The Essential Jean-Paul Sartre

The Emotions and Essays in Aesthetics

Jean-Paul Sartre

• Editorial: Philosophical Library/Open Road
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781504064125
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Existentialism in Philosophy

The renowned French philosopher lays the foundation for an Existentialist approach to psychology and aesthetics in this pair of classic works. In The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, Jean-Paul Sartre explores the role of emotions in the human psyche, presenting a phenomenological approach to psychology. Analyzing the universal, yet subjective, experiences of fear, lust, anguish, and melancholy, Sartre asserts that human beings develop their emotional capabilities from a very early age, which helps them identify and understand the names and qualities of their feelings later in life. Essays in Aesthetics is a provocative collection that explores the nature of art and its meaning. Sartre considers the artist's "function, " and the relation between art and the human condition. Engaging with the works of Tintoretto, Calder, Lapoujade, Titian, Raphael, and Michaelangelo, Sartre offers a fascinating analysis of the creative process. The result is a vibrant manifesto of existentialist aesthetics.

A Philosophical eLibrary Edition

ESSAYS IN AESTHETICS

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Selected and Translated by

Wade Baskin

With a New Preface by

Susan Braudy

PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY

New York

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

PREFACE

Jean Paul Sartre was a total live wire. The man is still bigger than a rock star in France. He lived the life of the mind to its fullest. He also found time in the second half of his life to become an idealistic international politician, manipulating his world-wide reputation to further his ethical and artistic beliefs—which he relished amending and even changing. Biographer Ronald Hayman wrote that Sartre’s face was familiar to people who had never seen him; his beliefs and sayings were quoted by people who had never read his books. As Sartre himself once proclaimed euphorically, “Fame is good, even at forty or fifty; fame is desirable; there is happiness, an intense enjoyment, in pushing one’s way into the spotlight like this.”

And to his enormous credit, Sartre is still relevant and celebrated. It is the totality of his work—his deliciously audacious, learned and personal essays such as those in this book, Essays in Aesthetics, as well as his great fiction like Nausea, and his great plays such as No Exit.

Sartre is acknowledged by such intellectuals as Bernard-Henri Levy as the outstanding philosopher of the twentieth century. Like millions of others, Levy has admiration for this great thinker. Levy writes that people thought Sartre the absolute intellectual, and thus they expected from him things they had never expected, and will probably never expect again from anyone else.

Sartre was only 5’3” and homely except when in the throes of commanding an awed group of friends with one of his electrifying new ideas. These boisterous sessions frequently took place in one of his favorite cafés, in his small grungy apartment, or in his beloved mother’s home, which he frequently shared. When he died in 1980 at the age of 75, fifty-thousand dazed and bereft human beings wandered after his funeral procession each feeling all together and all alone. Thirty-year-old Bernard-Henri Levy mourned with Soviet dissidents, arguing Pakistanis, paparazzi, crying housewives, Sartre’s former adversaries and so many more from all over the world. Levy asked himself with wonder how and why the great dry metallic voice of Sartre had gained a hearing in so many languages and affected so many destinies. People who had professed their hatred of the man and his ideas, accusing him of sullying France and corrupting youth, calling him “a hyena with a typewriter,” these people honored him with their passion and now with their love. This is what a truly great writer is—a sometimes frightening, always brave beacon.

The French idolize their passionate intellectuals and artists. Sartre is what they reverently call “a philosophe” as well as a timeless artist. This philosopher, creative thinker, critic, biographer, novelist, political gadfly, and playwright almost singlehandedly inspired millions of people to grapple with the philosophy and theology of atheistic existentialism. He argued that a man creates himself by his actions. Existentialism meant to him that a person’s existence precedes his essence. Each man has freedom which is not constrained or determined by his basic nature. Thus man is born neither good nor evil. In his book What Is Literature? Sartre writes, “We are no better than our life and it is by our life that we must be judged.”

Once he became a famous world figure, Sartre exerted enormous power as a public political force. Because he was a left-wing moralist who proudly saw himself as independent, he refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 to protest the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam. He also turned down a tour to lecture in the United States for the same reason.

A contrarian to his core, he enjoyed nothing better than denouncing his previous beliefs. After he broke with Soviet Communism, he continued to use Marxian analysis. He finished few writing projects and we are fortunate to have this volume of essays on aesthetics and artists’ lives—subjects among those dearest to his heart and soul. He denounces poetic writing in his book What Is Literature? and yet in Essays in Aesthetics he waxes poetic about Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures.

Sartre brought his own original thinking and prodigious writing skills to existentialism and made his modernist quest to understand the self and personal identity the hot topic of his era. His questions and answers permeate our lives and our internal monologues to this day. He was above all interested in human beings. Indeed the issues Sartre brought to the public in his swashbuckling debates and prodigious writings remain relevant to many people, including myself. The universality of what he was muddling through is still classic and important.

I have always been fascinated by the existentialists and frequently think about their theories. Sartre studied and revealed the human psyche in a unique and highly intimate way. Like the tortured nineteenth century Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (of whom he was a devoted follower), Sartre relished what philosophers call value theory—ethics and aesthetics. To me these have always been the most meaningful branches of philosophy because they help us understand ourselves.

