Sartre Enjoying Reappraisal at Centennial

Yahoo - AP ^ | 6/21/05 | JAMEY KEATEN

[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."

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

'It is the best of all possible worlds.'

Then there was Candide...

[Bushbacker]

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

___It is an article, not a philosophical treatise, and Sartre's philosophical position is to be found in BEING AND NOTHINGNESS. "Existentialism is a Humanism" is just a superficial summary.

[Bushbacker]

In other words, you are confused enough to think that anyone who writes novels cannot also do philosophy.

___Of course. Sartre wrote NAUSEA AND NO EXIT. But Camus never wrote an extended work of philosophy that begins with fundamental premises and builds a system.


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?

_____I think Camus was a man of literature who had a philosophical bent, but not a philosopher.



And I expect that you consider John Locke's monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to have no philosophical value?

__As an essay, yes.


Is Sartre now disqualified from being considered a hack philosopher because he was also a hack playwright and a hack Marxist essayist?

____I part company with his Marxist phase, but BEING AND NOTHINGNESS is a profound and basically apolitical work.



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.

____I like Camus. THE REBEL was impressive, particularly. But Camus was not writing in the Continental philosophical tradition that Sartre was extending.





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.

_____I don't admire Sartre's politics, only his intellect.



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.

___THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS was not a work of comprehensive philosophy.

[Bushbacker]

You can't possibly have read BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
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.

___I'm not embarrassed, but you should be if you came away from your reading with such a take on Sartre.



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!

___You're entitled to your opinion but it sure sounds like that of a Philistine.

[wideawake]

It is an article, not a philosophical treatise, and Sartre's philosophical position is to be found in BEING AND NOTHINGNESS. "Existentialism is a Humanism" is just a superficial summary.

You keep repeating yourself.

Examine what you imply: that while Heidegger, a real philosopher, was capable of pithily expressing deep concepts in the public lecture format your hero Sartre, a hack, was only able to present superficial crap.

L'Etre was published three years before he presented Existentialisme - the latter is a summary of the superficial mess that L'Etre is.

"Being for oneself", "being for the other", the problem of "nothingess" - I ask again: supply one conceptual breakthrough that L'Etre represents in comparison to SuZ or even Jaspers' desultory exploration of Existenz.

You can't, because there isn't any. So you are left with your sad strategy of badmouthing Existentialisme in favor of L'Etre without supplying a shred of evidence from L'Etre that it is in any way superior to Existentialisme.

[wideawake]

Camus never wrote an extended work of philosophy that begins with fundamental premises and builds a system.

Neither did Nietzsche. Nor did Plato. Nor did Leibniz. Nor did the mature Wittgenstein.

Are they disqualified from being philosophers as well?

As an essay, yes.

What do you mean by this statement? That Locke's Essay was not philosophy because it is an essay? Really?

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS is a profound and basically apolitical work

While L'Etre never specifically mentions politics, it was written to provide a new philosophical underpinning for Marxism in the wake of Hegelianism's demise.

And while you continually claim profundity for L'Etre you offer no examples.

But Camus was not writing in the Continental philosophical tradition that Sartre was extending.

?!?

Perhaps because Camus was explicitly questioning the continuing usefulness of that tradition?

I don't admire Sartre's politics, only his intellect.

His meagre intellect was swamped in politics - they are not separable, unless one believes that politics has nothing to do with thought. No modern philosopher has attached himself as slavishly to a political party as Sartre did to the PCF.

Even the Nazi-sympathizer Heidegger tried to reinterpret Nazi ideology to fit his philosophy, not the other way around.

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS was not a work of comprehensive philosophy.

Again, who cares?

Neither was Zur Genealogy der Moral (Genealogy of Morals), neither was Phaidros (Phaedrus), neither were the Blue and Brown Books.

The criterion of philosophical achievement is not a neat, systematic treatise - it is the introduction of bold new analyses of existence.

I can't believe you honestly think that one cannot be a philosopher unless one conforms to the Kantian model of highly structured treatises.

And you have the nerve to call me a Philistine.

[wideawake]

you should be if you came away from your reading with such a take on Sartre

Translation: one should always come away from reading a philosophical work with an attitude of slavish obeisance and author-worship.

A critical attitude is an embarrassing trait for a student of philosophy.

Unbelievable.

[Bushbacker]

You keep repeating yourself.

__So do you.



Examine what you imply: that while Heidegger, a real philosopher, was capable of pithily expressing deep concepts in the public lecture format your hero Sartre,

___He is NOT my "hero." I simply
respect him as a philosopher. Merleau-Ponty, however, is closer to my preferences.



a hack, was only able to present superficial crap.

____No...he was simply attempting to present his ideas in a wider, more popular forum...

L'Etre was published three years before he presented Existentialisme - the latter is a summary of the superficial mess that L'Etre is.

----"Superficial mess?" Statements like that make me doubt that you read the work.



"Being for oneself", "being for the other", the problem of "nothingess" - I ask again: supply one conceptual breakthrough that L'Etre represents in comparison to SuZ or even Jaspers' desultory exploration of Existenz.
You can't, because there isn't any.

=____Sartre's philosophy captures the confrontation of consciousness with a world out of control and full of terrors (like the Holocaust) and he creates a systematic way of comprehending it.



So you are left with your sad strategy of badmouthing Existentialisme

___I don't "badmouth" it, I simply don't think it can be used as a touchstone for Sartre's thinking.



in favor of L'Etre without supplying a shred of evidence from L'Etre that it is in any way superior to Existentialism.

____Oh, come on....the conceptual detail is far sketchier.

[Bushbacker]

And you have the nerve to call me a Philistine.

---You are.

[Bushbacker]

should be if you came away from your reading with such a take on Sartre



Translation: one should always come away from reading a philosophical work with an attitude of slavish obeisance and author-worship.
A critical attitude is an embarrassing trait for a student of philosophy.

Unbelievable.

__YYour critical terminology in dealing with Sartre---who won the Nobel Prize even though he refused it...is juvenile and crass.

O am not a worshiper of Sartre...I am a Christian conservative and he was an atheist Marxist...but I respect his talent, his intellect,
and I am glad he is being reappraised after a period of neglect.

[wideawake]

Sartre's philosophy captures the confrontation of consciousness with a world out of control and full of terrors (like the Holocaust) and he creates a systematic way of comprehending it.

Not a very substantive claim, but it sounds really nice.

I'll just note in passing that Sartre was (1) unaware of the systematic nature of the Holocaust at the time of his writing, since when he began he and other Stalinists were pro-Hitler and the Wannsee conference (the beginning of the Final Solution) was held only while he was writing.

(2) He was a supporter of Stalin's show trials, starvation policies, liquidation of the kulaks as a class, etc. I tend to doubt that L'Etre really addresses anything other than Sartre's own prejudices and whims. It certainly reads as self-indulgent pablum.

(3) Sartre learned so much from his deep philosophical explorations on human responsibility in the face of horror that he supported the slaughter of the Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Heidegger, Brentano, to a certain extent Husserl, Stein, Marcel, Levinas and Jaspers preceded him in this project and addressed these questions in an original way.

Again, I ask you to supply a concrete analytical insight from the pages of L'Etre that is not immediately derivative of works published in the 10-15 years preceding it.

You are apparently unable to accede to this request - I guess it's another manifestation of my Philistinism to request substance.

---You are

LOL!!!

Will your next post include a "nyah-nyah-nyah" for good measure?

[wideawake]

Your critical terminology in dealing with Sartre---who won the Nobel Prize even though he refused it...is juvenile and crass.

Whether or not he won a Nobel Prize is immaterial - the Nobel Prize is often awarded to forgettable authors who accomplished little in real terms.

My terminology is "crass" and "juvenile" - I'd call it blunt and unpretentious, but to each his own.

Here's your hero Sartre's assessment of Camus:

Your combination of dreary conceit and vulnerability always discouraged people from telling you unvarnished truths… . Tell me, Camus, for what mysterious reasons may your works not be discussed without taking away humanity’s reasons for living? How serious you are, and yet, to use one of your old words, how frivolous! And suppose you are wrong? Suppose your book simply attested to your ignorance of philosophy? Suppose it consisted of hastily assembled and secondhand knowledge? … Are you so afraid of being challenged? … But I don’t dare advise you to consult Being and Nothingness. Reading it would seem needlessly arduous to you: you detest the difficulties of thought.

I see you have begun your rhetoric with your master's.

Camus' offense, like mine, was to disagree with the trite, faux-profonde pretensions of L'Etre - but, in Sartre's mind (like yours) anyone who called Sartre on his thought's derivativeness and failure to address fundamental issues rigorously must not have read or must be incapable of reading his magnum opus.

Anyone who fails to be impressed by Sartre's self-indulgent posing is simply unintelligent.

[x]

"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."

Sartre sold very well in France, and had plenty of disciples. And Levy has certainly made a splash in Europe with his book. What BHL is probably saying is that Sartre weren't as influential in France as he would have wanted them to be. Sartre -- and BHL himself -- probably weren't as popular as BHL wanted them to be, either.

Since they were both men of large egos, that's not surprising. Sartre's "homeland," though, wasn't so much a country as a class or stratum of society worldwide. What he lost in influence at home among most people, he picked up abroad among his foreign followers.

But many American writers would give his eye teeth to be as "hated" and "shunned" in his native land as Jean-Paul Sartre was in France. He came pretty close to being a household word for a time. That could be because he wasn't just a writer, but a political figure and something like the "brand name" attached to a small but vocal part of society.

