JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)
1905 Raised in the Calvinist home of his maternal grandfather.
1929 Teaching degree in philosophy. He and Merleau-Ponty were high school phil. teachers.
1933-35 Sabbatical in Berlin and Freiberg, exposed to Heidegger and Husserl. Disagrees with Heidegger on death and ontology.
1936 Critique of Husserl: The Transcendence of the Ego
1938 publication of Nausea.
1943 The Flies
1943 Being and Nothingness
1945 No Exit
1946 "Existentialism is a Humanism"
1946 Trip to New York
1950's Marxist phase: Critique of Dialectical Reason published in 1960.
ca. 1950 Broke with Merleau-Ponty on Korean War.
1956 Broke with French Communists on Hungary.
1960's Anti-Vietnam War Movement: Co-chair with Bertrand Russel the War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm.
1968-69 Student Movement in France.
1970's Directorship of two French Maoist papers. Three volume work on Flaubert.
Take a look at the 1970 interivew on reserve.
Heidegger goes back to Kant; Sartre goes back to Hegel.
SARTRE=S NEO-HEGELIAN ONTOLOGY
Hegel=s Für Sich6Sartre=s Pour-Soi consciousness as negativity.
Hegel=s An Sich6Sartre=s En-soi material stuff.
Contrast with Descartes= dualism of res extensa (extended stuff) and res cogitans (thinking stuff). Neither Sartre nor Hegel believe that the mind is a thinking thing or substance.
AThe fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God.@ Agrees with Hegel on the goal, but disagrees that it can be reached. Sartre has no progressive, synthetic dialectic.
Hegel: Being + non-being 6 becoming with a final resolution.
Sartre: En-soi + pour-soi 6 always more process, tension, and back sliding.
Sartre says that en-soi is "uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop (in the way, in excess) for eternity." The en-soi is simply itself and it is not even in time. It "has no secrets; it is a solid mass."
The primary role of the pour-soi is negating the en-soi. "Nothingness [as pour-soi] lies coiled at the heart of being, like a worm" (BN, p. 56). Elsewhere he calls the pour-soi a "hole of being at the heart of being." Sartre offers the analogy of the conservation of energy to make his point: "If a single one of the atoms which constitute the universe were annihilated, there would result a catstrophe which would extend to the entire universe and would be the end of the earth. . . the for-itself is like a tiny nihilation which has its origin at the heart of Being; and this nihilation is sufficient to cause a total upheaval to happen to the in-itself (BN, p. 786).
Freedom is the yearning for pour-soi to be like Hegel's Spirit--completely in and for itself. For Hegel this is possible and this will mean the end of history, but for Sartre it's impossible. This goal is essentially the project of becoming God. Sartre's Titanism. Camus referred to this as an attempt at an "impossible transparency."
HEIDEGGER=S RESPONSE TO SARTRE=S EXISTENTIALISM IS A HUMANISM
Heidegger=s Letter of Humanism appeared in the same year of 1947. He implies that Being and Time is not anthropology or psychology or even humanism. It is a fundamental ontology very different from Sartre=s neo-Hegelian ontology.
The essence of human action has a non-human base: Being itself. The Alogic@ (logos) of Being speaks through human beings. Being acts, not humans (!) This is not humanism.
Sartre: AWe are on a level where there is nothing but humans.@
Heidegger=s answer: AWe are on a level where there is principally Being.@
SARTRE'S EXISTENTIALISM IS AN HUMANISM
Sol,196 Is it true, as Sartre claims, that all existentialists have in common the motto "Existence precedes essence"? What does it mean? Does Heidegger agree with this? Frontal attack on "essentialism." Can an atheist be an essentialist?
198: Humans aren't simply what they conceive themselves to be, but what they will themselves to be. Voluntarism. Existentialism "puts every man in possession of himself." What would Marcel's response be?
Sartre's Cartesian starting point: humans "cannot pass beyond human subjectivity." "There's no such things as a non-human world." What sort of "world" is this? A historical-cultural, human world.
198 bottom: In choosing we choose for all humans. Sartre's version of Kant's categorical imperative (CI). What are the key differences?
199 "A legislator deciding for the whole of mankind." A free choice is always "good"; "for we are unable ever to choose the worse." Choice between choosing a Christian or Communist Union. Choosing to marry.
200 Reference to Kant's Categorical again: "the act of lying implies the universal value which it denies." Kant: the will contradicts itself not what will be the consequences if every one does it.
200 Abe and Isaac and the question of the truth of the messenger. Didn't seem to enter Abe's mind. This question leaves Abe and others like him in a dilemma that reason can't resolve.
199-200 Sartre seems to have a different view of the origin of Angst than Heidegger. Sartre says that Angst is "afraid of being afraid" (BN, p. 65), whereas Angst for Heidegger is the awareness of our ultimate nonexistence. For Sartre Angst arises because of the absolute freedom of consciousness. This is not possible in Heidegger because the "existentials" limit Dasein's freedom. For example, Dasein cannot choose not to care or to be with others. The existentials are built into Dasein's being.