Kierkegaard had formulated a Christian existentialism which includes the concept that with each and every one of our actions we particularize our self, and thus create a self. Therefore our existence precedes our essence. This is a highly moral view and makes each one of us responsible for our own lives—our missteps and our achievements. For Kierkegaard, the lowest stage of human development is about materialism, sensation and pleasure. This brings little or no fulfillment. Kierkegaard writes that it is through suffering that man arrives at the second stage—the ethical stage. Sartre believed the ethical stage is the highest stage of human development.

Unlike Sartre, Kierkegaard postulates a third more evolved state: Christianity, and a person arrives there again through an awareness brought about by suffering. Sartre was able to bring Kierkegaard’s philosophy to the forefront of discourse in the twentieth century, although one of Sartre’s controversial modifications is to make the ethical stage the highest stage. His is an atheistic existentialism.

Meanwhile, across the channel in England in the mid-twentieth century, rigorous, formalistic and even cold philosophers such as the logical positivists A. J. Ayer and Ludwig Wittgenstein were trying to throw value theory—Sartre’s meat and potatoes—out of the academy. Attempting to foment a revolution, they cited scientific principles and clarity. They wanted to prove that Sartre’s humanist preoccupations were not philosophy: not measurable, not empirical, too emotional. Thankfully, great French thinkers like Sartre and Albert Camus continued to explore exhilarating questions of the nature of man’s existence, his reason for being, his perception of his physical and metaphysical self, indeed his essential nature and control of his fate.

In this jewel of a collection, Essays in Aesthetics, Sartre analyzes, picks on and extols four artists—giving him the chance to demonstrate his panache with language and his great knowledge of aesthetics, that major philosophical discipline.

Sartre is nothing if not opinionated—objectivity is boring. Sartre is not. He paints brilliant word pictures of the motives and methods as well as the art and biographies of the four artists. He has the most fun lambasting Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto. He also examines the art and life of Alberto Giacometti (noting that while Giacometti sketched Sartre, the artist remarked of the philosopher’s face, “what density, what lines of force.” Upon hearing this, Sartre claims surprise, writing that he believes his features weak and ordinary.) The third artist is the great Alexander Calder, whose mobiles Sartre loved. Finally he extols the abstract painter and experimental film maker Robert Lapoujade, who with Sartre opposed the French war against the Algerians.

In this delightful volume, Sartre perhaps enjoys himself most when writing his fiery, subjective tirade about Jacobo Tintoretto, the sixteenth century Venetian. Sartre irreverently calls the great artist a “huckster-painter.” In ridiculing Tintoretto, Sartre knows whereof he speaks from both inside and out. He is an artist who courted and achieved fame as well—although he cared little for material possessions and in fact gave his money away.

Sartre’s portrait of Tintoretto is remarkably contemporary and as such is a dead ringer for the dysfunctional marriage of art and commerce in today’s art world. According to Sartre, the wily Tintoretto is a wheeler dealer who lies and pretends he doesn’t compete with his peers for commissions. Yet he lures potential customers by bragging that he paints originals for the price of reproductions.

Perhaps Sartre also has it in for Tintoretto because the painter went to school for a total of only five years and ridiculed humanist men of letters. Sixteenth century Venice had few poets and fewer philosophers, and Tintoretto irks Sartre because he refuses to have anything to do with them. The painter even wonders about their legitimacy. Sartre contemptuously writes that Tintoretto somehow doesn’t believe men of letters earn their livelihood by sweat and work.

If Sartre disapproves of Tintoretto’s business methods, he loves Calder’s mobile sculptures. Sartre rhapsodizes like a fine poet about the beauty of his friend’s work. He muses that Calder’s mobiles are “fed on air” and “vibrate in the wind like Aeolian harps.” He calls them “strange creatures halfway between matter and life,” writing that the mobiles are “neither completely living nor completely mechanical and which…constantly change but always return to their original position...like aquatic plants bent low by a stream.”

In these essays, Sartre displays an astonishing knowledge of visual art and history. It is a show of superior creativity and intellect that deserves to be rediscovered and savored. Employing a similar virtuosity of language at the end of his midlife autobiography simply titled The Words, Sartre immodestly describes his modesty: “A whole man, mode of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.”

Susan Braudy

New York, New York 2011

SUSAN BRAUDY is an author and journalist. She did graduate study in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and was an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. She blogs for The Huffington Post and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Ms. Magazine, New York Magazine and Yale University’s The New Journal. She has also been a vice president of Warner Brothers.

Susan Braudy is the author of five books; her most recent, Family Circle, The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Between Marriage and Divorce, A Woman’s Diary; This Crazy Thing Called Love, a non-fiction account of the Woodward Family; and the novels Who Killed Sal Mineo? and What The Movies Made Me Do.

Ms. Braudy lives with Joe Weintraub in New York City.

SARTRE QUOTES

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

God is dead.

The existentialist…thinks it is very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny. That my whole being cries out for God, I cannot forget.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

Hell is other people.

Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.

The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a raging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

All I have learned about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

We do not judge the people we love.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Words are loaded pistols.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing the God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.

Death is a continuation of my life without me.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite possibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

On refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964

The prize was awarded, said the academy, for “his imaginative writing which by reason of its spirit and freedom and striving for truth has exercised a far-reaching influence on our age.”

…[M]y refusal is not an impulsive gesture, as I have always declined official honors …. This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he ...