SAINT GENET: ACTOR AND MARTYR. See GENET, JEAN.
SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS. Bohemian neighborhood on the Left Bank of Paris that emerged as the geographical center of French existentialism after World War II. Saint-Germain was already a gathering place for French artists and writers in the 1930s. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir worked and lived there starting in the early 1940s, attracted by its numerous cafés and bars, bookstores, publishing houses, cheap hotels, and charming narrow streets. Starting in the winter of 1941, at a time when heating fuel was scarce due to the war, Sartre and Beauvoir used the well-heated Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain as their base of operations, writing there each morning and afternoon as well as socializing and receiving visitors. By the autumn of 1945, the café was recognized as the center of the French existentialist movement, and through the late 1940s tourists flocked to the Flore and to the neighboring Café les Deux Magots to catch a glimpse of Sartre and Beauvoir. Boris Vian parodied the Bohemian life of Saint-Germain in his novel L’Écume de jours.
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL (1905–1980). French philosopher, novelist, and playwright. Sartre was the chief representative of existentialism after World War II, and it is difficult to overestimate his importance, both for his philosophical and literary contributions as well as for the social and political dimensions he introduced into existentialist debates.
The term “existentialism” itself was coined around 1944 as a label for Sartre’s philosophy, possibly by Garbriel Marcel, one of his staunchest critics. Beginning in the fall of 1945, Sartre and his colleague and companion Simone de Beauvoir became famous in the French media as the leaders of an “existentialist movement.” Through their journal, Les Temps modernes, as well as through their numerous plays, novels, and philosophical works, Sartre and Beauvoir advocated a conception of radical individual freedom, choice, and responsibility that held up to French citizens an ideal of continual self-creation without metaphysical foundation. Freedom became the watchword of Sartre’s philosophy, and it was in the service of an increasingly political understanding of freedom that Sartre strove through his writings to transform postwar French society. Like many French intellectuals of the time, Sartre was attracted to the Marxist ideal of a classless, egalitarian society, yet he remained skeptical of orthodox Marxism and the politics of the Communist Party. However, with the heating up of the Cold War in the early 1950s, Sartre came to regard communism as the only viable alternative to Western capitalism, which he perceived as the greatest threat to world peace and social justice.
It should be recalled that Sartre was not an existentialist at every stage of his career. The core of his existentialist writings was conceived and written between 1939 and 1952, starting with Being and Nothingness (1943), his major work of philosophy and the primary statement of his existentialism. Nonetheless, aspects of this systematic work were anticipated in shorter phenomenological studies Sartre published between about 1937 and 1940. These include studies of consciousness (The Transcendence of the Ego [1937]), emotion (The Emotions: Outline of a Theory [1939]), and imagination (The Psychology of Imagination [1940]). Thus, the boundaries of Sartre’s philosophical career, while real, must not be drawn too sharply. Ideas formulated in Being and Nothingness continued to inform Sartre’s later thought, whose primary goal was a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism. This Sartre attempted in his second major philosophical work, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).
Life. Sartre’s childhood was documented in his playful autobiography, The Words (1964). He was a pampered, only child, raised by a doting mother in the home of his maternal grandparents. His father, Jean-Marie Sartre, a French naval officer, died when Sartre was only a year old. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was Albert Schweitzer’s cousin. Sartre’s first and deepest ambition was to become a great writer. From an early age he wrote often and copiously, producing a stream of stories, poems, letters, and lyrics. From 1924 to 1929 Sartre was enrolled as a philosophy student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where his fellow students included Raymond Aron and Jean Hyppolite. His commitment to philosophy was awakened by Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will (Les données immédiates de la conscience [1889]). Bergson oriented him toward the study of consciousness and convinced him that through philosophy “you could learn the truth.” In 1929 he met Simone de Beauvoir, who was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, and she became his lifelong companion and collaborator. Having failed his first attempt at the competitive agrégation exam for university teachers in 1928, in 1929 Sartre took first place and Beauvoir second. The same year he met Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who remained a friend and collaborator for more than 20 years. From 1931 to 1939, Sartre was a high school philosophy teacher, first in Le Havre, then in Laon and in Neuilly. His earliest literary recognition came with the publication of his novel Nausea in 1938, followed by a well-received collection of short stories, The Wall, in 1939.
