Stephen Priest
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) is one of the greatest French thinkers. A polemical and witty essayist, a metaphysician of subjectivity, a political activist, a revolutionary political theorist, a humanistic novelist, a didactic playwright, his genius lies in his powers of philosophical synthesis and the genre-breaching breadth of his imagination.
In the 1970s, the French journalist Michel Rybalka delivered a lecture on Sartre which divided his intellectual development into three stages: liberty, equality and fraternity. The three concepts of the slogan of the French revolutionaries of 1789 were used to denote three kinds of philosophy which Sartre endorsed: existentialism, from the mid-1930s, Marxism, increasingly from the Second World War, and anarchism, in the last few years before he died in 1980.
Rybalka’s threefold taxonomy is too neat, too clean and, however appealing, it is an over simplification. The adult Sartre was always an existentialist, a practitioner of that style of philosophising which addresses the fundamental problems of human existence: death, anxiety, political, religious and sexual commitment, freedom and responsibility, the meaning of existence itself. It follows that Sartre remained an existentialist during his long Marxist phase and during his final overtly anarchist phase.
Sartre’s existentialism was never a pure existentialism. One of his outstanding philosophical syntheses is the fusing of existentialism with phenomenology. The Moravian, German-speaking philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his Austrian teacher, the psychologist and philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917), are the founders of phenomenology. Phenomenology is the attempt to explain the possibility of all knowledge, including philosophy, by describing the content and structure of consciousness. It was Husserl’s hope that this partly Cartesian and partly Kantian project would place all knowledge on indubitable and incorrigible foundations. Husserlian phenomenology is Cartesian because it shares with Descartes the ambition of methodically exposing preconceptions and grounding knowledge in certainty. It is Kantian because it shares with the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) the ‘transcendental’ ambition of showing how all knowledge is possible (notably in his Critique of Pure Reason, 1781 and 1787).
The Danish Protestant theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–59) and the German atheistic nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) are considered the initiators of existentialism. Profound dilemmas of human existence are explored in the works of the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoievski (1821–81). His Notes From the Underground (1864) particularly anticipates Sartrean themes.
Sartre was not alone or wholly original in marrying phenomenology and existentialism into a single philosophy. Phenomenology had already undergone the profound transformation into ‘fundamental ontology’ at the hands of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his large, if incomplete, 1927 masterwork, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). The book is an examination of what it means to be, especially as this is disclosed through one’s own existence (Dasein). The 1945 synthesis of phenomenology and existentialism in Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménoiogie de la Perception) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s philosophical friend and political antagonist, follows hard on the heels of Sartre’s own 1943 synthesis, Being and Nothingness (l’Etre et le Néant), with which it is partly inconsistent. Sartre’s existentialism, like that of Merleau-Ponty, is ‘existential phenomenology’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) offers a phenomenology of the body which eschews mind-body dualism, reductivist materialism and idealism. He influenced Sartre politically and collaborated in editing Les Temps Modernes but broke with Sartre over what he saw as the latter’s ‘ultrabolshevism’.1
Sartre’s Marxism was never a pure Marxism. Not only did he never join the PCF (Parti Communiste Frangais), the second massive synthesis of his philosophical career was the fusion of Marxism with existentialism. The large 1960 first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la Raison Dialectique I) is an attempt to exhibit existentialist philosophy and Marxist political theory as not only mutually consistent but as mutually dependent: as dialectically requiring one another for an adequate understanding of human reality. This neo-Hegelian ‘totalising’ philosophy promises us all the intellectual apparatus we need to understand the direction of history and the unique human individual in their complex mutual constitution. The German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) thought that philosophical problems could be exhibited as apparent contradictions that could be relieved, overcome or ‘synthesised’ (aufgehoben). Hence, for example, human beings are both free and causally determined, both mental and physical, social and individual, subjective and objective, and so on; not one to the exclusion of the other. ‘Synthetic’ or ‘totalising’ philosophy shows seemingly mutually exclusive views to be not only compatible but mutually necessary.2
Sartre’s Marxism is a ‘humanistic’ Marxism. His faith in Marxism as the most advanced philosophy of human liberation is tempered by his awareness of the crushing of the aspirations of the human individual by actual Marxism in, for example, the Soviet collectivisation of the farms and purges of the 1930s and 1940s, the supression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the decades of atrocities in the Soviet Gulag, the ending of the Prague Spring in 1968. Like the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, Sartre does not think the oppression of the individual by communism is only a problem of political practice.3 He thinks Marxist political theory is flawed. Unlike Popper however, he seeks to humanise Marxist theory rather than reject it utterly. Also unlike Popper, he thinks the neglected resources for a theory of the freedom of the individual can be found within the early writings of Marx himself. The young Marx is to be construed as a kind of proto-existentialist.
The putative synthesis of existentialism and Marxism is extraordinarily ambitious. Some of the most fundamental and intractable problems of metaphysics and the philosophy of mind are obstacles to that synthesis. Classical Marxism is determinist and materialist. Sartre’sexistentialism is libertarian and phenomenological. Marxism includes a theory of history with prescriptive prognoses for the future. Existentialism explores agency in a spontaneous present which bestows only a derivative existence on past and future. Marxism is a social theory in which the class is the subject and object of change. In existentialism individuals do things and things are done to individuals. Marxism has pretensions to be a science. Existentialism regards science as part of the very problem of dehumanisation and alienation.
