By: A.C. Grayling
Jean-Paul Sartre lived a very public life, and serves as a paradigm of the engage intellectual. His talents were wide ranging: he wrote novels, plays, biography and criticism as well as philosophy, but through all of them his philosophical and political commitments – the latter evolving over time – are never far away. From the strictly philosophical point of view his major work is Being and Nothingness (1943), and significant also is Existentialism is a Humanism (1946). His own nomination for his most important work is the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), in which he sought to provide a refreshed basis for Marxism as ‘the philosophy of our time’, but freed from associations with what he saw as its degraded Soviet version.
Sartre was born and educated in Paris, forming some of his most important relationships while a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure where he met Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. He also at this time met Simone de Beauvoir, who was studying at the Sorbonne. While at the Ecole he gained a reputation as a practical joker, one of his pranks – announcing to the press that the wealthy aviator Charles Lindbergh was to receive an honorary degree there – caused such a fiasco that the Ecole’s director had to resign. French men were obliged to undertake a form of national service, so Sartre had a spell in the army as a meteorologist before embarking on a career as a schoolteacher, which is what most of his contemporaries did while working on doctoral dissertations.
When the Second World War broke out Sartre rejoined the army, was captured and imprisoned for nine months by the Germans. The experience was transformative. Simone de Beauvoir records that when he returned to Paris he had acquired a new seriousness. The underground resistance group he helped to form, Socialisme et Liberté, contemplated its options, including the assassination of collaborators, but for want of support it collapsed. Disappointed, Sartre decided to concentrate on writing. The war years produced Being and Nothingness and his plays The Flies and No Exit, and a number of magazine articles.
Soon after the liberation of Paris in 1944 Sartre, with Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, founded Les Temps Modernes, named after the film of the same name by Charlie Chaplin. Its first number contained a statement of aims by Sartre, defining the idea of littérature engagée. Many notable writers were introduced to the world in its pages, including Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. The Cold War and the vexed question of Stalin took their toll; Aron was the first to leave because of the magazine’s support for Communism – he moved to Le Figaro as its editor – and Merleau-Ponty left later. Another of its victims was the friendship between Sartre and Albert Camus. The former deeply disapproved of the latter’s attitude to the Algerian war – born in Algeria, Camus saw the force of considerations on both sides of that ugly episode; perhaps too much so – and therefore Sartre recruited a hostile reviewer for Camus’ The Rebel. When Camus remonstrated, Sartre replied in a way that made a rupture inevitable.
Korea, Cuba, Russia, Algeria, the anti-colonialist movements in the rest of Africa and elsewhere, opposition to American hegemony, Vietnam and politics in general, not least in the turbulent period of the late 1960s in France, attracted Sartre’s energies in the three decades after 1945. He was arrested for causing a civil disturbance during the Paris riots in the summer of 1968, but was released on the orders of General de Gaulle, who remarked, ‘One does not arrest Voltaire.’ Sartre refused the Légion d’Honneur in 1945, refused election to the Académie Française in 1949, and refused the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, saying that he did not want recognition by institutions associated with political dispensations he opposed. In 1976, however, he accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Jerusalem. After his death one of the members of the Swedish Academy is said to have claimed that, some years after rejecting the Nobel Prize, Sartre or a representative of his asked whether he could nonetheless have the prize money.
At his funeral in 1980 huge crowds, said to be 50,000 strong, followed his coffin to Montparnasse. Legend has it that one young person told his parents he had gone to the demonstration against Sartre’s death. That, like the name of the cemetery itself, is appropriate as a mark of his end.
Whatever else people know about Sartre, they know about his lifelong relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. The two ceased to be lovers in the physical sense quite early in their relationship, and each had many other lovers, in de Beauvoir’s case of both sexes. Their lovers included their students and colleagues, whom they shared or bequeathed to one another, the only durable bond being the one between themselves. Because sexism, unconscious or otherwise, has so long permeated everything, de Beauvoir’s stature as a writer and thinker, which is very great, remained a footnote to Sartre’s throughout their lives and for a time afterwards. Future history might order them differently.
What attracted Sartre to phenomenology was its promise to overcome the opposition between realism and idealism, in its simultaneous affirmation of both the presence of the world and the pre-eminence of consciousness. Sartre spent a year at the Institut Français in Berlin in 1933, making a close study of Husserl’s writings while there; later, in the early years of the war, he studied Heidegger. His ‘Phenomenological Ontology’ (the subtitle of Being and Nothingness) begins from these starting points, but diverges from them. He shares their way of distinguishing between ontology and metaphysics, the former understood as a descriptive project specifically related to consciousness, the latter as an attempt to provide an ultimate synoptic explanatory framework for life and the world. Heidegger had rejected the idea of such a project; Sartre more moderately says that it poses unanswerable questions.