Drafted into the French army in September 1939, Sartre was captured by the Germans in June 1940 and spent nine months in a German prisoner-of-war camp, an experience that gave him his first taste of social solidarity. Here he first read carefully Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and began to conceive Being and Nothingness. In March 1941, Sartre was released on the basis of a falsified medical excuse and spent the rest of the war working productively in occupied Paris, where he completed Being and Nothingness, two novels, and the plays The Flies and No Exit, which premiered in Paris at the time. In 1941, Sartre organized a clandestine group of writers and intellectuals, Socialism and Freedom, intended to resist the German occupation, but which disbanded due to internal disagreement. Toward the end of the war he contributed articles to Albert Camus’s underground Resistance newspaper, Combat.
Sartre emerged from World War II with a heightened political awareness, which found expression in his subsequent thinking and writing. An October 1945 lecture, published subsequently in book form as Existentialism Is a Humanism, marked the birth of existentialism as a cultural phenomenon and the start of Sartre’s celebrity. This short book set the tone for the French existentialist movement by emphasizing ethical and political dimensions of freedom largely absent from Sartre’s earlier work. A new political orientation was also evident in the first issue of Les Temps modernes (October 1945), in which Sartre, as editor, introduced the idea of “committed literature,” and in Sartre’s critical analysis of anti-Semitism, Anti-Semite and Jew (1946). The Age of Reason and The Reprieve, the second and third novels in Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, also appeared at this time (September 1945); they offered concrete illustrations of the problematic of freedom expounded in Being and Nothingness. Taken together with Beauvoir’s second novel, The Blood of Others, this deluge of publications constituted what Beauvoir referred to as an “Existentialist offensive” (FC, 38).
Starting in the late 1940s, Sartre became more embroiled in political controversies, especially with the communists, and spent less time on philosophy and literature. In 1948, he participated in the formation of a political movement, Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionaire, which lasted about one year. In the same year Sartre’s works were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Vatican. In 1950, Pope Pius XIII issued an encyclical that identified existentialism as one of the “False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine.” The final work of Sartre’s existentialist period was a biographical study of the writer Jean Genet, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), which, like his earlier study, Baudelaire (1947), put into practice the method of existential psychoanalysis outlined in Being and Nothingness. In 1952, Sartre broke with Albert Camus over Camus’s increasingly critical attitude toward the Soviet Union. In 1953, he broke with Merleau-Ponty over Merleau-Ponty’s support for U.S. involvement in the Korean War. Sartre became a staunch supporter of the French Communist Party until the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which disabused him of his hopes for Soviet communism and turned him toward his last philosophical work, Critique of Dialectical Reason, which he began in 1957 and published in 1960. In 1964, Sartre refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. His last intellectual project was a monumental biography of Gustave Flaubert in three volumes (1970–1971). Sartre remained active in politics until his death, supporting various radical and revolutionary movements in France and around the globe. His funeral procession in Paris in 1980 attracted some 50,000 people.
Phenomenological Phase. Sartre’s aim in each phase of his thought was to defend human freedom from physiological and psychological reductionism, and at the same time to demonstrate how consciousness, through which freedom is revealed, is necessarily engaged in the world. In the first phase of his career, his approach to the question of freedom was guided by his understanding of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly the theory of the intentionality of consciousness. Sartre’s introduction to phenomenology, recounted in an anecdote by Beauvoir, took place in a Parisian café with Beauvoir and Raymond Aron in 1932:
Aaron said, pointing to his glass: “You see my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” Upon hearing this, Sartre turned pale with emotion. (PL, 112)
Phenomenology seemed to promise the approach to concrete experience that Sartre had been hungering for, one that would avoid the pitfalls of idealism (“digesting” the object within consciousness) and realism (making the object stand on its own, irrespective of consciousness) as well as materialism (reducing consciousness to a physical object in the world).
Sartre refined his understanding of Husserl in a year spent as a fellow at the Maison Académique Française (French Academic Institute) in Berlin (1933–1934). Here he carefully read Husserl’s Ideas and developed his own critical position, which was published in 1936–1937 as The Transcendence of the Ego. Studies of emotion and imagination that followed rounded out Sartre’s phenomenological inquiries. Taken together, their conclusions paved the way for the existentialism of Being and Nothingness. The key to phenomenology for Sartre was the thesis of intentionality: that consciousness is essentially “directed to” or “intends” objects outside of itself. However, where Husserl understood intentionality as the relationship between the mind and the “meanings” it intuits, Sartre understood it as a direct apprehension of things as they are immediately experienced, a contact with the world. This was a central insight of existential phenomenology as formulated by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. While Sartre had by his own admission not yet read Being and Time carefully, his debt to Heidegger was already apparent in a short article from 1939 entitled “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Here Husserl’s staid vocabulary is replaced by torrid Heideggerean metaphors: Consciousness is a “being beyond itself,” a “refusal to be a substance”; Sartre compares it to a “whirlwind,” a “bursting” out beyond ourselves “into the dry dust of the world, on to the plain earth, amidst things.” “Imagine us,” he writes, “thus rejected and abandoned . . . in an indifferent, hostile, and restive world—you will then grasp the profound meaning” of Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality (“Intentionality,” 5).
