Sartre in 60 Minutes

Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes

Walther Ziegler

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783741227721
• eBook ISBN:
  9783741230103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Sartre is surely one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. His "philosophy of existence" influenced not just academic debate but the whole of Western civilization, especially European youth. In France, from the end of WW2 on into the 1960s, a certain "youth culture" milieu composed of secondary school and university students and young artists and intellectuals proclaimed their "existential" attitude to life by wearing the black clothes and horn-rimmed glasses that Sartre was seen to wear in so many photos from the period. The motto of these "existentialists" ran: 'do not let anyone else tell you how you are to live'. They advocated a frank and intensive style of life, both as regards friendships and love affairs and political commitments. Sartre was the great philosopher of freedom. No other philosopher has so strongly emphasized the freedom of the human will. And because Man is free he must make something out of his life and live as he believes it right to live, if necessary contrary to existing social rules and traditions. Sartre, for example, opposed many of his country's wars, fought for a more just society, launched many petitions, and carried on a so-called "open relationship" with his lifelong companion Simone de Beauvoir. In his principal work "Being and Nothingness" Sartre also became one of the first philosophers to explore the nature of "love". How does love actually work? What does it mean to lead a free and self-determined life? The book "Sartre in 60 Minutes" explains the most important of Sartre's theses in a clear and comprehensible way, keeping close to Sartre's own text and including over fifty selected passages from his work. In the chapter on "what use Sartre's discovery is to us today" it is shown how important Sartre's thoughts still are for our personal lives and for the society of the 21st Century. The book forms part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Sartre’s Central Idea

Man is Condemned to be Free

Man, claims Sartre, is not just free in his decisions; he is ‘condemned to be free’. Neither inherited dispositions nor education can limit Man’s freedom. He is absolutely free and must, therefore, in every moment consider what to do – and what not to. This structure is inherent in Man’s very essence. It is not that a human being enters the world and only subsequently wins freedom; rather, he is born free:

What does Sartre mean by this? He means that it is an essential part of human nature to have to plan and form one’s own life. We must, so to speak, completely invent our own being: even our social position, our character and our body.

Sartre knows, of course, that no one can decide whether he is born rich or poor. He also knows that there exist genetic predispositions over which we have no control, such as the colour of our eyes or hair and how tall or muscular we are. He himself, for example, was barely five foot tall, so was certainly aware that we are all born with strengths and weaknesses that we did not choose. Nevertheless, he insisted that even such innate traits of character and physique do not prevent us from being absolutely free.

We always have the opportunity to take up a stance, and to behave in a certain way, vis-à-vis these innate traits and qualities. One is free, for example, to find one’s eye-colour, physique, or particular gifts either beautiful or ugly, good or bad. And one can freely decide whether to treat one’s small stature either as an excuse for leading an unhappy life or, on the contrary, as a spur to achieve great things.

This means that our lives have, in their very essence, something provisional and incomplete about them. Each second, we ‘plan ourselves’ anew and decide which direction we want to develop in. But what of our upbringing, our background, and our early experiences? Are we not informed by our own past? Are many paths of development not closed to us early on, for example through not having received proper education? Sartre’s answer here is a clear ‘no’. An unhappy childhood can be treated either as a reason to hang oneself or, on the contrary, as a spur to making one’s adult life especially happy and successful. Sartre, then, puts no faith in that pedagogical theory whereby upbringing and early childhood experiences leave their mark on the human being and his character as if he were malleable clay. Nor is Sartre willing to grant decisive importance to the ‘drives’ and ‘traumas’ which the psychoanalyst Freud believed he had discovered in Man:

Our freedom, then, according to Sartre, is always absolute. This, however, is not just a gift; it is also a burden. Since we are free, we must constantly be deciding whether and what we want. We cannot simply let ourselves be carried along by life but must rather actively form and shape it. And for Sartre this really is a case of ‘must’. Man really has no choice but to do this:

Since no one asks us beforehand whether we wish to come into the world as a stone, a flower or a human being, we are ‘condemned’ to live with our human freedom of decision.

Freedom and Guilt

Here we have already arrived at Sartre’s central idea. Since Man is in fact free and is compelled to choose, he necessarily makes himself guilty. It doesn’t matter whether the choice that is made is a good or a bad one; Man makes himself guilty in any case. Grasping certain possibilities always means rejecting certain others:

If I study philosophy, I can no longer become an astronaut or a doctor; if I marry, I can no longer be single. Thus, a groom, before the altar, swears to always be faithful to his chosen bride and to forgo all other lovers. This sad farewell to the possibility of other choices is marked, in many cultures, by a ‘stag night’ on which the groom enjoys his freedom one last time and all is permitted him before he ‘forsakes all others’ for his bride’s sake. But such a process of leave-taking does not occur only in the case of such big decisions as choosing a spouse or a profession but rather many times daily in a hundred more trivial situations. It is the sum of all these big and small decisions that determines the course of one’s life. By, for example, reading this book about Sartre and learning about existentialism, you are also making a choice. You are choosing not to spend time with friends or go to the cinema. Every decision, then, is a selection. But what if one refuses to make any choice at all? Sartre discussed also this possibility:

Once can, then, choose not to choose – but in doing so, one has still made, even without wanting to, a choice. If I decide not to begin a new relationship or a new job because I can’t or won’t make a choice, I have thereby made a decision after all, namely, the decision to continue with the same life I’ve led up till now. And I have to answer for this, just as I would have to answer for some new end I might have set myself:

Because we bear full responsibility for our ends we become guilty. What Sartre calls ‘guilt’ here is not moral guilt, like, for example, the guilt incurred by breaking one of the Ten Commandments or breaking a law. Nor is it guilt vis-à-vis God or our fellow men. Initially, it is guilt vis-à-vis ourselves. Because by our decision for a particular job, partner, or country to live in, it is ourselves that we have robbed of many other possibilities. This kind of guilt – in other words, responsibility – is, argues Sartre, unavoidable:

Our freedom ‘condemns’ us, then, to absolute responsibility. But this ‘condemnation’ has its positive side. Choice, and the elimination of unchosen possibilities, gives to every moment – or, as Sartre prefers to put it, every ‘situation’ – its special significance. Being mortal, we cannot re-choose our choices as often as we wish. If we lived forever, it would indeed be possible to practice, one after the other, all imaginable professions, learn all musical instruments, train ourselves to perfection in all sports, and engage in an infinite number of love affairs. Everything would be arbitrary, since we would always be able to choose, at some later point, what we had initially chosen to forgo. But since death awaits all human beings at some not-so-distant point, each moment of our lives is in fact unique and unrepeatable. There are many choices that one will only have one chance in one’s life to make. Even the smallest life-decisions, however, inevitably involve us in that ‘responsibility vis-à-vis our own existence’ of which we have spoken.

The central idea of Sartre’s philosophy is now clearer: Our freedom is a threefold ‘condemnation’. Firstly, we are ‘thrown’ into existence, without being asked, as free beings; secondly, we must constantly, day by day, choose certain possibilities and forgo others; and thirdly, we are condemned to take responsibility for this choosing and forgoing and to take upon ourselves the ‘guilt’ implied by it.

Freedom as ‘Ek-stasis’ or ‘Standing-Out’

It is also human freedom that forms the basis for the possibility of failing – something which, Sartre argues, a stone, say, or a plant can never do. Because a stone does not exist – or at least not in Sartre’s emphatic sense of ‘existence’. The stone is merely ‘there’. It makes no decisions. What Sartre calls ‘existence’ is a certain ‘standing out’ into a realm of freedom in which a stone can have no part. Sartre draws here on the Latin root of our modern word ‘exist’: ‘ex-istere’, implying ‘stand out’ or ‘go forth’. Man, as Sartre puts it, ‘hangs suspended’ in his own freedom because this freedom causes him to ‘jut out’ beyond the mere ‘there-ness’ of his physical body into a transcendental sphere:

What does Sartre mean by this? Man is ‘suspended’ in his own freedom inasmuch as he must adopt an observer’s standpoint outside of his own self, thus becoming an object to himself. In contrast to the stone or the plant, Man is a being catapulted out of the context of Nature – a ‘freedman’ vis-à-vis Nature’s rigid, unfree order who, as such, needs still to create and ‘choose’ his own self:

This is a quality which, Sartre argues, is exclusive to Man. A tick, for example, is firmly bound into a mechanism of stimulus and response. It knows no such ‘standing out’ from Nature as Sartre refers to when he speaks of ‘existence’ as an ‘ek-stasis’. The tick is, as the famous naturalist Jakob von Üexküll once put it, perfectly interwoven with the natural order in a fixed functional plan. Its perception of the world is narrowly limited. It has a perception of altitude suficient to allow it to take its place on a branch and a much more developed perception for the sweat of living bodies in the form of butyric acid and heat. It has, however, neither sight nor hearing. A tick may wait on its branch for several months, without nourishment, before a deer happens by. When one does, the tick senses already from far away how the smell of sweat grows stronger and stronger until it finally reaches such an intensity that the tick drops from its branch and clings to the deer. But this dropping from the branch is not a choice, not an existential decision, in Sartre’s sense. It is, of course, very important, indeed a matter of life and death, for the tick that it drops at exactly the right moment. If it drops a minute too soon or too late it may have missed its only chance. But still its action is, for the tick, completely unproblematical. No tension or nervousness attaches to this action because the tick does not have to...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Sartre’s Great Discovery
• Sartre’s Central Idea
• Of What Use Is Sartre’s Discovery for Us Today?
• Bibliographical References
• Already published in the same series
• Coming soon in the same series
• The author
• Copyright