Introducing Sartre Introducing Sartre E-Book

Philip Thody

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

INTRODUCING guide to the father of existentialism and one of 20th century philosophy's most famous characters. Jean-Paul Sartre was once described as being, next to Charles de Gaulle, the most famous Frenchman of the 20th century. Between the ending of the Second World War in 1945 and his death in 1980, Sartre was certainly the most famous French writer, as well as one of the best-known living philosophers. Introducing Sartre explains the basic ideas inspiring his world view, and pays particular attention to his idea of freedom. It also places his thinking on literature in the context of the 20th century debate on its nature and function. It examines his ideas on Marxism, his enthusiasm for the student rebellion of 1968, and his support for movements of national liberation in the Third World. The book also provides a succinct account of his life, and especially of the impact which his unusual childhood had on his attitude towards French society.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-976-9

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Existentialism

The Early Years

The Beaver

Military Service

Diverging Paths to Freedom

Nausea

Existentialism

Socialism

Imagination and Freedom

The Proof of Freedom

Essence and Existence

The Moral Value of Existence

Bad Faith: an Intimate Story

Relieved of Freedom

The Mind in Command

What are Emotions?

The Jewish Question

The Experience of War

The Absurd

The Flies

A Resistance Fighter

Freedom and Self-Awareness

Being and Nothingness

Inescapable Consciousness

Change and Inauthentic Being

Problems of “Being” and “Being Aware”

To Be or To Do?

The Loss of Being

No Exit

Mutual Bad Faith

Sartre and Simone

Existential Psychoanalysis of Baudelaire

Baudelaire’s Case

The Classic Oedipus

Words and the Writer

A Difference of Choices

The Romantic Myth

Producing a Free Society

The Communists …

Dirtying Your Hands

Changes in the Communist Party Line

Keeping Faith with Socialism

The Problem of Class Awareness

The War in Indochina

Cold War Attitudes

Marxism and Existentialism

A Temporary Optimism

May 1968

The Algerian Struggle

The Prisoners of Altona

Double Bind

Tribunal of the Crabs

Critique of Dialectical Reason

The Practico-Inert

Capitalism, Colonialism and Violence

The Problem of Torture

Saint Genet

Eight Months or Eight Years?

Words: a Writer’s Failure

Refusing the Nobel Prize

Two Opposing Views of Literature

Committed Literature

The First Existentialists

Excluded from Normality

The Rough and Tumble of 1968

Voltaire in the Streets

What was Special about Flaubert?

The Commune of 1871

The Family Idiot

Words, Words, Words …

Writing as Revolutionary Activity

Sartre, the Icon

The Death of Sartre

Notes and Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

The Authors

Existentialism

“Europe now philosophizes with hammer blows”, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) prophetically wrote. One of those who hit hardest in the 20th century was Jean-Paul Sartre. His own philosophy of Existentialism has its starting-point in a statement from his best-known novel, Nausea (1938).

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.

Existentialism, a way of looking at experience which Sartre made famous, was the attempt to draw all possible conclusions from the fact that there is no God. “Man”, he wrote in 1943, “is a useless passion”. But he is also “condemned to be free”.

The Early Years

Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, playwright, novelist, essayist and political activist, was born in Paris on 21 June 1905. His mother, née Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was 23 years old, and his father, Jean-Baptiste, the son of a country doctor, 31.

On 17 September 1906, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, died of a fever contracted in Cochinchina.

His widow, without means of earning her own living, had to go back to live with her family.

From 1913, I practised as a missionary doctor in the hospital I founded at the jungle village of Lambaréné in Gabon, Africa.

Sartre’s origins, like those of Roland Barthes (1915–80), are Protestant, and this might explain his sense of being an outsider in a largely Catholic France. His maternal grandfather Charles Schweitzer was uncle to the famous Bach scholar, musician, theologian and Christian missionary Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965).

In 1963, Sartre published a biographical essay, Les Mots (Words). It tells the story of what he presented as a lonely and unhappy childhood, isolated from other children.

I was kept at home because of the selfish and possessive attitude of my grandfather, Charles Schweitzer.

In 1917, his mother remarried, choosing as her second husband an old admirer, Joseph Mancy.

We know little of this second husband, with whom Sartre did not get on, except that he had earlier not seen himself as capable of offering Anne-Marie the kind of lifestyle which he thought she deserved.

Now that I began to make a career for myself as an engineer, I proposed marriage and took Anne-Marie and her son to live with me in La Rochelle.

For the first time in his life, in La Rochelle, Sartre began to go regularly to school. Once at school, perhaps understandably, Sartre did not get on well with his fellow pupils.

I tried to buy their friendship by offering them treats paid for with money stolen from my mother’s purse.

Academically, however, he had few problems, apart from a reluctance to concentrate on the mathematics which his stepfather saw as essential to the career as an engineer which he wished to see him follow. Joseph Mancy did not himself enjoy a particularly successful career and actually went bankrupt.

In 1920, Sartre returned to Paris to study first at the prestigious lycée Henri IV, then the lycée Louis le Grand, a school with a high success rate in preparing students for the competitive examinations required for entry into one of the grandes écoles. In 1924, he competed successfully to enter the École Normale Supérieure, the most famous of all French institutes of higher education for the study of literature and philosophy, and he stayed till 1928.

I became very critical of French society and the highly élitist system in which I was being educated.

The principal function of the École Normale Supérieure was to prepare students for the competitive examination known as the Agrégation, the essential step in any successful teaching career in France. Candidates successful in this examination enjoy higher pay and shorter hours of work than their less well-qualified colleagues. Then, as now, all pupils in the higher forms of the lycées were required to study philosophy.

It is my aim to become a philosophy teacher.

