Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Wisdom of Sartre
    The Wisdom of Sartre
    The Wisdom of Sartre
    Ebook122 pages3 hours

    The Wisdom of Sartre

    By Philosophical Library

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

     

    An invaluable introduction to the leading French intellectual of the twentieth century  The Wisdom of Sartre offers key excerpts from the eloquent French writer, playwright, and philosopher’s masterpiece, Being and Nothingness. From this collection, readers will discover the strongest themes in his early philosophical work: an ontological account of what it means to be human, and the role of perception, knowledge, and consciousness in the practical demands of life. Sartre’s view that man’s freedom is a unique source of both misery and pleasure and that the question of which will prevail depends on man’s awareness and commitment to his freedom is both thought provoking and timely.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilosophical Library Open Road
    Release dateSep 7, 2010
    ISBN9781453202012
    The Wisdom of Sartre

    Read more from Philosophical Library

    Related to The Wisdom of Sartre

    Titles in the series (35)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Great Morality Scam

      Jul 30, 2018

      The Great Morality Scam
      5 min read

    • Article

      Love, Objectively

      Mar 7, 2022

      Love, Objectively
      5 min read

    • Article

      Ethical Dilemma

      Jul 29, 2019

      Ethical Dilemma
      2 min read

    • Article

      Human, All Too Human

      Jul 29, 2019

      Human, All Too Human
      5 min read

    • Article

      What’s Philosophy For?

      Aug 10, 2020

      What’s Philosophy For?
      4 min read

    • Article

      Forward Thinkers

      Oct 9, 2023

      by Wolfram Eilenberger (Allen Lane, $65 hb) is out now in ebook and in hardback on October 10. Every era has its defining questions that animate the self and the world, and in the 20th century, such questions of philosophy in the Western world were f

      4 min read

    • Article

      Thought Experimenters

      Sep 1, 2023

      We tend to think of philosophers as solitary creatures. Whether it be Diogenes or Socrates, Spinoza or Rousseau, Thoreau or Nietzsche, the philosopher is by necessity a loner. Several recent books, however, remind us that philosophers can also travel

      4 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 Postmodern Books

      Nov 3, 2021

      In 1996 Andrew C Bulhak of Monash University created a computer program called the Postmodernism Generator, which automatically produces imitations of postmodernist writing. “It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically corr

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Beauty of Honesty

      Apr 16, 2019

      The Beauty of Honesty
      2 min read

    • Article

      Left Behind

      Apr 18, 2022

      There exists a strand of social thought, stretching from Georg Hegel in the 19th century through to Max Weber in the early 20th and Jürgen Habermas in the postwar era, that insists a hallmark of modernity is the differentiation of forms of human know

      7 min read

    • Article

      Errant Thought

      Mar 1, 2023

      If brown rats spoke a human language, they would coin the term rodentism to affirm their conviction that the world is their trash can. Homo sapiens, however, is convinced, with Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things,” and so we invented h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Philosophy’s Big Oversight

      Apr 17, 2023

      Philosophy’s Big Oversight
      5 min read

    • Article

      Brave And Barmy New Worlds

      Jun 24, 2021

      Brave And Barmy New Worlds
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Dizzying Labyrinth Of Credulity

      Jan 27, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM From Oracles at Delphi to Spiritualism in America Loren Pankratz Prometheus Books 2021 Hb, £25, 472pp, ISBN 9781633886681 If you have ever asked yourself “How can an

      11 min read

    • Article

      Can Humanism Save Us?

      Apr 5, 2023

      Can Humanism Save Us?
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Wisdom of Sartre

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Wisdom of Sartre - Philosophical Library

      The Wisdom of

      SARTRE

      A Selection

      Philosophical Library

      Contents

      I. THE BODY AS BEING-FOR-ITSELF FACTICITY

      II. THE BODY-FOR-OTHERS

      III. THE THIRD ONTOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE BODY

      THE WISDOM OF

      SARTRE

      Wade Baskin, Professor of Modern Languages Southeastern State College

      The wisdom of Jean-Paul Sartre has found partial expression in a stream of words which now fill more than thirty volumes. Forever exploring new path-ways to freedom, his thought transcends the limitations of class or nationality and encompasses problems common to all mankind. Though he would be the first to reject the label, those familiar with his activities call him an apostle of humanistic existentialism. His indefatigable efforts to relate his doctrine to the practical demands of living are reflected in his contributions to social and political philosophy. His uniqueness resides in his ability to use these original contributions to philosophy in creating works of the highest literary merit. His incisive words strike a responsive chord in the hearts of all men committed to the defense of human freedom and unwilling to concede, with the philosopher Michel Foucault, that not merely God but man himself—the humanist’s man—is dead.

      I was prepared at an early age to regard teaching as a priesthood and literature as a passion, he wrote in his remarkable autobiography, The Words. Books were his companions and playthings. The library was a universe captured in a mirror. He wrote his first novel at the age of eight, and he has never ceased to explore the possibilities of words. He turns with ease from creative literature to technical philosophy. His novels and plays go beyond mere illustration and elaborate concepts simply mentioned in passing or abandoned as unproductive in his formal studies. His vast output, noteworthy alike for its stylistic perfection and infinite variety, is unified by his unique vision of man in the existential situation. In his novels, dramas, essays, and philosophical treatises he studies the unique source of human misery and human grandeur—human freedom. The complexity of the Sartrean universe is the reflection of the personality of an extraordinary man with a single purpose: to play a constructive role in the universal drama in which the outcome depends on man’s awareness and commitment of his freedom.

      Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. Orphaned shortly after his birth, the ugly, walleyed boy was brought up by his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, an uncle of the great missionary. The books to which Sartre was exposed early in life were those venerated by his grandfather’s generation and placed in the patriarch’s library. Early in life Sartre was overwhelmed by the idea that salvation could be found through literary creation, but he rejected the bourgeois Catholic morality of his own generation. As a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure he reacted against the prevailing mood of Cartesian rationalism; moreover, he shared the surrealists’ delight in overturning bourgeois values and reversing meaning by identifying reality with the world of imagination and dream. He received his doctorate in philosophy, with high honors, in 1929 and embarked upon a successful teaching career. He taught in the provincial secondary schools for several years, but he was able occasionally to travel—to Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Germany—always absorbing ideas. It was in Germany that he became interested in the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Soren Kierkegaard. After his return from his period of study in Germany, he published his first philosophical and fictional works—a treatise on the Imagination (1936), and an epochal novel, Nausea (1938). He gave up his teaching position at the Lycee Pasteur in Neuilly and enlisted as a private in the army when World War II broke out. Sent to the Maginot Line, he was captured and held prisoner for several months (1940–41). Following his repatriation, he returned to his post at the Lycee Pasteur. He moved from there to the Lycee Condorcet in Paris, where he also played an active role in the resistance movement. His first play, The Flies (1943), was a protest against tyranny, yet he was able to have it produced in France during the German occupation. During the same year he outwitted the censors and published his monumental treatise on phenomenological ontology, Being and Nothingness. Vitally interested in political movements after the liberation, he founded Les Temps Modernes (1946), which publishes many of his works and serves as a platform for the expression of independent left-wing views. A legendary figure even before his major philosophical work had been translated into English (his plays had drawn huge audiences, and his essays and other fictional works, including the first volume of his Roads to Freedom, had captured the imagination of the younger generation), he traveled widely throughout the United States and lectured at various universities. His words of wisdom made him the undisputed leader of the French intellectuals of his generation. In 1949 he helped to found the Republican Democratic Rally, which collapsed in 1952. Undaunted, he has continued to turn out essays, novels, plays, and scenarios which define and dramatize existentialist views. That he has alienated many Americans in recent years—by allying himself with the War Crimes Tribunal initiated by Lord Russell, for instance, and by condemning our foreign policy as well as our handling of such domestic issues as desegregation—is undeniable. We might recall that he was no less outspoken in his condemnation of Stalinist prison camps and Soviet intervention during the Hungarian uprising. At any rate, we should credit him with complete honesty in his attempt to achieve the goal which he set for himself in his first major exposition of the philosophy of existentialism: to use his own freedom to modify the shape of the world.

