Jean-Paul Sartre

Key Concepts

Steven Churchill, Dr. Jack Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317546689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Most readers of Sartre focus only on the works written at the peak of his influence as a public intellectual in the 1940s, notably "Being and Nothingness". "Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts" aims to reassess Sartre and to introduce readers to the full breadth of his philosophy. Bringing together leading international scholars, the book examines concepts from across Sartre's career, from his initial views on the "inner life" of conscious experience, to his later conceptions of hope as the binding agent for a common humanity. The book will be invaluable to readers looking for a comprehensive assessment of Sartre's thinking - from his early influences to the development of his key concepts, to his legacy.

ONE

Introduction: Sartre vivant

Steven Churchill and Jack Reynolds

Most philosophers live and die in relative obscurity. If they are both insightful and fortunate, they sometimes achieve a measure of fame and posterity afterwards. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) bucked this trend. Perhaps no other philosopher was as famous in his own time as Sartre, or so we would claim. Fame, of course, does not entail or denote value, whether it be philosophical value or otherwise. It can also be fleeting, as the posthumous life of Henri Bergson showed, at least for quite some years. Sartre also seemed “dead” in academic circles, perhaps twenty years ago, and much earlier in France. Sartre himself would no doubt have been unhappy to learn of this posthumous fate; after all, in his beautifully crafted autobiography, entitled Words (1964), he positioned his life’s work as a writer as rooted in his desire to achieve a kind of immortality through his writings, which would survive him into posterity. It became fashionable to declare that we have “been there and done that”, as far as the study of Sartre’s life and works are concerned, and have long since moved on.

Yet those declaring that all there was to be known about Sartre had already been written (whether by Sartre himself or by others) were arguably doing so from a position of “bad faith”, as Sartre might have said. Perhaps those dismissing Sartre as irrelevant had read and enjoyed some of Sartre’s short stories, plays or novels, such as Nausea (La Nausée; Sartre 1938, 1965a). Maybe they had read Sartre’s famous public lecture, Existentialism and Humanism (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme; Sartre 1946b, 1973), or even thumbed their way through parts of Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant; Sartre 1943a, 1958a). Few, though, would have examined Sartre’s earlier, psychologically motivated philosophical works in any real depth, such as Imagination (L’Imagination; Sartre 1936, 1972a) or its sequel, The Imaginary (L’Imaginaire; Sartre 1940, 2004a); then there is The Transcendence of the Ego (“La Transcendance de l’ego”; Sartre 1936–7, 1957a) to be considered, not to mention his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (Esquisse d’une théorie des emotions; Sartre 1939a, 2002). Fewer still have attempted to grapple with Sartre’s later works, including his massive two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique; vol. 1: Sartre 1960b, 1960c; vol. 2: Sartre 1985b, 2006), or his multi-volume masterpiece, The Family Idiot (L’Idiot de la famille; Sartre 1971–2, 1981c, 1987, 1989a, 1991a, 1993c). Indeed, parts of Sartre’s body of work – particularly those projects that he had started but simply never finished – only appeared quite some years after his death; the Notebooks for an Ethics (Cahiers pour une morale; written during 1947–8, but only published in 1983 in French, and in 1992 in English translation), which Sartre composed while initially trying to construct an ethical philosophy, provide an important example of the extent to which Sartre’s body of work has continued to grow and develop, even in his absence. So, then, those claiming to have “exhausted” Sartre’s body of work, thereby safely confining his intellectual figure to a halcyon period, had typically read and understood only a fraction of his vast, and ongoing contributions, made across multiple fields of inquiry.

Since Sartre’s works have yet to be understood and appreciated in their full depth as the totality they represent, we would argue that Sartre is very much alive, particularly for those willing to resist these persistent claims of irrelevancy. Today, there are new biographies and scholarly interpretations that extend understanding of his thought into texts that simply never received the attention they deserved, there are reissues of his earlier works, and various books on Sartre and existentialism continue to appear. Recently, Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), the journal founded by Sartre and his life-long partner Simone de Beauvoir, published a special edition entitled The Readers of Sartre, intended to rebut the claim that Sartre is no longer read, either in France or elsewhere. The current editorial director of Les Temps modernes, famed documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (himself a close friend to Sartre), asserted that “it is simply not true” that Sartre has faded into obscurity.

Despite these positive developments, much remains to be done in the field of Sartre scholarship. Perhaps the most important of these tasks is to try to grasp Sartre’s works as the totality we have just now asserted they represent. While we do not claim in this concise volume to achieve anything approaching a totalizing perspective on Sartre’s works, we do seek to make a small start toward this immense project, by attempting to make Sartre’s broader body of work accessible to a wider audience. By bringing together a diverse group of philosophers working across multiple disciplines, we hope to introduce those new to Sartre to works of his beyond those that appear regularly in the public domain, such as the Existentialism and Humanism lecture or Nausea. At the same time, we hope to provide those familiar with Sartre’s works with a range of perspectives which may serve to spur new insights and further research.

