Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most famous philosophers of recent times; he is also one of the most difficult. His fame owes much to his political and emotional engagements, as well as to the wealth of ideas expressed in his novels, plays, journals and critical essays. The difficulties arise as soon as we ask about the reasons for endorsing those ideas. In order to achieve a proper understanding of his views, and the reasons that might support them, we need to look at that part of Sartre’s work where he explicitly addresses their content, presuppositions and implications; in other words, we need to explore his philosophy.
The philosophical writings of Sartre span fifty years. During that period, Sartre articulated, developed and elaborated, in sometimes unpredictable ways, a number of seminal arguments on major topics of philosophical enquiry. The desire for securing a reliable compass through the sea of Sartrean volumes, diaries and still unpublished manuscripts might make one adopt a sideways approach to Sartre’s philosophy. We might wish to introduce his philosophy by categorizing his work under fixed headings, such as “existentialism”, “socialism” or “phenomenology”. This is a justifiable way to proceed if we already know what those terms mean, and how they should apply to each Sartrean text that is taken to express those schools of thought. Another approach may introduce Sartre’s trajectory as filling the intellectual gap between, say, certain Austrian and German philosophers, on the one hand, and certain French or American philosophers, on the other. Such an approach might be correct in some respects, but it remains distinctively unhelpful for anyone with insufficient grasp of the work of the philosophers under consideration.
For the purposes of this book, I have taken the rather less travelled path of introducing Sartre’s thought by focusing just on specific parts of Sartre’s own work. Some references to other philosophers are of course inescapable – especially for those who wish to enquire into the context of Sartre’s work.
A valuable source of feedback on my work on Sartre comes from teaching, for nearly a decade now, upper-year undergraduate and postgraduate students, who make up the kind of audience to which the present book is primarily addressed. It is not uncommon for students who are acquainted with Sartre through textbook paraphrases of some of his most popular claims, to experience serious puzzlement when they turn to the original texts expecting to see a fixed set of existentialist slogans popping up on every page. What they find instead is a philosopher working in meticulous detail on some fundamental problems in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of value, meaning, mind and action. Moreover, the Sartrean approach to practical issues is hard to justify or, even, to interpret correctly, if it is not seen from within the Sartrean perspective of reality in general. I have accordingly focused on certain themes whose discussion might help introduce the reader to the Sartrean way of thinking about reality. The themes of intentionality, perception, emotion, imagination, being, existence and essence are also topics of concern to contemporary philosophical enquiry. I have thus tried to articulate how the Sartrean approach may advance our understanding of the current debates surrounding those issues. My reasoning, to be sure, is not that these are the only issues worth exploring in Sartre’s voluminous output; it is rather that an exploration of several other topics presupposes or, at least, can most securely proceed on the back of a good grasp of the issues addressed in the present work.
One of the nice things about completing a manuscript is the opportunity it affords the author to acknowledge the help he received, mostly in the form of incisive remarks from several colleagues. I am first of all grateful to audiences in London, Oxford, Paris and St Petersburg, where some of the ideas presented in the book had their first airing. I should also thank Chris Daly, Peter Goldie, Harry Lesser and David Liggins for commenting astutely on parts of the manuscript.
I have debts of a different order to Steven Gerrard at Acumen for his Jobian patience, to John Shand for his valuable advice and to Jonathan Webber for his constructive remarks on the final draft.
Thanks are also due to the editors and publishers who kindly gave permission to use material from work that has previously appeared in print, including “The Philosopher and his Novel” (2003), “The Case Against Unconscious Emotions” (2007) and “Emotions in Heidegger and Sartre” (2010).
I hope the reader will find enough, in my brief presentation of Sartre’s views, that might be worth arguing for – or against.