While Husserl had focused primarily on perception, memory, and logical thought, Sartre’s concern for concreteness led him to study emotion and imagination as exemplary intentional attitudes. In this Sartre may have been influenced by the work of Max Scheler. Fear, anger, love, and imaginative fantasy are not merely subjective states of mind but intentional acts that disclose the world as a correlate of my attitude toward it; through emotions “things . . . abruptly unveil themselves to us as hateful, sympathetic, horrible, lovable” (“Intentionality,” 4–5). For Sartre, the doctrine of intentionality established an intrinsic link between consciousness and world; through my projects and attitudes I invest the world with meaning and value, yet the world remains “transcendent” to my experience of it, for it is a concrete world, not a world of my invention, a world of ideas. Later Sartre characterized the position he was seeking as a type of realism.
Transcendence of the Ego. The idea of intentionality led Sartre in turn to question the traditional concept of the self or ego as a mental subject that remains identical through time. He formulated his thoughts in The Transcendence of the Ego (1937). The mind cannot be thought of as a self-enclosed subjective sphere, nor as a substance that produces thoughts. Rather, “consciousness,” “mind,” and “self” designate a manner of relating to the world, an activity, not a substantial thing. Harkening back to the thought of Bergson, Sartre observed that consciousness is a pure “spontaneity” that “creates itself” anew at each moment; it is “translucence” in that one sees through it to the world while it itself remains “empty” of content and structure. Hence, when I turn my attention to myself, Sartre reasoned, consciousness relates to itself as an object, not as a subject: “The ego is not the owner of consciousness; it is the object of consciousness” (TE, 97). It follows that the ego does not “inhabit” consciousness as its permanent structure or identity. Rather, the ego is an object in the world like any other: “A tree or a chair exist no differently” (TE, 88).
Critics have noted that Sartre’s repudiation of the ego poses problems for explaining the apparent permanence and identity over time of a coherent first-person perspective. Yet for the most part Sartre did not respond directly to this problem, as he regarded self-identity and permanence as illusions rather than as necessary conditions of awareness. Because he believed that consciousness is at bottom an “impersonal spontaneity,” a power of apprehending and assigning meaning to the world that creates itself anew at each moment, he concluded that there can be no permanent self to which conscious acts and decisions may be attributed. Rather, “each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo” (TE, 98–99). Why then do we tend to assign substantial attributes to consciousness? It is because we confuse the object reflected on in self-awareness (a particular person with a particular name, physical appearance, past, temperament, and so forth) with the act and source of reflection (consciousness), which remains elusive, nonobjectifiable, and unpredictable. For this reason, consciousness is inherently disturbing to acknowledge: “There is something distressing . . . to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators . . . man has the impression of ceaselessly escaping from himself, of overflowing himself, of being surprised by riches which are always unexpected” (TE, 99).
Freedom and Situation. Being and Nothingness preserved and expanded upon many of the insights of the phenomenological period but recast them in an existential and “ontological” framework inherited from Heidegger’s Being and Time. The feeling of being “frightened by one’s own spontaneity” Sartre now called anxiety. The power, previously exemplified by imagination, to “withdraw from the world” and to “negate” what is given, he now named “freedom.” (For a detailed discussion, see BEING AND NOTHINGNESS)
The central drama of the book concerns the struggle of consciousness (being-for-itself) to accept the “nothingness” of its freedom—its lack of adequate cause or foundation. In this, Sartre’s analysis is modeled after Heidegger’s; both present existence as a struggle to confront one’s essential nature as a finite and free being. Missing from Sartre’s account, however, is an appreciation of the historical dimension of consciousness, the manner in which the individual is necessarily formed by a specific class, culture, and time period. Sartre insists rather that freedom is absolute; even a slave is free to choose the attitude he or she takes toward slavery. The situation one inhabits may be accepted or denied, and in this sense it is always freely chosen rather than passively suffered. Individuals are responsible for all aspects of themselves “down to the minutest detail.”
