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Sartre's Existentialism
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This is the Greatest Philosophers In History series, where we analyse the most fundamental ideas of the most extraordinary philosophers in human history. In this episode, we’ll be exploring the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre.
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Jean Paul Sartre had a great influence on many areas of modern thought. A writer of prodigious brilliance and originality, Sartre worked in many different genres: as a philosopher, a novelist, and a cultural critic. Sartre is one of the key figures in the philosophy of Existentialism, which emphasises the existence of the individual or human subject who faces existential angst in an apparently absurd world. Sartre is credited for revivifying
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and popularising Existentialism to the world after it had remained quite stagnant since the death of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was no accident that his philosophy reached a wide public for the first time during the immediate aftermath of World War Two. France was an exhausted country and Sartre’s ideas brought a message of hope, the old frameworks of value on which people lived on were collapsing, including family values and Christian beliefs.
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Sartre saw that people were starting to take responsibility for their actions and for him this was a great opportunity for his philosophy. Sartre was born in Paris, in 1905. The only child of his father, an officer of the French Navy, who died when he was just two years old. He was raised by his mother Anne-Marie, whom he was very fond of and his grandfather Charles Schweitzer, who introduced Sartre to classical literature at an early age.
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As a teenager, he was frequently bullied, in part for having a strabismus in his right eye, a problem with eye alignment. He was also very short, standing at around 5 feet tall in his adulthood, he felt that he had an ugly physically appearance and focused all his energy on his mind. He studied philosophy and psychology at the École Normale Supérieure, one of the most prestigious graduate schools in Paris that
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was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. He quickly developed a reputation as an unconventional bohemian figure. The student who came second to him in their final philosophy exams was the writer Simone de Beauvoir, a prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, although it was quite open and they were not monogamous.
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Sartre served as a meteorologist in World War Two and was captured by German troops, spending nine months in prison. During this time, he read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and was greatly influenced by it. Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, but he declined it. He was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize. He was horrified by the idea of becoming incorporated into the establishment.
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By this time, Sartre had become a household name. He was often seen frequenting cafés where he wrote while he chatted with his colleagues. He remained a simple man with few possessions and was actively committed as an activist, taking part in various strikes. On one occasion he was arrested for civil disobedience. French president Charles de Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, saying that “you don’t arrest Voltaire”.
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Although Sartre spend much of his later life trying to reconcile the individualist philosophy of Existentialism with the collective vision of Marxism, ending up in a sort of anarchism, we’ll be focusing on thoughts of the Existentialist Sartre, not his later controversial political life.
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Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, gave a name for existential angst. He considered it as one of his most precious novels, it portrays Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence and finds it meaningless. He lives alone, has no friends, and usually eavesdrops on other people’s conversations and watches their actions. It is written in the form of a diary, in which he documents every feeling and sensation about the
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world and people around him. He finds situations and inanimate objects imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence, all that he encounters in his everyday life is permeated with a horrible taste, evoking in him a sense of nausea, especially his freedom. In a passage from the book, he states:
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It is believed that Sartre used the term Nausea after reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is used and associated with contemplating the mediocrity of humanity.
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Have you ever looked at a word hard enough and had the thought of it seeming unusually strange? Almost as if it were the first time you’ve heard the word? For Sartre, this feeling extends way beyond words and things and encapsules the whole of life. He calls it “The Absurdity of the World.” Consider having dinner with your partner. You are essentially part of a habitable planet called Earth, in the midst of the milky way galaxy, sitting down on chopped up wood which
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people use to make chairs and tables and you put pieces of plants and meat in your mouth along with your partner, with whom you one day hope to procreate with and start a family. This is the true absurdity of the world and we live our lives immersed in it.
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Sartre is also a leading figure in phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that offered a radical account of the workings of human consciousness. In other words, it is experiencing reality as we experience it with our perceptions, distinguished from the world as it really is. He studied under Edmund Husserl, the world’s leader in that field. He felt that he found an entirely new way of seeing man’s existence in the world.
