Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre's phenomenological ontology starts from the lived experience of consciousness, anguish, nausea, the look of the other, rather than from rational deductions or pure sensory facts. Consciousness is from the outset an intentional relation to the concrete world, and it is by describing it that one knows it. But the pre-reflective cogito remains a Cartesian-type foothold, which keeps Sartre near the median, leaning slightly toward described experience.

Being and Nothingness, Introduction · The Imaginary

Against all relativism, Sartre insists that there must be an absolute starting point, and that there is none other than the cogito: consciousness grasping itself, immediate and within everyone's reach. But this certainty is narrow: it yields the subject's existence, not an essence, a human nature or values, all of which are wanting, since existence precedes essence. Foundationalist on this single foothold yet stripped of any other given certainty, Sartre stands near the divide, on the side of assurance through the cogito, on the side of vertigo for all the rest.

There can be no truth other, at the starting point, than this: I think, therefore I am; that is the absolute truth of consciousness attaining itself.Existentialism Is a Humanism

Existentialism Is a Humanism · Being and Nothingness, Introduction (the pre-reflective cogito)

All consciousness is consciousness of something: it is therefore no substance, no thing-self lodged within it, but a presence to itself separated from itself by a nothingness. It is this gap, not an ego (against Descartes and Husserl), that makes the for-itself never what it is and is what it is not: the condition of its freedom and its temporality.

Consciousness is a being such that in its being its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself: it is never what it is and is what it is not.Being and Nothingness, Introduction

Being and Nothingness, Part 1, ch. 1 (the for-itself is not what it is) · Being and Nothingness, Part 2 (the transcendent ego; cf. The Transcendence of the Ego)

Sartre refuses any redemptive justification of suffering: without God or providence, no theodicy redeems it, and to lend it a hidden meaning would be a flight into bad faith. Suffering is a contingent fact that freedom must assume and, as far as possible, transform through action; it has only the meaning we give it, not a fruitfulness inscribed in the order of things.

Being and Nothingness · Existentialism Is a Humanism

Lacking given values, the good is not received but made: it is the authentic existence that assumes its freedom and its project without taking refuge in bad faith or in a reassuring essence. The successful life is the one that lucidly realizes itself in action and engagement, more than a codified virtue or a pursued pleasure.

Existentialism Is a Humanism · Being and Nothingness, IV

For Sartre, desire is not an accident to be corrected but the way the for-itself, a lack of being, throws itself toward the world and toward others: freedom is experienced in desiring engagement, to be assumed rather than fled. The analysis of Being and Nothingness nonetheless marks it with a tragic note, the desire to coincide at last with oneself being a useless passion.

Being and Nothingness, IV

Consciousness is wholly turned outward: there is no inner life folded upon itself, for consciousness is intentional, always consciousness of something, and the ego itself is a transcendent object, in the world. Man reveals himself not through introspection but through his acts and his engagement. The leaning thus runs toward the primacy of action, even if reflective lucidity remains required.

Man is nothing other than the series of his acts, he is nothing other than his life.Existentialism Is a Humanism

The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) · Existentialism Is a Humanism (man is the sum of his acts)

The for-itself is stretched toward the future: it defines itself by the project, that toward which it throws itself forward, and is never fixed in its past, which it must always take up and re-signify. To live is to pro-ject oneself; the present itself has meaning only in relation to what one makes oneself be. The orientation is therefore resolutely that of the project, not of memory nor of the bare instant.

Being and Nothingness, Part 2, ch. 2 (temporality, the ecstasis of the future)

Existence is contingent and without justification: being-in-itself is de trop (superfluous), gratuitous, and consciousness arises in a world that promises it nothing. The human condition is marked by anguish, abandonment and despair, and by the failure of every craving for the absolute (man is a useless passion). This tragic tone of finitude leans clearly toward tragic thought, without however reaching a defeatist pessimism, since freedom remains a foothold.

