Jean Paul Sartre: Engaged Literature and Existential Philosophy

Kenneth and Margret Thompson, Sartre: Life and Complete Works, p. 53
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 43
Hazel Barnes, Sartre. P. 76
H Stuart Hughes, Obstructed Path, p. 6
Ibid., p. 3-10
Hazel Barnes, Sartre, p. 10
Andrew Leak, Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 19, 90
Joseph Fell, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place, p. 23-27
Hazel Bares, Sartre, p. 98
Ibid., p. 92
Introduction by James Woods, Nausea, p. XV
Sartre, Nausea, p. 127
Ibid., p. 125
Ibid., p. 129
Ibid., p.128
Sartre, Nausea, p. 127. This touches upon another topic of the in-itself existence that deals with Sartre's idea on the "espousal of nominalism", more thoroughly defined in the Age of Reason (1945) and the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). It states that theorems and abstract existents, like a circle, are precisely definable because they are not real. They are existents that are created with a rationality that exists beyond reality. Much like a circle, they are perfect, yielding to no defects imposed by the actual world. Furthermore words like "lovable", "detestable", or "cowardly" are representations of behavior standards that vary by each individual creating an unattainable image for a person to declare for themselves – it is always a judgment for another to make. This concept might be further evinced through other plays, such as Oscar Wilde's the Importance of Being Earnest where his characters repeatedly claim others as "perfectly boring" or "perfectly pessimistic", hinting at the idea that there is an idealized personality to achieve.
Andrew Leak, Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 17
Kenneth and Margret Thompson, Sartre: Life and Complete Works, p. 53
The unconscious stated here does not refer to Sigmund Freud's concept of the subconscious. And although Sartre was well intrigued with Freud's psychoanalytic analysis, he disapproved of this theory altogether and regarded it as another excuse to ultimately escape one's responsibility of existence.
Sartre, Nausea, p. 100
Ibid., p. 131
Ibid., p. 98
Andrew Leak quoting Jean-Paul Sartre (Situations X, p. 175), p. 41
Ibid., p 42
Ibid., p. 54
Ibid., p. 55
Charles Hill, Jean-Paul Sartre: Freedom and Commitment, p. 10
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 28
Sartre, The Flies, p. 90
Ibid., p. 61
Ibid., p. 62
Ibid., p. 80
Ibid., p. 79
Ibid., p. 103
Ibid., p. 104
Robert Cumming quoting Being and Nothingness (p. 47-70), The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, p.137
The reason for this bad faith and inauthenticity can be drawn from the concept that one is existing with 'the Other' in mind, presupposing that the existence of 'the Other' is more important than the individual-self. One would act in bad faith so they might be able to hide themselves behind the customs of their culture and to avoid being isolated. Isolation, at this point, would be the aversion from people or society, which would only happen if the people around oneself deems that individual as something to avoid – think of Frankenstein. The inauthentic individual projects themselves as something that is acceptable in their society. Thus, they are living off a standard, a social norm that tells them how to act instead of the individual acting from their own conscious being. This concept is immensely infused with Sartre's perspective of social judgment and interaction.
Charles Hill, Jean Paul Sartre: Freedom and Commitment, p. 5
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 31, 41
Ibid., p. 33
Sartre, The Flies, p. 94
Ibid., p. 105
Ibid., p. 122
Ibid., p. 127
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 49
Andrew Leak, Jean Paul Sartre, p. 9-41
H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path, p. 142
Hazel Barnes, Sartre, p. 100
Andrew Leak, Jean Paul Sartre, p. 62
Sartre, No Exit, p. 38
Ibid., p. 47
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 41
Ibid.
Hazel Barnes quotes Sartre's Being and Nothingness (p. 412), Sartre, p. 76
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 41
Ibid.
