Jean-Paul Sartre was born on June 21, 1905 in Paris where he spent most of
his life. After a traditional philosophical education in prestigious Parisian
schools that introduced him to the history of Western philosophy with a bias
toward Cartesianism and neoKantinism, not to mention a strong strain of
Bergsonism, Sartre succeeded his former school friend, Raymond Aron, at the
French Institute in Berlin (1933-1934) where he read the leading
phenomenologists of the day, Husserl, Heidegger and Scheler. It is clear that
Sartre devoted much of his early philosophical attention to combating the then
influential Bergsonism and that mention of Bergson's name decreases as that of
Heidegger grows in Sartre's writings of the "vintage" existentialist
years. Sartre seems to have read the phenomenological ethicist Max Scheler,
whose concept of the intuitive grasp of paradigm cases is echoed in Sartre's
reference to the "image" of the king of person one should be that
both guides and is fashioned by our moral choices. But where Scheler in the
best Husserlian fashion argues for the "discovery" of such value
images, Sartre insists on their creation. The properly
"existentialist" version of phenomenology is already in play.
Though Sartre was not a serious reader of Hegel or Marx until during and
after the war, like so many of his generation, he came under the influence of
Kojeve's Marxist and protoexistentialist interpretation of Hegel, though he
never attended his famous lectures in the 1930s as did Lacan and Merleau-Ponty.
It was Jean Hyppolite's translation of and commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit that marked Sartre's closer study
of the seminal German philosopher.
Sartre had long been fascinated with the French novelist Gustave Flaubert.
In what some would consider the culmination of his thought, he weds
Existentialist biography with Marxist social critique in a Hegelian "totalization"
of an individual and his era, to produce the last of his many incomplete
projects, a multi-volume study of Flaubert's life and times, The Family
Idiot (1971-1972). This study, which he
describes as "a novel that is true," incarnates that mixture of
phenomenological description, psychological insight, and social critique that
have become the hallmark of Sartrean philosophy. These features doubtless
contributed to his being awarded the Novel prize for literature, which he
characteristically refused along with its substantial cash grant lest his
acceptance be read as approval of the bourgeois values that the honor seemed to
emblemize.
In his last years, Sartre, who had lost the use of one eye in childhood,
became almost totally blind. Yet he continued to work with the help of a tape
recorder, producing with Benny Levy portions of a "co-authored"
ethics, the published parts of which indicate that its value is more
biographical than philosophical. He died on April 15, 1980.
Philosophy and Writings:
Asked why his plays were performed only in the bourgeois sections of the
city, Sartre replied that no bourgeois could leave a performance of one of them
without "thinking thoughts traitorous to his class." The so-called
aesthetic "suspension of disbelief" coupled with the tendency to
identify with certain characters and to experience their plight vicariously
conveys conviction rather than information. And this is what existentialism is
chiefly about: challenging the individual to examine their life for intimations
of bad faith and to heighten their sensitivity to oppression and exploitation
in their world.
Sartre's early work Nausea (1938) is
the very model of a philosophical novel. Its protagonist, Roquentin, works
through many of the major themes of Being and Nothingness that will appear five years later. It can be read as
an extended meditation on the contingency of our existence and on the
psychosomatic experience that captures that phenomenon.
The case at hand is an artistic way of conveying what Sartre in Being and
Nothingness (1943) will call "the
phenomenon of being." He agrees with the tradition that "being"
or "to be" is not a concept. Sartre's existential phenomenology
appeals to certain kinds of experience such as nausea and joy to articulate the
"transphenomenal" character of being. Pace Kant, an
"eidetic" reduction (the phenomenological method that would grasp it
as an essence). Rather, being accompanies all phenomena as their existential
dimension. But this dimension is revealed by certain experiences such as that
of utter contingency like that of Roquentin. What this novel does
imaginatively, Being and Nothingness,
subtitled "A Phenomenological Ontology," pursues conceptually, though
with the aid of phenomenological "arguments."
In a series of essays published as What is Literature? (1947), Sartre expounds his notion of
"committed" literature, a turn in his thought first indicated in the
inaugural issue of Les Temps modernes two years earlier. Though steeped in the polemics of the day, this
continues to be a seminal text of criticism. Addressing the problem of
"writing for our time," Sartre underscores the harsh facts of
oppression and exploitation that were not erased by the upheaval of world war.
Ours remains "a society based on violence." Sartre proceeds to urge
that the prose-writer reveal that man is a value to be invented each day and
that "the questions he raises are always moral" (203). A clear
rejection of "art for art's sake," Sartre insisted on the social
responsibility of the artist and the intellectual in general.
Sartre in the 21st Century:
At least three features of Sartre's thought seem particularly relevant to
current discussions among philosophers both Anglo-American and Continental. The
first is his concept of the human agent as not a self but a "presence to
self." This cracking opening of the Cartesian "thinking thing"
supports a wide variety of alternative theories of the self while retaining the
features of freedom and responsibility that, one can argue, have been central
tenets of Western philosophy and law since the Greeks.
Emphasis on an ethics of responsibility in contrast to one of rules,
principles or values in recent years that led to a wide-spread interest in the
work of Levinas as a necessary complement to so-called "postmodern"
ethics. But Sartrean "authenticity" is equally relevant in this
regard, as Charles Taylor and others have pointed out. And its location within
a mundane ontology may resonate better with philosophers of a more secular
bent.
Finally, the recent revival of the understanding of philosophy as a
"way of life" as distinct from an academic discipline focused on
epistemology or more recently on the philosophy of language, while renewing an
interest in Hellenistic ethics as well as in various forms of
"spirituality," can find in Sartrean existentialism forms of
"care of the self" that are in fruitful conversation with
contemporary ethics, aesthetics and politics without developing into moralism,
aestheticism or fanaticism. From a philosopher suspicious of moral recipes and
focused on concrete, lived experience, this is perhaps as much as one could
expect or want. This information was taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.