Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Best Known For:

• Founder of Existentialism.
• Winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1964.

Main Works:

• Being and Nothingness (1943).
• Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).
• Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).
• Nausea (1938).
• The Flies (1943).
• No Exit (1944).

Key Dates and Info:

• Born: 1905, in Paris.
• Died: April 15, 1980, in Paris.
• His father was an officer of the French Navy (who died when Jean-Paul was one year old) and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, first cousin of the Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer.

• 1939: drafted as a meteorologist for the French army, was captured in 1940 and kept prisoner for nine months.

Being In Itself, For Itself, and For Others:

Sartre’s metaphysics draws a fundamental distinction between three ways of being. The first is being in itself: this is, roughly speaking, unconscious being. Every non-living entity can be said to be in itself. On the other hand, humans can also be said to be for themselves; that is, humans have body parts that we regard as unconscious, but they also have conscious experiences of their own being alive. Finally, we have being for others: for Sartre, if we are at all capable of grasping the existence of other beings for themselves it is because we are capable of conceiving of our own being as being for others. What we do, finds its place in a universe of conscious subjects: we bear responsibilities for our actions to the other subjects.

Condemned to be Free:

The asymmetry between being in and for itself is foundational to any ethical and political discussion.

Because we consciously experience our own existence, we are capable of thinking ourselves as free. More than that: we are condemned to be free, that is, condemned to perceive ourselves in existence and in control of our existence.

While any being in itself can be defined via some essential properties (say, water is that substance having H20 as its characteristic chemical formula), any being for itself cannot be defined in any way: its essence is its existence. Humans, in other words, are capable of conceiving themselves as totally free: although they bear a specific relationship to their own bodies, such relationship does not (at least in principle) define them in any way.

Anguish, Abandonment, and Despair:

The human condition is hence a peculiar one. Humans have to face their destiny of free agents and their awareness of bearing responsibility for their actions in front of Others (they are being for others): every action that you do, from the most insignificant to apparently the most decisive and influential, is an action that you do on behalf of the whole humanity. The connection between metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy has seldom been more direct in the history of Western thought.

Sartre famously used three adjectives to characterize the human condition: he described it as one of anguish, despair, and abandonment. The best place for our purposes were they are characterized is Existentialism Is a Humanism; here is what Sartre has to say on anguish during that lesson:

"The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows: When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind – in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility."

Humans are condemned to choose for other humans. Those who occupy position of leadership bear the fullest weight of such responsibility; but any of us, really, is responsible for affecting the behavior of our dearest and those who live "around" us, whether we want that or not. For this reason, the human condition is one of anguish.

Abandonment, instead, is related to the absence of a God to whom we can rely for asking forgiveness and for deciding what’s best to do. By abandonment – Sartre continues in Existentialism Is a Humanism – "we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end." This feature especially is key in allowing a comparison between Sartre’s philosophy and the one taught in Ancient Greece.

Finally, Sartre explains despair thus: "the meaning of this expression is extremely simple. It merely means that we limit ourselves to a reliance upon that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the probabilities which render our action feasible. Whenever one wills anything, there are always these elements of probability." You can never know rest assured that your will will come true; but you are condemned to will; so you are condemned to live in despair.

It is important to stress that, according to Sartre, existentialism is not a pessimistic philosophy and is not a philosophy that should encourage withdrawal from worldly engagement. On the contrary, humans cannot but engage in society: they are actually condemned to do that and the more they embrace their condition the better.

Further Online Readings:

• The entry on Sartre at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• The entry on Sartre at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• The website for the UK Sartre Society.
• A rich online archive of works by and on Sartre.
• The website for the Group d’Etides Sartrienne, based in Paris.
• The text of Existentialism Is a Humanism.