes the precise and mannered movements of a café waiter
(BN, 59). In thus behaving, the waiter is identifying himself with his role as waiter in the
mode of being in-itself. In other words, the waiter is discarding his real nature as for-
itself, i.e. as free facticity, to adopt that of the in-itself. He is thus denying his
transcendence as for-itself in favour of the kind of transcendence characterising the in-
itself. In this way, the burden of his freedom, i.e. the requirement to decide for himself
what to do, is lifted from his shoulders since his behaviour is as though set in stone by the
definition of the role he has adopted. The mechanism involved in such a project involves
an inherent contradiction. Indeed, the very identification at the heart of bad faith is only
possible because the waiter is a for-itself, and can indeed choose to adopt such a project.
So the freedom of the for-itself is a pre-condition for the project of bad faith which denies
it. The agent’s defining his being as an in-itself is the result of the way in which he
represents himself to himself. This misrepresentation is however one the agent is
responsible for. Ultimately, nothing is hidden, since consciousness is transparent and
therefore the project of bad faith is pursued while the agent is fully aware of how things
are in pre-reflective consciousness. Insofar as bad faith is self-deceit, it raises the problem
of accounting for contradictory beliefs. The examples of bad faith which Sartre gives,
serve to underline how this conception of self-deceit in fact involves a project based upon
inadequate representations of what one is. There is therefore no need to have recourse to
a notion of unconscious to explain such phenomena. They can be accounted for using the
dichotomy for-itself/in-itself, as projects freely adopted by individual agents. A first
consequence is that this represents an alternative to psychoanalytical accounts of self-
deceit. Sartre was particularly keen to provide alternatives to Freud’s theory of self-
deceit, with its appeal to censorship mechanisms accounting for repression, all of which
are beyond the subject’s awareness as they are unconscious (BN, 54-55). The reason is
that Freud’s theory diminishes the agent’s responsibility. On the contrary, and this is the
second consequence of Sartre’s account of bad faith, Sartre’s theory makes the individual
responsible for what is a widespread form of behaviour, one that accounts for many of the
evils that Sartre sought to describe in his plays. To explain how existential
psychoanalysis works requires that we first examine the notion of fundamental project
(BN, 561).

c. The Fundamental Project

If the project of bad faith involves a misrepresentation of what it is to be a for-itself, and

thus provides a powerful account of certain types of self-deceit, we have, as yet, no
account of the motivation that lies behind the adoption of such a project.

As we saw above, all projects can be viewed as parts of the fundamental project, and we
shall therefore focus upon the motivation for the latter (chapter 2, Part Four). That a for-
itself is defined by such a project arises as a consequence of the for-itself’s setting itself
self-identity as a task. This in turn is the result of the for-itself’s experiencing the
cleavages introduced by reflection and temporality as amounting to a lack of self-identity.
Sartre describes this as defining the `desire for being~ (BN, 565). This desire is universal,
and it can take on one of three forms. First, it may be aimed at a direct transformation of
the for-itself into an in-itself. Second, the for-itself may affirm its freedom that
distinguishes it from an in-itself, so that it seeks through this to become its own
foundation (i.e. to become God). The conjunction of these two moments results, third, in
the for-itself’s aiming for another mode of being, the for-itself-in-itself. None of the aims
described in these three moments are realisable. Moreover, the triad of these three
moments is, unlike a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, inherently instable: if the
for-itself attempts to achieve one of them, it will conflict with the others. Since all human
lives are characterised by such a desire (albeit in different individuated forms), Sartre has
thus provided a description of the human condition which is dominated by the
irrationality of particular projects. This picture is in particular illustrated in Being and
Nothingness by an account of the projects of love, sadism and masochism, and in other
works, by biographical accounts of the lives of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Jean Genet. With
this notion of desire for being, the motivation for the fundamental project is ultimately
accounted for in terms of the metaphysical nature of the for-itself. This means that the
source of motivation for the fundamental project lies within consciousness. Thus, in
particular, bad faith, as a type of project, is motivated in this way. The individual choice
of fundamental project is an original choice (BN, 564). Consequently, an understanding
of what it is to be Flaubert for instance, must involve an attempt to decipher his original
choice. This hermeneutic exercise aims to reveal what makes an individual a unity. This
provides existential psychoanalysis with its principle. Its method involves an analysis of
all the empirical behaviour of the subject, aimed at grasping the nature of this unity.

d. Desire

The fundamental project has been presented as motivated by a desire for being. How does
this enable Sartre to provide an account of desires as in fact directed towards being
although they are generally thought to be rather aimed at having? Sartre discusses desire
in chapter I of Part One and then again in chapter II of Part Four, after presenting the
notion of fundamental project.

