Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century and the public face of existentialism. His central claim — “existence precedes essence” — means that there is no human nature fixed in advance by God or biology; we exist first, find ourselves thrown into the world, and only then define ourselves by what we do. We are therefore “condemned to be free”: totally responsible for what we make of ourselves, with no excuses. The flight from that freedom he called bad faith. Novelist (Nausea), playwright (No Exit: “Hell is other people”), philosopher (Being and Nothingness), biographer, editor, and later Marxist militant, he refused the Nobel Prize in 1964. When he died in 1980, some fifty thousand people followed his coffin through Paris.

Life

Childhood among books

Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905. His father, a naval officer, died of fever when Jean-Paul was fifteen months old, and his mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer (a cousin of Albert Schweitzer), returned to her parents’ home. His grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a German teacher with a white beard like God the Father, raised him among books and adulation. In his autobiography The Words (Les Mots, 1964) Sartre portrayed himself as a child-actor performing for adults, who discovered his vocation in writing — and who later recognised that literature had been his religion, a way of seeking salvation, an illusion he had to unlearn.

He was small, wall-eyed (blind in his right eye from early childhood), and, after his mother’s remarriage in 1917, unhappy in La Rochelle, where he discovered that he was ugly and that violence ruled the schoolyard.

École Normale and Beauvoir

At the École Normale Supérieure (1924–29), he was a brilliant, provocative student and a notorious prankster. He failed the agrégation in philosophy in 1928, then came first in 1929; second was Simone de Beauvoir. They became lifelong partners in an open relationship, never married, never lived together, and read each other’s every manuscript. Their “pact” — “ours is an essential love; but it is a good idea that we should also experience contingent love affairs” — became famous and controversial.

Husserl, Berlin and Nausea

He taught philosophy at lycées in Le Havre and Laon. In 1933, his friend Raymond Aron told him, over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar, about phenomenology: “You see, my little comrade, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” Sartre, Beauvoir recounted, turned pale with emotion. He spent 1933–34 in Berlin studying Husserl, then read Martin Heidegger.

His early works were phenomenological studies of the imagination, the emotions and the self: The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37), arguing that consciousness has no “I” inside it — the ego is an object in the world, like other people; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939); The Imaginary (1940).

Nausea (1938), his first novel, is the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a historian living in the gloomy seaport of “Bouville” (Mudtown), who is overcome by a strange sickness: objects lose their names and functions and appear in their raw, superfluous existence. The crisis comes in the park, before the root of a chestnut tree:

The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just under my bench. I no longer remembered it was a root… And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself.

Everything exists without reason, without necessity: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” Existence is contingent and superfluous (de trop). The only salvation Roquentin glimpses is in art — a ragtime song, “Some of These Days”, whose melody does not exist but is, necessary like a circle — and he resolves to write a novel. A short-story collection, The Wall (1939), followed.

War and captivity

Mobilised in 1939 as a meteorologist, Sartre was captured in June 1940 and spent nine months in a prisoner-of-war camp at Trier, where he read Heidegger, wrote and staged a Christmas play, and discovered, he said, solidarity and history. Released in 1941 (feigning poor eyesight), he founded a short-lived Resistance group, “Socialism and Freedom”, and wrote.

Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant, 1943), 700 pages subtitled An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, was his philosophical masterpiece. His plays The Flies (1943), a version of the Orestes story about freedom against guilt and tyranny, and No Exit (Huis clos, 1944) were staged under the Occupation.

The existentialist moment

After the Liberation, existentialism became a craze. On 29 October 1945, Sartre gave a lecture at the Club Maintenant; the crowd was so dense that people fainted, chairs were broken and he could barely reach the stage. It was published as Existentialism Is a Humanism (Existentialism Is a Humanism). The same month, he founded the journal Les Temps modernes with Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, jazz cellars and black turtlenecks became the existentialist scene.

He wrote a trilogy of novels, The Roads to Freedom (1945–49); plays — Dirty Hands (1948), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), The Condemned of Altona (1959); essays — What Is Literature? (1948), arguing for committed literature; Anti-Semite and Jew (1946); and Saint Genet (1952), a vast existential biography of Jean Genet.

Marxism and politics

From 1952 Sartre became a “fellow traveller” of the Communist Party, which led to the quarrel with Albert Camus; he broke with the Communists after the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956). He opposed the French war in Algeria so fiercely that his flat was bombed twice by the OAS, and his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) endorsed anti-colonial violence. When advisers urged de Gaulle to arrest him for sedition, de Gaulle reputedly answered: “One does not imprison Voltaire.”

His Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) attempted to reconcile existentialism with Marxism — which he called “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time” — through notions of praxis, scarcity, the practico-inert, seriality (people waiting at a bus stop) and the group-in-fusion (the crowd storming the Bastille).

In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize, saying a writer must not let himself be turned into an institution. He sat on the Russell Tribunal on American war crimes in Vietnam, supported the students of May 1968, distributed Maoist newspapers on the street, and visited Castro, Khrushchev and Andreas Baader. His last great work was The Family Idiot (1971–72), a 3,000-page unfinished study of Flaubert.

Almost blind by 1973, he died on 15 April 1980. Fifty thousand people followed the funeral procession to Montparnasse cemetery, where Beauvoir was later buried beside him.

