The Only World: A Brief Overview of and Position on Jean-Paul Sartre's Philosophy

A vast crowd was sweeping over road and fields, close-packed, mulish, implacable-a human flood. Not a sound but the scraping of boots and shoes over hard earth. Sarah experienced a moment of panic; she wanted to run somewhere, anywhere, into the open countryside; but she pulled herself together, took a firm grip on Pablo, and dragged him along, letting herself be swept forward. Stench. The hot, stale stench of human beings, the sweet acrid stench of destitution, the unnatural stench of thinking animals. Between two red necks topped by derby hats she could see the last of the cars, her final hope, vanishing into the distance. Pablo began to laugh, and Sarah gave a start.

"Shh!" she said shamefacedly. "This is no time to laugh."

But he kept on, noiselessly.

"What are you laughing at?"

"It's like a funeral," he explained.

She felt the presence of faces, of eyes, to right and left of her, but she dared not look at them. They plodded on, clinging to their plodding as she clung to life; walls of dust rose in the air and broke upon them; they kept on plodding. Sarah, very upright, her head high, kept her eyes focused far ahead, staring between the two red necks in front, and she kept saying to herself: "I won't become like them!"

This quotation is an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Troubled Sleep (21). At this point in the story, Sarah (the wife of one of the main characters) is fleeing the invasion of Paris by Nazi Germany on foot, with her son Pablo. A quintessential phrase of Sartre's is "man is condemned to be free." Right off the bat his character vows, "I won't become like them!", "them" being the masses of the hopeless, the helpless, fleeing around and with her, and her condemnation (to be free) being her vow of individuality. Later she offers to help an old woman carry her load: "The old drab shot a glance of hatred at Sarah and sidled away. ‘I'm not giving my bundle to nobody,' she replied" (23). Suddenly, Sarah realizes: "They don't want to be loved...They don't want to be loved, they're not used to it" (23). She doesn't want to become as heartless as they are, but immediately after her offer to help the old woman, her son asks to be carried. "'He's pretending,' she mused. ‘He's jealous because I offered to carry the old woman's bundle'...He will exhaust all my strength and I shan't be able to help anybody. She would end by carrying the child as the old woman was carrying her bundle; she would become one of them" (23).

While Sartre's philosophical reasoning-once one gets past the prickly language of both his works and the many summaries and commentaries on his works-is rational, it is also incomplete in that it does not answer the basic question: Where do we come from? He clearly explains that man has no predetermined purpose; he must "create his own nature or essence because it is not fixed in advance," as Jostein Gaarder says in Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (456-457). And since we have no natural design to determine how we live, it is up to the individual to decide his or her actions ("I will not become like them!" [Sartre Troubled Sleep 21]), to fashion purpose for himself or herself, or to let others decide for him or her ("We are just caught up in the crowd, and the crowd is walking and we walk; we are no more than the feet of the interminable vermin. Why walk when hope is dead? Why live?" [Sartre Troubled Sleep 24]). Searching for the meaning of life, then, is absurd, since the meaning of life is self-imposed; you need only ask yourself and come up with something ("...she must start once more to live, she must start once more to walk.).

His ideas make sense up to a point, but one can't help but ask the question: Yes, but where did we come from? You have instructed us what to do now that we are here on earth in physical form, but where is here in relation to the place where our souls were birthed?

From his early philosophy to his more mature philosophy-which was highly popular in Paris in the 1940s due to the faith-defying atrocities of World War II-Sartre's claim that "existentialism is humanism" argues an interesting, but Godless and lonely, guide for living (which eerily parallels the lonely worldview of the modern book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Before we can discern the nature of Sartre's philosophy, we must first define some of his fundamental vocabulary. The Dictionary of Philosophy by Antony Flewdescribes existentialism:

Existentialism is generally opposed to rationalist and empiricist doctrines that assume that the universe is a determined, ordered system intelligible to the contemplative observer who can discover the natural laws that govern all beings and the role of reason as the power guiding human activity.

In the existentialist view the problem of being must take precedence over that of knowledge in philosophical investigations. Being cannot be made a subject of objective enquiry; it is revealed to the individual by reflection on his own unique concrete existence in time and space.

Existence is basic: it is the fact of the individual's presence and participation in a changing and potentially dangerous world. Each self-aware individual understands his own existence in terms of his experience of himself and of his situation. The self of which he is aware is a thinking being which has beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, the need to find a purpose, and a will that can determine his actions.

The problem of existence can have no significance if viewed impartially or in abstraction; it can only be seen in terms of the impact that experiences make on a particular existent. No individual has a predetermined place or function within a rational system and no one can discover his supposed duty through reasoning; everyone is compelled to assume the responsibility of making choices.

