Sartre, Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French existentialist; a Marxist philosopher, dramatist, and novelist; and a major political figure on the French Left during the 1950s and 1960s. His chief works of relevance for social theory include L'ego et la Transcendance (The Ego and Transcendence, 1937), l'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), “l'Existentialisme est un humanisme” (“Existentialism and Humanism,” 1946), and Critique de la Raison Dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason—Vol. 1, 1960; Vol. 2, 1985). He was also the founder-editor of the journal Temps Modernes. His most important philosophical influences were French Hegelianism and the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger.

Sartre's existentialism, which he developed over the first part of his life, achieved a wide popularity, especially through his novels (La Nausée [Nausea], 1938), and l'Age de la Raison (The Age of Reason, 1945), and plays (les Mouches [The Flies], 1943; Huis Clos [No Exit], 1944). It was underpinned, at the same time, by a complex philosophy that he continually developed. Very different philosophers can be lumped together under the label “existentialist,” and about the only thing they have in common is summed up in the slogan “existence precedes essence,” the direct opposite of Descartes' “I think, therefore I am.” We cannot assume anything about the nature of human beings; there is no a priori essence or human nature from which we can derive an understanding of human thought and action.

Sartre's early work is concerned with developing an ontology, a philosophy of Being. What is Being? And what sort of Being exists in the world? In keeping with Heidegger's (1962) Being and Time. Being—a subjectless verb—is to be distinguished from beings, or particular entities, and is to be studied through the rigorous inspection of human consciousness. Sartre developed a critique, however, of Husserl and his pupil, Heidegger, that led him to posit a radical freedom and a radical individualism. For Husserl, consciousness constituted its object, just as, for modern social constructionists, language or discourse constitutes its objects. Sartre argued that if this was the case, then consciousness could only ever be conscious of itself. Yet consciousness is always consciousness of something, a relation to something else. This something else must transcend the individual ego. He argued that consciousness was a “Nothingness,” a hole in the solidity of Being. Consciousness (the “for-itself”) is only a relationship to Being (the “in-itself”); most important, Being cannot determine consciousness—there is nothing between the two, no channel through which Being can seep into consciousness, no causal mechanism by means of which it can determine actions and thoughts. Consciousness itself is negation. If I look around my study and think that I would like to change it in some way, I am negating what is there and positing something different in a free act that is not determined by anything operating on my consciousness. This ability to negate is my freedom. There is a sense in which my freedom is an unbearable burden and I seek to lose it in my relationship with Being. My consciousness and freedom are always in relation to a situation. I have no choice but to choose a relation to the situation in which I find myself. I am condemned to be free. Even if I am hung upside down and left to die, I must adopt a relationship to the situation of my death. This choice is not something I think about or decide on; it does not happen at a cognitive level, but at a prereflective level. Consciousness is split. The prereflective is seen by Sartre as a flight toward Being, a solidity that can never be achieved, and the relationship between the reflective and prereflective is like that between two mirrors, constantly reflecting each other. Consciousness has no content; there is no unconscious, and it relates to everything, including the ego, the self, and language, as external objects.

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