Philosophy of Jean Paul Sarte

1. Jean Paul Sartre
AGNES F. MONTALBO | DTE | October 5, 2017
DR. PEDRITO PLACIO
ADVANCED WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

2. Biographical basics
Born in Paris, June 21, 1905
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre
Father’s death (when JPS was 1) had
significant effect
Intellect > physical unattractiveness
Early writer (and never stopped!)
Sociable to peers, rebellious
against authority (grandfather,
school officials, military conscription)

4. • Sartre suffered problems with his eyes. In 1909 (4 years old) he
caught a cold which led to a leucoma in his right eye and strabism.
• His life changed radically at age eleven when his mother remarried; at
age 12 he joined her at La Rochelle, where his stepfather, Joseph
Mancy directed a shipyard.

5. JPS and Simone de Beauvoir
Met at Ecole Normale Superieure – tutor for exams
Passionate, intellectual, lifelong relationship
Never married; often apart; accepted affairs

6. Breznev, Soviet Union
With Che Guevarra

7. With Fidel Castro

8. Influence of WWII
Served for France; captured in June, 1940
Put in German prison camp
Escaped in March, 1941
Joined French Resistance movement

9. • After he escaped, he told Beauvoir
that he no longer saw his work as
separate from the social and political
circumstances in which he lived; he
was convinced that it must be rooted
in the present situation and directed
toward the cause of socialist
revolution.
• This marks the beginning of a new
period in his career, characterized by
his awareness of historicity.
• For ten year or so his literary activity
increased; the 1940s are par
excellence the decade of Sartrean
existentialism.

10. Post-war years
Sartre himself moves to the left politically
Existentialism takes off as a philosophy
JPS wins Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964,
refuses it
“A writer must refuse to allow
himself to be transformed into an
institution.”

11. • After Sartre became unable to pursue
his reading and writing, he turned to
other lines of activity; music (for which
he was very fond); conversations with
Beauvoir and other friends, giving
additional interviews and political
activities such as marching and signing
petitions.
• He remained enthusiastic about the
Maoist in France, with whom he had
earlier collaborated.

12. • He died in April 1980 after suffering for
some time from circulatory and other
difficulties.

13. (some of)
Sartre’s WritingsNovels
• Nausea (1938)
• The Age of Reason (1945); The
Reprieve (1947); Troubled Sleep
(1950) (3 parts of a 4-part
series)
Plays
• The Flies (1943)
• No Exit (1944)
• The Respectful Prostitute (1947)
• The Condemned of Altona (1960)
Biography & literary criticism
• Baudelaire (1947)
• Saint Genet (1952)
• The Idiot of the Family (on
Flaubert) (1971)
Autobiography: Words (1963)
Philosophical works
• The Transcendence of the Ego (1937)
• The Psychology of the Imagination
(1940)
• Being & Nothingness (1943)
• “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946)
• Search for a Method (1957)
• The Critique of Dialectical Reason
(Vol. I, 1960; Vol. II, 1985)

14. EXISTENTIALISM BEFORE SARTRE
• SOREN KIERKEGAARD (1813- - 1855)
• He is a Danish Christian Existentialist philosopher. Existentialist themes: focus on
absurdity of certain lifestyles and belief systems, the necessity of our choosing
who we want to be without reason as a guide, individual choice, giving life our
own meaning, total engagement in a project we decide upon
• FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900),
• He is a German/Swiss philosopher. His belief system focused on the awareness
that God does not exist ("God is dead!"). According to him ethics is a human
creation and should serve human needs. God's nonexistence, ethical conflict,
individuality is the central role of humanity. Christian ethics is used destructively:
represses our instincts, keeps us from the pleasures of the body, and makes us
focus on an otherworldly existence rather than on becoming the best sort of
people we can on earth. He advocated a new sort of morality based on individual
excellence and the Übermensch (Superman).

16. • EVERYTHING HAS AN ESSENCE AND OUR ESSENCE EXIST IN US BEFORE WE WERE BORN
• ESSENCE GIVE US PURPOSE WE WERE BORN TO BE A CERTAIN THING – ESSENTIALISM

17. FIRST we simply exist –THEN we create the
nature of who and what we are
• WHAT IF WE EXIST
FIRST?
• WHAT IF WE WERE
BORN WITHOUT ANY
HARDWIRED
PURPOSE AND THEN
IT IS UP TO US TO
FIGURE OUT OUR
OWN ESSENCE?

