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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80)
Academics and intellectuals tend to champion particular thinkers for a decade or two. Some scholars become something of a fad—as we find, for instance, with Noam Chomsky.
When another luminary comes along, hitting on the right things at the right time, the first star usually fades into the background among all the others.
One could say this was the fate of the late, great Jean-Paul Sartre, a once extremely popular French philosopher born in Paris.
Somewhat out of fashion these days, his unique version of existentialism as presented in Being and Nothingness (1943) was the calling card for 1960s and early 70s thinkers and beatniks alienated from industrial society and traditional religion.
Existentialism speaks to a void. It suggests that mankind is uprooted from nature and exists in an absurd and essentially meaningless world.
Psychologists say that animals are bound by patterns of environmental ’stimulus and response’ but human beings apparently have a gap of nothingness between stimulus and response.
From this radical and potentially alienating freedom, Sartre says we must create meaning through personal choices and commitments.
His concept of bad faith has little or nothing to do with being a bad religious person and everything to do with being an inauthentic human being. For Sartre inauthenticity means we fool ourselves into thinking we are forced to do something when in fact we chose to do it. The old line of the exposed criminal, “I had no choice,” would be a prime instance of bad faith. Sartre would say the criminal chose to be a criminal, no matter how bad the circumstances were leading up to that choice.
The existential style was taken up by writers such as Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.
Sarte also wrote several novels, such as The Reprieve and Iron in the Soul. He was awarded but didn’t accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. » Bad Faith, Foucault (Michel), Free Will, Fromm (Erich)
On the Web:
- Video of Sartre speaking in public to French intellectuals
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