Sartre in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 71

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Sartre is surely one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. His “philosophy of existence” influenced not just academic debate but the whole of Western civilization, especially European youth. In France, from the end of WW2 on into the 1960s, a certain “youth culture” milieu composed of secondary school and university students and young artists and intellectuals proclaimed their “existential” attitude to life by wearing the black clothes and horn-rimmed glasses that Sartre was seen to wear in so many photos from the period. The motto of these “existentialists” ran: ‘do not let anyone else tell you how you are to live’. They advocated a frank and intensive style of life, both as regards friendships and love affairs and political commitments. Sartre was the great philosopher of freedom. No other philosopher has so strongly emphasized the freedom of the human will. And because Man is free he must make something out of his life and live as he believes it right to live, if necessary contrary to existing social rules and traditions. Sartre, for example, opposed many of his country’s wars, fought for a more just society, launched many petitions, and carried on a so-called “open relationship” with his lifelong companion Simone de Beauvoir. In his principal work “Being and Nothingness” Sartre also became one of the first philosophers to explore the nature of “love”. How does love actually work? What does it mean to lead a free and self-determined life? The book “Sartre in 60 Minutes” explains the most important of Sartre’s theses in a clear and comprehensible way, keeping close to Sartre’s own text and including over fifty selected passages from his work. In the chapter on “what use Sartre’s discovery is to us today” it is shown how important Sartre’s thoughts still are for our personal lives and for the society of the 21st Century. The book forms part of the popular series “Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes”.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Sartre’s Great Discovery

Sartre’s Central Idea

Man is Condemned to be Free

Freedom and Guilt

Freedom as ‘Ek-stasis’ or ‘Standing-Out’

The ‘For-Itself’ and the ‘In-Itself’

The Three ‘Ek-stases’ of Temporality

“Bad Faith” (“Mauvaise Foi”)

Nothingness

‘Looking’ and ‘Being-Looked-At’

Shame Under the “Look of the Other”

“Being-For-Others” as Struggle for Recognition

Love as the Surmounting of Struggle?

Absolute Freedom and Absolute Responsibility

Of What Use Is Sartre’s Discovery for Us Today?

Leave “Bad Faith” Behind – Go Your Own Way

Don’t Just Dream – Put Your Thoughts and Ideas into Practice

If Necessary, Be Ready to Rethink

Become Political – The Courage to Intervene

Bibliographical References:

Sartre’s Great Discovery

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. He became world-famous through his provocative thesis that Man is ‘condemned to be free’. His existentialist demand that, in the face of the certainty of death, we cease to believe in some heavenly ‘beyond’ and form our lives freely and determinedly in the here and now became the credo of a whole generation:

Sartre’s philosophy of existence did not only influence academic discussion at universities; it exerted its effect on the whole of Western civilization, above all on European youth.

Existentialism became a kind of lifestyle: high-school pupils, students and artists, along with other enthusiasts for this worldview, began to meet regularly in cafés. This, admittedly, was nothing new in France. But these open discussion-circles, shared in equally by men and women, gave rise to a youth culture of their own. As a sign of their shared existentialist attitudes, participants wore dark clothing and hornrimmed glasses, following Sartre himself. The existentialists’ motto ran: Do not let anyone tell you how you must live; decide yourself how to act and stand by the things you do; live earnestly and intensively both in your love affairs and friendships and in your political commitments.

Sartre himself strongly emphasized this last point: that existentialism is not just a call to individual self-realization but, above and beyond this, also a call to social commitment:

This led existentialists to demonstrate both against French colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina and against American imperialism in Vietnam. Their rejection of bourgeois morality also prompted them to experiment with free love. Sartre himself maintained an ‘open relationship’ with his lifelong companion Simone de Beauvoir. That is to say, both partners sometimes entered into intimate relations with others – which never, indeed, endangered their deep attachment to one another. They even concluded a ‘contract of freedom and openness’, in which they declared their rejection of bourgeois conventions of monogamy while at the same time committing themselves to always remaining honest with, and therefore, to one another.

Besides his philosophical books, Sartre also wrote many novels and plays. But above all he showed active political engagement, organizing countless petitions and, after four years’ support of the Communist Party, subscribing to moderate forms of Maoist political positions. When, in 1957, he threw his support behind Algerian independence and urged French soldiers to refuse to fight in Algeria, his apartment was completely destroyed in a bomb attack mounted by angry conservative-nationalist forces.

He also sought dialogue, all his life, with revolutionaries and social outsiders, visiting Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong and – when he was already over seventy – the imprisoned members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. During this latter prison visit he lodged a strong protest, despite his age and failing eyesight, against the isolation in which Baader and the others were held.

Like many of his existentialist contemporaries, Sartre was a heavy smoker. Still today the menu of his favourite Paris café, the Café de Flore, includes an ‘existentialist breakfast’ priced at only two euros. It seems a good price – until one sees that it consists only of a cup of black coffee and an unfiltered cigarette. But just such ‘purism’ – the decision to breakfast on just that which mattered to the individual without all the ‘bourgeois’ trappings – really was part of the existentialist attitude to life. It was in the same spirit that Sartre refused to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, which seemed to him to be mere ‘bourgeois’ pomp.

All aspiration toward security, comfort and acquisition of possessions seemed contemptible to the existentialists: a sign one was not truly free. Sartre was consistent here and lived his whole life in bare hotel rooms. It was also important to him that he composed all his literary and philosophical works at tables that were not his own.

He was, however, a little disturbed by the youth culture that adopted him as its figurehead, fearing that he would no longer be taken seriously by scholars. But his fears proved ungrounded. His principal work, which appeared in 1943 with the provocative title Being and Nothingness, still counts as a milestone in the history of philosophy. In this book Sartre declares freedom to be the decisive core of Man. No other philosopher before or since has accorded such tremendous significance to human freedom of decision.

Still today, Sartre is considered to be the philosopher of freedom. But this is not all. He also made a second discovery of great consequence. He was one of the first philosophers to investigate the structure of inter-human relations. Among the phenomena he analysed here was love – and he arrived at an astonishing insight: each human being, if he is to develop any sort of sense or idea of himself, is existentially dependent upon the love, the opinion, and the reactions of other human beings. Sartre, indeed, sees freely-accorded recognition by our fellow human beings as forming the very basis of our being. On the other hand, though, we experience just this constant exposure to being judged by others (or, as Sartre prefers to phrase it, by ‘the Other’) as something threatening, because beyond our control:

This danger – which Sartre calls ‘ontological’ – consists in the fact that we do indeed desire to be recognized by others but can never be sure of this recognition because ‘the Other’ is, in principle, free and can always reject and refuse to recognize us. Even a love relationship, in which the lovers offer unconditional mutual recognition to one another, can suffer a crisis or a split. We are involved, therefore, says Sartre, in a ceaseless ‘struggle for recognition’. Since this struggle belongs to the very structure of what it is to be human, Sartre draws here the provocative conclusion:

But this insight gives rise to a whole series of questions. Is there really, for humankind, no way out of the ‘struggle for recognition’? Might a solution to this conflict not be found in love? Why does Sartre believe that love is bound to fail? And above all: what becomes of our freedom if we are constantly dependent on assurance derived from others? Is there really such a thing as ‘freedom’ at all?

Sartre’s Central Idea

Man is Condemned to be Free

Man, claims Sartre, is not just free in his decisions; he is ‘condemned to be free’. Neither inherited dispositions nor education can limit Man’s freedom. He is absolutely free and must, therefore, in every moment consider what to do – and what not to. This structure is inherent in Man’s very essence. It is not that a human being enters the world and only subsequently wins freedom; rather, he is born free: