Jean-Paul Sartre

June 12, 2022

First Aired: January 17, 2016

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Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the first global public intellectuals, famous for his popular existentialist philosophy, his works of fiction, and his rivalry with Albert Camus. His existentialism was also adopted by Simone de Beauvoir, who used it as a foundation for modern theoretical feminism. So what exactly is existentialism? How is man condemned to be free, as Sartre claimed? And what’s so hellish about other people? John and Ken speak in good faith with Thomas Flynn from Emory University, author of Sartre: A Philosophical Biography.

Ken is skeptical that Sartre’s philosophy is coherent and holds together. The idea of radical freedom for example is hard to sell. There is facticity and the way things are, but that doesn’t decide what you do for you. Whereas facticity is in-itself, a person is a for-itself. Humans have no essential pre-given nature that fixes what we do. Our natures insofar as we have one, is determined only by ourselves. Existence precedes essence.

Roving Philosophical Reporter (Seek to 6:55): His activism, playwriting, and philosophy took place after he was a prisoner of war in WWII. He had a big love life, and a romantic rivalry with Albert Camus. He had a fallout with Camus over Camus’ The Rebel. His famous one-liner that “Hell is other people.”

John and Ken invite Thomas Flynn from Emory University, author of Sartre: A Philosophical Biography. Flynn got into Sartre because of his easiness to read in French. Flynn makes a distinction to help John and Ken: freedom is situational. “You can always make something out of what you’ve been made into.” Freedom is creative for Sartre, it’s expanding the notion of situations, thinking concretely and aware of the choices we’ve made in the past.

How does Sartre respond to the dilemma of no objective values being presented with someone blatantly bad like Hitler? Flynn says that Sartre has an ethics of authenticity. But Ken asks how does an ethic of authenticity respond to other peoples’ morally problematic actions? Sartre said that you cannot be an authentic Nazi because it is against freedom. He is concerned with maximization of freedom not just of oneself but also of others. When you choose, you not only choose for yourself, but also for others.

John asks how Marxist historical materialism can be squared with Sartre’s radical freedom. Flynn explains, you couldnt think of Marxism and consistently be a materialist and you have to be an idealist. It moves him away from the individualism he’s always been leveled with. How does Sartre’s philosophy relate to Foucault and also Stoicism?

How does race and ethnicity and identity politics relate to radical freedom? Are we free to declare ourselves in a given race that goes against how the social facticity might declare us? What is bad faith? It is self-deception in our relation to the in-itself and the for-itself, in pretending that we’re not in a situation that demands our radical freedom.

60 Second Philosopher (Seek to 45:50): Ian Shoales looks at how the 20th century’s disasters ruined ideas of progress and the intelligentsia tackled despair as a way of life.