18. • The existentialist are not atheist, some are like Kierkegaard. God may exist
but instilling us with a purpose or meaning is not included as a work of God.
We are each born in a world in which our words and action lack ANY
INHERENT importance this is what they call the ABSURD.

19. • We are creatures who need meaning but we are abandoned in a
universe full of meaninglessness. The world wasn’t created for a
reason and it doesn’t exist for a reason.

21. We are painfully free, Sartre we are condemned to be free.
Any situation in which one finds oneself is his own creation
therefore, one creates his own world by supplying the meanings, the interpretations,
the significance for things and events since the world is the product of my choice,
I and and I alone bear responsibility for the world

22. it means that we have to accept the full weight of your freedom in the light of the
absurb, you have to recognize that every meaning in your life has is given to it by
you. And if you decide to follow on the path that other people has set, like parents,
teachers or religion, you have bad faith.

23. Bad Faith
• not a value judgment (bad vs. good)
• Sartre’s conception of self-deception
• the deliberate creation in oneself of the appearance of a belief which
one in fact knows to be false
• people oftentimes lie to themselves: “I am not an alcoholic,” says the
alcoholic
You can live in bad faith by not taking responsibility for actions, by
pretending as if your actions are the result of genetics or environment
or human nature or the actions of others, etc., by acting not as if you
are choosing for all people, etc.,

24. Existentialese 101
Being-in-itself: inanimate objects
(observer creates “essence”)
Being-for-itself:
human consciousness
(one chooses his/her “essence”)
Bad faith
to see ourselves as determined by an outside
influence: our nature, our body, the physical
world, and/or the expectations and pictures
others have of us

25. More of Sartre’s ideas, on . . .
• FREEDOM is the central and unique potentiality which constitutes us
as human. Sartre rejects determinism, saying that it is our choice how
we respond to determining tendencies.
• CHOICE. I am my choices. I cannot not choose. If I do not choose, that
is still a choice. If faced with inevitable circumstances, we still choose
how we are in those circumstances.

26. Responsibility
• RESPONSIBILITY. Each of us is responsible for everything we do. If we
seek advice from others, we choose our advisor and have some idea
of the course he or she will recommend. "I am responsible for my
very desire of fleeing responsibilities."

27. No Exit
Written in 2 weeks in 1944
Literal translation = the French
equivalent of the legal term in camera,
referring to a private discussion behind
closed doors
"Hell is other people" (from the novel No
Exit). He believed that the master/slave
relationship defined the human condition
in every dimension.
Sartre’s No Exit is a great example of individual
responsibility; three characters end up in hell
together, as a result of their own cowardly and
selfish actions. They try to dodge their
responsibility throughout the play, but in the
end, they must face the fact that they have no
one to blame but themselves for their
damnation.

28. Being and Nothingness
Written in 1943
(Freedom and Responsibility)
War: “There are no innocent victims”
Why was I born?
Sartre is making the point
that at every step in life’s
journey we make the choice
as to what happens to us.
You may be “obligated” to
participate in a war due to
conscription or defense, but
you could always desert or
kill yourself, too. “For lack
of getting out of it, I have
CHOSEN it.”
I didn’t ask to be born
You might try to abandon your
responsibility by saying this. Sartre argues
you can’t escape choice. Even if you want to
abandon responsibility and be passive, you
are still making that decision, which allocates
responsibility to you. Even if you resent being
alive, you recognize you are alive, and Sartre
claims that in a way this means you choose
life. Everything comes back to CHOICE

29. Existentialism is Humanism
Written in 1946
“confronts man with a possibility of choice.”
there is no ultimate truth,
you are free to make your
own decisions and create
your own meaning. Our
lives have meaning
because we choose to
make them so! “There is no
reality except in action!”
“meaninglessness,” what existentialists
mean is that life on its own (as in the
basic biological function) has no
meaning. Meaning develops from the
actions we take, and no external factors.
Interestingly, Sartre also
claims that when we make choices
for ourselves, we are making
choices for all of humanity; when
we make decisions for ourselves,
we are acting as we think all
people should act; we are creating
our ideal image of humanity (“in
fashioning myself I fashion man).
This gives us as individuals a
massive amount of responsibility.

30. Humans are at their best:
rebelling against impersonal society
taking responsibility
not making excuses