Sartre begins by distinguishing two fundamental categories of being: the in-itself (en-soi) and the for itself (pour-soi). In crude terms, the in-itself is non-conscious being, the for-itself is conscious being. Later he adds a third category, the for-others (pour-autrui). Each human being is both an in-itself and a for itself, combined. A person’s in-itself aspect is passive, existing inertly and lumpenly; it just is what it is. Her for-itself aspect is dynamic, fluid and metamorphic. It depends on the in-itself – that is, cannot exist without it – but is continually making an effort to transcend it or ‘nihilate’ it, thus creating a ‘situation’. Individuals are always in a ‘situation’. Situations are indeterminate, their indeterminacy a function of the differing proportions of the mixture of in-itself and for-itself. Sartre says this shows that we are always trying to be more than we are, or something other than we are. He gives the example of a waiter in a restaurant, who strives to be a waiter, a being-in-itself; but he cannot be a waiter as a plate can be a plate, because as a man he is a being-for-itself who is working as a waiter while wanting to be a waiter. So he is in a condition of ‘bad faith’, trying to be what he cannot be.
What explains the waiter’s dilemma is that the in-itself occupies the role of substance or thinghood; whereas the for-itself is not substantial, not a thing, but as it were an ‘acting against’ things. The in-itself is facticity, the for-itself is possibility; the relationship between them is like the relationship of past to future or actuality to possibility, hence the ‘nihilating’ endeavour of the for-itself, just as the future nihilates the past. The experience of time is the experience of the for-itself striving for its possibilities against the inertness of the in-itself’s lumpenness as ‘what is’.
The category of for-others becomes relevant on the appearance of another subject. A Robinson Crusoe figure could not deduce the existence of an Other from the two categories of in-itself and for-itself; the only way to know of the for-others is to meet with one. Sartre uses the example of being discovered in an embarrassing situation: the shame one feels is a ‘phenomenological reduction’ of being aware that the Other is a for-itself, a subject of experience. The Other thus objectifies us – we are an object for it: we exist in the Other’s consciousness – which is how we come to know ourselves in the first place; but because the primary way in which individuals relate is, in Sartre’s view, through conflict, it is also the case that ‘hell is other people’ (this is the culminating line of his play No Exit). The reason is that before encountering the Other we are free and self-constituting, looking outwards from the pre-reflective self at the world.
When Others enter the picture they become a suction-pipe draining one into it; for we are made to see ourselves as the Other sees us, objectifyingly, an alienating situation because it renders us into an in-itself for the Other. We see this when we realize that such emotions as shame and pride arise only in response to ‘the look’ (‘the gaze’, le regard) of an Other. The look does not require the actual presence of an Other; its notional presence is enough.
Of course the relationship between oneself and the Other is mutual and reciprocal – just as the Other objectifies and alienates me, I objectify and alienate him. ‘While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me.’ The allusion to Hegel’s ‘master–slave dialectic’ is apparent here. It is an inevitable source of ‘bad faith’, mauvaise foi, because the possible forms of relationship all raise problems. Sartre describes as ‘masochism’ the effort to annex the Other’s freedom by subjugating oneself to her as nothing but an object for her, while ‘sadism’ is the effort to transcend her attempted objectification of oneself by refusing to let her do it. Love is the endeavour to achieve a wholeness of being as ‘for-itself-in-itself’ through the merging of the two consciousnesses, mine and the Other’s, into one. But since this would obliterate the otherness that is the foundation of a for-itself’s consciousness of its existence, and because, further, the obliteration is mutual, the result is contradiction and conflict. But given that there is no escaping relationship with others, the only way we manage to live with the situation is by bad faith.
Central to Sartre’s view is commitment to the connected pair of ideas that ‘existence precedes essence’ and that we are radically, indeed agonizingly, free. The first idea is that individuals are self-creating; they do not arrive in the world, or at the point of self-awareness, with an antecedent purpose or plan waiting for them, but have to make what they become through their choices and actions. In Existentialism is a Humanism Sartre writes, ‘man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.’ The corollary is that each individual is responsible for his self-creation: ‘Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does.’ Knowledge of that freedom and the responsibility it entails causes anguish.