Man is a useless passion.Being and Nothingness, conclusion

Being and Nothingness, conclusion (man is a useless passion) · Nausea (contingency, being superfluous)

Existentialism assumes despair in a technical sense: one reckons only on what depends on one's own will, without leaning on the hope of outside rescue, of Providence or of a guaranteed meaning to history. To act without hope is not resignation but lucidity: action is worth something in itself, not through the expectation of an assured outcome. The leaning thus runs toward a lucidity without hope, rather than toward a principle of hope.

Whatever the things I want, there will always be this possibility that things come about otherwise than I want: one must act without hope.Existentialism Is a Humanism

Existentialism Is a Humanism (anguish, abandonment, despair)

Sartre rejects any morality of a priori rules: to the young man torn between staying with his mother and joining the Resistance, no doctrine, neither Christian love nor Kantian duty, dictates the answer: no general ethics can show what is to be done. What remains is the primacy of the agent who makes himself through his acts, close to a virtue ethics refounded on freedom and authenticity, without a table of values or a reckoning of utility.

Existentialism Is a Humanism (the example of the young man, moral invention)

To will one's own freedom is, by the same movement, to will that of others. The engaged Sartre, drawing ever closer to Marxism after 1945, makes solidarity and the struggle against oppression an extension of this demand. The position leans toward an altruism of responsibility, without giving up each person's grounding in his own free project.

I cannot take my freedom as an end unless I take that of others equally as an end.Existentialism Is a Humanism

Existentialism Is a Humanism (willing the freedom of others) · Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), commitment and collective praxis

The early Sartre starts from the individual freedom of consciousness, irreducible, which anchors his thought firmly on the side of the individual. But the later Sartre, of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, articulates this freedom with matter and history: the individual makes himself within collective wholes (the group-in-fusion, the practico-inert) that condition him in return. The position thus hovers near a balance, shifted slightly toward the collective by this evolution.

Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the group-in-fusion and the practico-inert

The later Sartre attempts a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism: history is not pure contingency but the dialectical process by which men make their history out of material conditions they did not choose. He nonetheless maintains the irreducibility of free praxis against any rigid historical determinism, hence a moderate directional orientation, with no guaranteed teleology.

Search for a Method (1957) and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

Sartre, an engaged and dissenting intellectual, refuses the constituted authorities that fix man in a role or deny his freedom: he declines the Nobel Prize in 1964 so as not to be institutionalized, supports anti-colonial struggles and the revolt of 1968. Without theorizing a systematic anarchism, his constant distrust of the state, of institutions and of all alienating authority leans clearly toward that pole.

Refusal of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1964); political commitments (anti-colonialism, May 1968)

With no God and no supra-sensible order, there is no backworld where values or meaning are deposited in advance: everything plays out in the immanence of the world into which man is thrown and which he must shape. Meaning and values do not descend from a beyond, they arise from the project of finite consciousness, here below. The position is therefore clearly immanentist.

Existentialism Is a Humanism (no a priori values, abandonment) · Being and Nothingness (transcendence as the for-itself's structure toward the world, not toward a beyond)

The ontology of Being and Nothingness sets two regions of being against each other: the in-itself, full, opaque, what it is, and the for-itself, consciousness, a nothingness that brings forth the world and its meanings. This is not a substance dualism in Descartes's manner, since the for-itself is no thinking thing but a fissure in being; nor is it a materialism, consciousness not being reducible to the in-itself. The position stands between a basis of brute being and the irreducibility of conscious upsurge, hence the shared weights.

Being and Nothingness, Introduction (the in-itself and the for-itself)

Under the influence of Marxism, Sartre analyzes labor in scarcity as the site where human praxis congeals into the practico-inert, turns back against those who produced it and breeds alienation. Yet labor remains the mode through which man transforms the world and objectifies himself in it, which leaves it a measure of possible fulfillment, beyond its dominant alienated figure.

Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), scarcity, the practico-inert, alienation