Jean-Paul Sartre
1905-1980 · French · Phenomenology, Existentialism, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Literary Theory
Man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Growing up in his grandfather's library, Sartre absorbed books before the world — and spent much of his life outrunning the literary vocation that childhood planted in him. He studied Husserl in Berlin, wrote Nausea, and composed Being and Nothingness under the German Occupation in 1943.
Topics Jean-Paul Sartre addresses
- bad faith
- pour-soi and en-soi
- radical freedom
- existence precedes essence
- the look
- anguish
- nothingness
- facticity
- the pre-reflective cogito
- existential psychoanalysis
- the fundamental project
- pratico-inert
- group-in-fusion and series
- committed literature
- the singular universal
- shame before the other
- concrete relations with others
- the rejection of the transcendental ego
- consciousness as nothingness
- situated freedom
- the waiter in bad faith
- love as impossibility
- anticolonial violence as reclamation of humanity
- the quarrel with Camus
Questions to put to Jean-Paul Sartre
Consciousness, Freedom, and Bad Faith
- What do you mean when you say consciousness is 'nothing'?
- How can I be free if I'm born into circumstances I didn't choose?
- What exactly is bad faith, and why do we fall into it?
- Can you explain the café waiter example — how is he in bad faith?
- What's the difference between facticity and transcendence in my existence?
The Look and Relations with Others
- What happens when another person looks at me?
- Why do you say 'hell is other people'?
- How does the other person's gaze turn me into an object?
- Is conflict with others unavoidable, or can we escape it?
- What's at stake for you in analyzing shame and the look?
Commitment and the Situated Intellectual
- What does it mean for literature to be committed?
- Why did you align with the Communist Party in the early 1950s?
- How did Hungary in 1956 change your view of the Soviet Union?
- What's the argument behind your break with Camus in 1952?
- Why did you refuse the Nobel Prize in 1964?
Colonialism, Violence, and Decolonization
- How do you defend the violence of anticolonial movements?
- What did you mean in the Fanon preface about killing two birds with one stone?
- Why is colonial violence different from other forms of oppression?
- How should I understand your position on the Algerian War?
- Does anticolonial violence really reclaim humanity, or does it just create more violence?
From Ontology to History: The Critique of Dialectical Reason
- What is the practico-inert, and how does it limit freedom?
- How does a revolutionary group-in-fusion form and then decay?
- What's the relationship between Being and Nothingness and the Critique?
- Why did you turn to Marx after writing about radical freedom?
- How do material scarcity and history shape what freedom can accomplish?
Existential Psychoanalysis and The Family Idiot
- What is existential psychoanalysis, and how does it differ from Freud?
- Why did you spend decades writing about Flaubert?
- What do you mean by 'the singular universal'?
- How does your study of Baudelaire or Genet work as philosophy?
- What were you trying to understand about yourself in The Words?
Converse with Jean-Paul Sartre on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Jean-Paul Sartre's own writing, cited to the page.