Being and Nothingness

Being-in-itself and being-for-itself

Sartre divides being into two regions:

• Being-in-itself (l’être-en-soi): the being of things — solid, opaque, complete, simply what it is. “Being is. Being is in itself. Being is what it is.”
• Being-for-itself (l’être-pour-soi): the being of consciousness — which is never simply what it is, but always beyond itself, toward its objects and its possibilities. Consciousness “is what it is not and is not what it is.”

Consciousness introduces nothingness into the world (see Nothingness). His famous example: I arrive at a café to meet Pierre, who is not there. Pierre’s absence haunts the whole café; the café becomes a ground against which Pierre’s absence stands out. Nothingness is real — and it comes into being through consciousness, which can question, negate, imagine what is not.

Freedom

Because consciousness is nothingness — not a thing, with no fixed nature — it is free. Human beings are not determined by their past, character or circumstances; at every moment they must choose who they will be. Freedom is not something we have, but what we are: “Man is condemned to be free.”

Freedom is revealed in anguish (angoisse) (see Anxiety): the vertigo of the man on the cliff path who fears not falling but that he might throw himself over — nothing prevents him.

Freedom is always exercised in a situation — my body, my past, my place, other people, my death — but the situation’s meaning depends on my projects. A rock is an obstacle to the climber, a viewpoint to the tourist.

Bad faith

Bad faith (mauvaise foi) (see Bad Faith) is lying to oneself about one’s freedom — pretending to be a thing, determined, or pretending to be pure freedom unbound by facts. Sartre’s examples are among the most famous in philosophy:

• The waiter in the café, whose movements are a little too precise, a little too eager; he is playing at being a waiter, trying to be a waiter in the way an inkwell is an inkwell — as if he were not free to be otherwise.
• The woman on a first date who lets her companion take her hand and leaves it there, “neither consenting nor resisting — a thing”, pretending to herself that nothing is being decided.
• The homosexual who refuses to admit what his conduct shows, and the “champion of sincerity” who demands that he confess “I am a homosexual” as if it were a fixed essence — both in bad faith.

Being-for-others and the Look

Other people are revealed through the Look (le regard). Sartre’s example: I am peeping through a keyhole, absorbed in what I see, jealous. Suddenly I hear footsteps in the corridor: someone is looking at me. In a flash I become an object — a voyeur — in another’s eyes; I feel shame. The Other’s look reveals that I have an outside, a nature I cannot control.

Hence human relations are a struggle: each tries to possess the other’s freedom or to escape being objectified. Love, desire, masochism, sadism, indifference and hate are analysed as failed strategies. No Exit dramatises this: three dead people — Garcin, a deserter; Inès, a lesbian postal clerk; Estelle, a socialite infanticide — are locked forever in a Second Empire drawing room, with no mirrors, no sleep and no darkness. They expect torture; they discover that each is the torturer of the others. “Hell is other people” (l’enfer, c’est les autres). Sartre later explained that he meant not that relations with others are always hellish, but that when relations are corrupted, others become hell, because we depend on their judgment.

The fundamental project and the desire to be God

Every person, Sartre argues, lives a fundamental project — an original choice of oneself that gives unity to all one’s acts. It can be uncovered by existential psychoanalysis, which replaces Freud’s unconscious with this choice.

At bottom, the for-itself desires to be in-itself-for-itself: conscious and free yet solid and complete — the definition of God. This is impossible. Hence “man is a useless passion” (l’homme est une passion inutile).

Existentialism Is a Humanism

The 1945 lecture popularised these ideas:

• Existence precedes essence (Existence Precedes Essence): a paper-knife is made according to a concept; if there is no God, there is no concept of the human being. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
• Responsibility: in choosing myself, I choose an image of humanity; I am responsible for all.
• Abandonment: Dostoevsky wrote, “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted” — and that, says Sartre, is the starting point of existentialism. No sign in heaven tells us what to do.
• The student’s dilemma: during the war a student came to Sartre torn between joining the Free French and staying with his mother. No ethical theory could decide. “You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.”
• Despair: we act without hope, counting only on what depends on our will.

Sartre later regarded the lecture as a simplification.

Critics and reception

• Heidegger, in the Letter on Humanism (1946), repudiated Sartre’s reading: Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” merely reverses a metaphysical proposition and remains within metaphysics.
• Merleau-Ponty argued that freedom is always embodied and situated, not absolute.
• Camus rejected the Marxist justification of violence.
• Structuralists (Lévi-Strauss, Foucault) in the 1960s attacked the sovereign subject; Lévi-Strauss called Sartre’s history a myth.
• Beauvoir extended and corrected his analyses in The Second Sex (1949), showing how the Look structures women’s oppression.
• Analytic philosophers often dismissed his style, though recent scholarship takes him seriously as a philosopher of mind and agency.

Key terms

Existence precedes essence

Humans exist first and define themselves through action.

Being-in-itself / for-itself

The being of things versus the being of consciousness.

Nothingness

What consciousness introduces into being — negation, absence, possibility.

Bad faith

Self-deception that denies one's freedom or facticity.

The Look

The gaze of the Other, which makes me an object.

Using Sartre in conversation

• On freedom: “Man is condemned to be free.”
• On excuses: bad faith — the waiter playing at being a waiter.
• On others: “Hell is other people” — but read the explanation.
• On choice: “You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.”