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."
Are you think of 'No Exit'? That's the play. Being and Nothing ness is a long philosphical treatise.
For your sake, I hope that you are joking.
One of his important contributions is that he incorporated religious concerns into his analysis (he was influenced by and influenced Martin Buber and he commented secularly on the Talmud) and that he focused on knowability in the sense of kennen - i.e. I come to "know" the Other in the sense that I come to know a friend or an enemy, not in the sense that I "know" a fact or a datum.
You can see a strong Heideggerian influence in his use of language and his distrust of traditional metaphysics.
Rimmer: Sartre said that hell is being locked up in a room forever with your friends.
Lister: Yeah, but his mates were French.
SD
Sartre was a jackass. His reputation will sink into oblivion, no matter what anybody, including the above author, says.
As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a "collaborator"; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He fully realised that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance--or perhaps his death--would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother's behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, where as anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. For instance, to set out for England he would have to wait indefinitely in a Spanish camp on the way through Spain; or, on arriving in England or in Algiers he might put into an office to fill up forms. Consequently, he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous--and it might be frustrated on the way. At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debatable validity. He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour, deny your self for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular person to live? Who can give an answer to that à priori? No one. Nor is it given in any ethical scripture. The Kantian ethic says, Never regard another as a means, but always as an end. Very well: if I remain with my mother, I shall be regarding her as the end and not as a means: but by the same token I am in danger of treating as means those who are fighting on my behalf; and the converse is true, that if I go to the aid of the combatants I shall be treating them as the end at the risk of treating my mother as a means.
This is embarrassingly shallow analysis.
In what way, precisely, is Sartre's pupil making his mother a "means" by joining DeGaulle?
Since when does the New Testament say that the "hardest" way is necessary rather than the way most conformed to God's will?
Why can't the pupil help his mother while secretly joining the underground resistance within France?
His use of Christ and Kant here is glib and shallow, he creates a fake hypothetical with only two choices, and basically builds a straw man badly in order to support his painfully weak thesis, a thesis which ignores the challenges presented by Berkeley and Hume entirely.
Good point.
When Richard Rorty explicitly tackles the question of who are the "giants of the twentieth century," Sartre is not even on the radar screen.
And Rorty is in political lockstep with Sartre, so that's relatively telling.
Admittedly, I am not studied on any of their works to the point I could discuss in detail. But, I have always looked at these guys as developing a philosophy to rationalize their country's behavoir during World War II, the evacaution of Jewish children and Jews, while France capitulated.
It may be easier to live with yourself if your philosophy is that "nothing matters," when you yourself or your countryment were tacitly complicit in the deaths of innocents. For Sartre and the like, I have always been of the opinion that his philosophy did not rise in isolation as solely an intellectual pursuit, but rather was a mechanism to rationalize his country's shameful conduct during the War.
Nietzsche at least faced up to what nihilism meant for the future of humanity. The incoherent Nietzschean Marxism of Foucault doesn't. It's the Disneyland version of Nietzsche. It assures us that all will be well once the Last Man achieves sexual satisfaction.
Of course, vulgar Marxism is true Marxism. Non-vulgar Marxism has merely appropriated the concern for culture to further the great cause of liberation, which now evidently means the self-satisfaction of the Last Man.
his work is embarrassingly trite.
__You can't possibly have read BEING AND NOTHINGNESS..you must hav read "Existentialism is a Humanism," which is a journalistic piece and is superficial.
1
Camus was a far more talented writer and philosopher than Sartre ever was or could be.
___Camus was an essayist and a novelist, not a philosopher.
I hope that you are joking.
__What do you know about phenomenology?
I'll quote a chunk of his Existentialisme et Humanisme in translation
___People who know nothing of Sartre invariably quote this piece of journalism. It was a pop article Sartre wrote, not a philosophical treatise.
"Camus was an essayist and a novelist, not a philosopher."
In The Fall and the Stranger Camus demonstrated that sometime in any persons life they will be confronted with moral choices and failure to make a choice leads to madness or death.
He was a romantic moralist in the classic French tradion as one commentor noted many years ago although the citation goes back to far for me to provide the source.
This observation is particularily a propos given that Sartre was a proponent of the Aragonist (Stalinist) wing of the French left and broadcasted on the radio under German supervision while Camus worked for the French resistence in Algeria and on the French mainland.
If Camus had not died in a car crash in the early sixties the historical assessment of Camus vs Sartre would be quite different.
Only that it is as poor a substitute for philosophy as astrology is for astronomy.
(1) Dismissing the work as "pop" (a) shows that you are avoiding the issue with Gallic contempt rather than confronting the fact that your emperor is naked and (b) ignores the question of whether Heidegger, Kant, Bergson, et al. wrote "pop" articles - are serious thinkers in the habit of writing clumsy "pop" pieces? The fact that you assume Sartre did this is telling.
(2) This article (the actual title is, as I checked my shelves last night, Existentialisme est un humanisme), far from being "pop", is considered Sartre's most succinct statement of his philosophical position. There is no biographer or analyst of Sartre's philosophy who has not commented on this piece in depth.
(3) Far from being a "pop" article (you make it sound as if he wrote it for Maxim) it is the text of a public lecture he gave on his philosophical position in 1946.
Heidegger gave many similar public lectures, but I don't think the one he gave entitled Was ist das - die Metaphysik? (translated in the US as "What is Metaphysics?") is considered "pop" - rather it is taken as a condensed statement of his metaphysical thinking.
Give us a break.
That's it exactly...
In other words, you are confused enough to think that anyone who writes novels cannot also do philosophy.
What is the difference between an essayist and a philosopher? Are not many philosophical treatises, and some of the best at that, essays?
Do Hume's Essays Moral and Political make him just an essayist and not a philosopher?
I assume Kierkegaard and Plato, who deigned to couch philosophical discourse in fictional settings are therefore not philosophers either, but novelists?
And I expect that you consider John Locke's monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to have no philosophical value?
Is Sartre now disqualified from being considered a hack philosopher because he was also a hack playwright and a hack Marxist essayist?
The fact is, Camus is universally acknowledged as a philosopher and his ideas - especially as encapsulated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe - were far more fresh in his day and far more relevant in our own than anything Sartre ever scribbled.
One measure of Camus' true stature was his decision to break from the lemminglike adoration of Marxism that Sartre and his other mediocre contemporaries practiced.
Most tellingly, Sartre published L'Etre et le Neant the year after Camus published Mythe and much of the criticism of L'Etre in the press at the time mentioned its failure to address the aporia of free will and determinism in the existentialist project - a problem Mythe had already raised the year before.
Sartre the philosopher was playing catch-up with the mere novelist Camus and losing.
I've read l'Etre et le Neant in the French, thanks.
You have absolutely no idea what I have or have not read and if you're wise, you'll refrain from such embarrassing presumption in future.
Guess what, genius?
I've read a book you claim to have read and I came away with an entirely different opinion! In real life, it sometimes happens that not everyone is as easily gulled by hacks as you are!
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