Despite the fact that Sartre’s overt anarchism emerges only at the end of his life – it is mainly professed in a series of interviews with his then secretary Benny Lévy for the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur – Sartre also claimed in the 1970s that he had always been an anarchist.
Anarchism is the theory that the abolition of the state is both possible and desirable. It is true that Sartre was a figure who increasingly challenged authority, especially the authority of the state; from the mocking of bourgeois values in the 1938 novel Nausea (La Nausée), through the support for the Algerian and Cuban rebels in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a host of other left-wing or anti-colonial causes, to his hawking of Maoist newsheets on the streets of Paris in the early 1970s. Sartre never wrote a philosophical synthesis of anarchism and the other philosophies he espoused. Rather, his anarchism is in his behaviour.
Sartre lost patience with communism after the failure of the May 1968 riots to develop into a revolutionary overthrow of French capitalism. He penned the tract Les Communistes ont peur de la révolution (The Communists are Afraid of Revolution) to condemn what he saw as the betrayal of the revolution by the PCF. His acceptance of the editorship of La Cause du Peuple (The People’s Cause) and other Maoist papers was his last significant Marxist gesture. In the 1970s he struggled to learn the political stance of his young revolutionary colleagues who sometimes viewed the ageing writer with mirth or contempt.
Despite these complexities, there is something profoundly apposite about Rybalka’s use of liberty, equality, fraternity to denote Sartre’s existentialism, Marxism and anarchism. The doctrine that human beings have an ineliminable freedom to choose, no matter how constrained they may be, is essential to Sartre’s existentialism. We are the beings who choose what we are. In Marxism, equality is not only a value, it is the core political value: the value upon which other values depend. In anarchism, fraternity makes social harmony in the absence of the power of the state possible. Ordinary human friendships do not need to be sustained by police, army, courts or taxation and this is a clue to the fact that society without the state is possible.
It could be that existentialism, Marxism and anarchism are not mutually consistent. If philosophical problems need to be solved to show their compatibility, then this applies equally to the slogan of the French revolution of 1789. Arguably the history of the Westernised world since the 1790s has conspicuously included the attempt to reconcile the competing claims of liberty, equality and fraternity. If that is right, the avid reception of Sartre’s works worldwide becomes more comprehensible.
Sartre, then, is a synthesiser. It is not unusual for the greatness of a philosopher to consist in being a synthesiser. Plato reconciled the static, rationalist, monist world-picture of Parmenides with the pluralistic, empirical, process ontology of Heraclitus. Descartes, wrote his dualist philosophy to reconcile the medieval theological world picture he had inherited, with the findings of the new physical science.4 Kant, consciously if messily, synthesised the continental rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza with the British empiricism of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Marxism, as Lenin pointed out, is a meeting of French socialism, British economics, and German philosophy. Sartre’s syntheses of phenomenology and existentialism in the 1940s and existentialism with Marxism from the late 1950s take their place with these others in the history of philosophy. They are at least as philosophically significant as the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism of his German-American contemporary, the Frankfurt School radical Herbert Marcuse, who was so much more influential than Sartre in the événements of May ‘68.5
He was born Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre on 21st June 1905, in Paris. His naval officer father died of a tropical disease the following year and so Sartre was brought up by his doting mother and rather austere maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Charles Schweitzer (who was the uncle of Albert Schweitzer the famous Protestant theologian) dominated the household. Paradoxically, he treated Sartre as an adult and Sartre’s mother as a child.
Sartre was allowed no friends of his own age so he sought the companionship of the books in his grandfather’s large library. Educated at home by Charles until he was eleven, Sartre attended a string of Lycées until intellectual and personal liberation came in the form of admittance to the École Normale Supérieure in 1924.
It was at the École Normale that Sartre met his lifelong companion and lover Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). She was to become the brilliant feminist existentialist author of Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), (1948) many philosophical novels, and the most significant work of existentialist ethics: Pour Une Morale de L’Ambiguité (For a Morality of Ambiguity) (1944). The mutual influence of de Beauvoir and Sartre is immense. They tested their ideas against each other. Their relationship seems to have allowed of a frankness extremely rare between two human beings.6
It was usually in the company of de Beauvoir that Sartre travelled abroad. At first just for holidays, later at the invitation of political leaders, Sartre visited between the 1930s and 1980s Spain, England, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Swizterland, Greece, Morocco, Algeria, Norway, Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, China, Italy, Yugoslavia, Cuba, the USA, Russia, Brazil and Japan. Some countries he visited more than once. He met Tito in Yugoslavia, Breznef in Russia and Castro in Cuba, as well as the Chinese communist leadership.
Sartre’s literary and philosophical output is immense. What enabled him to write so much was a combination of a naturally strong physical constitution, high motivation, an extremely efficient writing routine, and the intermittent abuse of amphetamine tablets which increased his production, if not his coherence.
Sartre suffered problems with his eyes. In 1909 he caught a cold which led to a leucoma in his right eye and strabism. Henceforth, he had hardly any vision left in that eye and was left with the distinctive squint which would be exploited with ruthless hilarity by political cartoonists when he became a world figure. In the 1970s he went blind. Fortunately, by 1975 (when he was seventy) he felt able to claim in an interview ‘I have said everything I had to say’ (Life/Situations, p. 20). Although Sartre sometimes suffered from the symptoms of stress he was blessed with great physical and intellectual stamina.
Many conjectures could be made about his motivation to write. Perhaps in his solitary childhood his early reading and writing was a substitute for the human conversation and playful childhood interchanges that were denied him. Certainly, the release from his grandfather’s orderly study into the comparative chaos of the world fascinated him. The contrast motivates his existentialism and perhaps his later socialism. Perhaps he wrote because of the excitement of realising he could write. It is certain that he hated his childhood and much of his writing is writing against it.
Sartre’s writing routine was as follows: at 8.30 am he got up. From 9.30 am to 1.30 pm he would write. (Four hours in the morning and four hours in the evening, that was his only rule.) From 2.00–4.00 pm he would lunch in a café such as Les Deux Magots or Café Flore on Boulevard Saint Germaine, La Coupoule in Montparnasse or Les Trois Mousquetaires on the Avenue de Maine, perhaps work there on some writing but certainly meet friends for conversation. Before 5.00 pm he would walk home and the second four-hour stretch of writing would be from 5.00–9.00 pm. At 9.00 pm he would typically walk to Simone de Beauvoir’s flat and they would talk and listen to music. Sartre would be asleep by 12.30 am and, in the morning, would breakfast in a local café, between 8.30 and 9.30 am. The apropriately named La Liberté on the corner of rue de la Gaité and Boulevard Edgar Quinet was his favourite for breakfast. He would not overeat. Although he drank plenty of black coffee and smoked excessively, he drank very little alcohol. His social life took place in the afternoons. Three o’clock in the afternoon, he thought, was too late to finish anything and too late to start anything. The first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason was written at three times the normal speed because Sartre took twenty amphetamine tablets per day to finish it. Although he was physically strong, or perhaps partly because of it, Sartre took little care of his body. Sport bored him. He was happy to abuse his body to accelerate his written output.
Sartre never owned a house or an apartment. For long stretches he would rent rooms in hotels. Indeed, his personal possessions were few: modest clothes, cigarettes, writing materials. When money came, say from Gallimard, he would carry all of it as a wad of banknotes in his wallet donating it copiously to friends or worthy causes. Michel Rybalka reports that on arriving to interview Sartre about Critique of Dialectical Reason they had to walk to a local bookshop to buy a copy. The interview was hard to conduct. Sartre wanted to know all about the role of the committed journalist.
The Second World War is the most decisive turning point of Sartre’s intellectual career. Before the war, Sartre was an individualist in theory and practice. His philosophy and literature treated human subjects as atomic agents. Although he spent 1933–4 in Germany studying phenomenology, he seems to have been oblivious to the Nazi rise to power, with the exception of noting that the communists had gone underground in Berlin. Despite the anti-Fascist sentiments of ‘The Wall’ and ‘Childhood of a Leader’, and despite his mocking cynicism towards the middle classes in Nausea, his own life remained that of an essentially apolitical writer of growing reputation. Some of his friends joined the Popular Front but he did not. Nor did he show any of the overt political commitment to the republicans in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) that motivated so many left-wing intellectuals in Europe and the USA, if not to fight, then at least to write. During the 1938 Munich crisis he was a pacifist. When war comes in September 1939 he is anti-Nazi but for the nationalist reason that France could be invaded; a reason he would later regard as embarrassingly inadequate. The Sartre of the 1930s had no developed political consciousness. Sartre’s immediate impact in the post-war period was still not as a Marxist but as the world leader of the philosophical vogue called ‘Existentialism’.
On Monday 29th October 1945 in Le Club Maintenant (‘The Now Club’) at 8 rue Jean Goujon, Sartre delivered his lecture L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme. This title is usually translated into English as ‘Existentialism and Humanism’ but the literal rendering is ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, meaning that Existentialism is a kind of humanist philosophy. Sartre expressed regret that this short text, delivered without notes, came to be taken as an authoritive guide to his thought. He also felt uncomfortable with the label ‘Existentialist’. Even as Existentialism flourished in the cafés, theatres and bars in a way that exceeded the popularity of Henri Bergson’s philosophy after the First World War, Sartre’s serious commitment was to revolutionary Marxism.
What was it about the Second World War which turned Sartre the naive individualist into Sartre the political figure? In an interview late in his life he says of being called up for military service in September 1939 that this was what made him suddenly realise that he was a social being. He spent the ‘phoney war’, September 1939–May 1940, in the meterological corps of the French army, on the militarily ineffectual Maginot Line, taking the opportunity to make copious notes that would much later be Les Carnets de la Drôle de Guerre (War Diaries) (1983). The diaries anticipate themes in Being and Nothingness. It was his capture by the Wehrmacht on 21st June 1940, along with thousands of other French soldiers, and his incarceration in a prisoner-of-war camp in Triers that made Sartre realise that he was subject to political forces and needed to take political action. On his escape in March 1941 he helped found the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté.
It could be that the experience of the 1939–45 war left Sartre with two enduring models or attitudes for his politics in the period 1945–80. The Nazi occupation of France provided him with a stark contrast between oppressor and oppressed. It seemed so obviously right to side with democracy, socialism and France against the violent totalitarianism of the invader (even if, for many of Sartre’s contemporaries, collaboration or passive acquiescence was a more prudent strategy). This clean distinction between the rights of the oppressed and the wrongs of the oppressors is a moral distinction that informs nearly all his post-war political commitments. The French state and the Algerian people, the Batista regime and the Cuban rebels, the USA and the Vietnamese communists, the Franco regime in Madrid and the ETA separatists, German business and government and the Baader Meinhof gang, the Renault management and the striking car workers: in each case Sartre unquestioningly divides political antagonists into oppressor and oppressed, immoral and moral. The Nazi occupying forces and the French resistance are the prototype for these clashes of Good and Evil.
The other enduring political attitude bequeathed to Sartre by the Second World War was an immense sympathy for the Soviet Union. In their café arguments in the 1950s Sartre would allow himself to criticise Soviet policy, but if Albert Camus or Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined him he would spring to the Soviet Union’s defence. It was not just the fact that the Soviet Union was the most effective antidote to Nazism in the period 1941–5, it was also that, in Sartre’s eyes, the communist French resistance seemed so much more effective than the Gaullist, pro-Western, French resistance in killing Germans and sabotaging the Nazi military economy. His admiration for the communist resistance fighters was immense. In himself he felt ashamed and inadequate: ashamed of his bourgeois upbringing, ashamed of his privileged education and lifestyle, ashamed of his political and military ineffectiveness as an intellectual rather than a fighter.
Indeed, it was mainly by writing that he resisted. In January 1943 he joined the Comité National des Ecrivains and in 1944 started writing for the resistance paper Combat. He staged the politically didactic Bariona in the Stalag and Les Mouches (The Flies) in Paris in 1943, the descent of the flies onto Argos being a barely concealed allegory for the Nazi occupation of France. In September 1944 Sartre formed the editorial committee for the socialist literary, political and philosophical review Les Temps Modernes. In 1945 he declined the Légion d’honneur.
Sartre entered the Second World War young but emerged middle aged. He was thirty-four when it began in 1939 and forty when it ended in 1945, so it was the mature Sartre who was the socialist Sartre.
The Sartre that emerged from the 1945 conflict was increasingly a Marxist, an eloquent and committed revolutionary who felt a duty to speak out for the dispossessed of the world, a mass media critic of French colonialism in Indo-China and Algeria, the Batista regime in Cuba, the treatment of the Basques in Spain, and the American involvement in Vietnam. His serious theoretical works were increasingly political works, from the June 1946 essay ‘Materialism and Revolution’ (Materialisme et Révolution in Les Temps Modernes) through the massive first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and its prefatory Questions of Method (Questions de Méthode) until his final loss of patience with Marxism in the aftermath of ’68. In October 1948 his works were placed on the prohibited list of the Catholic church. A perennial irritant to the Gaullist government and a communist ‘fellow traveller’, Sartre always eschewed formal membership of the Parti Communiste Frangais, which he criticised as doctrinally fixed, inauthentic and too far to the right. In February 1948 Sartre joined in the attempt to form a coalition of left-wing political parties, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionaire (RDR) but this proved a failure when the PCF left. In January 1950 Sartre and Merleau-Ponty jointly condemned the Soviet Gulag system. Nevertheless, Sartre worked closely with the PCF, for example over the Henri Martin affair, until the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 which he condemned in the November of that year. In the same month he condemned the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in the Suez Crisis.
The post-war Sartre was willing to take risks. From January 1955Les Temps Modernes officially condemned French rule in Algeria and Sartre spoke out at press conferences and at demonstrations. On 19th July 1961 Sartre’s rented accommodation at 42 rue Bonaparte was bombed, probably by pieds noirs appalled by his urging the French to withdraw from Algeria. On 7th January of the following year it was bombed again, so he moved to an appartment on Quai Blériot. That was bombed too so he had to move to 222 boulevard Raspail. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1963 Sartre pleaded with the Soviet government not to give in to American pressure to withdraw their weapons from Cuban soil. Regarded by many as irresponsible behaviour in a world on the brink of nuclear holocaust, this for Sartre was an authentic political act.
In 1964 Sartre was offered the Nobel Prize for Literature but refused it, adding that he would also have declined the Lenin Prize had it been offered him. Authentic writing is not subject to an authority with the power to grant or withhold prizes.
From July 1966 Sartre sat on the International Wars Crimes Tribunal formed by Bertrand Russell to investigate US military actions in Vietnam. He condemned US involvement in south east Asia at the tribunal’s press conferences in 1967, taking the chair at the Stockholm session of 2nd–10th May. On 19th December 1969 he condemned the My Lai killings, on French television.
In the événements of May 1968 Sartre’s aim, like that of the Marxists, situationists and anarchists, was to turn the demonstrations and strikes of the trades union and student movements into the revolutionary overthrow of French capitalism. Taking to the streets with the students and workers amidst tear-gas, flying paving-stone fragments and C RS baton charges, he urged them to revolutionary violence. He was interviewed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit on Radio Luxembourg on 11th May and addressed the crowd at the Sorbonne on the 20th. One of the slogans daubed on walls was ‘Pouvoir â l’Imagination’, ‘Power to the Imagination’. When capitalism was not overthrown and the Gaullist government did not fall, he publicly held the PCF responsible in a July interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel, and despaired of it as a genuinely revolutionary movement.
In April 1970, when the two young editors of the Maoist paper La Cause du Peuple were arrested, Sartre took over their editorial role and spoke in their defence at their trial on 27th May. Distributing the paper in the street he was bundled into a police van and arrested. However, De Gaulle soon had him released, explaining that one does not imprison Voltaire. From October 1970 to the following April he actively supported the long strike by Renault car workers, being finally ejected from the Renault factory by police on 14th April 1972 and being present at the burial of the Renault worker Pierre Overney on 14th March.
