Existentialism: philosophical concepts and core principles

Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre developed his own particular brand of existentialism and embodied it in his works not only of philosophy but for his novels and plays as well. His analysis of emotions also separates him from some other theorists, and he tends to be more concrete in his terminology and to make clear distinctions between emotions as expressed about something real and emotions that emerge from inner states alone. What he says about fear fits into this category as he makes a distinction between fear and anguish or anxiety. He follows Kierkegaard to the effect that anguish is a response to the perception of one's own freedom, while fear is a fear of something in the real world, meaning a concrete threat. As Sartre writes, using the image of the army recruit as an example, "The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is afraid of being afraid; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself" (Sartre Being and Nothingness 35)..Sartre discusses the problem of free will and determinism based on how individuals experience fear, noting, I am walking up a mountain along a narrow path and I experience fear before the possibility that I may at any moment slip and fall, and anguish before the possibility that I can at any moment choose to throw myself over the edge" (cited by Charlesworth 9).

For Sartre, God is not necessary and is in fact non-existent, and so man is free in a way that can be terrifying and that imposes responsibility. Jean-Paul Sartre was not only a leading philosopher of his generation but also a playwright, novelist, political theorist, and literary critic. Sartre in his writings in the 1940s and after was reacting to the horrors of the war, but he viewed the devastation of war not in terms of its effect on a specific country or people but on humanity. He was continuing in an intellectual tradition extending back to the nineteenth century and to the works of Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. His philosophy is not collective in the way Marxism is nor built on social classes and hierarchies in the way Hitler's is. His view is described as a contemporary form of humanism, with the individual at the center and with a belief in the ability of each individual to shape his or her own existence. Sartre's philosophy was a reaction to the collectivism of both the Communists and the Fascists. He did not center human actions on a political entity such as the fatherland or on a sense of racial identity. Instead, he begins with the human-centered situation of life and rejects the view that defines human essence or being and then tries to determine the purpose and values of human existence from that identity. Sartre asserts that existence is prior to essence and that our condition is what defines human nature rather than the other way round. We do not live by preexisting values and meaning but instead have the responsibility of creating our own, and through the choices we make we determine values for all:

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It is also what is called subjectivity, the name we are labeled with when charges are brought against us... existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. (Sartre Existentialism and Human Emotions 15-16)

Sartre rejected any doctrine that is imposed to tell others how to behave and to assert some higher destiny.

Values are not given and are seen by Sartre as vague at best. He sees human beings as operating best by instinct. Sartre also argues with Marxists and with the collectivism that is their creed. The Marxist relies on others, and Sartre accepts this idea only to a certain extent. Sartre emphasizes the importance of individual action and also the necessity for each individual to shape himself through rational and deliberate choice. Sartre rejected the doctrine of determinism and finds instead that freedom is the condition of mankind, for good or ill:

Never let it be said by us that this man... had made an arbitrary choice. Man makes himself. He isn't ready made at the start. In choosing his ethics, he makes himself, and force of circumstances is such that he can not abstain from choosing one. (Sartre Existentialism and Human Emotions 43)

For Sartre, there is an absolute truth which can be grasped, and it can be grasped by everyone. Existentialism for Sartre is an atheistic position, though he notes that there is a form of Christian existentialism as seen in Kierkegaard. For Sartre, humanism is the important touchstone for existentialism, and he says that existentialism is nothing more than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. For the existentialist, it does not matter whether God exists or not, for nothing would change in either case.

Sartre links the issues of freedom and responsibility and shows how they define the human situation. Indeed, Sartre says that man is condemned to be free. Sartre states:

Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. (Sartre Existentialism and Human Emotions 52)

This gives man a great responsibility, for man makes himself, as noted, and so he must wholly assume his situation as if he had created it. This responsibility is the logical consequence of our freedom:

What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it. Moreover everything which happens to me is mine. (Sartre Existentialism and Human Emotions 52)

All situations are human situations and become our responsibility. Our freedom leads to our responsibility, and for Sartre our freedom leads to our desire to become God.

Each person has to face the reality of his or her freedom and bdgins with the need to choose his or her own values; as Sartre writes, "Values in actuality are demands which lay claim to a foundation." (Sartre Being and Nothingness 46). The will is the course of these values, but this also means that the foundation can be changed at any time. It I also possible for the individual to have no values sat all:

It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of value and that nothing, absolutely nothing justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation.((Sartre Being and Nothingness 46)

Sartre's statement "man is not what he is" relates to his concept of negation and to his concept of consciousness. Facts are what they are and so satisfy the demands of ordinary logic. Human beings are not what they are because of the realities of consciousness. Sartre says that the self-conscious structure of consciousness involves negation, and this implies that the constitutive role of self-consciousness is at the same time self-nihilating. This stands at the core of freedom and of human life. Our self-directed nothingness, a nothingness that means that we are not what we are, is found in our capacity to detach ourselves from the roles we find ourselves occupying. We live by self-deception and convince ourselves of something precisely because we already believe the opposite. Sartre places an emphasis on the development in childhood of the "fundamental project" which gives unity to the subsequent life of the person, and the development of this fundamental project is a choice. We have this choice because we have freedom, and we must respect our own freedom and the freedom of others (Honderich 792-793). The existentialist must understand from this the meaning of existence and that existence precedes essence. He or she must also understand the nature of freedom and the responsibility conferred by freedom and the reality of choice. Sartre's statement thus has strong ethical implications and points to the beginning of an analysis of the relationship between the individual and society on several levels. Sartre develops the theme more fully in his various writings.