201 Sartre's use of Heidegger's "thrownness" and "fallenness". Again he has his own view.
201 Essentialism with or without God is still faulty.
202 Existentialism is a humanism: "We are now upon a plane where there are only men." Heid's answer in Letter on Humanism (1947): "we are now upon a plane where there is only Being." If humans have no nature, then there is no determinism, human freedom follows automatically? Feral children example? Being and Nothingness: "The environment can act on the subjects only to the extent that they understand it" (BN, p. 321 [Cummings]).
202-203 Sartre's equivalent of Abe and Isaac. Traditional or any "rational" morality is useless in cases like these.
204 Very heart of existentialism: absolute character of free commitment. People actualize themselves as types of humanity. "One must observe equally the relativity of Cartesianism and the absolute character of the Cartesian commitment." Titanism? "Everyone one of us makes the absolute by breathing...by behaving in any fashion whatsoever.
Descartes: We are equal to God in will, but not equal to him in power. Is this what Sartre is trying to say?
205 True existentialism coincides with atheism. It's the only true philosophy of hope.
"Patterns of Bad Faith" from Being and Nothingness
Sol. 207 "First Date" Example. (Think of the young couple in Nausea, too) Each wears a mask whose qualities are "fixed in a permanence like that of things." Refusing to realize the real possibilities in the immediate future.
208 She's being objectified in terms of his desires; he's objectifiying himself by presenting a mask of "sincere" regard. In disregarding his hand, is she really showing her "essential aspect"? Both parties have reduced themselves to the in-itself. The woman's body is alienated from her, so is the man's hand from him. In the woman's effusions about "Life," we see that bad faith can be attained just as well by too much transcendencne as by too little. Total divorce of body and soul. See No Exit, in which, each character is being objectified in each other's "stare" or "glance."
209: Double property of human being: facitity (Heid's thrownness) and transcendence (freedom). Authenticity coordinates these two; bad faith divorces them.
210: Transcendence allows us false as well as true freedom. It can allow us to always avoid facing our true selves and true situations. One can always flee from any reproach, any criticism. But, paradoxically, "I affirm here that I am my transcendence in the mode of a thing." Example: Vain people make themselves into things of beauty. Pornographic actors make themselves, freely but falsely, into things of lust.
Being-or-itself and Being-for-Other. Sartre's version of Mitsein. Bad faith represents a false being-for-others. For Sartre this seems to be the norm, not the exception. Sartre and deBeavoir: Heidegger's Mit-sein is too "warm and fuzzy."
211 What is required for true sincerity, the opposite of bad faith? For people to be only what they are. But isn't this, as Sartre asks, the definition of the en-soi? Not quite, because we all just have the power of transcendence. Returning to the lover example, the woman can affirm herself as the woman she is by either refusing his advances (get your mitts off me) or by accepting them and openly laying down the conditions for a relationship. An authentic affirming of what you are also means affirming your possibilities for a future "what you are."
212 "If a man is what he is, bad faith is forever impossible, and candor ceases to be his ideal and becomes instead his being." Pour-soi-en-soi. A synthesis of knowing and being that is Hegelian and also Eastern.
Famous Waiter Example. He is playing a role, like most of us do in our working and non-working lives.
213 "The grocer who dreams is not wholly a grocer": our amazement that people aren't really what their "roles" are. But they're not merely things, so the dialectic of facticity (en-soi) and transcendence (pour-soi) is continually at play.
214 The true self as relative non-being (Gk. me on) and not absolute non-being (ouk on): "I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions." I'm not my body: I'm not my "personality", etc., etc. (Similar to Buddhist psychology) "On all sides I escape being and yet--I am."
214-215 Sadness as a mode of being. Wittgenstein would call it a "form of life" not a ready-made being that I can give myself. Heid. would say that it is a state-of-mind, an Existential, a mode of Being, too. But wouldn't the Existentials restrict the absolute freedom of Sartre's pour-soi?
221: bad faith consists in Adenying the qualities which I possess.@ The woman denying that she is attractive; the Abrave@ person saying that he was never afraid. The faithful man pretending that he has never desired another woman.
Parallel to natural virtue vs. Aduress@ virtue.
222: Dialectical coincidence of bad faith and sincerity; dialectical coincidence of being cowardly and not-cowardly; of being faithful and not faithful to one=s partner. ADynamic@ fidelity vs. a fidelity that is as Aendurable as stone.@
SARTRE'S FIRST NOVEL NAUSEA
From his autobiography The Words (158): "At the age of thirty, I executed the masterstroke of writing in Nausea -- quite sincerely, believe me -- about the bitter unjustified existence of my fellowmen and of exonerating my own. I was Roquentin; I used him to show, without complacency, the texture of my life. At the same time, I was I, the elect, chronicler of Hell, a glass and steel photo-microscope peering at my own protoplasmic juices. Later, I gaily demonstrated that man is impossible...I was a prisoner of that obvious contradiction...(being a man.)