From 1972 Sartre’s sympathies were increasingly anarchist. This emerges in the series of interviews conducted by Benny Lévy and Philippe Gavi, which began in the November. Nineteen seventy-two also saw the height of the Baader Meinhof gang’s violent attempts to destroy capitalist hegenomy over the Third World. When its leading members were caught, tried and imprisoned by the West German government Sartre gave an interview to Der Spiegel urging their release, and visited Andreas Baader in Stammheim jail on 4th December 1974. When Baader and other gang members died in prison, Sartre insisted that they had been murdered by the authorities. In 1976 he led the campaign to release Mikhail Stern from political imprisonment in the Soviet Union.
In 1978–9 Sartre devoted his remaining political energies to speaking out on behalf of Vietnamese refugees and to trying to further the Arab-Israeli peace process. He had, he said, many good friends on both sides of that conflict.
Sartre fell into unconsciousness on 13th April 1980 and died at 9.00 pm on the 15th in Broussais hospital. He had arterial blockages which affected the functioning of his lungs and kidneys. Tens of thousands filled the streets, following the funeral cortege to Montparnasse cemetery on the 19th.
Sartre’s oeuvre oscillates between fact and fiction and ends as a synthesis of the two. His juvenalia are literary; already at thirteen years of age he was penning a novel about Goetz von Berlichingen. Five years later his ‘L’Ange du Morbide’ and ‘Jesus la Chouette’ appear in La Revue Sans litre in 1923. It is just over a decade later, on his return from a formative visit to the French Institute at Berlin, that he began work on the novel that would be La Nausée (Nausea). The 1933–4 period in Germany was spent learning phenomenology, and in Sartre’s first serious publications we can see him situating himself partly within and partly outside that philosophy.
La Transcendance de I’Ego (The Transcendence of the Ego) appeared in 1937 as a long paper in the 1936/7 volume of Recherches Philosophiques, a distinguished journal of academic philosophy. Sartre attacks Husserl’s thesis that there exists an irreducibly subjective source of one’s own consciousness called the ‘transcendental ego’: an inner self that is a condition for the possibility of a person’s experience. Sartre argues that the postulation of the transcendental ego is phenomenologically illegitimate. Phenomenology describes only what appears to consciousness. No transcendental ego appears to consciousness, so no consistent phenomenologist can maintain the existence of the transcendental ego. (The difference between Sartre and Husserl here is in some ways analogous to that between Hume and Descartes on the self.)
When Sartre was a philosophy undergraduate at the École Normale Supérieure he wrote his final year dissertation on the philosophy and psychology of the imagination: ‘L’Image dans la vie psychologique’ (‘The Image in Psychological Life’). On his return from Berlin he rewrote this as the 1936 book L’Imagination. It reads mainly as a survey of metaphysical and psychological theories, though its final chapter entails a partial break with Husserl on the epoché, or methodological reduction of the world to its appearance, on intentionality, or the ‘aboutness’ of all consciousness, and on the mental image, which Sartre treats as an act not a psychic entity. Sartre’s other book on the imagination, L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de I’Imagination (The Imaginary) (1940), takes up this theme. Rather like Wittgenstein and Ryle, Sartre argues that a mental image is not a private picture, a non-physical psychological item that may be scrutinised by introspection.7 Mental images are mental acts directed to objects in the world that may or may not exist. We see here already a departure from the phenomenological description of the inferiority of consciousness and an endorsement of the neo-Heideggerian existentialist thesis that our being, including our psychological being, is ‘being-in-the world’.
Like the early philosophical writings, the novel Nausea published in April 1938 is a work of both existentialism and phenomenology. The central character, Antoine Roquentin, confronts the brute contingency and meaninglessness of his own existence in a way that produces existential angst and the nausea of the novel’s title. The thesis that existence, including one’s own existence, is contingent rather than necessary is essential to existentialism. There are also many passages in Nausea when Roquentin confronts the world as it would appear if it were subjected to neo-Husserlian phenomenological description. On the bus, on the sea shore, looking at a chesnut tree, objects are reduced to phenomena. What is is what appears to be.
Nausea is an overtly philosophical novel. To the extent that Sartre’s portrayals of Roquentin’s experiences are internally consistent, credibility is lent to existential phenomenology. Roquentin confronts philosophical problems as problems in life. The problems of induction, universals and particulars, how language refers to the world, objective truth, and what it is for something to be are all sources of profound anxiety and discomfort to him.
Although Nausea is a strongly didactic novel, it has one strength lacking in, say, Albert Camus’ The Plague (La Peste, 1948) or Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1868–9). Although Tolstoy is a stronger artist than Sartre, he paints in more detail, he constructs mentality with at once a greater economy and a greater plausibility, his grasp of history is less naive, Tolstoy can only include philosophy in War and Peace by addressing the reader directly. Tolstoy has to lecture us for many pages to convince us of his atomistic historical determinism. With slightly more subtlety, Camus in The Plague philosophises about the confrontation with death and meaninglessness through conversations between Dr. Rieux (who turns out to be the narrator) and his humanistic neighbour, Tarrou. The reader is allowed to eavesdrop on their profoundity. Sartre has the better of both these writers in weaving existentialism and phenomenology into the experience of his character. Although the experience is necessarily thereby unusual, Sartre himself does not have to intervene to tell us about philosophy, nor does Roquentin.