Sartre was born in Paris in 1905, the son of a naval engineer. His mother was first cousin to Albert Schweitzer. His father died of fever when the boy was only a year old, and Jean-Paul was raised thereafter by his grandfather, Charles, from whom he received an education and certain values which he would cite later as having been vital in his formation as a writer and philosopher. From a young age, he was tending more and more toward the life of a writer. Jean-Paul was slight of build and suffered from leucoma of the right eye, which would lead to loss of sight in that eye and to his squinting appearance. The boy had conflicting religious training. Officially, he was Catholic, but his grandfather's Protestantism influenced him greatly. He learned little of the major philosophers of the day because they were not given attention at the French university of the time, but he would encounter them later when he was in his twenties. He passed his written examination for the agregation on his second try and fulfilled his military service from 1929 to 1931, doing so in the meteorological section. He then became professor of philosophy at the lycee in Le Havre and later taught at Laon. By then he had met his lifetime companion, Simone de Beauvoir. They never married, for marriage ran counter to their ideas of personal independence. Sartre's political views in the 1930s were radical, anticapitalist, antielitist, and proworker, and he was more of an anarchist than a revolutionary (Brosman 107).

Sartre's literary career began when he contributed to and acted in a student revue. He then wrote two novels, unpublished, a story published in 1923, an essay on the theory of the state in French thought (also published), and other pieces. He would continue to write during his military career. He wrote his first philosophical treatise -- L'Imagination (Imagination) -- in 1936, followed by the Transcendence of the Ego in 1937. His first novel, La Nausee (Nausea), was published in 1937 as well. His stories were published in 1939 under the title the Wall and were well-received (Brosman 8-9).

Walter Kaufmann notes that no philosopher in all of history has reached as large an audience in his lifetime as has Sartre, and he has also reached a wide audience as a novelist, playwright, and journalist (Kaufmann "Preface"). Sartre's existentialism was tremendously successful from its first appearance in contemporary thought, and in part Sartre benefited by finding a receptive audience in the days of World War II when most traditional values were treated with scorn (Lafarge 1). Sartre indeed was instrumental in bringing existentialism to such a wide audience that people with only a vague idea of his tenets understand that this is a modern philosophical approach that has infused much of modern thought and philosophical and artistic expression in the last 50 years or more.

Arland Ussher notes Sartre's position on fear, and especially on the fear of death, and finds fault with in part, writing,

Sartre, however, just for fear we should take him seriously, at once proceeds to cheapen and sensationalize his idea. Suppose, he says, I am doing something held to be discreditable -- say listening at a key-hole. Suddenly I become aware of an eye behind me, fixing me -- perhaps an accusing voice and outstretched finger. For the first time I experience, along with terror, shame; and Sartre will have it that all guilt-feelings originated in this way -- a very obvious cart-before-horse argument. In his massive analysis of Genet, the pederast and thief of genius (where the vision of the accusing finger is again called up), we find something like the ancient theory that it is the Law which brings Sin into the world, and not the other way; and it is suggested that the thief (who was not one until he was detected) does well to take up the challenge, and show that one Absolute of conduct is as good -- or bad -- as another. (Ussher 111) the primary critique of Sartre was Marxist, given that Sartre's philosophy of freedom was directly opposed to the Marxist doctrine of historical necessity: "He tried to make the two cohere in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) but ended up drowning in a sea of verbiage" (Holt para. 8).

Given that the human being creates and then re-creates himself, a high degree of self-awareness is necessary for the human being to function. A cardinal sin, therefore, would be self-deception, a falsehood that would shape the choices made and that would negate freedom. Sartre explored this idea in Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre saw the central feature of human existence in the capacity to choose in full awareness of one's own non-being, and therefore it has to be asked whether or not I will be true to myself in making choices:

Self-deception invariably involves an attempt to evade responsibility for myself. if, for example, I attribute undesirable thoughts and actions to the influence upon me of the subconscious or unconscious, I have made part of myself into an "other" that I then suppose to control the real me. Thus, using psychological theory to distinguish between a "good I" and a "bad me" only serves to perpetuate my evasion of responsibility and its concomitants. ("Sartre: Existential Life" para. 7)

Sartre offered examples of mauvaise foi (bad faith) in action, referring to people "who pretend to keep all options open while on a date by deliberately ignoring the sexual implications of their partners' behavior, for example, [to] illustrate the perpetual tension between facticity and transcendence" ("Sartre: Existential Life" para. 8). Sartre says that the ability to accept ourselves for what we are and to do so without exaggeration is the key, noting that since the chief value of human life is fidelity to our selves, this is sincerity in the most profound sense:

In our relationships with other human beings, what we truly are is all that counts, yet it is precisely here that we most often betray ourselves by trying to be whatever the other person expects us to be. This is invidious, on Sartre's view, since it exhibits a total lack of faith in ourselves: to the extent that I have faith in anyone else, I reveal my lack of the courage to be myself. There are, in the end, only two choices -- sincerity or self-deception, to be or not to be. ("Sartre: Existential Life" para. 9)