At this point there is also another topic called "the Desire to be God" that is at the foundation of Sartre's perspective of becoming into being. The Desire to be God situates itself among social interaction as an ideal for an individual to strive for. This goal is set by peers or people within the social milieu of an individual. Consequently, "god" to Sartre is manifested through the qualities and attributes that a person desires within other people: it is a trait that an individual does not have and pursues as a standard to follow. This then means that a person has to constantly reflect upon that trait in order to strive for it but the trait is something that can never be accomplished. The person is always in a state of becoming, which is never complete until their life can be fully looked after their death.
Thompson, Sartre: Life and Complete Works, p. 264
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 19,37-39
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism.


Clarke Stevenson June 9, 2014
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Bridge of Existentialism
This essay will discuss one of the most recognized intellectuals of the 20th century: Jean-Paul Sartre. In the wake of a slowly deflating Romantic Idealism from the previous century, Sartre helped shift Western thought into a new perspective through his literature and philosophical expositions. His philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, is recognized as his most complete explanation of his beliefs regarding our absurd existence, his theories on consciousness, ethics on freedom, and the concept of inauthenticity in social interaction. And although he wrote an unbelievable amount of noteworthy essays, books and plays throughout his life, like Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the series of ten critical essays called Situations (1947-1976), or the political plays Dirt Hands (1948), Being and Nothingness is the most idiosyncratic product to his legacy. However, the abstractions in this treatise can be difficult to decipher at times. In order to provide some of the a priori explanations a relatable context to be understood by the general public, Sartre turned to literature and play writing. There are three literary works which best emulate his philosophies on contingency, his ethics on freedom, and his concept of "the Other" proposed in Being and Nothingness: the book Nausea (1938), and the two plays The Flies (1942) and No Exit (1943), respectively.
Sartre's contributions to Existentialism and phenomenology have made him an important figure for the twentieth century while his books and plays act as a bridge for the public to understand his more abstract philosophies found in Being and Nothingness. The product is his Engaged Literature. His ability as a writer has emphasized him as a prominent intellectual and a serious philosopher in history. In these literary works, Sartre attempts to persuade the reader that our entire world has no rational reason to exist, using the novel Nausea (1938) as the best testimony to this point. Of course, we have our own reasons and values that give meaning to our world, but those are purely subjective values, varying by each individual. Sartre believes there is no higher power that determines the way conscious beings behave or think, and as such, there is no absolute ethic to living. The subjective rational is then the only manner of living and communicating. Each person constructs their world based of a free will that is able to recognize or to ignore any number of possibilities existing in the physical world. Sartre uses the play The Flies (1943) to exemplify rationality as variable to each person and how anyone is able to influence a situation just as much as another person. Both works, Nausea and The Flies, describe both an "absurd" world where the entire structure of our society and thought is based off nothing but varying degrees of subjective preference, and the responsibility associated with the freedom for an individual to fabricate those preferences.
Furthermore, Sartre claims that "the fundamental aim of existentialism is to reveal the link between the absolute character of free commitment… and the relativity of the cultural ensemble that may result from such a choice". Our society is intimately connected to each individual's decision to act or abstain from the infinite number of possibilities that consume each situation. Due to this intimacy, each person is thinking and acting off the decisions and judgments of another person. As much as a conscious being has an ethic to be free and to better themselves, they also have a duty to their society because one's presence directly influences another – a human being is a function and a direct product of their environment. Sartre's contributions to the beliefs of social interaction become interwoven with his beliefs on contingency, creating a type of philosophy that reconstructs the world as an inescapable, vicious circle. These thoughts are excellently displayed through his written dialogue, making plays like No Exit (1944) a remarkable account of social interplay.
Introduction
France started to see a shift in thought in the late 19th through the early 20th centuries. With the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair still lingering on the minds of a divided France and the repercussions of the First World War that produced a great depression in 1931, the errors of France's economic and administrative decisions became increasingly suspicious. It was in these years of political and social despair that reduced France to reconsider their foundations, including their ideas of aesthetic and moral values. Jean-Paul Sartre became one of the few intellectuals who arose to shift France into this new intellectual movement and used his studies abroad in Germany to do this. Sartre's development in Germany was pivotal in his life and when he returned he brought back the complexities of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Edmund Husserl into the stagnating French perspective. After returning in 1933, Sartre adopted a new way of thinking to the narrow-mindedness of France. Phenomenology and Ontology became this new method of discourse, creating a new wave of thought for France to consider.