After having, to everyone’s surprise, failed at his first attempt at the Agrégation de philosophie in 1928, Sartre was more successful in 1929. He came first, followed in the competition, in second place, by Simone de Beauvoir.

The Beaver

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) later wrote of her feelings for Sartre at this time in the first volume of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958).

I met “the Beaver” earlier in 1929 at the Sorbonne.I knew when I left him to go home at the end of that academic year that he would never be out of my life.

Although Sartre and “the Beaver” (his nickname for her) never married, they would indeed become lifelong partners.

Military Service

Before Sartre could take up the teaching post to which he was now entitled, he had to do his military service. It is an indication of what the French call la dénatalité française (an undesirably low birth-rate) that although Sartre was virtually blind in his left eye, he was not exempted on medical grounds and was called up again at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Like a million-and-a-half other French soldiers, he was taken prisoner in the summer of 1940.

I was sent back to France in August 1941 on the grounds that I was a civilian.How could anyone with such a handicap be in the army in the first place?

Sartre was not, however, either in 1929 or in 1939, expected to be a fighting soldier, and was put into the meteorological section. By an odd coincidence, his instructor was another French philosopher whom he already knew, Raymond Aron (1905–83).

We had been students together at the École Normale Supérieure.But our careers and intellectual development would radically diverge.

In a way later resumed by the remark current in intellectual circles in Paris in the 1980s, it was better to be “wrong with Sartre rather than right with Aron”.

Diverging Paths to Freedom

It is interesting at this early stage to remark on the “forks” in the road that his friends and acquaintances would later take. Sartre had become a close friend of Paul Nizan (1905–40) at the lycée and the École Normale Supérieure. Nizan, a journalist and novelist, was killed in action near Dunkirk in 1940. Aron would become the most distinguished and successful intellectual defender of liberal capitalism.

I joined the French Communist Party but resigned in protest at Stalin’s alliance with Nazi Germany in 1939.I’m too anarchistic to join any party.Capitalism triumphed in France and throughout the world by the 1980s. I won the argument!

French teachers working in the public sector are all civil servants who have to go where they are posted by the Ministry of Education. Although Sartre had been sent to Le Havre and Simone de Beauvoir to Marseilles, they caused great scandal among the parents of their essentially middle-class pupils by making no secret of the fact that they were living together without being married. Both were seen as eccentric and adventurous enthusiasts of jazz and the cinema.

I also introduced the Beaver to the habit of using “engineer” as the worst possible insult.Not because of his stepfather the engineer but to emphasize our total rejection of the world of bourgeois capitalism and applied science.

Nausea

In 1938, Sartre published his first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), not only an immediate and enduring success, but a work which he himself saw as the best from a literary point of view. The action takes place in the late 1920s or early 30s in a French provincial seaport to which Sartre gives the name of Bouville (Mudtown). It is fairly clearly based on Le Havre where Sartre was still teaching at the time.

Its inhabitants are presented with contempt for the rich and ironic sympathy for the poor.

The novel is written in the form of a diary kept by the central character, Antoine Roquentin. He is a bachelor, lives in a hotel, and has a small private income that enables him to devote his time to writing a biography of an 18th century adventurer, Monsieur de Rollebon. Roquentin is faced with a problem.

Why is it that everything I touch, like the feelings from my own body, makes me feel sick?

The answer, he discovers, is that there is no reason for anything to exist at all.

Everything which exists is born for no reason, carries on existing through weakness, and dies by accident.

The fact that there is no God to provide an ultimate justification for the world is the fundamental cause of Roquentin’s nausea. It is this intuition of what Sartre, through the character of Roquentin, calls the “total gratuity and absurd contingency of the universe” which gives him his feeling of perpetual sickness.

Sickness, in the sense of the desire to vomit, is the product of excess. We feel sick because we have eaten or drunk too much. Roquentin feels sick because there is just too much of everything in the universe, not only all around him but also in himself. If there were a God, there would be a very good reason for the world and all there is in it to exist, because He would have made it according to His divine will.

There would not then be this nauseating plethora of things.

But since there is no God, everything is characterized by the same lack of necessity, the same contingency, the basic absurdity which Roquentin feels all around him and which inspires his nausea.

Roquentin spends a good deal of his time in a café which has a juke-box with a record of Sophie Tucker singing Some of These Days.

One of the ways in which I find temporary respite from my nausea is by listening to this song.

For it is, he comes to realize, like all tunes, and like all mathematical concepts, free from the absurdity and nauseating superabundance of ordinary existence.

Just as a circle carries its own definition within itself, being defined as the rotation of a straight line round a fixed point, so the existence of a piece of music lies beyond the world of accidental and contingent physical existence.

If you broke the record, or tore up the score, the song would still be there. It is not like a tree or a human being, the product of the accidental coming together of a number of physical circumstances.

It is boyond existence, in the sense that nothing that happens in the ordinary world of real objects can possibly touch it.

The solution which Roquentin finds for his problem is an essentially aesthetic one. Nausea ends with his decision to write a book of a particular type.

It will not only be as beautiful and hard as steel, and therefore free of the nauseating sloppiness which characterizes the natural world. It will also make men feel ashamed of their existence.

The introduction of this second aim underlines the didacticism which is also a characteristic feature of all Sartre’s work. He is not only a writer who explores his own anguish. He is one who wishes to inspire the same feelings of guilt and anguish in other people.

Sartre did not follow up this idea of salvation through art in any other of his major writings. It was more the didactic aspect of Roquentin’s ambition that showed itself in the books written after Nausea. One is tempted to see in this didacticism some kind of inherited influence from his Protestant grandfather, the man who prevented Sartre from having a normal childhood, and the uncle of the Christian missionary Albert Schweitzer.

It has always been our fundamental Christian belief that human beings are sinful and ought to be ashamed of themselves!