Simply Sartre

David Detmer

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781943657438
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

"This is a delightful introduction to the life and ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre. Detmer's writing is clear, engaging, and fun to read. The book weaves together accurate overviews of Sartre's main ideas with convincing reasons these ideas are still relevant today. The book ends with useful summaries of 50 of Sartre's works—a perfect roadmap for anyone who wishes to read Sartre himself. If I had to recommend one book to a friend, colleague, or family member on Jean-Paul Sartre, this would be it."
—Joshua Tepley, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Saint Anselm College Born in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was largely raised by his mother and his maternal grandparents after his father died when he was two. He attended the renowned École Normale Supérieure, where he studied psychology, philosophy, ethics, sociology, and physics. In 1929, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who went on to become a celebrated feminist writer and philosopher, with whom he had a lifelong intellectual and romantic relationship. After serving briefly in the French army during World War II and spending nine months as a prisoner of war, Sartre lived under the Occupation in Paris, where in 1943 he wrote his best-known philosophic work, Being and Nothingness, one of the foundational texts of existentialism. Following the war, and for the rest of his life, Sartre was deeply engaged in left-wing, anti-colonialist politics, while producing a prodigious number of plays, novels, philosophical works, and critical essays. With the popularization of existentialism in the 1960s, Sartre became a household name, and his celebrity (or notoriety) was heightened in 1964 when he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Simply Sartre, Professor David Detmer tells the story of Sartre's life and work, focusing on the contemporary relevance of his ideas—ideas that maintain their power to inspire, entertain, enlighten, and enrage. Uniquely, Prof. Detmer covers all periods of Sartre's career and his many different kinds of works, providing the general reader with the opportunity to fully appreciate Sartre's many contributions to intellectual and political thought. For anyone interested in one of the towering figures of the twentieth century or the development of a philosophy that lies at the heart of modern human experience, Simply Sartre is an indispensable biographical work.

1

Suggested Reading

Sartre was a remarkably prolific writer, having authored over 600 works, and in a wide variety of genres. It would be impossible to discuss all of them in this short book. However, as a guide to further reading, I offer the following list of what I take to be his 50 most interesting and/or important works. I will provide bibliographical information for each work on my list, as well as a few remarks on its content. These annotations will also allow me to expand on some of the issues discussed in earlier chapters, and to introduce briefly a few others not treated there.

1. Imagination (1936), trans. Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (New York: Routledge, 2012). There is also a translation by Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972).

This was Sartre’s first book. It is mostly devoted to criticism of several prominent modern philosophical and psychological theories of the imagination. Of greatest interest is the book’s concluding section, in which he offers a sympathetic account of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological approach to the topic.

2. The Transcendence of the Ego (1937), trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991). There is also a translation by Andrew Brown (New York: Routledge, 2004).

It was in this work that Sartre presented his argument, discussed at length in Chapter Three above, that there is no pre-existing ego or “self” inhabiting or underlying consciousness. He claimed that the ego is not a substance, directing consciousness, but rather a construct, an object for consciousness, that consciousness brings into being by selectively synthesizing several of its own reflective acts.

3. “The Wall” (1937), in The Wall and Other Stories, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1975).

This was the first short story that Sartre published as an adult. It received rapturous reviews upon publication and helped to establish Sartre as a major writer. It has taken on the status of a classic in the short story genre, having been reprinted in countless anthologies, and made into a movie in 1967.

Written in response to the Spanish Civil War, it is a tense, suspenseful, atmospheric account of the experiences of a prisoner of war during what he believes to be his final night of life before being executed in the morning.

4. Nausea (1938), trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 2000). There is also a translation by Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 2013).

This was Sartre’s first novel. Published right on the heels of “The Wall,” its reception cemented Sartre’s literary reputation and established that his mastery extended to long-form fiction. Some of the ideas it presents are discussed in Chapter Three.

One additional theme not addressed above is the difference between life and art. Life, as it is lived, is messy, and full of superfluous, irrelevant detail. If something interesting happened to you while you were walking down a street today, an account of that event that failed to discriminate between what was relevant to it, and interesting and important, and what was not, would go on forever, and the experience of hearing or reading such an account would be intolerably boring. Suppose that the point of interest in your experience while walking down the street was the fact that you bumped into an old friend who lives overseas, and who you have not seen in thirty years. Such facts as that you were wearing brown shoes at the time, that the laces of each shoe were 27 inches long, that you had taken 19 steps on Boylston Street when you first spotted your friend, that you were feeling slightly thirsty at the time, and so on forever, would be utterly irrelevant to the story, and, in part for that reason, uninteresting. If you are a good storyteller, or even merely a minimally competent one, you will leave these details out when you tell others about this reunion. Similarly, fictional stories, that is, literary works of art, are ruthlessly selective in what they include and what they leave out. They do not ramble on pointlessly, but rather stick to what is essential and necessary to their artistic purpose. Stories and plays, and, for that matter, pieces of music, have a logic and structure to them that is lacking in life as it is lived. Stories and songs typically have clear beginnings and endings. Life does not. It just keeps on going. Observing this, Roquentin, the novel’s protagonist, remarks in his diary, “I wanted moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail.” (N, 63)

In Nausea, the work of art that is discussed extensively in this context is a song, “Some of These Days.” Every note of its melody is necessary and essential. To change even one note would alter, and diminish, the tune. Moreover, the melody is indestructible, for it is distinguishable from any performance of it, or recording of it, or written representation of it in sheet music. It is untouched by the scratchy imperfections of the one particular copy of one recording that Roquentin hears (a good listener is able, in his or her auditory experience, to push such noise into the background so as to focus solely on the “signal,” that is the music). Thus, art is capable of achieving a kind of perfection, timelessness, purity, and precision that no human life could ever hope to match. Accordingly, at the end of Nausea, Roquentin ponders the idea that he might be able to justify, and find meaning in, his otherwise seemingly pointless existence by creating art. So he resolves to write a novel.