A shift toward an appreciation of the situated character of freedom is perhaps the defining feature of Sartre’s later thought. By the mid-1950s, Sartre came to see freedom as legitimately constrained by social, economic, and historical factors, and consequently he came to repudiate the conception of absolute freedom founded in individual choice. His second and final philosophical work, Critique of Dialectical Reason, centered on the notion of praxis or action as a collective accomplishment. Individual freedom was still affirmed, but as a moment within a broader social and historical enterprise. Sartre’s later view thus approximated the account proposed by Merleau-Ponty in the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception. Toward the end of his career, in 1969, Sartre summarized his mature view of freedom in these terms:
[T]he idea which I have never ceased to develop is that in the end one is responsible for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else besides assume this responsibility. For I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him. This is the limit I would accord today to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him. (BEM, 34–35)
SCHELER, MAX (1874–1928). German philosopher who, during and after World War I, was one of Germany’s leading public intellectuals and most original thinkers. Working at times outside of the university as a freelance scholar, Scheler expanded the scope of phenomenology beyond the study of logic and intellectual processes to a consideration of feelings and emotions like sympathy, resentment, and love; religious consciousness; and the experience of values. Scheler thus succeeded in making phenomenology more concrete, more closely aligned with the experiences of everyday life. For this reason, and thanks also to his personal charisma and enthusiasm, his thought was attractive to a generation of German and French philosophers of existence in the 1920s and 1930s. Scheler was also greatly appreciated by the Spanish existential philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.
Central to Scheler’s viewpoint was the idea that values must be emotionally felt rather than intellectually known or perceived, and that values have an objective status independent of the experiencing subject. The latter idea Scheler derived in large measure from his contact with Edmund Husserl, beginning in 1901. Husserl suggested to Scheler that emotional consciousness, just like perceptual and logical consciousness, must follow invariant rules, independent of empirical conditions. In this way, Scheler concluded that values may be understood as transcendental “essences” apprehended by various types of feeling states. Throughout his career he defended the autonomy of moral, intellectual, and religious values vis-à-vis sensorial life and physical impulses.
In 1915, Scheler published The Genius of War, an impassioned apology for World War I and German nationalism. The book won him popular acclaim but sacrificed his friendship with several prominent German intellectuals, including Max Brod and Martin Buber, who remained pacifists. The book also earned him a position with the propaganda department of the German Foreign Office, giving inspirational speeches to officers, soldiers, and prisoners of war. Later that same year, however, Scheler experienced a change of heart typical of the turmoils of his personal life. In 1916, Scheler published his reflections in a second book, criticizing war as a destructive force, followed by several publications recommending the reconciliation and unification of Europe based on Christian ideals. Scheler continued to be engaged in political issues, advocating in his writings and lectures a cosmopolitan Catholic perspective that combined ideals of individuality and socialist cooperation. However, in 1924 he once again experienced a radical shift in thinking and broke with the Catholic Church, which he criticized as antiquated and dogmatic.
In his final years, Scheler attempted to formulate a general vision of human existence that expressed his new perspective. This philosophical anthropology bore similarities to Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein in Being and Time. Heidegger acknowledged a debt to Scheler’s conception of the person as a center of lived experience irreducible to a thing or substance. However, he took pains to distinguish his perspective from Scheler’s, which he found limited by its uncritical acceptance of traditional ontological categories.
SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH (1775–1854). German Romantic philosopher significant in the history of existentialism particularly for his influence on Søren Kierkegaard. Beginning with his 1809 “Essay on Human Freedom,” Schelling devoted much of his later thought to the problem of freedom and to existence in its “positive” “actuality” as opposed to how it is “negatively” (merely intellectually) conceived by philosophical idealism. In this way, Schelling became a critic of G. W. F. Hegel’s system of absolute idealism, the dominant philosophical position of the time in German-speaking countries. While Schelling and Hegel had attended seminary school together and had lectured side by side at the University of Jena, Schelling came to fault Hegel for his deficient understanding of human existence. It is thus fitting that Kierkegaard should have been awakened to philosophy while attending Schelling’s lectures in Berlin in 1841–1842. Following Schelling, Kierkegaard developed an original critique of Hegel. He also inherited from Schelling the distinctive usage of the term existence that characterizes existentialism.
SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788–1860). German pessimistic philosopher whose unique blend of post-Kantian idealism and vitalism was a major influence on the early thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and a youthful influence on Søren Kierkegaard. A critical moment in the development of existentialism was Nietzsche’s decision to reject Schopenhauer’s view of existence as inevitable suffering. Nietzsche and those who followed him, such as Albert Camus, were thus not pessimists. Unlike Schopenhauer, they viewed embodiment, striving, and the relative strength of the passions over reason as cause to affirm life rather than to renounce it in favor of “will-less” quietism.
Schopenhauer’s major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation (1818; 1844), followed Immanuel Kant in distinguishing between things as they appear to the human mind, namely, as mental representations (Vorstellungen), and things as they are “in-themselves,” independent of human cognition. Schopenhauer diverged significantly from Kant, however, in asserting that the thing-in-itself is accessible to human experience, paradigmatically in the experience of will, an immediate, nonrepresentational feeling of existence or a striving to exist. Externally, for example, when I look at a photograph of myself, I appear as a physical thing in the world, about which I can form various mental representations. Internally, for example, when I feel hunger, thirst, or sexual appetite, I experience myself immediately as will. Will, the vital drive to exist, is the fundamental nature of reality untrammeled by categories of human cognition. Plants and animals display a similar dual aspect: to the mind they appear as physical things that follow causal laws corresponding to the laws of science, yet in-themselves they are expressions of will, a blind striving to exist. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics held that at the deepest level both organic and inorganic nature are phenomenal expressions of a single, unitary cosmic striving to exist.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism derived from his assumption, influenced by his reading of the Upanishads, that willing entails suffering. Because the goal of willing is the quietude that results from the cessation of will, and because this is not possible while we are alive, life is inherently painful. The striving of will ceases permanently only in death or, in the case of the saint or ascetic, in renunciation of the will to live. Nonetheless, suffering may be temporarily relieved in moments of aesthetic contemplation when one appreciates a beautiful object independent of the desire to possess or enjoy it.
It may be noted that, in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was indebted to Schopenhauer’s discussion of artistic creation. Influenced by Hinduism, Schopenhauer identified the function of art with that of a “veil of illusion”—the Veil of Maya—that necessarily cloaks human perception of reality, protecting us from the dark truth of will. In similar fashion, Nietzsche proposed that in Greek tragedy the Apollonian principle of order and reason tempers and makes bearable life’s Dionysian elements of chaos and destruction.
SEARCH FOR A METHOD. See CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON.
SECOND SEX, THE. See BEAUVOIR, SIMONE DE; FEMINISM.
SELF. See AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY; EGO; FREEDOM.
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. See CONSCIOUSNESS; EGO; PREREFLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS.
SHAME. See OTHER, THE.
SHE CAME TO STAY (L’Invitée, 1943). Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, begun in 1938 and completed in 1941, during the German occupation of France, is set on the eve of World War II. The novel is based on Beauvoir’s relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and with her student, Olga Kosakiewicz, who became one of her closest friends during the war. When Beauvoir introduced Sartre to Olga he became infatuated, and for many months Olga, who did not return Sartre’s affections, was the subject of Sartre’s obsession. This became a source of frustration for Beauvoir, who genuinely liked Olga yet prized her relationship with Sartre above all else. Her intention to remain united with Sartre in mutual enjoyment and instruction of young Olga (Olga was 17 when they first met) backfired when Olga asserted her own subjectivity.
She Came to Stay tells the story of a similar “conflict of consciousnesses” among Françoise (based on Beauvoir), Pierre (based on Sartre), and Xavière (based on Olga). Beauvoir understands this conflict in Hegelian terms, as she announces in the epigraph to the book, a quotation from G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.” That is, in human relationships each struggles to possess the other, to control, rather than be controlled by, the other’s consciousness. The novel develops various permutations of this theme. Initially, Xavière is merely an “annex” to Françoise, a pliable young girl from the provinces whom Françoise hopes to mold in her image by inviting her to Paris to live with her and Pierre. However, when Xavière begins to assert her own subjectivity, Françoise is forced to experience herself through Xavière’s eyes. She sees herself as old, rigid and unspontaneous, jealous—an object judged by another and no longer a sovereign consciousness. Pierre becomes attracted to Xavière, and Xavière becomes increasingly hostile and intransigent to both Pierre and Françoise. The formerly hermetic world, in which Françoise and Pierre imagined that they were “as one,” has been breached by a “third,” who judges them and shatters their illusion of autonomy. No resolution seems possible. The novel ends with Françoise murdering Xavière by turning on the gas in her room while she sleeps.
She Came to Stay clearly has philosophical intentions as well as personal meaning for Beauvoir. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who devoted an essay (“Metaphysics and the Novel”) to the novel, praised it as a successful synthesis of philosophy and literature in which abstract ideas are given concrete expression through ordinary human relationships. He admired the way in which for Beauvoir “there is no Last Judgment . . . no other side of things where true and false, fair and unfair are separated out.” In this way, for Merleau-Ponty the novel embodied a deep “metaphysical” truth: that “[w]e are inextricably . . . bound up with the world and with others” (SNS, 36). It should also be mentioned that She Came to Stay anticipated Sartre’s treatment in Being and Nothingness of themes of desire, shame, the look of the other, and sadism and masochism.