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To understand Sartre’s view of what phenomenology is, a good starting point is his 1945 public lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism”, which was later made into a book, he declared his famous proposition that for human beings “Existence precedes essence”, that is the fundamental tenet of Existentialism. Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle believed that every object had within it an essence. The essence of a thing is a specific
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thing within an object that need to be there for that thing to be considered as whatever it is. If this thing for some reason did no longer have this specific property, it’d have lost its identity and would therefore become something else. Take for instance a knife, if it lacked its blade, it would just be a colourful handle of a sort. In other words, it’d have lost its essential property or the essence of that knife, a quality that is necessary to make it what it is.
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This extends to every single object, including human beings. Every human being is born with this essence; thus, essence precedes existence. This is the core philosophy of Essentialism. This theory remained strong since the time of ancient Greek philosophy right until the 20th century. Here is where Sartre comes in, and asks: what if we are born without an essence? What if when we are born, we are to determine what our essence will be? What if existence
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precedes essence? In other words, an individual creates himself through what he does, he is what he does. Just as a painter paints on a blank canvas, we invent what will eventually appear on the canvas. In that way, our life is a work of art and every action defines us. However, the moment when you realise that your existence is not founded upon any past objective facts, that your existence consists of what you’re going to make of it, it becomes a slightly horrifying realisation.
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For Sartre human beings live in anguish, or the feeling of total and deep responsibility, not because life is terrible, but because, as he says:
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We are born without a choice, yet here we are born into a world with so much freedom to choose while simultaneously held responsible for everything we choose to do in this existence that we didn’t choose to have. We are condemned to be free. In Existentialism, this is known as thrownness, a word coined by Martin Heidegger. It is the condition of an individual’s existence upon being thrown into the absurdity of the material
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world, arbitrarily born into a given family, within a given culture, at a given moment in human history. Heidegger calls these “givens” facticities. Sartre addresses that these limiting things that we don’t have control over do not limit our freedom. As he says:
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Since existence precedes essence, there is no design for a human being, there is no God. For Sartre, phenomenology has to be atheistic. Assuming that God exists and has created everything would mean that essence precedes existence, the opposite of Sartre’s view. We therefore exist first and only then do we end up trying to make sense of things by way of science, religion, political ideology, philosophy, or anything else.
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That is quite a difference from Kierkegaard’s view of Existentialism, for him, you can’t do Existentialism without God, for Sartre it works the other way around. As you can see, these existentialists have really different ideas even while pertaining to the same philosophical movement. Sartre tries to rebuild the idea of freedom taken out of the Christian culture, getting rid of the power of God on human life. He believes that if God exists man is not free, and if man is free God does not exist.
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If God is dead, or as Dostoevsky said:
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So, if there is nothing that preordains our human nature, then we must be free. We can then begin to set our own meaning to our life. Once we exist, it is our job to discover our essence. Freedom is one of the most important aspects of Sartre’s philosophy, to understand how truly free you actually are. However, once you realise that you are completely free – you begin to feel dread of the amount of possibilities that are open to you, everything
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is possible. It is you who has to decide the meaning of your life, when you realise that your freedom is completely without direction or guidance, it produces a sort of dizziness or nausea, which is why Sartre regards freedom as a condemnation. Man is nothing but his life and actions, and this is horrifying.
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A common trap that people fall into is what Sartre calls Bad Faith, a dominant theme of his work. Bad faith is a way of denying the fundamental nature of our freedom and responsibility, it is a way of making excuses for ourselves. We accept something as true that really isn’t that convincing to us, but because it is convenient and easy for us to believe in. Sartre talks about a hypothetical waiter, he does not like his job, he goes to work day after day and does not feel fulfilled,
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but when he thinks of applying to a different job or asks himself the difficult questions that would come along with that sort of life choice, he convinces himself that it’d be better to just to remain a waiter. For Sartre, this is nonsense, it is Bad Faith. We are free individuals that can choose the meaning of our life. We convince ourselves that we actually don’t have a choice: we need the money, to pay the bills, feed our
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family, and so on. And that being unhappy at the current job is just how life is. Sartre would say that it is entirely self-imposed, it is self-deception. It is something that people do to avoid making difficult life decisions, desperately trying to avoid temporary discomfort in the present moment, which comes from the ability to choose and be free, telling oneself excuses. We put ourselves in long-term agony, in an attempt to avoid short-term discomfort.