There is some evidence that Sartre, at the time when he wrote Nausea, shared Roquentin’s vision of the creation of art as a means to personal salvation. If so, he definitely abandoned it later on in favor of the view that writing was more about a free exchange of ideas among writers and readers, and about their joining together in a project of attempting to disclose truths about the world, and to bring about, on the basis of such knowledge, needed social, political, and economic changes. Commenting in a 1964 interview on how much his views had changed since the time of Nausea, he remarked, “what I lacked [then] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality. I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child Nausea cannot act as a counterweight.” (LBSM, 62)

5. “The Childhood of a Leader” (1939), in The Wall and Other Stories.

This story recounts the adventures of a confused and insecure young man who, in an attempt to win the respect of others and to gain for himself a sense of his own identity, attempts to “be” a fascist and anti-Semite. This well-constructed and entertaining story introduces several themes that Sartre would develop in greater detail in later, nonfiction, works. These include, most prominently, bad faith (Being and Nothingness), anti-Semitism (Anti-Semite and Jew), and the psychology of the fascist mentality (several political writings).

6. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Routledge, 2014). It has also been translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1948).

In this short book, Sartre offered a phenomenological account of emotional experience. He attempted to show that the popular conception of emotion as a state, something that we have and passively endure, is wrong. Emotions are more accurately characterized as modes of awareness of the world. They are neither projections in consciousness of disturbances in the body nor involuntary, reflex, reactions to external stimuli, but rather intentional conscious acts—prereflective responses to meanings (for example, “threatening,” “horrible,” or “wonderful”) encountered in experience.

7. “A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality,” in Critical Essays, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Seagull Books, 2017). It is also available in We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

This short essay helped to introduce Husserl’s phenomenology to a French audience. In it, Sartre defended the idea, discussed in Chapter Three, that consciousness is not a thing, a container that takes ideas into itself, but rather an activity of reaching out toward and focusing on external objects. Sartre gave to this seemingly dry and technical thesis a highly dramatic treatment, and suggested that it entails consequences of enormous importance.

8. “Monsieur François Mauriac and Freedom” (1939), in Critical Essays. A different translation, titled “François Mauriac and Freedom,” can be found in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1962).

Aside from lengthy, more general and theoretical works, such as What is Literature?, this is the most famous of Sartre’s many works of literary criticism. It is a bold, audacious piece, in that it attacks a still living, but much older (by twenty years), and much more established, writer, the widely respected Catholic novelist, François Mauriac. (Like Sartre, he would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.) And while Sartre had never been a shrinking violet, afraid of engaging in polemics, the severity of his criticism of Mauriac surprised many of his readers, some of whom also saw it as excessive and unfair.

Sartre’s main criticism of Mauriac was that he (allegedly) treated his characters as pawns, whose sole function was to serve as instruments for the communication of their creator’s worldview, rather than as free beings. The essay ends with the memorable, oft-quoted line: “God is not an artist. Neither is Monsieur Mauriac.” (MFMF, 80)

9. War Diaries (written 1939-1940, published posthumously, 1983), trans. Quintin Hoare (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012).

In these diaries, one finds descriptions of Sartre’s day-to-day experiences as a conscripted soldier mixed in with his reactions to the various books he was reading at the time and, most significantly, the initial formulations of many of the philosophical ideas that he would later present in Being and Nothingness.

10. The Imaginary (1940), trans. Jonathan Webber (New York: Routledge, 2010). It has also been translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Psychology of Imagination (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966).

Not to be confused with Imagination, published four years earlier, this is the work in which Sartre presented his own phenomenological account of imagination and of “imaginaries” (that is, imagined objects). As discussed in Chapter Three above, Sartre analyzes our ability to imagine in terms of our capacity to “nihilate,” or negate, what is given in our perceptual field, and to turn our attention, instead, to what is not currently present in that field. And this capacity, in turn, he regards as evidence of our fundamental freedom.

11. Being and Nothingness (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992). There is also a translation by Sarah Richmond (New York: Routledge, 2018).

This dense and massive work, exceeding 700 pages in length, is widely considered to be Sartre’s greatest philosophical work. Its subtitle is “A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology.” Ontology is the study of being, and Being and Nothingness attempts to describe the basic categories of being and their interrelations. It must be emphasized, however, that when Sartre speaks of “being,” he is usually not talking about entities or substances, but rather the way in which something exists. So a phrase such as “the being of consciousness” does not refer to the kind of entity consciousness is, but rather to the various modalities of being conscious.

The book’s most fundamental analytical tool is the distinction between “being-in-itself” (the mann...