SHESTOV, LEV (1866–1938). Russian philosopher and religious thinker. Along with Nikolai Berdyaev, Shestov is often classed as a “Russian Christian existentialist,” but it should be noted that his views developed prior to and independently of the major currents of existential phenomenology in the 1920s and 1930s. Shestov’s real name was Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann. He migrated to Berlin in 1922 and then to Paris in the early 1930s. His works on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche were translated into French in the 1930s and won him an audience among French intellectuals.
Shestov had a mystic bent; stressed the contingency, arbitrariness, and mystery of existence; and was suspicious of attempts to formally analyze it. Albert Camus identifies him as a philosopher of the absurd and comments on him in The Myth of Sisyphus. His thought was not otherwise particularly influential in the development of French existentialism.
SIN. See CONCEPT OF ANXIETY, THE.
SINCERITY. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, being sincere in the sense of “being true to oneself” is a vice, not a virtue, for it requires the false assumption that one has a fixed nature, essence, or inner self in accordance with which one ought to live. Sartre analyzes the “ideal of sincerity” (BN, 62–67) as an instance of bad faith; in aspiring to sincerity, I must interpret myself as a “thing”—a person with a fixed character or nature—with which I might “coincide.” The goal of sincerity is thus to disburden oneself of the freedom and responsibility of deciding who one is through one’s actions and commitments. For Sartre, the ideal of sincerity is a basic pitfall of inauthentic existence.
SISYPHUS. See MYTH OF SISYPHUS, THE.
SITUATED FREEDOM. See FREEDOM; MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE; SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL; SITUATION.
SITUATION. The concept of situation plays an important role in existentialism, closely linked to the concepts of action, commitment, and freedom. In general terms, the situation is the product of an evolving relationship between freedom and facticity, that is, between human projects and the world in which they are engaged. Factical components of the situation include the past, the physical environment, social facts, and cultural artifacts; the “freedom” component refers to goals and intentions as expressed through one’s chosen attitudes and actions. Existentialists differ somewhat in their interpretation of the concept, assigning more or less weight to facticity or to freedom. Nonetheless, there is general agreement that the concept of situation is ontologically hybrid, reducible to neither an “external world” of things nor an “internal” sphere of thought. Existentialist accounts of situation, like their accounts of freedom, are meant to recall the interdependence of self and world that cannot be further reduced without serious distortion.
Jean-Paul Sartre provides the most detailed account of these issues. On the one hand, the situation is relative to one’s project. To a mountain climber, a mountain is “climbable,” a physical challenge to be met, while to a farmer the same mountain may be simply “untillable land.” Similarly, the condition of slavery depends on the attitude in which it is “lived”; some slaves may accept enslavement as preordained, while others experience it as cause for revolt (BN, 550). In each case, the situation reveals the “properties” of things as dependent on human projects. On the other hand, Sartre observes that freedom must encounter some “resistance” to its realization, and that the factical givenness of the world provides such resistance. Accordingly, the mountain and the institution of slavery clearly must in a sense exist “in-themselves,” independent of my thoughts and intentions. The facticity of the situation provides resistance, but only on the basis of the meaning my project assigns to it (BN, 482–483). Conversely, the goals I freely pursue are not conceived ex nihilo but as the “surpassing” of factical limits encountered in the social and physical environment. With this in mind, Sartre expresses the idea of “situated freedom”: that “there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom” (BN, 489).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger offer accounts more weighted toward facticity. According to them, the situation is necessarily informed by an inherited “horizon of significance,” projects and meanings already constituted by society and tradition. However, as Merleau-Ponty writes, if “[the] world is already constituted,” it is “also never completely constituted” (PP, 453). Freedom is exercised by taking up possibilities from the past and actively making them one’s own.
SKEPTICISM. See REALISM AND IDEALISM.
SOCIALISM. See COMMUNISM; MARXISM; POLITICS.
