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."

[Bushbacker]

the trap is now closed. I have treated Sartre precisely as he treated Camus -

____How Sartre treated Camus or what Camus thought of Sartre was, as I said, a political quarrel between left-wingers...it is irrelevant to the issue of whether r not Sartre was a serious philosopher...and, indeed, to be hihonest, that question is really off-topic for FR.

Just because Sartre was a political whacko doesn't mean that his analysis of human consciousness is bogus. Many great thinkers have been political dunces...including, as I've noted, Martin Heidegger.

[Bushbacker]

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

___Howard Dean is a politician, Sartre was not.



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

__So was Camus and perhaps the majority of French intellectuals of that period.


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,

___Your opinion, unproven in this discussion. I find both philosophers to be worthy.

--



his collaboration with the Nazi regime was an intellectual commitment

____The fact that he could move intellectually from BEING AND TIME to Nazism doesn't make you pause?



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.

--___Sartre's CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON...his Marxist
tome..came later in his career.



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.

___I don't reject Heidegger's work because he was a political boob, and I don't think you should do the same for Sartre's.

I abhor Sartre's pro-communist views...but I don't see any taint of hese views in BEING AND NOTHINGNESS or in some other essays or his plays and novels.