In the first short discussion of desire, Sartre presents it as seeking a coincidence with
itself that is not possible (BN, 87, 203). Thus, in thirst, there is a lack that seeks to be
satisfied. But the satisfaction of thirst is not the suppression of thirst, but rather the aim of
a plenitude of being in which desire and satisfaction are united in an impossible
synthesis. As Sartre points out, humans cling on to their desires. Mere satisfaction
through suppression of the desire is indeed always disappointing. Another example of
this structure of desire (BN, 379) is that of love. For Sartre, the lover seeks to possess the
loved one and thus integrate her into his being: this is the satisfaction of desire. He
simultaneously wishes the loved one nevertheless remain beyond his being as the other
he desires, i.e. he wishes to remain in the state of desiring. These are incompatible
aspects of desire: the being of desire is therefore incompatible with its satisfaction. In the
lengthier discussion on the topic “Being and Having,” Sartre differentiates between three
relations to an object that can be projected in desiring. These are being, doing and having.
Sartre argues that relations of desire aimed at doing are reducible to one of the other two
types. His examination of these two types can be summarised as follows. Desiring
expressed in terms of being is aimed at the self. And desiring expressed in terms of
having is aimed at possession. But an object is possessed insofar as it is related to me by
an internal ontological bond, Sartre argues. Through that bond, the object is represented
as my creation. The possessed object is represented both as part of me and as my
creation. With respect to this object, I am therefore viewed both as an in-itself and as
endowed with freedom. The object is thus a symbol of the subject’s being, which presents
it in a way that conforms with the aims of the fundamental project. Sartre can therefore
subsume the case of desiring to have under that of desiring to be, and we are thus left
with a single type of desire, that for being.

5. Relations with Others in Being and Nothingness

So far, we have presented the analysis of the for-itself without investigating how different
individual for-itself’s interact. Far from neglecting the issue of inter-subjectivity, this
represents an important part of Sartre’s phenomenological analysis in which the main
themes discussed above receive their confirmation in, and extension to the inter-personal
realm.

a. The Problem of Other Minds

In chapter 1, Part Three, Sartre recognizes there is a problem of other minds: how I can
be conscious of the other (BN 221-222)? Sartre examines many existing approaches to
the problem of other minds. Looking at realism, Sartre claims that no access to other
minds is ever possible, and that for a realist approach the existence of the other is a mere
hypothesis. As for idealism, it can only ever view the other in terms of sets of
appearances. But the transphenomenality of the other cannot be deduced from them.
Sartre also looks at his phenomenologist predecessors, Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl’s
account is based upon the perception of another body from which, by analogy, I can
consider the other as a distinct conscious perspective upon the world. But the attempt to
derive the other’s subjectivity from my own never really leaves the orbit of my own
transcendental ego, and thus fails to come to terms with the other as a distinct
transcendental ego. Sartre praises Heidegger for understanding that the relation to the
other is a relation of being, not an epistemological one. However, Heidegger does not
provide any grounds for taking the co-existence of Daseins (‘being-with’) as an
ontological structure. What is, for Sartre, the nature of my consciousness of the other?
Sartre provides a phenomenological analysis of shame and how the other features in it.
When I peep through the keyhole, I am completely absorbed in what I am doing and my
ego does not feature as part of this pre-reflective state. However, when I hear a
floorboard creaking behind me, I become aware of myself as an object of the other’s
look. My ego appears on the scene of this reflective consciousness, but it is as an object
for the other. Note that one may be empirically in error about the presence of this other.
But all that is required by Sartre’s thesis is that there be other human beings. This
objectification of my ego is only possible if the other is given as a subject. For Sartre, this
establishes what needed to be proven: since other minds are required to account for
conscious states such as those of shame, this establishes their existence a priori. This does
not refute the skeptic, but provides Sartre with a place for the other as an a priori
condition for certain forms of consciousness which reveal a relation of being to the other.

b. Human Relationships

In the experience of shame (BN, 259), the objectification of my ego denies my existence
as a subject. I do, however, have a way of evading this. This is through an objectification
of the other. By reacting against the look of the other, I can turn him into an object for my
look. But this is no stable relation. In chapter 1, Part Three, of Being and Nothingness,
Sartre sees important implications of this movement from object to subject and vice-
versa, insofar as it is through distinguishing oneself from the other that a for-itself
individuates itself. More precisely, the objectification of the other corresponds to an
affirmation of my self by distinguishing myself from the other. This affirmation is
however a failure, because through it, I deny the other’s selfhood and therefore deny that
with respect to which I want to affirm myself. So, the dependence upon the other which
characterises the individuation of a particular ego is simultaneously denied. The resulting
instability is characteristic of the typically conflictual state of our relations with others.
Sartre examines examples of such relationships as are involved in sadism, masochism
and love. Ultimately, Sartre would argue that the instabilities that arise in human
relationships are a form of inter-subjective bad faith.