Man is in a condition of anxiety arising from the realization of his necessary freedom of choice, of his ignorance of the future, of his awareness of manifold possibilities, and of the finiteness of an existence that was preceded by and must terminate in nothingness (107-108).

He goes on to define humanism, and this explanation provides the evidence Sartre needs to combine the two philosophies:

"In this century the label has been appropriated by those who reject all religious beliefs, insisting that we should be exclusively concerned with human welfare in this, allegedly, the only world" (142).

Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris. After his father died, he and his mother moved in with his grandparents before she remarried. He attended Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he "surprisingly failed his aggregate exam, but the next year he took the test again and finished first in the class. Simone de Beauvoir, who was to become his lifelong friend and lover, was second" (Marino 337). And speaking of lovers, Sartre, like many philosophers over the ages, had some very interesting ideas on physicality, and sexuality:

What is the meaning of desire? That is to say, why does consciousness make itself-or vainly try to make itself-a body, and what does it expect of the object of its desire? The reply will be easy if we reflect that, in desire, I make myself flesh in the presence of another in order to appropriate for myself the flesh of the other. . . .The caress does not want itself to be simply a contact; it seems that man alone can reduce it to a contact, and that then it has missed its real significance. For the caress is not simply a stroking: it is a shaping. By caressing another, I bring to birth her flesh by my caress, beneath my fingers (Sartre The Caress 96).

In 1929 he was drafted and served two years in the French army, after which he taught philosophy to high school students, started working on his novel Nausea (which is considered by some to be his greatest work), was introduced to the phenomenological arguments of Edmund Husserl, traveled throughout Germany, and returned to Paris to teach once again. World War II began in 1939, and Sartre worked for the French army once more, this time as a meteorologist, but was taken prisoner in 1940. He was later released and went home to Paris, having started on his next great work Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology while he was imprisoned. In post-World-War-II France, Sartre's plays and novels were to become "all the rage," and he enjoyed enormous success and world-wide recognition (Sartre Being and Nothingness 337-339). He refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964, stating that by accepting this award he would be acknowledging the "bourgeois values that the honor seemed to emblemize" (Flynn).

Bergsonism-a philosophy dealing with the experience of time, and its governing effects upon organic processes (bergsonism)-was a philosophy that Sartre reacted to in his earlier years, but turned from as he pursued the ideas presented by Heidegger. He used something called "Husserlian intentionality" when he said that Heidegger's "human way of being" is "in the world" mainly by its realistic, down-to-earth concerns, and not its philosophic, or, epistemic concerns. This displays that Sartre's philosophy characterizes a pragmatist view, which means that the meaning of an idea lies in its ability to have perceptible, feasible effects (Flynn).

In his work The Family Idiot, a study of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, he "joins his Existentialist vocabulary of the 1940s and early '50s with his Marxian lexicon of the late '50s and '60s to ask what we can know about a man in the present state of our knowledge. This study, which he describes as ‘a novel that is true,' incarnates that mixture of phenomenological description, psychological insight, and social critique that have become the hallmark of Sartrean philosophy" (Flynn).

"While anguish is Heidegger's fundamental experience, Sartre's is that which he calls nausea, disgust, revulsion against being, duration, repetition and continuance of life, as well as against the unending mobility of human existence" (Flynn). His vision of morale departs from a theological viewpoint where God or a higher being creates the laws of morality, and instead each man must create his own (Flynn). Not only must he fashion for himself his own morality, he must fashion for himself his own nature because, as there are no divinely-inspired morals, there is also no divinely-inspired "human nature," and therefore we cannot say that we "must" do anything, or that something we do is only "human nature." We cannot blame our species' predetermined patterns of behavior for our actions, because there is not predetermined pattern of behavior; every man creates his behavior for himself, or copies the men he sees around him (and thus it has gone through the ages, so that there appears to be a "social norm" when in fact we are all choosing our natures based on what the men before us have chosen). "'Man is condemned to be free,'" Jostein Gaarder quotes Sartre in his novel Sophie's World. "'Condemned because he has not created himself-and is nevertheless free. Because having once been hurled into the world, he is responsible for everything he does'" (457). He goes on to explain that Sartre was not a nihilist, or, someone believes that "anything goes." "Sartre believed that life must have meaning, it is an imperative. But it is we ourselves who must create this meaning in our own lives. To exist is to create your own life" (458).