SOCIALISME ET LIBERTÉ (Socialism and Freedom). Short-lived French Resistance group organized in 1941 by Jean-Paul Sartre along with Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and other intellectuals to fight the German occupation of France and prepare the way for a future socialist government, which, they naïvely believed, would take charge after the liberation of France. The group was a loosely knit association of socialist and Marxist intellectuals and writers, who printed clandestine pamphlets but lacked organization, political coherence, experience, and personal resolve. Twenty years later, in 1961, Sartre described the effort in these terms:
In 1941, intellectuals, more or less throughout the country, formed groups which claimed to be resisting the conquering enemy. I belonged to one of these groups, “Socialism and Freedom.” Merleau[-Ponty] joined us. This encounter was not the result of chance. Each of us had come from a petit bourgeois background. Our tastes, our tradition and our professional conscience moved both of us to defend freedom of the pen. Through this freedom we discovered all the others. But aside from that, we were simpletons. Born of enthusiasm, our little group caught a fever and died a year later, of not knowing what to do. (Situations, 167)
SOLICITUDE (Ger. Fürsorge). A technical term in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger appropriates the ordinary German expression for “caring for others,” as in “child care” or “care for the elderly,” to designate Dasein’s attitude toward other human beings. He observes that relations with other persons are not incidental to but rather constitutive of a human life. Thus Dasein’s essential character as being-in-the-world is also a “being-with-others”; the world of everyday practical concern is a social world, suffused with the presence of other people. Even when, as is often the case in everyday existence, I am indifferent to other people and they do not matter to me, I still apprehend them as human beings to whom I am indifferent and never merely as things present-at-hand.
Heidegger outlines two extreme possibilities of solicitude: “that which leaps in and dominates, and that which leaps ahead and liberates.” In leaping in, the most common mode, I relate to the other as a subject of concern: Perhaps I help to resolve a problem, for example, I loan a friend some money, and thus I “take away his ‘care’.” In leaping ahead of the other, in contrast, I “help the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it.” Unfortunately, the distinction remains highly schematic. Nonetheless, it is significant that Heidegger characterizes leaping ahead as the authentic manner of relating to other persons, one that somehow “frees the Other in his freedom for himself” (BT, 159; slightly altered). Heidegger’s characterization of authentic solicitude is reminiscent of Karl Jaspers’s concept of authentic philosophizing as an illumination of possibilities rather than a justification of doctrines, which leads others to confront their freedom as Existenz.
SPACE/SPATIALITY. See MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE.
SPANISH EXISTENTIALISM. See ORTEGA Y GASSET, JOSÉ; UNAMUNO, MIGUEL DE.
SPIRIT OF SERIOUSNESS, THE (Fr. l’esprit de sérieux). Jean-Paul Sartre uses this expression to characterize the common view that values exist independently of individual choice and commitment. For Sartre, such a view mistakenly posits values as preexisting facts rather than consequences of human attitudes; hence, objects become “mute demands” while the subject is “nothing . . . but the passive obedience to these demands” (BN, 626). The spirit of seriousness is exemplary of bad faith in that it is motivated by the desire to avoid taking responsibility for oneself and the anxiety that ensues from this realization.
SPIRITUALISM (Fr. spiritualisme). Movement in French philosophy whose name derives from the French term esprit, “mind.” Spiritualism refers to the philosophical position that the higher powers of the mind, including the will and emotions such as love, joy, pride, and guilt, are free from physical determination and represent the essence of the human being. A spiritualist tradition in French philosophy begins with the 18th-century philosopher Maine de Biran. Spiritualism is continued in the 19th and early 20th centuries by thinkers such as Félix Ravaisson and Henri Bergson. The positions of Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular his view of the absolute nature of consciousness and freedom, have spiritualist overtones.
SPONTANEITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. See CONSCIOUSNESS.
STATE-OF-MIND (Ger. Befindlichkeit). In the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Befindlichkeit refers to the manner in which the meaning of one’s situation registers in awareness prior to explicit self-reflection. Heidegger coins the term, derived from colloquial German expressions such as “Wie befinden Sie sich?”—“How are you?”—to capture the idea that we standardly find ourselves in a certain mood or disposition without (necessarily) knowing why, and without having chosen it. Central to Heidegger’s account is the claim that state-of-mind reveals something about the world and not merely about ourselves, that it cannot be reduced to an “internal,” “subjective” state that has no bearing on the way things are “externally” and “objectively.” The main thrust of Heidegger’s argument in Division I of Being and Time is to question the assumption that “reason” and “theoretical observation” are the primary human modes of access to reality; the thesis he defends is that, before the world can be objectively observed and rationally reflected on, it must first be apprehended in a more immediate fashion. State-of-mind is one of two basic modes of this apprehension of meaning; the other is “understanding” (Verstehen).
STRANGER, THE. See CAMUS, ALBERT; PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD.
SUBJECT/SUBJECTIVISM. See DASEIN.
SUBJECTIVITY. See EXISTENCE; KIERKEGAARD, SØREN.
