Posted on 06/21/2005 7:13:35 AM PDT by Borges
PARIS - Jean-Paul Sartre, the 20th century philosopher whose influence has been on the wane, may be getting the last laugh from the grave as France battles a new existential crisis.
The 100th anniversary of the bespectacled thinker's birth on Tuesday comes amid a bout of soul searching about France's role in the world following voters' resounding rejection of the European Union constitution and turmoil in the country's fabled social welfare system.
With the word "crise" on just about everyone's lips, Sartre's legacy is being re-examined in a flurry of academic gatherings, media reports and commemorative exhibits marking the centennial, as well as the 25th anniversary of his death in April.
"Sartre can be used to decode the sickness that France is living today," said Annie Cohen-Solal, author of a best-selling biography on Sartre. "He plays the role of revealing the identity crisis."
But while Sartre's philosophy is attracting renewed interest in some circles, his status as an intellectual icon has largely faded among the general public.
The philosopher's fans mutter that his works are disappearing from the high school curriculum, and worry that his unapologetic support of controversial left-leaning causes has overshadowed his philosophy.
One of the centennial tributes, a National Library exhibit featuring letters, photos, interviews and manuscripts has drawn disappointing numbers of visitors since March, library officials said.
"France hated him when he was alive and shuns him in death," said philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, author of "Sartre — The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century." "He is treated like a pornographer."
Yet Sartre's impact is undeniable.
Admirers praise his criticism of the state, his rejection of the bourgeois society from which he emerged, and his willingness to take sharp, often unpopular, positions on political issues.
He was a co-founder of the left-leaning newspaper Liberation, established in 1973. Today it is a major newspaper in France.
One of Sartre's most enduring legacies may have been his image: that of the archetypal Parisian intellectual.
France has gone through considerable change since the days when Sartre and his illustrious companion Simone de Beauvoir contemplated life and politics at smoky Left Bank redoubts like the Cafe de Flore.
But that era is still romanticized today — even if many people know little about the philosophy it produced.
Other echoes of Sartre's France remain: He would likely have approved of the frequent labor strikes, student demonstrations and popular revolts against authority like the EU constitution vote.
Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the late French president, once explained why Sartre was never arrested for his participation in often-raucous demonstrations during the 1960s: "You don't arrest Voltaire," he said.
Sartre is credited with bringing philosophy to the street level, injecting pop-star magnetism into France's rarefied intellectual circles and raising criticism of the state to an art form.
But his missteps were equally as prominent. He defended the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and praised what he claimed was "absolute freedom" of speech in the 1950s Soviet Union before breaking with Moscow following its 1956 invasion of Hungary.
Sartre's image as rebel was reinforced when he refused to accept the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature, seeking to show his contempt for an honor he considered bourgeois.
During the Nazi occupation of France, Sartre wrote "Being and Nothingness," his treatise on existentialism, which holds that people are born without meaning to their lives and have freedom of choice to determine their "essence."
"Hell is other people," said one of his characters in "No Exit," perhaps his best-known play, one of the few that are still regularly performed in French theaters and school auditoriums.
"In his lifetime, France had two faces: that of Sartre and that of de Gaulle," Levy said. "I miss that period; we've fallen a few notches since then."
About 80,000 mourners attended Sartre's funeral in 1980.
But today on the streets, especially among the young, Sartre's significance is often overlooked. Near the Pantheon, students struggled to remember his influence, using terms that echoed his philosophy of nihilism.
"I have no recollection," said Jean-Francois Vergnoux, 22. "It's terrible — it's total emptiness when I think about him."
That is one of the most deliciously ironic, and hilarious, statements that I've seen in a while.
If nothing really matters and all societies are relative in their moral values, then we are truly lost. Christ lived a life that denied Satre's life of surrender. If Satre was right then, truly, anything is possible because it's no longer possible to call an act "evil". Eichmann (the real one, not Ward Churchill's) is the result.
L'Etre at Neant reads like a bad rehash of Heidegger by a college student who has not read Heidegger particularly well.
Sarte's "literature" is unreadable, politicized garbage, his "philosophy" is unreadable, derivative garbage, and his politics are execrable garbage.
The less said about his economic ideas, the better.
The fact is, Camus was a far more talented writer and philosopher than Sartre ever was or could be, and the neglect of Camus is far worse for France than the imagined neglect (Sartre is still celebrated in France and he was lionized while alive, despite the ridiculous comments in the article) of the cheerleader of the 1972 Munich terrorists.
Ecrasez le mediocrite!
Very well said. I've often thought that both Sartre and Foucault each read one Nietzsche book once and then based their entire philosophical outlook on that reading. That said, at least Foucault has some interesting thoughts on epistemology and ontology. Sartre just sucks.
A short drop to the bottom if there ever was one.
This makes me nauseous.
Etre at Neant reads like a bad rehash of Heidegger by a college student who has not read Heidegger particularly.
___A very glib dismissal. Have you read L'ETRE or BEING AND TIME? There are some shared concepts, but Sartre delves into human reality in a way Heidegger never did.
Sartre was a leftist kook (and Heidegger supported the Nazis) outside of his philosophy, but as a philospher, one of the giants of the 20th century....I'm not going to let my politics deny his talent.
Sure. France is in trouble, civilization is collapsing, the barbarians are at the gate, so let's all sit around feeling our existentialist angst. Marxist nihilism will really help pull us out of this mess!
I vaguely remember some of his works from college . . .
i agree with your post 100%. i like camus.
>"L'Etre at Neant reads like a bad rehash of Heidegger by a college student who has not read Heidegger particularly well."
it is a bad re-hash because sartre returned to the dualism that heidegger had worked long to reject.
It's clear to me that Sartre owes his reputation to his ability to prostitute himself to the PCF party line.
His job was to take the stale Marxist-Leninist dialectic that the French had wearied of by the 1930s and to recast it into the fashionable jargon of the 1940s and 1950s - he was an ad exec for the PCF, not a serious thinker.
Foucault actually came up with some interesting ideas - importing Nietzsche into sociology. Ultimately a fruitless endeavor, given the low quality of Nietzsche's original "insights" but something new, in any case.
Levinas was a much more intelligent and innovative philosopher than either of these, and of course, there are no news articles lamenting the neglect of Maritain, Marcel or de Lubac.
But for anyone to get an idea of how contemptible Sartre's intellectual abilities were, one merely has to compare Camus' Le Mythe de Sisyphe to Sartre's Existentialisme et Humanisme - read in sequence, one becomes aware of what a lightweight Sartre was.
Camus was a terrific writer, as was Malraux. I'm not familiar with Levinas' works. Which of his books would you suggest for a first-time reader?
That is one of the most deliciously ironic, and hilarious, statements that I've seen in a while.
That is perfect, isn't it?
When I think of him, I think of that song, "I'm a loser baby/ so why don't you kill me."
His "philosophy" is nothing but a long invitation to suicide.
I've read both.
There are some shared concepts, but Sartre delves into human reality in a way Heidegger never did.
I am of the opinion that neither delved very deep into lived reality at all.
as a philospher, one of the giants of the 20th century
Simply untrue.
Name one original insight or analysis he contributed.
Just one.
Heidegger, who also aligned himself with institutionalized evil, at least managed to develop several original vocabularies and platforms of analysis that others have found useful.
Sartre has nothing to offer other thinkers, because he was a parasite of others' thought - not an original thinker himself. Quite frankly, his work is embarrassingly trite.
I beg to differ. There is nothing "long" about Sartre's "invitation to suicide."
I had to sit through a college production of "Being and Nothingness" and I was ready to do myself in after 20 minutes.
Bears repeating. He was a better man as well.
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