Jean-paulSartre

Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905-80

Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre has been described as the best known philosopher of the twentieth century and the father of Existential philosophy - the existentialism that became popular after World War II. After Sartre was arrested for civil disobedience during the student strike in Paris in 1968, President de Gaulle pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrest Voltaire."
A precocious child, Sartre was introduced to classical literature at an early age. He received a doctorate in philosophy from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in 1929. He waded through Kant, Hegel and Heidegger and picked up on the issue of "Being" raised by Martin Heidegger, Heidegger complaining that Sartre misunderstood him. Sartre engaged in the kind of writing that Heidegger used, such as "Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object." He spoke of things-in-themselves and essence. Like Heidegger he stayed away from epistemology. Unlike Heidegger he was not interested in nationalist spirit. But he was interested in morality. He focused on the human condition, including the idea that emotions are not mere "inner states" but ways of relating to the world. People, he held, are free to make decisions and their decisions are theirs alone. There was no escape from choice through godly interventions. For Sartre guidance through prayer was fiction. Sartre claimed that people deceive themselves when they hide their freedom. The universe does not care about us. We must act to protect ourselves and get what we want. A corollary to this is that we are responsible for our acts. Here is Sartre's morality. People create their morality, not some deity. People define themselves by what they do. Some take refuge in a notion of a fixed or determined self, excuse themselves because they are only human, because their mothers did not love them or because their behavior is determined by a curse from the supernatural or some other excuse, but according to Sartre there is no escape from responsibility. And he sees following the crowd as no excuse. He sums it up in arcane language of mis-schooled philosophers: existence precedes essence, man first of all exists, he encounters himself, and defines himself afterwards.
Sartre's view of responsibility developed when fascism was coming into power. France was conquered by Hitler's Germany. People chose between collaborating with fascism or resisting it. Pacifism was a form of collaboration. Sartre's mother belonged to the prestigious German family of Albert Schweitzer. Sartre was drafted into the French army and captured by the Germans. In 1941, after nine months as a prisoner of war, he was released. He began working against the German occupation and was disappointed with the behavior of some of France's prestigious intellections, André Gide and André Malraux among them. It was the Marxists who were most active in the struggle against German occupation - after the Jews they were the most persecuted. Sartre was a man of the political left and anti-fascist while rightists and churchmen were collaborating with Hitler. Regarding communists, Sartre became what was called a "fellow traveler." After the war he retained his devotion to leftist political struggle in collaboration with Marxists. He saw communist revolutionaries as bound by the same burden of making choices as others, not just pawns of the socio-economic forces of an over-simplified Marxism. And he was criticized by Marxist ideologues for putting his existentialism above his Marxism.
Conservatives were, of course, critical, some of them upset that Sartre did not accept the immutability of human nature. Mortimer J. Adler, charged Sartre with denying human nature altogether, and metaphysically oriented conservatives believed that to deny human nature and godly instructions was to deny human morality. Conservatives believed in the superiority of their cultural heritage as a force for doing right and accused those who thought otherwise guilty of either cultural relativism or cultural nihilism, and this charge of nihilism they leveled against Sartre. Some of these conservatives admired the ancient Greeks, and Sartre criticized the ancient Greeks for their slavery.
Conservatives exaggerated the misery in Sartre's philosophy - what Sartre referred to as angst. For some of them there was no happiness or comfort without the love of God. Sartre's angst was picked up by comedians, as in Woody Allen's movie, Play it again Sam.
WOODY ALLEN: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: Yes it is.
WOODY ALLEN: What does it say to you?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
WOODY ALLEN: What are you doing Saturday night?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: Committing suicide.
WOODY ALLEN: What about Friday night?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: [leaves silently]
In 1964, Sartre was offered a Nobel Prize for literature, but he turned it down, stating that he had always refused official honors and didn't wish to align himself with institutions.