Sartre and Existentialism

By: Seyed Javad Meynagh

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. Sartre

Abstract

To understand the meaning of meaninglessness of modernity Sartre proves to be the best example of philosophy without wisdom. Of course this is not to underestimate his paramount importance within secular tradition but it is a gentle indication that human existence without essential grounding is a journey without destination. In this essay we have tried to explicate some aspects of existentialism as seen from Sartre’s vista.

Jean Paul Sartre

Many contemporary students of philosophy begin their exploration of existentialism by reading either Sartre or Albert Camus. Jean-Paul Sartre’s strong political beliefs, ever evolving as they were, and his need to be in the public eye, contributed to his long shadow as the sole champion of existentialism. Sartre was largely responsible for the “trendy” nature of existentialism — the lingering images of men and women wearing black, smoking Turkish cigarettes, drinking black coffee. The Beat Generation owes a great deal to Sartre. However, in one word one could argue that with him Existentialism started to be redefined and reconsidered as an intellectual pursuit where the philosopher is a student of Human Condition and this general approach to Existentialism we owe to Sartre regardless of many critics’ opinion about his status as a true existentialist.

Jean-Paul Sartre was born 21 June 1905 in Paris, the only child of Jean-Baptiste and Anne-Marie Sartre, two individuals from distinguished families. Jean-Baptiste Sartre was the son of Dr. Eymard Sartre, a noted country doctor in the Dordogne region of France. Eymard had written several medical texts; he published his first work in his early twenties. Sartre’s mother was the first cousin of Albert Schweitzer, the famous German missionary. Sartre died in April 15^th of 198o in Paris.

The Core of Sartre’s Philosophy

Jean Paul Sartre was one of the leaders of the French post war left wing intellectual movement, co-founding with Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) the journal Les Temps Modernes. His experiences as a resistance fighter shaped his philosophy that was influenced by the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger. Politically Sartre claimed he was a Marxist and thought that freedom had both political and individual dimensions.

Unlike Kierkegaard, Sartre was an atheist. As God does not exist, there are no 'essences'. By essence, Sartre is talking about a pre-defined human nature. What Sartre meant by the phrase 'existence precedes essence' could be expressed briefly as the following: If there is no cosmic designer, then there is no design or essence of human nature. Human existence or being differs from the being of objects in that human being is self-conscious. This self-consciousness also gives the human subject the opportunity to define itself. The individual creates his/her self by making self-directed choices.

As human existence is self-conscious without being pre-defined, we, as autonomous beings are "condemned to be free": compelled to make future directed choices. These choices induce anxiety and uncertainty in our psyches by impacting the universe of our selves. If we, as individuals, simply follow custom or social expectations in order to escape this angst, we have escaped the responsibility of making our own choices, of creating our own essence. We have acted in bad faith. This is what he means by the phrase ‘bad faith’ which has been used constantly and misunderstood widely too.

To act authentically we must take responsibility for our future. We cannot choose what gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, or country we were born into, but we can choose what we make of them. We are free to create our own interpretation of ourselves in relation to the world, to create a project of possibilities, of authentic actions as the expression of freedom. Freedom is the key in all existentialist genres but very forcefully capitalized by Sartre who seems to essentialize the human nature based on ‘choice’ with freedom as its interior.

Another two concepts very frequently used by Sartre and very essential within his frame of thought are ‘nausea’ and ‘anguish’. The word nausea is used for the individual's recognition of the pure contingency of the universe, and the word anguish is used for the recognition of the total freedom of choice that confronts the individual at every moment. Both of these terms within Sartre’s philosophy refer to the fact that you are free and this freedom should lead to a reshaping of you and your world along emancipative lines which would liberate humanity at large while set us free as individuals within the society in our dealings and interactions with each other and whatever ‘others’ may be out there. In his early philosophic work, Being and Nothingness, written whilst a prisoner of war, humans were conceived as beings who create their own world by rebelling against authority and by accepting personal responsibility for their actions, unaided by society, traditional morality, or religious faith. (Sartre, 1993)

In terms of phenomenology Jean Paul Sartre's Existentialism maintains that in man, and in man alone, existence preceded essence. This simply means that man first is, and only as a result is this or that. In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he slowly but surely defines himself based on the choices he makes along the path of becoming what he best could be as a human person. And the definition constantly remains open ended: we cannot say what this man is before he dies, or what humanity is before it has disappeared.