6. Authenticity
If the picture which emerges from Sartre’s examination of human relationships seems
rather hopeless, it is because bad faith is omnipresent and inescapable. In fact, Sartre’s
philosophy has a very positive message which is that we have infinite freedom and that
this enables us to make authentic choices which escape from the grip of bad faith. To
understand Sartre’s notion of authenticity therefore requires that we first clarify his
notion of freedom.

a. Freedom

For Sartre (chapter 1, Part Four), each agent is endowed with unlimited freedom. This
statement may seem puzzling given the obvious limitations on every individual’s
freedom of choice. Clearly, physical and social constraints cannot be overlooked in the
way in which we make choices. This is however a fact which Sartre accepts insofar as the
for-itself is facticity. And this does not lead to any contradiction insofar as freedom is not
defined by an ability to act. Freedom is rather to be understood as characteristic of the
nature of consciousness, i.e. as spontaneity. But there is more to freedom. For all that
Pierre’s freedom is expressed in opting either for looking after his ailing grandmother or
joining the French Resistance, choices for which there are indeed no existing grounds, the
decision to opt for either of these courses of action is a meaningful one. That is, opting
for the one of the other is not just a spontaneous decision, but has consequences for the
for-itself. To express this, Sartre presents his notion of freedom as amounting to making
choices, and indeed not being able to avoid making choices.

Sartre’s conception of choice can best be understood by reference to an individual’s

original choice, as we saw above. Sartre views the whole life of an individual as
expressing an original project that unfolds throughout time. This is not a project which
the individual has proper knowledge of, but rather one which she may interpret (an
interpretation constantly open to revision). Specific choices are therefore always
components in time of this time-spanning original choice of project.

b. Authenticity

With this notion of freedom as spontaneous choice, Sartre therefore has the elements
required to define what it is to be an authentic human being. This consists in choosing in
a way which reflects the nature of the for-itself as both transcendence and facticity. This
notion of authenticity appears closely related to Heidegger’s, since it involves a mode of
being that exhibits a recognition that one is a Dasein. However, unlike Heidegger’s,
Sartre’s conception has clear practical consequences.

For what is required of an authentic choice is that it involve a proper coordination of

transcendence and facticity, and thus that it avoid the pitfalls of an uncoordinated
expression of the desire for being. This amounts to not-grasping oneself as freedom and
facticity. Such a lack of proper coordination between transcendence and facticity
constitutes bad faith, either at an individual or an inter-personal level. Such a notion of
authenticity is therefore quite different from what is often popularly misrepresented as a
typically existentialist attitude, namely an absolute prioritisation of individual
spontaneity. On the contrary, a recognition of how our freedom interacts with our
facticity exhibits the responsibility which we have to make proper choices. These are
choices which are not trapped in bad faith.
c. An Ethical Dimension

Through the practical consequences presented above, an existentialist ethics can be

discerned. We pointed out that random expressions of one’s spontaneity are not what
authenticity is about, and Sartre emphasises this point in Existentialism and Humanism.
There, he explicitly states that there is an ethical normativity about authenticity. If one
ought to act authentically, is there any way of further specifying what this means for the
nature of ethical choices? There are in fact many statements in Being and Nothingness
which emphasise a universality criterion not entirely dissimilar from Kant’s. This should
come as no surprise since both Sartre and Kant’s approaches are based upon the ultimate
value of a strong notion of freedom. As Sartre points out, by choosing, an individual
commits not only himself, but the whole of humanity (BN, 553). Although there are no a
priori values for Sartre, the agent’s choice creates values in the same way as the artist
does in the aesthetic realm. The values thus created by a proper exercise of my freedom
have a universal dimension, in that any other human being could make sense of them
were he to be placed in my situation. There is therefore a universality that is expressed in
particular forms in each authentic project. This is a first manifestation of what Sartre later
refers to as the ‘singular universal’.