It might have been preferable for Sartre to go on writing fiction and drama, than to turn out theoretical tomes, political tracts, and existentialist literary criticism. His writing in the 1940s wasn't bad, and it got people thinking. There may have been more for him to say in novels or stories or on the stage.

It's likely that Sartre got spooked. Scared by that whole "existential aloneness" thing, and scared by the demands of an artistic career and literary reputation, he retreated from art into ideology and became a priest in a Marxist-Existentialist cult of his own devising.

There's a thin line between using words to recapture and explain the world and using words to explain away the world and give oneself a privileged and protected status apart from it. Sartre crossed over that line and created a theoretical corpus as personal armor to protect him from the outside world.

But perhaps Sartre hit a wall in his creative work. His life largely was books and reading, and his "real life" was lived amongst people for whom ideologies and political stances were more important than "real world" perceptions and relationships. In this he wasn't so different from American novelists who have their big hit and then find that fame and the literary millieu cut them off from the environment and situation that engendered their successful early work.

In his later years Sartre turned his back on some of his earlier ideas. He didn't officially recant but seemed to look on the earlier JPS as someone else, whose stances and poses and slogans didn't have much to do with his own understanding of the world.

[beckett]

Respect his intellect? Gag me with a spoon.

Pardon me, you seem like a nice lady but you're way out of your depth on this thread. Sartre was a jackass who made zero, zip, nada contributions to philosophy. Anything that may have appeared novel with him was actually just re-packaged stuff from Kierkegaard. His impenetrable prose was seldom worth parsing. He was a longwinded, coke-bottled glasses, excessively weak and self-centered man who added only to the confusion of his age.

He will be forgotten.

[Bushbacker]

Yes, Sartre did not know of the Holocaust when he wrote BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, and, yes, he was a frar leftist...He can be viewed without political spin, however, unkless you prefer to totally discredit Heidegger because of his endorsement of Nazism.

[Bushbacker]

Here's your hero Sartre's assessment of Camus

____He broke with Camus, so what..it was a family quarrel on the French left...and Sartre is not a hero of mine. Your tendency address the issues in these terms is evidence of intellectual immaturity.

[dennisw]

1. When the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, seen here in 1967, died in 1980, some 50,000 people attended his funeral in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery, but the hundredth anniversary of his birth passed off with little comment in France(AFP/File)
   AFP/File - Jun 21 11:21 AM
   
   

   ---

2. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, right, and his companion Simone de Beauvoir attend a reception in Paris in 1974. Sartre, the 20th century philoshopher whose influence has been on the wane, may be getting the last laugh from the grave as France battles a new existentialist crisis. (AP Photo)
   AP - Jun 20 7:49 AM

[Bushbacker]

Pardon me, you seem like a nice lady but you're way out of your depth on this thread. Sartre was a jackass who made zero, zip, nada contributions to philosophy.

____Only if you write the whole
history of European phenomelogical philosphy off...



Anything that may have appeared novel with him was actually just re-packaged stuff from Kierkegaard. His impenetrable prose

__I never had any trouble with it...maybe you're just not attuned to reading philosophy?



was seldom worth parsing. He was a longwinded, coke-bottled glasses, excessively weak and self-centered man who added only to the confusion of his age.

+++Yeah, he wore glasses and he was wall-eyed, too...very astute of you...

[wideawake]

He broke with Camus, so what..it was a family quarrel on the French left...

And why did he break with Camus? Because Camus had the temerity to point out that Sartre's simplistic formulation of the nature of freedom was inadequate.

Rather than engage this challenge intellectually, he spread nasty, untrue rumors about Camus among their circles of mutual friends, used his influence to have Camus banned from several leading publications and societies and used his celebrity as a platform to personally trash Camus.

Your tendency address the issues in these terms is evidence of intellectual immaturity.

And the trap is now closed. I have treated Sartre precisely as he treated Camus - except that my accusations are accurate and documented, unlike Sartre's.

If you're going to condemn me as intellectually immature, then you must also include Sartre in your condemnation.

[wideawake]

He can be viewed without political spin, however,

I'm sure Howard Dean can be viewed without political spin as well - except that neither he nor Sartre wanted to be seen outside of their politics.

As Sartre himself said, he was "preeminently a man of the Left."

unkless you prefer to totally discredit Heidegger because of his endorsement of Nazism

Heidegger should always be viewed with deep suspicion on this account - while he, unlike Sartre, was an extremely creative and original thinker, his collaboration with the Nazi regime was an intellectual commitment and one which he reconciled with his philosophical viewpoint - he made Nazism, at least temporarily, part of his philosophical project just as Sartre permanently made Marxism a part of his.

One cannot assess a thinker without assessing at least all the work he consciously decided to publish.

the case can also be made that Heidegger's celebrated Kehre was in part a reaction to his disastrous foray into politics.