Sartre’s second significant work of fiction is the collection of short stories Le Mur (The Wall), published in 1939. In each story at least one central existential problem is lived from the inside by a fictional character. Notably, the condemned Republican volunteer Pablo Ibieta contemplates being shot at dawn by a Fascist firing squad in the Spanish Civil War story ‘Le Mur’ which gives the collection its title. Two very different kinds of bad faith, or refusal to recognise one’s own freedom and its consequent responsibility, are exhibited by Lulu in ‘Intimité’ (‘Intimacy’) and by the young Lucien Fleurier in ‘L’Enfance d’un Chef’ (‘Childhood of a Leader’). Lulu feels unable to quite leave her husband, Henri, or quite commit herself to the new lover, Pierre, and by choosing neither allows herself to be manipulated by her friend Rirette. Lucien becomes an anti-semite and a fascist French nationalist leader, thus committing that double act of bad faith that Sartre calls ‘being a swine’ (salaud): not only denying one’s own freedom by the adoption of a ready-made ideology, but denying others their own freedom.
In The Wall Sartre experiments stylistically, for example by unexpectedly changing tenses or changing grammatical person, sometimes within a single sentence. He is unable to do this with the confidence and lack of artificiality that one finds in Dos Passos or Joyce who are Sartre’s influences.8 It is, however, the beginning of that disavowal of the mastery of the author over the authored that will be essential to the mature literary theory of Qu’est que la Littérature? (What is Literature?) (1948).
In Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Sketch For a Theory of Emotions) (1938) Sartre criticises the scientific or pseudo-scientific psychology of his time, including psycho-analysis, introduces us to phenomenological psychology and advances the provocative thesis that we choose our emotions. Rather than my being involuntarily subject to a wave of emotion, I choose, say, to be sad and to cry at a strategic moment, to control another’s behaviour or evade the other’s control of myself.
The culmination of Sartre’s fusion of existentialism and phenomenology is the massive and complex philosophical treatise L ‘Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943). The book can be read in many ways: as a reconciliation of Heidegger’s thought with much of what Heidegger rejected in Husserl, as an antidote to the positivism and pseudo-science that dominates twentieth-century philosophy, as the imposition of the ontological constraints of ‘existentialism’ on phenomenological ‘essentialism’, as an atheistic metaphysics, as a series of profound psychological and sociological observations.
The ‘being’ of the book’s title is divided by Sartre into two types, roughly speaking subjective being and objective being, which he labels Tetrepour-soi’ (‘being-for-itself’) and ‘l’ëtre-en-soi’ (‘being-in-itself’). This neo-Hegelian distinction is between the active existing of a free conscious human individual, and the passive being of inert non-human reality. The ‘nothingness’ of the book’s title is introduced into the world by human reality. Only human beings have the power to imaginatively negate their surroundings. I am myself a kind of nothingness at the heart of being.
In chapters on freedom, bad faith, temporality, transcendence, and social relations Sartre describes the existential structures of human reality. The complexity of insight, the richness of description, exceed Heidegger’s Being and Time and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. What is perhaps most striking about the book is that where a scientific treatise would seek mechanisms ‘behind the scenes’, or a law-like physical reality beyond appearance, Sartre treats everything as ‘surface’. Appearance is reality. It is science that fabricates a world of abstractions and our daily world of choice and consciousness is concrete reality.
Sartre left Being and Nothingness unfinished. A large impression of the moral philosophy promised in its closing pages appeared posthumously as Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for an Ethics) (1983). There is however something in principle incompletable about Sartrean existential phenomenology. If the distinction between being-for-itself and being-in-itself is Hegelian in origin, it resists any Hegelian overcoming or synthesis in absolute knowing. Although human reality is the desire to be God, this desire is forever frustrated. In this incompleteness, this perpetual deferral, lies our capacity for self-definition, our freedom. We make ourselves what we are by our choices and this process of self-definition is only complete at the moment of death.
What is Literature? (1948) is an attempt to answer the questions: What is writing?, Why write? and For whom does one write?, and ends with a meditation on the situation of the writer in the post-liberation France of 1947. Sartre insists that one should write for one’s own age, not for posterity, not to restore the past, not to gain status or money. Literature must be committed literature or engaged literature (lalittérature engagée). The literature of a given age is alienated and inauthentic when it does not recognise within itself its own freedom but subjects itself to a prevailing ideology or ruling interest. The writer should write to express their own freedom and liberate the reader. Committed literature is committed to freedom.
A paradigm case of Sartrean committed literature is the Roads to Freedom (Les Chemins de la liberté) trilogy:The Age of Reason (L’Age de Raison, 1945), The Reprieve (Le Sursis, 1945), and Iron in the Soul (La Mort dans I’Âme, 1949). Parts of a fourth volume The Last Chance (La Dernière Chance) were serialised in the November and December 1949 issues of Les Temps Modernes. In a famous passage, which concludes the first part of the last complete volume of the trilogy, Iron in the Soul, Mathieu Delarue, the previously ineffectual schoolteacher, acts meaningfully and decisively for the first time in his life. Deserted by their bourgeois officers during the May–June 1940 Nazi invasion of France he and his comrades choose to resist to the death the oncoming Wehrmacht from the cover of a village clock tower:
Mathieu was in no hurry. He kept his eye on this man; he had plenty of time. The German army is vulnerable. He fired. The man gave a funny little jerk and fell on his stomach, throwing his arms forward like somebody learning to swim.