In any thinker’s universe there is a hub where the central ideas are configured in a kaleidoscopic fashion into a unit idea and Sartre is not any exception in this regard. Freedom is for Sartre that unit idea which without his entire discourse may collapse into meaningless verbose sophism of worst kind. Sartre based his Existentialism on human free will. As individuals are free, from the moment of conception, they define their essence throughout their existence. A person's nature is what he or she has done in the past and what that person is doing at the moment. No one is complete until death, when self-definition ceases. Then, how others interpret the individual is based upon the individual's accomplishments and failings. But how is he perceived by the Holy is never debated by Sartre as he views reliance on orthodoxy in any sense as a bad faith as the best faith is the one you make up as a free actor based on your ability. Is this really what Sartre himself did or his entire metaphysics of action was a grand reflection of French Enlightenment tradition? This is an issue left for historians of philosophy to decide.

The importance of Existentialism as a social theory is an issue which needs more attention by sociologist and Sartre’s brand of Existentialist morality is a case in this regard as he views responsibility not only as a subjective individual task but as a social objective which affects the fabric of society in its whole by its consequences at large. For him Existential morality arises from the fact that all choices affect others, physically and emotionally. Social responsibility results from the interdependencies of individuals. Since any living person is engaged in the process of defining self and others, ethics develop accordingly. Since the existentialist values free will and wants others to respect his or her freedom, the ethical system developed is based upon free expression.

As for the metatheoretical character of Sartre's philosophy it should be mentioned briefly that it is explicitly atheistic and pessimistic; he declared that human beings require a rational basis for their lives but are unable to achieve one, and thus human life is a "futile passion." He nevertheless insisted that his Existentialism is a form of humanism, and he strongly emphasized human freedom, choice, and responsibility. What does it mean that Existentialisme est un Humanisme? By claiming that "existentialism is a humanism" Sartre places his version of existentialism into the mainstream of the libertarian humanist tradition that could be traced back to the Renaissance and its stress on human creativity and freedom. (Sartre, 1948) But this task is not as unproblematic as one may think at first sight as with this combination in mind Sartre is taking over an already existing and widely abused or distorted term which he wanted to redefine so that it could serve a serious philosophical purpose. His approach has attracted great many critics from almost all sides and the overriding critiques leveled at Sartre could be schematized under the following categories:

(1) Hopeless Passivism. By asserting that action is futile if not impossible existentialism invites people to remain in a state of "desperate quietism". Existentialism itself ends up in a kind of "contemplative philosophy" lagging behind Marx' 11th Thesis on Feuerbach which stipulates that philosophy should change the world.

(2) Disappointing Negativity. By over-emphasizing the sordid and the "dark side" of human nature existentialism propounds human degradation the way "naturalism" used to expose the worst human traits in the nineteenth century. Thus existentialism tendentiously neglects the greatness and magnificence of humankind.

(3) Individualistic Isolationism. By taking pure subjectivity as the starting point and by treating man as an isolated being existentialism disregards the social character of man and his innate inclination toward solidarity. No coincidence that existentialism commits this distortion, for it is an heir of Cartesian episteme which has conceived human existence as isolated and entirely enclosed into subjective consciousness.

(4) Whimsical Permissiveness. By rejecting God's commandments and the "eternal verities" existentialism delivers human undertakings to "pure caprice" and arbitrary evaluations. It denies objective standards and norms of human conduct and preaches a perilous relativism.

Some of the abovementioned charges against Sartre or Existentialism at large are surely mistaken as, for instance, the third category where Marxist theorists claimed that Sarterian theory would lead to anti-social morality whereby they totally neglect the social character of his morality in the constitution of self and society. However it is undeniable that Sartre could not provide any explanations on the question of ethics and relativism except his insistence on the importance of freedom in the constitution of self based on will to be free. This is more of a poetic desire rather than a philosophical explanation that Sartre himself claimed to be up to. His approach, ,however, which relates philosophical theory to life, literature, psychology, sociology, and political action, stimulated so much popular interest that it became a worldwide movement.