With these goals of achieving a balance of both breadth and depth in mind, we have sought to organize the essays in this volume thematically, rather than in terms of a strict chronology of Sartre’s works. Nevertheless, the three parts may be loosely defined as representing Sartre’s early philosophy (in Part I), Sartre’s “middle period” as a mature thinker (in Part II) and, finally, Sartre’s later thought (in Part III).

Part I, Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature, deals primarily with Sartre’s efforts to give an account of the human condition in terms of a phenomenological psychology and existential psychoanalysis. This part encompasses Sartre’s early perspectives on the imagination, selfhood, and the emotions and so on, as well as Sartre’s dramatization of these themes in literary form in Nausea.

Part II, Ontology: Freedom, Authenticity and Self-Creation, deals with the development of Sartre’s early phenomenology into a mature phenomenological ontology, particularly as it appears in Being and Nothingness. The conceptual terrain covered here includes Sartre’s conceptualizations of “bad faith”, authenticity and the fundamental project, along with Sartre’s account of inter-social relations via his notion of “the look”. Part II concludes with an account of Sartre’s intellectual trajectory from a relatively apolitical writer to a politically engaged provocateur par excellence.

In Part III, Ethics and Politics, the overview of Sartre’s political progression initially continues; particular attention paid to his postwar works, including What Is Literature? (Qu’est-ce que la littérature?; Sartre 1948a, 1988), Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive; Sartre 1946a, 1948b) and “Materialism and Revolution” (“Matérialisme et révolution”; Sartre 1946c, 1962a). Then, Sartre’s theory of groups is considered, bringing to light Sartre’s conceptualizations of revolutionary praxis and institutional power, particularly in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, but also in The Family Idiot. Sartre’s attempt to produce an ethics guided by his view of Marxian dialectics then follows, in which Sartre’s concepts of “need” and “scarcity” serve as the main elements in his vision for an ethical society, under socialism. Part III concludes with a perspective on Sartre’s final efforts towards an ethics, as chronicled in his final interviews in 1980. Sartre’s concepts of “need” and “scarcity” that featured in his dialectical ethics are complemented in these interviews by his concept of “reciprocity” (alternatively described as an ethics of the “We”). Ethical action is driven here by the ideal that individuals may relate to each other in a way that positions the Other’s interests and needs as continuous with one’s own. In this “fraternal” mode of being-together, the objective of ending scarcity and lack would become goals shared in common by all of humanity, bringing about truly ethical relations between human beings.

Although the essays in this volume are organized according to a thematic and loosely chronological order as we have noted, the essays may also be read as self-contained articles, should readers so desire. Søren Overgaard’s chapter on “the look”, for example, provides context on the development of Sartre’s ontology, such that the central concept of the look is sufficiently explained, without the need to refer to subsequent chapters. At the same time, though, each chapter is designed to build on the one that precedes it; suggested further readings at the end of each chapter are designed to both explore the ideas covered in a particular chapter, and to encourage further research and discovery.

In his moving obituary for his friend and colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), entitled “Merleau-Ponty vivant” – that is, “Merleau-Ponty alive”, or “Merleau-Ponty lives” – Sartre asserted that “Merleau is still too much alive for anyone to be able to describe him” (Sartre 1961). We assert that the same may be said of Sartre himself, even now, over three decades after his death. Even a volume many thousands of words longer than this collection would still leave something of Sartre fleeing beyond one’s grasp, so to speak. Nevertheless, this posthumous elusiveness of Sartre is confirmation for us – and, no doubt, for the marvellous group of contributors appearing in this collection – of one thing: Jean-Paul Sartre vivant!

TWO

Life and works

Gary Cox

The keynote speaker at the 2011 UK Sartre Society Conference in London was Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre’s foremost biographer and author of the magnificent Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Cohen-Solal 2005). Her chosen theme was a series of public lectures Sartre gave in the early 1930s, during his time as a school teacher in Le Havre. Sartre’s time in Le Havre has been characterized as his wilderness years – the brilliant student of the prestigious Parisian École Normale Supérieure exiled to the provinces, unappreciated, unpublished and unhappy. Yet they were also hugely formative and creative years for Sartre: a nine-month sabbatical in Berlin in 1933 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the incessant revising of a work on contingency that eventually became the classic existentialist novel Nausea (Sartre 1938, 1965a).