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Sartre's masterwork and major philosophical work of his life is Being and Nothingness, which became the core of Existentialism. He speaks of consciousness, bad faith, the existence of “nothingness”, free will and authenticity. The idea that individuals can always choose their own actions, even in situations which appear to enslave them. He begins with the origin of negation, the empty nothingness or opposite of being. Our conscious existence introduces the idea of
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nothingness into the world. What this means is that we are able to conjure up things that aren’t physically visible to us. For example, you might see your bed because its right in front of you, but you can also not see a pyramid, you can imagine it being there, and thus your experience of the current room is altered and structured around the fact that there is not a pyramid in it. Sartre believes consciousness involves making
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ongoing distinctions between things and yourself. He explains that making these distinctions that make things appear as they do in our experience, also involves their continuing to not appear to be other things. It is a process of negation. A table continues to be a table, it is not an animal, an automobile, or an abstract formula. In other words:
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Thus, perception is a negative process and consciousness affects it by nihilating, to encase in a shell of non-being. The theory of nothingness is central to Sartre’s philosophy. He distinguishes between two kinds of being: consciousness or what he calls the Being For-Itself, which is the source of all meaning. And on the other hand, a mode of existence that simply is, which is not conscious and is relevant only to inanimate objects, the Being In-Itself.
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One of the problems of human existence for Sartre is the desire to attain Being-In-Itself, which he describes as the desire to be God, a longing for full control over one’s destiny and for absolute identity, only attainable by achieving full control over the destiny of all existence. The world is meaningful to us because we, the For-Itself, give meaning to the In-Itself. The For-Itself uses the world to try to give itself some kind of definition, but it is pure nothingness.
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Sartre doesn’t believe you can define humanity, whatever we are is so free that we can constantly redefine whatever we are. Nothing could ever become necessary for us. Therefore, we are a kind of nullity. But we must have some kind of content, we need to become, what he calls an In-Itself For-Itself. That is, we need to become conscious of having some meaning and content. All of our activity is understood by trying
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to cover up our nothingness and delude ourselves into thinking that we have an identity, some kind of content and meaning in our lives. But since we really don’t and can’t have it because we are pure freedom and nothingness, we are a futile passion or in despair. So, we are constantly in bad faith, we are the kind of being that needs something that we can't have. In addition, he later adds the Being For-Others, which englobes the whole of society. He states
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that many relationships are created by people’s attraction not to another person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. Whenever Sartre thought about what other people were thinking when they were looking at him is fundamental to his existence and to all his writing.
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The Look is a central concept in Sartre’s phenomenology. It is the exploration of the experience of being seen. You are a subject, but if someone gazes into you for a long time, you start becoming hyper aware of yourself as an object in other people’s views. What we think of self-consciousness is actually our consciousness of the world. For Sartre, there is no such thing as a self, an essential being that we truly are. This is merely a
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security blanket of an idea which he tries to get people to abandon. His whole argument is that there is no predetermined character which makes you be who you are, who you are is a function of what you do. Sartre gives the example of a person looking through a keyhole into a bedroom. He is behaving as a subject, but the experience of being caught seeing through the keyhole immediately makes this person aware that they are a person
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looking at a bedroom behind a closed door, whereas before they were just looking at the scene. This person has been transformed into something that was just trying to see and listen to the conversation, to a person with a nauseating feeling of shame, proving that we are always under the eyes of other people. Thus, we are all objects in the eyes of others. There is no way that people can feel entirely comfortable with each other, it is always going to be impossible to think of yourself
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simultaneously as someone who is going around the world acting in it and being an agent, and also to think of yourself as being an object that other people are observing. The entire social realm is based on adversarial aspects. In his book No Exit, Sartre illustrates the difficult coexistence of people, because we are unable to escape the watchful gaze of everyone around us, which alienates us and locks us in a particular kind of being, which in turn deprives us of our freedom.
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Sartre’s physical condition deteriorated, in part because of his workaholism, but also because he was a notorious chain smoker. He died in 1980 from swelling of the lung. Over 50,000 people took to the streets of Paris to follow his coffin and millions watched on television. No philosopher had ever had a bigger following. He was a philosopher who thought against himself, against everything given to him by society and education, he spent his life testing the
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limits of traditional thinking. The fact that life is meaningless gives us the opportunity to give it a meaning. It is precisely because it doesn’t have a meaning in advance that we are justified in creating one. In a world with increasing anguish and despair, Sartre teaches us that we are in control of our lives, that we are allowed to build it the way we want with our own values.
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