SUBSTANCE. In traditional philosophy, the category of substance refers to that which exists by itself in an unchanging form. According to Aristotle, a thing is a substance in the sense of being a permanent subject to which various properties are ascribed. (In this way, the distinction between substance and property is informed by the distinction between grammatical subject and predicate.) Moreover, substances are said to be ontologically primary in that properties and qualities cannot exist unless predicated of substances. Thus substance in ancient ontology indicates what is the most real in the sense of what is unchanging and self-identical.
Existentialists reject substance ontology as inadequate for understanding human existence. Human beings, they insist, do not exist in the same manner as nonhuman things like a stone, a planet, or a table. To begin with, a human being does not consist of some unchanging substrate onto which various changing properties are attached; there is no “essence” of the human being in the sense of a universal form or definition that is instantiated by individual humans. Rather, in the case of human beings it must be said that existence precedes essence, for what a person is (essence) emerges only in the course of projects and commitments (existence). Existence is thus fundamentally non-substance-like in that it admits of no permanent properties that can be described from an external perspective.
In place of the language of substance and property, the essential features of existence are described by existentialists as possible ways of being, chosen ways of relating to the world, oneself, and others. For example, while a table may be properly described in terms of objective properties such as “being made of wood” and “being six feet long,” an existing person cannot be said to “have” properties in this sense. If Pierre “is a coward,” it is because he has chosen this manner of being. In each case, what looks like an objective property is better understood as an existential project, a manner of committing oneself.
A further criticism of substance ontology is the manner in which primary substances are thought to exist independently of one another. This is particularly clear in René Descartes’s substance dualism, where minds or “spiritual substance” (res cogitans) are said to exist independently of things or “material substance” (res extensa). Martin Heidegger develops a sustained critique of Descartes’s substance ontology in Being and Time. The core of his criticism is that the relationship between human being and world cannot be thought of as that between two independent substances. Instead, Heidegger defines Dasein in terms of its relation to the world, and the world in turn is defined in terms of Dasein’s historical, pragmatic, and projective character. See also ESSENCE; EXISTENCE.
SUICIDE. Albert Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the surprising claim that “suicide is the only serious philosophical question.” Suicide, for Camus, is tied to the concept of the absurd, the realization that life has no ultimate purpose or justification. The question Camus is concerned with is, does the absurd require suicide?
Camus distinguishes between the physical act of taking one’s own life and what he calls “philosophical suicide,” seeking an intellectual means of escape from life’s absurdity in illusory truths of metaphysics, religion, or science. Both are, ultimately, inappropriate forms of response to the absurd. Belief in the redemptive power of religion, in scientific progress, or in philosophical system-building brings solace to the individual at the price of intellectual dishonesty, imputing transcendent meaning to existence where there is none, or where we can never be sure there is any. These are “metaphysical” illusions, contradicted by the evidence of human history and by the immediate certainties of existence: that I exist here and now, that I can find no reason for existing (i.e., that I and any other part of the world are purely contingent and could just as readily not exist), and that I will die.
The physical act of suicide is also an inappropriate response, a concession to absurdity that confirms life’s futility. In place of physical suicide or appeal to abstract forces or entities about which I can never be certain, Camus exhorts a response of “lucid struggle” or “revolt.” In an attitude of lucid revolt, individuals commit themselves passionately and consciously to their choices and activities. This is the response of Camus’s Sisyphus, the exemplary existential hero, who, fully conscious of his futile labors, nonetheless embraces his situation, for he realizes that he is free, “master of his own destiny.” “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” Camus writes. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (MS, 123). In the end, lucid consciousness of the absurd enables one to overcome nihilism and to seize upon one’s own action and passion as the source of life’s meaning. See also DEATH.
SURREALISM. Modernist movement in literature and art that flourished in Paris between about 1924 and 1939. The surrealists’ chief concern was to explore the meaning of the unconscious mind, that “shadow world” of repressed desires and childhood fantasies analyzed in the work of Sigmund Freud. With the publication of his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, André Breton became the movement’s nominal leader. Breton celebrated dreams as the finest fruit of human imagination, and he proposed the literary technique of “automatic writing,” a spontaneous and undirected flow of written words that allowed authors to access unconscious associations and create unexpected “sparks” of meaning. In similar fashion, painters such as Max Ernst and René Magritte juxtaposed incongruous images to produce haunting, dreamlike canvases. Surrealist writers who later became associated with existentialism include Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. As a college student in the mid- and late 1920s, Jean-Paul Sartre was attracted to surrealism and often emulated the surrealist style in his early fiction. His first published novel, Nausea, retained surrealist elements such as references to madness and hallucination. Surrealism was largely dead as an artistic movement by the end of World War II. See also EXISTENTIALIST LITERATURE.