(Iron in the Soul, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 216)
In the narrative, Mathieu’s shooting of the German infantyman is a freely chosen and deliberate act for which he alone is responsible. It is a deeply significant act metaphysically, personally, and politically. Metaphysically it is the termination of a life. Personally it is Mathieu’s recognition of his own freedom; ‘For years he had tried, in vain, to act’ (p. 217) Sartre reminds us. Politically it is the commitment to resist the forces of right-wing totalitarianism.
The Germans shell the clock tower and one by one Mathieu’s comrades are killed. Mathieu is alone and becomes infused with the feeling that he is going to die. Facing death alone, as in a profound sense we all must, he realises his own freedom:
Just time enough to fire at that smart officer, at all the Beauty of the Earth, at the street, at the flowers, at the gardens, at everything he had loved. Beauty dived downwards, like some obscene bird. But Mathieu went on firing. He fired. He was cleansed. He was all powerful. He was free.
(ibid., p. 225)
In the play Men Without Shadows (Morts sans Sépulture, 1946), one of Sartre’s most poignant pieces, captured French resistance fighters are being tortured and interrogated by Nazi collaborators. Even under torture, Sartre has his characters choose whether to talk, scream or remain silent. Sorbier deliberately throws himself through the window to his death rather than disclose the location of the group’s leader. Canoris chooses to talk. Even under the most extreme duress we still have a choice according to Sartre. Indeed, under duress, the agonising reality of our freedom of choice is inescapable. Bad faith or the denial of freedom is then impossible.
Our freedom is a burden that confronts us. It is a source of profound anxiety because it carries with it a terrible responsibility. I and I alone can make my choices and I and I alone am accountable to the rest of humanity for my actions. Sartre illustrates this with an episode from his own life experience in a passage in Existentialism and Humanism. During the Second World War one of his pupils approached him with this dilemma: His elder brother had been killed by the Germans in 1940 and the young man burned to avenge his brother’s death and fight in the struggle against Nazism. On the other hand, the young man’s mother was sick with grief at his brother’s death, lived alone, and needed her remaining son to care for her. If he joins the Free French he deserts his mother. If he stays with his mother he does nothing to avenge his brother or fight the Nazis. Sartre’s advice to his tormented pupil was this: ‘You are free, therefore choose’ (p. 38).
Sartre cannot make his choice for him. To choose an adviser is to make a choice. It is also to choose the kind of advice one would like to hear. In this example Sartre turns the tables on the determinist. It is the lived confrontation with freedom that is concrete and real. Determinism is a scientific abstraction. Even if determinism were true it would not be of the least help to the young man in resolving his dilemma. Nothing can lift from us the burden of our freedom.
Sartre says we are condemned to be free. We did not choose to be free; indeed, we did not choose to exist. In the Heideggerian idiom, Sartre says we are thrown into the world. We have no pre-determined essence. First of all we exist, then we face the lifelong burden of creating ourselves, generating our essence by free choices. We are nothing other than what we do and the only constraint on our freedom is this: we are are not free not to be free.
The recognition of our own freedom causes such anxiety that we pretend to ourselves that we are not free. The multitude of behavioural strategies which make up this pretence Sartre calls bad faith. He thinks most of us are in bad faith most of the time. It is usually only in extremis, like Mathieu in the clock tower, that we are confronted with the reality of our own freedom. The locus classicus of bad faith is in Being and Nothingness:
Let us consider the waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forwards a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer [ … ] He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a café waiter.
(p. 59)
Committed literature combats bad faith.
Questions of Method prefaces the first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). (It had appeared in an earlier version in a Polish magazine in 1958.) Sartre argues that existentialism and Marxism are mutually necessary in the explanation of human reality. Henceforth, the lived present of the choosing existential individual is located in history. Sartre says ‘philosophy’ does not exist, there are only philosophies. Any philosophy is an expression of a rising social class, and in modern history there have been three: the bourgeois individualism of Descartes and Locke, the idealist philosophy of Kant and Hegel and now Marxism. It is not possible to think ‘beyond’ a philosophy unless the historical conditions of its genesis are replaced. Hence, any putative anti-Marxist philosophy can only be a return to pre-Marxist ideas according to Sartre. In Questions of Method Sartre allocates only a modest place for existentialism, calling it an ‘ideology’, not in the Marxist sense, but in the sense of a parasitical system living in the margin of knowledge. Existentialism is prima facie opposed to Marxism but needs to be dialectically incorporated into a wider Marxism, rather as Kierkegaard’s existentialist individualism is puportedly opposed to Hegel’s ‘totalising’ philosophy but ultimately subsumable by it.
In the final section of Questions of Method Sartre outlines the Progressive-Regressive Method. The aim is nothing less than the total explanation of the human. We have to understand, according to Sartre, that humanity makes history and history makes humanity. Humanity fashions the world in accordance with human ends and projects. The human-manipulated world of history constitutes humanity in turn. It follows that the human-history relation is dialectical, or reciprocal. In this framework Sartre seeks to overcome the ‘contradictions’ between existentialism and Marxism: the individual and the social, the free and the determined, the conscious and the material, the subjective and the objective, the actual and the historical.