Sartre’s chosen theme for his public lectures was literature. Like his great friend and lifelong intellectual sparring partner, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre was interested in contemporary English and American literature; in the novels of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. Sartre’s original lecture notes are lost, but fortunately Cohen-Solal possesses photocopies of several pages of them. She told an enthralled conference how she was summoned one morning by de Beauvoir, who appeared at the door of her Paris apartment in one of her famous turbans. She did not invite Cohen-Solal in, but handed her a sheaf of papers with strict instructions to have the material back by the end of the day. Cohen-Solal hastened to the nearest Xerox machine.

The photocopies, a sample of which Cohen-Solal passed around the audience, show de Beauvoir’s neat, clear handwriting on the left, with Sartre’s scribble on the right. De Beauvoir had clearly translated passages of the aforementioned novelists for Sartre to analyse. Sartre’s lectures explore the techniques of these English and American novelists, particularly their use of “stream of consciousness” to reveal the depths of the unconscious mind. In his lectures Sartre philosophizes about literature and in so doing develops himself as a philosopher, novelist and literary critic. Not least, he sows the seeds of what later became his theory of existential psychoanalysis.

Sartre is famous for his wide and copious reading. He devoured thousands of texts in his lifetime, always looking to feed his own theories, and in his early days was capable of producing a new or modified theory on a daily or even thrice-daily basis. He had no respect for the constraints of the traditional divisions between philosophy, psychology and literature and tended to see each as somewhat retarded when isolated from the others. Always a supreme interdisciplinarian, he advocated a more philosophical psychology and a more literary philosophy. In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (Sartre 1939a, 2002), for example, he argues that pure psychology will only make genuine progress when it takes on board the insights of philosophy, or, more specifically, phenomenology. Meanwhile, Nausea demonstrates that some of the most profound philosophical insights into the human condition can only be achieved through literature, or more specifically the novel form. Sartre was a philosopher in the broadest, truest and best sense of the word: a lover of wisdom wherever and however expressed.

Sartre succeeded in breaking down many traditional, stultifying barriers between intellectual subjects and in so doing opened up many new territories to intellectual enquiry. It is this that is perhaps the most impressive feature of his life’s work. The longer one studies him, the more territories appear. Perhaps these territories cannot be enumerated because where Sartre did not explore a territory so thoroughly as to make it his own, he pointed the way towards it, either promising to reach it himself in due course or inviting others to investigate his sketchy insights.

In a sense, the number of Sartre territories there are seems now to depend on which of his myriad insights Sartre scholars wish to pursue. There is much work to be done, for example, in developing the ethical aspects of Sartre’s theory of authenticity in light of the posthumous publication of his Notebooks for an Ethics (Sartre 1983b, 1992). This research cannot ignore Sartre the post-Kantian, Sartre the Marxist, or even Sartre the post-Aristotelian virtue theorist. And whatever emerges from this particular intellectual labour must surely influence our understanding of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis and therefore the practice of existential counselling. Today, to name just a few areas of enquiry, there are Sartre scholars exploring his ideas on ontology, consciousness, imagination, anti-Semitism, colonialism, revolution, biography, French literature, freedom and bad faith. One has only to consider the wide variety of themes explored in this present volume to be reminded of the extraordinary breadth of Sartre’s thought.

As already suggested, Sartre’s many territories are not best seen as separate areas that he chose to explore at one time or another during his long career. His territories must instead be seen as integrated regions of a single, extensive landscape. Or, to employ a slightly different (and hopefully more revealing) topographical metaphor, his extensive writings seek to comprehensively schematize the complex landscape of the human condition with all the accuracy, honesty and attention to detail of an Ordnance Survey map.

Sartre knew that the complex landscape of the human condition is best mapped out by writing in a variety of literary media. Straightforward philosophical writing may be best when it comes to pinning down the abstract fundamentals of a theory, but at other times only the novel, with its irony, its capacity for description, and its ability to capture ideas through atmosphere and action, is sufficiently subtle to do the job. Sometimes, a play or a film script may be more effective at saying what needs to be said than a novel, or a biography may serve better than a play and so on. Sartre was not a philosopher who happened to have a quirky sideline in short stories, novels, plays, biographies, diaries and film scripts. Each literary form makes a unique and indispensable contribution to the intricate and integrated whole that is his complex, multifaceted philosophy. If Sartre were alive today he would undoubtedly further enrich his oeuvre by blogging and tweeting.

Sartre’s compelling need to understand, theorize, explain and provoke, in whatever literary media best served his purposes, was matched only by his compulsion to write. Contrary to popular myth, Sartre was not into drugs. He liked to drink alcohol and smoke tobacco, but he took a hallucinogenic drug only once in his life, in 1935, as part of a medically controlled experiment. He wanted to experience a genuine hallucination so that he could write about it in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on abbreviations
• Part I: Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature
• Part II: Ontology: Freedom, Authenticity and Self-Creation
• Part III: Ethics and Politics
• Bibliography
• Index