      The roots of existentialism are broad and deep. While the philosophy generally associated with Sartre’s name is an epitome of a mood of our time, it is as old as man’s desire to understand himself and his surroundings. There are two opposing views of human existence, the absurd and the tragic. One who adopts the absurd view concludes that human existence is ultimately futile and without meaning, a vain challenge to the void. One who adopts the tragic view discovers purpose and meaning in the struggle to understand himself and his surroundings. It is from the latter view that Sartre now observes the human drama. Through the years he had moved from the concept of man as a useless passion incapable of respecting the freedom of others to the view that each man, in pursuing his own freedom, must pursue the freedom of all men.

      The cataclysm of two world wars produced a somber vision of human existence and made people throughout the world receptive to the dark elements of existentialist thought: alienation, self-deception, anguish (the dread of freedom or of nothingness), introspection, contingency, responsibility. It was Sartre who wedded these elements into a system and—with his novels, plays, and scenarios and critical studies—chaneled into the mainstream of artistic creation notions which had preoccupied philosophers since the days of Heraclitus.

      The first popular exposition of Sartre’s views are found in Nausea, the celebrated novel which marked a turning point in French fiction. Here existence acquires a new meaning as Antoine Roquentin, a writer, reduces it to consciousness of existence and is sickened by the chaotic, viscuous quality of his surroundings.

      Overcome when he realizes that the things around him are simply there, grotesque and meaningless, Roquentin feels totally alienated, unable to classify or confer meaning on things or events. He yearns for a solid, predictable universe to rid him of his nausea. He experiences the horror of life in the absurdity of its proliferation and longs to transcend things or to reduce them to instruments for his own use. He discovers that people hide behind their status symbols, that activities and incidents are meaningless until an unpredictable future confers significance upon them, that his life cannot be a succession of discrete, orderly moments, and, finally, that the world is wholly contingent, with the result that human existence requires him to exercise his freedom to confer meaning on his own life. Through art he may find salvation. By using his imagination to create a perfect world, he may make a commitment which will give meaning to his existence and enable him to look upon his own past without disgust.

      Readers quickly identified Roquentin with Sartre and confidently expected the philosopher to go beyond raising the hope of personal salvation, justification, or redemption through art. The journey from aesthetic hope to the rediscovery of man’s true humanity—the power to make history by pursuing his own ends, as Sartre puts it in his Search for a Method (1957)—is still incomplete. It is obvious, however, that Roquentin, the existentialist anti-hero, continues to appeal to today’s youth, who are quick to show their aversion to the pretense, self-deceit, and hypocrisy which they detect at every level of existence. Their nausea finds expression in the renunciation of contemporary values based on the absurd competitiveness which ensnares their elders, and in their espousal of the belief that honesty is a virtue, phoniness a vice.

      Nausea was an initial statement of an emergent doctrine which found systematic expression in Being and Nothingness, which represents both a massive attempt to construct an existentialist theory of being and an exhaustive study of man as the central object of philosophical inquiry. Even though it clearly exhibits strains of Kierkegaardian pessimism, Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, and German phenomenology, it bears the stamp of its author’s unique vision. From Kierkegaard, Sartre borrowed the image of man’s anguish—his awareness of his own alienation or estrangement, his abandonment in an absurd world. From Hegel came the antithetical notions of unconscious beings who exist only in themselves and of conscious beings who are capable of transcending the immediate situation by making meaningful choices leading to the attainment of projected goals, and who therefore exist for themselves and are necessarily free. Marxism inspired Sartre’s passion for action, and phenomenology his compulsion

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1