These problems are addressed in the complex Marxist and Hegelian vocabulary of Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre of course envisages this book as a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism. In it existentialism is allocated a more salient role than the modest remarks in Questions of Method would suggest.
Sartre is also a biographer, but not a conventional biographer. Aside from the autobiography Les Mots (Words) (1963), there exist Baudelaire (1947), Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) and the massive three volume study of Flaubert: L‘diot de la Familie (The Family Idiot) (1971). His aim, especially in the Flaubert, is nothing less than the total explanation of one human being by another. Sartre’s method is the Progressive-Regressive Method. Why Flaubert? Because Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), realist and objectivist author of Madame Bovary (1857) and perfecter of the short story in Trois Contes (1877) is the inauthentic antithesis of Sartre. By repressing his own passions and by writing with an almost scientific detachment Flaubert writes uncommitted literature.
Sartre intends the Flaubert as a ‘true novel’ that overcomes the ‘contradiction’ between fact and fiction. The Progressive-Regressive Method of Questions of Method and the Critique is deployed alongside the existential psychoanalysis of Being and Nothingness and Sartre’s fictional imagination to understand the total Flaubert: psychological interiority and social exteriority, Flaubert in the world, history’s constitution of Flaubert and Flaubert’s reciprocal effect on history. Although Sartre’s Maoist friends around La Cause du Peuple had no patience with what they saw as the indulgent bourgeois individualism of the Flaubert project, it may in fact be read as the synthesis of Sartrean syntheses: Marxism and existentialism, existential phenomenology and psychoanalysis, and fact and fiction.
Since Sartre’s death in 1980 a number of significant works have been published: War Diaries (Les Carnets de la Dröle de Guerre, 1983) composed on the Maginot Line during the ‘phoney war’ period September 1939-May 1940, Notebooks for an Ethics (Cahiers pour une morale, 1983) which provides some of the moral philosophy promised at the end of Being and Nothingness, two volumes of correspondence with Simone de Beauvoir and others: Lettres au Castor et à Quelques Autres, 11926–39, II 1940–63 (1983), the screenplay for a film about Freud, Le Scenario Freud (1984), the second volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Tome II: L’intelligibilité de l’Histoire, 1986) and the metaphysically trenchant Truth and Existence (Vérité et Existence, 1989). The thesis that self-definition ceases at the moment of death clearly needs to be treated with some caution.9
1 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London, 1962), The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, 1968), Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston, 1973) and Stephen Priest Merleau-Ponty (London, 1998)
2 The form of this kind of philosophical problem solving, dialectic, is presented by Hegel in his Science of Logic (Wissenshaft der Logic, Nuremberg 1812–16). It is given content in The Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenolgie des Geistes, Jena 1807), The Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Berlin 1821) the volumes of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Heidelberg, 1815–30) and posthumously published series of lectures. See Michael Inwood (ed.), Hegel: Selections (London and New York, 1989).
3 Karl Popper (1902–94) attacks the philosophical foundations of right-wing totalitarianism in the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, 1945) (subtitled ‘Plato’) and left wing totalitarianism in the second volume (subtitled ‘Hegel and Marx’). The assumption that what happens in the present is historically inevitable is criticised in The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957). See also Anthony O’Hear, Karl Popper (London, 1980) and Bryan Magee, Popper (London 1973).
4 The philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) attempted to reconcile the theocentric world picture of the middle ages with the emerging modern science of the seventeenth century. Although Sartre rejected Descartes’ substantial distinction between mind and matter, he inherited his profound concern with human subjectivity. See René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations (Harmondsworth, 1974), Stephen Priest, Theories of the Mind (London, 1991) and Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York, 1968).
5 The critical theorist Herbert Marcuse synthesises Freudianism and Marxism in Eros and Civilisation (Boston, 1955). In One Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964) and Negations (Harmondsworth, 1968), he argues that the capitalist system defuses the opposition of those it exploits, by a combination of liberal ‘repressive tolerance’, the construal of everything as a commodity and the ideological production of consumerist appetite. See Alasdair Maclntyre, Marcuse (London, 1970). On the May 1968événements see Charles Posner (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968 (Harmondsworth, 1970).
6 On de Beauvoir see T. Keefe, Simone de Beauvoir: A Study of Her Writings (London, 1984), M. Evans, Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin (London, 1985) and Judith Okely, Simone de Beauvoir: A Re-Reading (London, 1986). On the relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre see Alex Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 1977) and Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: the Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (New York, 1994).
7 The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle attack the Cartesian idea that psychological concepts take on meaning only by reference to inner and private mental states and argue that there have to be third person criteria for psychological ascriptions. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1952) and Stephen Priest, Theories of the Mind (London, 1991).
8 The American modernist novelist John dos Passos deployed the radical technique of ‘montage’ in his U.S.A. trilogy (New York, 1930, 1933, 1936). The literary inventiveness and authentic concern with human reality shown by the Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) in his Ulysses (Paris, 1922) possibly makes it the most significant work of fiction of the twentieth century.
9 Sartre speaks frankly about his life and work in ‘Simone de Beauvoir interviews Sartre’ in Jean-Paul Sartre, Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davies (New York, 1977) and Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (Harmondsworth and New York, 1985). Two thoroughly researched and informative biographies of Sartre are Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre (London, 1986) and Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (London, 1987).