What are the basic philosophies and beliefs of Jean Paul Sartre?

"Jean Paul Sartre." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.


Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. (check your local library Web site for access)





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From 1933 to 1935 Sartre was a research student at the Institut Fran莽ais in Berlin and in Freiburg. He discovered the works of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and began to philosophize in the phenomenological vein. A series of works on the modalities of consciousness poured from Sartre's pen: two works on imagination, one on self-consciousness, and one on emotions. He also produced a first-rate volume of short stories, The Wall (1939).





In 1960 Sartre returned to philosophy, publishing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason. It represented essentially a modification of his existentialism by Marxist ideas. The drift of Sartre's earlier work was toward a sense of the futility of life. In Being and Nothingness he declared man to be "a useless passion," condemned to exercise a meaningless freedom. But after World War II his new interest in social and political questions and his rapprochement with Marxist thought led him to more optimistic and activist views.|||Rather than quote excerpts or speak of his philosophy as if you already understand it, I'll give you this:





He is famous for saying that existence precedes essence, which means that we are not born with a defined identity that limits us. As a very superficial example, just because I am born to a family of scientists does not mean I am going to become one as well; as a deeper example, just because I am a human being does not mean I am obligated to satisfy a social definition of what it is to be human. Similarly, Sartre finds a problem with those who see others as their roles, i.e. identifying a cashier as nothing more than one who works at a cash register to serve your needs, rather than as an equally free being. (This is actually the foundation of his ethics, where others are recognized as free individuals.) There is much more to this aspect of his thinking, but to sum it up: because we are free, we are defined solely by ourselves.





It is important to note, however, that he also does not exactly approve of self-definition. When we confine ourselves to particular systems (roles, principles, etc.), we are reducing ourselves from the "for-itself" (free being) to the "in-itself" (in short, a defined object), a process he calls "bad faith." According to Sartre, this is a retreat from the reality of the formlessness of our consciousness because of our fear, anxiety, and despair over our freedom and the responsibilities that lie therein. An example of bad faith would be, to use a previous case again, limiting oneself to the role of cashier.





Along with his philosophical work, he produced some fiction, most notably Nausea, to capture the essence of his philosophy in practice. I suggest reading Being and Nothingness, Existentialism Is a Humanism, The Transcendence of the Ego, and Nausea to get the full view of his thought.|||Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology) is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre that is regarded as the beginning of the growth of existentialism in the 20th century. The French title is L'脢tre et le n茅ant : Essai d'ontologie ph茅nom茅nologique. Its main purpose was to define consciousness as transcendent.


The basis of Sartre's existentialism is found in The Transcendence of the Ego. To begin with, the thing-in-itself is infinite and overflowing. Sartre refers to any direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself as a "pre-reflective consciousness." Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize etc. the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective consciousness." There is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-reflective, and so reflection is fated to a form of anxiety, i.e. the human condition. The reflective consciousness in all its forms, (scientific, artistic or otherwise) can only limit the thing-in-itself by virtue of its attempt to understand or describe it. It follows, therefore, that any attempt at self-knowledge (self-consciousness - a reflective consciousness of an overflowing infinite) is a construct that fails no matter how often it is attempted. Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object.





The same holds true about knowledge of the "Other." The "Other" (meaning simply beings or objects that are not the self) is a construct of reflective consciousness. One must be careful to understand this more as a form of warning than as an ontological statement. However, there is an implication of solipsism here that Sartre considers fundamental to any coherent description of the human condition.Sartre overcomes this solipsism by a kind of ritual. Self consciousness needs "the Other" to prove (display) its own existence. It has a "masochistic desire" to be limited, i.e. limited by the reflective consciousness of another subject. This is expressed metaphorically in the famous line of dialogue from No Exit, "Hell is other people."