Being-in-Itself

Sartre applied the French "en-soi," which dreamily means "in-self," to illustrate the state of being of objects -- things without self-awareness. Sartre's "Being-in-Itself" represents the idea that only concrete phenomena have any ontological status; only the concrete is real. Edmund Husserl's approach to phenomenology was embraced by Sartre as a basis for existential exploration. To simplify this concept, Sartre might state that a tree is a tree -- it cannot change what it is. In this manner, Sartre suggests there is facticity, or truth, in the existence of some objects, which is another way to say they are deprived of the act of choice. That is to argue man is free and as the necessary consequence of inalienable human freedom he is responsible qua his humanity in a way that a tree is not.

Being-for-Itself

Contrary to "Being-in-Itself" is Sartre's "Being-for-Itself" -- a state of self-consciousness and control. Walter Kaufmann elucidates the dissimilarities thusly:

The pour-soi (for-itself) is that being which is aware of itself: man. Its structure is different from that of the en-soi, and the phenomenon of self-deception serves the author as a clue: what must the pour-soi be like in order to make self-deception possible? (Kaufmann, 1956. p 43)

Sartre's "Being-for-Itself" portrays human consciousness as possessing the characteristics of incompleteness and potency, with an indeterminate structure. As Sartre is convinced that human responsibility makes sense only if there is no God as he argues that divine foreknowledge and predestination necessarily exclude alternative options and consequently responsibility then he arrives at the subsequent conclusion that the absence of a Creator leaves man without a predefined nature. Without a nature, individuals are nothingness. In effect, the essence of man is a complete lack of everything. Nothingness, Sartre thought, was freedom and free will. Applying this definition of nothingness to individuals, mankind is freedom. Sartre contended that not only was the individual free, but the essence of humankind was freedom. As a result of this freedom, individuals are responsible for all their actions and thoughts. Moral responsibility has been traditionally and within religious orthodoxies linked with God as the ultimate guarantor of values and sanctions. Sartre repudiates both components of the traditional view: in his eyes God is an impediment for human freedom and responsibility. The tension between human freedom and God is therefore insoluble. By following secular metaphysics which results in a dismissal of the transcendent source and foundation of responsibility Sartre attempts to found human morality on other grounds. The new question in this secular context is to whom man could be responsible? Sartre's answer is inadequately simple: only to himself. Not even to some absolute moral standards. How does pour-soi differ from en-soi?

What makes self-deception possible, according to Sartre, is that the pour-soi differs from the en-soi or, to be concrete: a man is not a homosexual, a waiter, or a coward in the same way in which he is six feet tall or blond.... If I am six feet tall, that is that. It is a fact no less than that the table is, say, two feet high. Being a coward or a waiter, however, is different: it depends on ever new decisions. (Kaufmann, 1956. p 44)

What Sartre always wanted his audience to understand was that he believed we always have the ability to choose a new role, a new state of being or novel modality. Today, one might be a philosopher, while tomorrow that same person might wait tables. In fact, humans can be and are more than one thing at a given moment. According to Sartre it becomes nearly impossible to describe a person. "He is what he is," might be the best description of anyone.

Many of the works by Sartre address a dualism between subject and object, the subjective consciousness and the objective human being. (Sartre, 1962) Sartre considered freedom a subjective experience. Being and Nothingness explores this dualism: "Being" is the thing-in-itself, similar to the Hegelian Absolute and "Nothingness" refers to freedom. Sartre wrote that freedom is the ability to define and assign meaning to things and events. Without thought, we could not be free. As an example, the play No Exit is about the results of how we define ourselves -- especially those who fail to seize the freedom to define themselves.

According to Sartre, we could not exceed the limits of our experiences; we remain within the phenomenological limits of experience. Though he accepted Husserl's approach to study, Sartre rejected Husserlian Idealism, considering the concept of a transcendental ego, solipsism -- only the self is real. Sartre was a critic of this school of thought, preferring the idea of being to be consisted of more than consciousness, yet is at the same time fixed in a reality. (Sartre, 1948)

Reference

Kaufmann, Walter; Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, Penguin; 1956.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism; translation from the French and introduction by Philip Mairet, London: Eyre Methuen, 1948.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Imagination: A psychological critique; translated with an introduction by Forrest Williams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology; Translated by Hazel E. Barnes; Introduction by Mary Warnock. London: Routledge, 1993.

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