Sartre in Popular Culture

Jean Paul Sartre's role in popular culture is difficult to estimate; his philosophical work spanned nearly half a century and several continents received his works in translation. Sartre is credited in essence as the founder of modern existentialist philosophy yet he denied that he was himself an existentialist. He was awarded the Alfred Nobel prize for literature and declined to receive the prestigious award from Sweden. Sartre was possibly the most successful philosopher of the 20th century.

Sartre had rather prosperous parents; he was not an underprivileged youth and did not find a bourgeois life to be a handicap for becoming a philosopher. He was an associate professor of philosophy early on in life at Le Havre France along the British channel before the war. If one debarks a cross channel boat at Le Havre and walks up the main street one will find oneself suddenly oriented in the city scene setting recognizably from Sartre's first published book 'Nausea'. The self-educated man reading in the library of Le Havre is an understandable figure for those of us that had not yet completed undergraduate work and yet had read philosophy and history for years. Sartre's direction as a philosopher was changed while at Le Havre in a direction he might not have anticipated; mobilization for the second world war arrived and he was called up to serve.

Sartre's career as a soldier was not much like that of the other soldier-philosopher we can be concerned with here for comparative purposes; Socrates. The French mobilization was a bizarre event as was the war for Sartre and his band of brothers. It was perhaps something more like going on a picnic without women, or a fishing or hunting mission to the field for these guys were not terribly well trained and not very well supervised or deployed. The reality of war was difficult and they did not know well enough how to 'make it go'. They surrendered reasonably soon when the Wehrmacht approached. Sartre wrote about the experience of mobilization in fictional novels after the war that he called 'The Freedom Novels' such as one titled 'The Age of Reason'.

Sartre spent some of the war in a German prisoner of war camp. That experience and the discipline of the camp life; the phenomenal transition from professorship to field soldier to capture and incarceration probably helped him to formulate his rational examination of the nature of human cognition and experience-the relation between the internal psychology and the contents of what one experiences.

It is popular now and was in the 20th century following the advent of analytical philosophy and symbolic logic to conjoin the inner and outer world of thought to a certain extent running roughshod over the 'reef of solipsism' that contains all human experience within subjective criteria. Bertrand Russell rather adroitly made of the mind a kind of analogue to a naked singularity without and event horizon of solipsism. In so doing he terminated the mind/matter dualism that Descartes so rightly formalized. Like a naked black hole the mind is part of the world of experience without any barrier through which we perceive through a glass darkly. Empiricism had sought for a method to renormalize mind-matter to a naive realism without need to trouble about the filters of perception and mind cognitive apparatus that receives images from reality. Russell's approach just set back the problem of mind-matter and the reef of solipsism farther to the quantum mechanical and relativistic level rather than end it. It is only sentient life that perceives events composed of phenomenal perhaps called super-strings or forms related in dimensions. A unified field theory may be obsolete while a cosmological constant may not be. Discrete, individual elements in shaped fields perhaps purposed with teleological implications present perceptible event-images for human mind at a select level. Few would claim that the mind or mind-event with its self-awareness is the same as the super-strings perceived or the composite forms or images and impressions arriving in the senses.

Sartre's existential works in Being and Nothing were written during the second world war in Paris following his liberation from internment. Sartre would have been a member of the resistance except the resistance it is said may have felt the philosopher was too chatty. Sartre being shunned from clandestine espionage work coveted even by Elvis Presley later on who asked President Nixon for an F.B.I. membership completed being and nothingness and several of his other works that reinforced the phenomenal and irrational nature of human social life.

Sartre was wooed by the French Communist Party following the war to become a member yet he forestalled that permanently. He was a well known writer and perceived by the left as a sympathizer. Sartre's tome Being and Nothingness wasn't well understood by many for quite a time I think. Sartre himself said that it is a continuation of French rationalist philosophy (such as Descartes wrote in 'Meditations on a Method). Sartre's conclusions differ a little from those of analytical philosophers and empiricists, for he describes what is known to his self awareness directly rather than through research projects of the a priori in science or logic. It is a useful and practical approach to epistemology.

Because Sartre was perceived as a leftist, which can be a non-ideological preference for particular social groups over those of others in some cases rather than an identification with the correctness of a particular political philosophy of governance or economics, he was invited to visit Moscow during the 1950's for a visit. It was during this busy period that Sartre wrote his second and final major philosophical work 'The Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Sartre lost vision in one eye during this project and wrote nearly continuously on the plus 1000 page opus of human social interaction. The work was a major influence perhaps on the change from Marxism to existentialism or a synthetic realm in between.

Certain political ideologies such as Marxism had existed developmentally to counteract advantages of the wealthy and oppressive classes over the majority of the people of the era who were poor. There are other traditional political philosophies of course yet the practical goals for most is for a self-benevolent economic and governance system that would permit actualization of being in the best possibly way. Certainly there are opinions based upon Darwinism such as political romanticism and barbarism that find domination by the strongest the best, and aristocratic and monarchical forms of government that offer the opinion that rule by the few and best works most effectively. Sartre's Critique simply examines the concatenation of phenomenal social relations in which people act. Following the clearing of the decks and submergence of civilization in to the ocean of pain and destruction of the second world war with the prospect for global thermonuclear war ahead and France in the front row seat Sartre's phenomenal-rational-existential insights about the social phenomenality of the masses without economic bias was a useful and influential project.

Sartre wrote short stories and plays as well as philosophy and novels. The Condemned of Altoona, The Flies and No Exit were interesting works. Sartre travelled all over the world, rode about in taxi cabs-walking along the highway in Valdez Alaska he stopped and asked for directions once, and I replied 'I'm not from here, sorry'. The philosopher exercised practical and theoretical influence popularizing the project of thinking for the masses perhaps better than had any prior philosopher except the Sage of the Sakyas. It is a mistake to assume that Sartre's rationalism is in any way an atheistic doctrine. It is simply the rational philosophical biography of a man of the 20th century.