Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give life a meaning.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.” ― Nausea

“Hell is—other people!” ―  No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, novelist, screenwriter and political activist. He was a key figure in 20th-century French philosophy and a vocal proponent of Marxism and socialism. Sartre believed that human beings are “condemned to be free” since there is no Creator who is responsible for our actions. And that freedom requires us to be responsible for everything we do; to lead an authentic life that seeks experience over knowledge.

Sartre earned a doctorate in philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) where he developed a life-long friendship, sometime fractious, with fellow French philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron. In 1964 Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964.  He refused to accept it on the grounds that receiving such an award would forever limit his freedom.

Sartre’s influential works include La Nausée (1938), Being and Nothingness (1943), The Age of Reason (1944), No Exit  (1944, play), Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Saint Genet (1952). In ‘La Nausée’ – Sartre’s famous manifesto of existentialism (influenced by the German phenomenological movement) – the protagonist’s (Roquentin) nausea is the restriction of his freedom which is linked to one’s morality.

Historical Context
The term ‘existentialism’ and the movement was linked to Sartre after a 1945 lecture (possibly by Gabriel Marcel). Sartre initially refused the label, but decided to go along with it - “My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even known what Existentialism is…In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes”. But what precisely is existentialism?”

During the Second World War Sartre had direct experience of totalitarian terror which included the Nazi occupation of his home country. After the end of the occupation (DEC44) national self-auditing took place on several fronts: the unquestioned foundations of society and morality; the integrity and betrayal in relation to the Occupation; the Resistance and the Vichy Government.  New horrors changed the political landscape:  German death camps, large-scale strategic bombing of civilian territories, super-efficient ‘city-killer’ atomic bomb. New levels of human capacity for evil and destruction forced philosophical and moral questions beyond mere academic interest.

Influence of ‘Being & Time’
While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's ‘Being and Time’ (1927), which used the method of Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for examining ontology. Sartre's existentialism has been described as merely "a version of ‘Being and Time'". Criticism of Heidegger is mixed. The analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer called Heidegger a charlatan. On the other pole the American philosopher Richard Rorty ranked Heidegger among one the important philosophers of the twentieth century. The conservative British writer Roger Scruton called Being and Time a "description of a private spiritual journey" rather than genuine philosophy. Simon Critchley writes that it is impossible to understand developments in continental philosophy after Heidegger without understanding Being and Time.

I Create Myself
European 19th-century idealism looked at the transcendental self which saw the image of the self as being the reality of the nature of mind or spirit. When comes to Sartre is it a different story for there is no transcendent self, no unifying core to the self that has any enduring identity.

The three-word ‘formula’ – I Create Myself – originated in Sartre’s 1945 lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism".   The late philosophy professor Dr. Arthur Holmes remarks, “’I create myself’ with every act of thought, every experience, every sense perception. You say that sounds like a wild idea.  Keep in mind that Sartre is doing phenomenology. He's an existential phenomenologist. Not interested in some 'transcendental self' in order to provide a new foundationalism to rescue science from its relativizing tendencies (Descartes found a foundation of his existence with ideas of reason; Locke found a foundation in experience). Nor is he going be like Heidegger’s - doing a phenomenology of human existence designed as a key to perceiving ‘Dasein’ (translated as ‘existence’) as being itself. Sartre is simply doing a phenomenology of human existence for its own sake in order to gain a clear perception of universal characteristics of human existence. Of 'being'.”

For Sartre living in a world of meaningless one must create one’s meaning, one’s value.  ‘Existence precede essence’ – I must create my own nature. “I create myself”.

Sartre's Dielectric
In ‘Being & Nothingness’ Sartre uses the terms être-en-soi (Being-in-itself) and être-pour-soi (Being-for-itself) to describe the tensions between one and others.
1) être-en-soi. Being-in-itself refers to things in the world that simply ‘are’. They are inert, passive and not open to change. They are not conscious so it is neither active nor passive and harbors no potentiality for transcendence.  Being-in-itself mode of being is relevant to inanimate objects, but not to humans, who Sartre says must always make a choice.
2) être-pour-soi. Being-for-itself is non-Being (Nothingness). Refers to consciousness. Consciousness is "no-thing-ness" because it cannot be defined and it does not settle into a stable identity. The for-itself is always changing, always becoming something else by the choices that it makes. The for-itself tends to label itself or accepting labels that other people put on it - a tendency to lie to itself which Sartre calls this 'bad faith'.

Dr. Holmes opines, “‘A thing for me’ echo’s a Kantian language. The self-consciousness individual is concerned that the world is for me (for-itself). And is blocked all the time by the transience…Sartre’s play ‘No Exit’ is a must read – if you can stand it. It is a dramatic setting of hell – people living with their pasts. Dramatic picture of an individual who wants the other one for self which is negated by the other which is what it is itself (anthesis of en-soi and pour-soi). The ending line in the play is ‘L'enfer, c'est les autres’ or ‘Hell is other people’”.