Jean-Paul Sartre Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The central and most prolific figure of French phenomenology and existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) made significant contributions to philosophy, literature, political analysis, drama, and biography. A critic of bourgeois conformism, oppression, and capitalism, he was the lifelong companion of French author and feminist Simone de Beauvoir and an internationally recognized public intellectual. During the cold war, he was very critical of France and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, and, without quite joining the fold, became a “fellow traveler” of the Communist Party, a position that drew him into public debates and alliances with other prominent French intellectuals, such as author Albert Camus, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and psychiatrist and revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon.

As a young man, though many of his colleagues were engaged in left-wing politics, Sartre worked on a modest “opposition aesthetics” that championed the individual who was aware of, and broke free from, the essentially ungrounded order of bourgeois society. Starting from his readings of German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl, Sartre developed accounts of the world as fundamentally ungrounded (following Nietzsche) and of consciousness as free awareness (following Hursserl), which he wove together in the novel Nausea (1938), a classic of existentialist literature.

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre argued that the human is essentially a freedom-to-be-something. Uncomfortably stretched between freedom and thing hood, people deceive themselves by pretending to either pole in “bad faith.” For example, to avoid feeling that his identity is pegged, a man might keep his options open, never commit to a specific role in life, and so pretend to an unlimited freedom. However, by not attempting to be anything, he squanders his freedom by failing to make a significant choice of his life. Alternatively, he might throw myself into a role and believe he is a kind of thing, such as an academic, but then because academics are not activists for example, he would not believe the possibilities of activism were his own, which would be false. Again, his freedom would be lost to him. Bourgeois life is a swamp of bad faith in which people neither face these truths of existence nor take responsibility for the choices they make. If an individual does face his freedom-to-be-something, if he takes responsibility for his life, he will realize that he is “nothing but what he makes of himself.” This radical account of human agency amounts to a philosophical humanism in which individuals are and ought to be fully responsible for their lives.

Increasingly from the 1940s onward, Sartre mobilized his words as weapons to fight oppression, making of himself a politically engaged champion of freedom. For some four decades, in polemical essays, in the press, and on the streets, Sartre wrote and spoke out in support of such groups as the Jews, the colonized Algerians, the victims of French and American imperialism in Vietnam, the proletariat, and the students of the 1968 uprisings in France.

In Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre wove together existentialism and Marxism. According to German social and political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, humans make their history through their practices, but their practices, rather than being unlimited, are significantly conditioned by dominant social relations, a view with which Sartre came to agree. However, Sartre argued further that the social relations themselves may be traced back to past practices that have become unintentional or inert patterns that continue to have inertial effects—the “practico-inert.” By reducing the conditioning limits of human practices to the practices of past humans, Sartre generated a Marxism in which the making of human history was entirely in the hands of humans in the final analysis—that is, a Marxism compatible with the philosophical humanism of his own existentialism.

Challenges to Sartre’s philosophical humanism inaugurated in part the postmodern tradition of the late twentieth century.

Bibliography:

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York:Washington Square, 1956.
Critique of Dialectical Reason, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, edited by Jonathan Rée. London: NLB, 1976.
“Itinerary of a Thought.” New Left Review 58 (1969): 43–66.
Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964.
Van den Hoven, Adrian, and Andrew Leak, eds. Sartre Today. New York: Berghahn, 2005.

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