Another aspect of Sartre's existentialism is his belief that "consciousness brings nothingness into being by questioning being. For a mundane example: When I got to the café and look for my friend and he is not there, his absence (nothingness) becomes a kind of positive presence" (Marino 339). This consciousness can engulf us with an endless supply of possible prospects, "which are, in a sense, another face of the nothingness that Sartre claims haunts being" (339). Because there are too many options, man make-believes that he is without choice (339), that he "must" act in some way, because if he must do something, then the endless possibilities of choice are narrowed down to one unquestionable non-choice: to act as he must act (to adhere to the man-made morals, to the social norm).

As Jean-Paul Sartre aged, he became nearly blind, and was only able to continue "writing" by using a tape recorder; his later works were coined "more biographical than philosophical" (Flynn). He died April 15, 1980, at the age of seventy-five, and one head-count speculated that there were nearly fifty thousand people at his funeral procession (Marino 339). "As the headline of one Parisian newspaper lamented: ‘France has lost its conscience'" (Flynn).

In order to understand how Sartre's philosophy corresponds with a Biblical worldview, let's return to our original definitions of humanism and existentialism:

Renaissance students of the literature of classical Greece and Rome-especially Greece-were called humanists. Such students were optimistic about human possibilities, attended enthusiastically to human achievements, and eschewed refined enquires into theological niceties. However, in this sense, humanism was perfectly consistent with belief in God. . . . In this century the label has been appropriated by those who reject all religious beliefs, insisting that we should be exclusively concerned with human welfare in this, allegedly, the only world (Flew 142).

Existentialism is generally opposed to rationalist and empiricist doctrines that assume that the universe is a determined, ordered system intelligible to the contemplative observer who can discover the natural laws that govern all beings and the role of reason as the power guiding human activity (107).

While this definition does not definitively prohibit the possibility of God, it does leave man fairly alone, and somewhat vulnerable, in the universe. Man is left to figure out, each for himself, what his purpose is; there is no "greater truth" for the human race; each man must find his place and part (an image comes to mind of a world full of actors, but no director; likewise, many scripts being produced all at once with no rhyme or reason or governing force to their production). In that, I believe Sartre must have come to a very forlorn conclusion about the nature of humanity: What is the point of living life if we must create the point itself for ourselves?

I think perhaps the popularity of Sartre's philosophy had largely to due with the atrocities visited on the inhabitants of Europe after World War II. "God is dead," as Nietzsche claimed, would be a suitable and coveted catch-phrase of anyone who had lost faith during the years of war. Belief in oneself, in creating purpose, destiny, in being responsible for oneself, would be extremely well-received in a continent beleaguered by the Communist slogan "Long live the indissolute union of the working class!" (Communist Slogans Page). After so much "unity," people wanted individual responsibility, individual purpose, and after cowering at the sound of every air-raid siren, they wanted control over their lives, their natures, their choices.

If Sartre had introduced this same philosophy in previous era, he would have been burned at the stake for heresy, or simply cast out as the village idiot. It is the nature of the time in which he lived-the nature that formed and cast his worldview-that prompted his search for philosophical answers at all. Sartre's philosophy would not be Sartre's philosophy if he had not lived through World War II. And because it was so influenced-created, even-by its time, it is not, then, timeless. And if it cannot be applied to any and every era of history, it cannot answer most, or even any, philosophical questions. It is for that reason that I conclude that his philosophy was malformed at birth by the fact that he was affected by his time, and not that he affected time with his philosophy.

I also cannot contend with the fact that God is so forcefully absent from his worldview. As I have previously mentioned, he has not answered where we come from, only what we are now that we are here. This complete disregard for a higher being seems somehow unscholarly, not because I believe he must believe that there is one, but because it doesn't appear that he even questions it.

Sartre has a bitter tone; my mind conjures up the image of acid slowly eating away at the lining of the stomach, and my brain conjures up the smell of feces and sweat in my nostrils. Perhaps that is a good thing, since worldviews should invoke some sort of reaction in its students. Indeed, I esteem him more highly than other philosophers for the simple fact that he is a writer of novels and plays; despite his philosophical shortcomings, I connect with him in the sense that we share some sort of common literary passion. I do not, however, believe he lived a happy life; how could he when his major works talked about the absence of God and the presence of death and annihilation (or, World War II). He had ugly characters that committed ugly acts and were, apparently, unredeemable.

There are so many things that amaze me in this world; too many to believe that life is nothing but darkness, that I must create myself and my role and my purpose. I am too small to do such a thing. And Sartre should know as a writer that the talent for writing is not something one can will into existence; it comes from outside oneself. How does he explain his own writing talents? If nothing else, that proves, to me, that God exists. If man is condemned to be free, then I shall liberate myself in the bondage of submitting to a higher being; a being Sartre does not believe exists.

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