The question arises whether it is possible to achieve authenticity, the chief if not indeed sole value of Sartrean ethics. In light of our condemnation to the alienated and anguished conditions described, his answer does not seem to describe something attainable. It is this: we achieve authenticity if we abandon our desire to become an ‘in-itself-foritself’ and thus liberate ourselves from the identification of our ego as being-in-itself – that is, as a thing. Instead we must allow a spontaneous pre-self-aware ‘selfness’ to emerge to replace ‘me’ as an ego. If I cease from being in relationships of ‘appropriation’ and self identification with my ego, and instead focus on my aims and goals in an outward-directed
way, I cease living in bad faith.
There is a widespread view that Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism is a summary of his outlook as it stood in the mid-1940s – the origin of the text was a lecture given in Paris in 1945 – in large part because its brevity and accessibility made it the one strictly philosophical work of Sartre’s which, in translation, reached a wide audience. It drew considerable fire from other philosophers, and Sartre himself rejected aspects of it later. It is, however, a locus classicus for the themes of freedom, its anguish and the responsibility imposed by freedom to be self-creating. These themes were an inspiration for the generations of young people who came into a sense of their own freedom and responsibility in the 1950s and 1960s, even if they knew of them only as slogans detached from their source in the ontology and phenomenology of Being and Nothingness.
At that time it was common for Albert Camus (1913–60) to be bracketed with Sartre as an ‘existentialist’ although he repudiated the label, and insisted instead on describing his view as ‘absurdist’. He argued that humankind’s absurd condition consists in the gratuitous nature of the relationship between humanity and the world; the fact that neither has any intrinsic meaning is ‘the only bond between them’, as he puts it. It invites one of three responses: literal suicide, intellectual suicide in the form of accepting some form of religious solace, or courageous acceptance and embrace of the absurdity of things. His essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ is, apart from his novels, the chief statement of this view. It concludes by saying of Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to a futile task – never succeeding in getting a boulder to the top of a hill – that in view of the fact that ‘the struggle itself’ confers meaning, ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Camus’ novels exemplify and expand on aspects of this central theme, and gave it a powerful hold on the imagination of his time.
In just the way that Camus’ reputation as a contributor to philosophy has become overshadowed by the connection with Sartre, so – and arguably, even less excusably – has that of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86). Her reputation as a feminist and novelist is of course outstanding; but her specifically philosophical contribution has been subordinated to her achievements in those fields. One can mention the following in illustration. Sartre had learned from Hegel the idea that consciousness is made ‘foritself’ by relationship with another, and through the conception of ‘the look’ he had developed the idea into his theory of alienation and the futile effort to achieve a transcendence, by means of love, of what is in effect the master–slave bond. De Beauvoir makes use of these ideas in terms that concretize and illuminate the actual situation of relationships between men and women. She does so by characterizing the prevailing ideology as one in which man is the Subject and woman is the Other and the slave, whose role is to recognize man’s endeavours and thereby validate and serve them. She describes romantic love as a woman’s effort to capture a man’s subjectivity by ‘fascinating’ his ‘gaze’, even while she allows him to legislate what her own interests and aims can be. De Beauvoir concludes, as Sartre did, that the attempt to forge a relationship must fail, given the conditions which Otherness imposes. In her case, however, what she writes must have a revelatory character for any reader because it cleaves so closely to reality; in Sartre the argument is stated in wholly abstract terms.
Add to these thoughts de Beauvoir’s application, at the opening of volume 2 of her most famous book, The Second Sex, of the point that existence precedes essence in her declaration that one is not born a woman but becomes one, with all that this implies – and one sees that her deployment of these themes puts her in the first rank of existentialist thinkers. In combination with the emphasis on the social possibilities of ethics outlined in her Ethics of Ambiguity (1948 – this title is a weak translation of Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté) her influence on Sartre’s own shift towards more universal concerns in his activism in the 1950s becomes clearer likewise.
A significant work of Sartre’s last years was his biography – though it is far from an orthodox one – of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–2). Though incomplete, it brings together the earlier existentialist and later Marxist themes in Sartre’s work, embellished by the considerable powers of psychological observation that inform his plays and novels. The result is described by one well-equipped reviewer as ‘admirable but mad’, appropriating a remark that Sartre himself had once applied to someone else. In the biography Sartre draws a surprising comparison between Flaubert’s unhappy childhood and his own blissfully happy one. The reviewer writes mischievously of the Sartres, ‘How selfish and irredeemably unfair of this bourgeois family to have inflicted untarnished contentment on the future Marxist, Existentialist and creator of Roquentin. The Flaubert family, on the other hand, was more properly bourgeois and supplied the correct degrees of trauma and unhappiness which Sartre was deprived of.’ It is a joke which raises an interesting question.