7. Other Contributions to Existential Phenomenology

If Being and Nothingness represents the culmination of Sartre’s purely existentialist
work, existentialism permeates later writings, albeit in a hybrid form. We shall briefly
indicate how these later writings extend and transform his project of existential
phenomenology.

a. Critique of Dialectical Reason

The experience of the war and the encounter with Merleau-Ponty contributed to
awakening Sartre’s interest in the political dimension of human existence: Sartre thus
further developed his existentialist understanding of human beings in a way which is
compatible with Marxism. A key notion for this phase of his philosophical development
is the concept of praxis. This extends and transforms that of project: man as a praxis is
both something that produces and is produced. Social structures define a starting point for
each individual. But the individual then sets his own aims and thereby goes beyond and
negates what society had defined him as. The range of possibilities which are available
for this expression of freedom is however dependent upon the existing social structures.
And it may be the case that this range is very limited. In this way, the infinite freedom of
the earlier philosophy is now narrowed down by the constraints of the political and
historical situation.

In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre analyses different dimensions of the praxis. In

the first volume, a theory of “practical ensembles” examines the way in which a praxis is
no longer opposed to an in-itself, but to institutions which have become rigidified and
constitute what Sartre calls the ‘practico-inert’. Human beings interiorise the universal
features of the situation in which they are born, and this translates in terms of a particular
way of developing as a praxis. This is the sense Sartre now gives to the notion of the
‘singular universal’.

b. The Problem of Method

In this book Sartre redefines the focus of existentialism as the individual understood as
belonging to a certain social situation, but not totally determined by it. For the individual
is always going beyond what is given, with his own aims and projects. In this way, Sartre
develops a ‘regressive-progressive method’ that views individual development as
explained in terms of a movement from the universal expressed in historical
development, and the particular expressed in individual projects. Thus, by combining a
Marxist understanding of history with the methods of existential psychoanalysis which
are first presented in Being and Nothingness, Sartre proposes a method for understanding
a human life. This, he applies in particular to the case of an analysis of Flaubert. It is
worth noting however that developing an account of the intelligibility of history, is a
project that Sartre tackled in the second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, but
which remained unfinished.

8. Conclusion
Sartre’s existentialist understanding of what it is to be human can be summarised in his
view that the underlying motivation for action is to be found in the nature of
consciousness which is a desire for being. It is up to each agent to exercise his freedom in
such a way that he does not lose sight of his existence as a facticity, as well as a free
human being. In so doing, he will come to understand more about the original choice
which his whole life represents, and thus about the values that are thereby projected. Such
an understanding is only obtained through living this particular life and avoiding the
pitfalls of strategies of self-deceit such as bad faith. This authentic option for human life
represents the realisation of a universal in the singularity of a human life.

9. References and Further Reading

a. Sartre’s Works

 “Intentionality: a Fundamental Ideal of Husserl’s Phenomenology” (1970) transl.

J.P.Fell, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1 (2), 4-5.
 Psychology of the Imagination (1972) transl. Bernard Frechtman, Methuen,
London.
 Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1971) transl. Philip Mairet, Methuen,
London.
 The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness (1957)
transl. and ed. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, Noonday, New York.
 Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1958) transl.
Hazel E. Barnes, intr. Mary Warnock, Methuen, London (abbreviated as BN
above).
  Existentialism and Humanism (1973) transl. Philip Mairet, Methuen, London.
 Critique of Dialectical Reason 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles (1982) transl.
Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Rée, Verso, London.
 The Problem of Method (1964) transl. Hazel E. Barnes, Methuen, London.

b. Commentaries

 Caws, P. (1979) Sartre, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

 Danto, A. C. (1991) Sartre, Fontana, London.
 Howells, C. (1988) Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
 Howells, C. ed. (1992) Cambridge Companion to Sartre, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
 Murdoch, I. (1987) Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Chatto and Windus, London.
 Natanson, M. (1972) A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology, Haskell House
Publishers, New York.
 Schilpp, P. A. ed. (1981) The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Open Court, La
Salle.
 Silverman, H. J. and Elliston, F.A. eds. (1980) Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary
Approaches to his Philosophy, Harvester Press, Brighton.

Author Information

Christian J. Onof
Email: c.onof@imperial.ac.uk
University College, London
United Kingdom

Last updated: January 17, 2010 | Originally published: October/13/2004

Categories: Continental Philosophy

http://www.iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/
26 January 2011