Sartre was born on June 21, 1905. His father died a year after his birth which burdened his mother to rear him with the help of her parents who lived in Meudon, France. He was born into a household of words and in his autobiography, the Words, Sartre said he will leave the world the same way. Arguably, without the death of his father, Sartre might not have been the prodigious writer that twentieth century historians have come to know. Without a father figure, and with a distant mother, Sartre was left to be free to his thoughts and only had the teachings of his tenured Grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, to follow. With an early aptitude for reading and writing he never suffered much from Schweitzer's strictly stoic guardianship. In fact he was raised to believe he was some intellectual prodigy. By an early age of seven he was reading (less so comprehending) Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Some even accredit the meta-aspect of Nausea to Flaubert's own meta-writing style in that very same book. In 1924, he entered into a school of higher education, École Normale Supérieure, where he became enamored in Western Philosophy and the study of Georg Hegel, a German philosopher who dealt with rationalism and arguably the most influential intellectual for the 19th-20th century. After failing to graduate in 1928, he won first place in his examination the following year with an essay on "Contingency and Freedom". He then earned a lecturing position at the lycée in Le Havre in 1931 discussing topics of philosophy and the novel. But this was all before his year abroad in Germany where he learned phenomenology and launched into a new perspective on life.
Phenomenology is the method of discourse that seeks to analyze the relationship consciousness has with a person in a phenomenon. Attempting to unify the being with their thoughts, phenomenology takes the ordinary situation and challenges its existence through the subjectivity of its perceiver. It is a style of discourse that considers the person as a creator themselves. There arose a few variations to this manner of thought that came from Sartre's contemporaries: Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Albert Camus (1913-1960), Simone De Beauvoir (1908-1986), and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) are a few prominent figures.
His Existentialism became an outrage for religious sect as he promoted a phenomenology that denied the existence of any divine transcendental being. His most distinguished essay, Being and Nothingness, explores the search for an ethics of living in a world without god and makes an effort to address the "bad faith" of people who reject their absolute freedom through social interaction and cordial "play-acting". Sartre's intent to demonstrate that free will exists is illustrated in his belief that religion is a form of deception. The being in consciousness is constrained to the morals of the religion, not to their own morals, and accordingly makes them believe that they are acting for an Almighty power who has already determined everything. But Sartre believes religion is just another path to escape one's realization of existence.
Sartre's Atheism became a seed to his legacy, where he regularly stated a world without God would make no difference. His phenomenology became a reminder for people to realize that their consciousness supplies the content of their world and nothing besides their own virtue will allow them to view their surroundings concrete or unreliable. However bleak this might seem, Sartre saw this as an optimistic revelation: we are absolutely free!
Freedom becomes a crucial theme for Sartre. His childhood was seeded in the havoc of the First World War, he was drafted into the Second World War, and he was raised under the studies of Descartes' skepticism. Whether it is to a sense of duty or to the vast question of existence, Sartre had a personal relationship with the aspect of freedom. But his view on freedom differs from the conventional. Immanuel Kant strove to free the rational being from an immoral virtue. Karl Marx fought to free the working class away from the market. However, being a highly-educated philosopher, Sartre accumulated a survey of knowledge that sought to free people from the constraints an individual imposes on themselves. Freedom, as follows, is less so the belief that a person can physically do whatever they want and more of an assertion that we have a consciousness that can never be restrained. A prisoner might be physically shackled to the walls but his imprisonment does not force him to think of anything in particular. He is free to choose his thoughts and to negate others. Sartre used his talent as a writer to help get these points across to the reader and help a generation of people in war and conflict understand the power of their consciousness.
Although he is acclaimed for the philosophical movement of Existentialism, his literary works have solidified him as a serious intellectual and a powerful figure. It is in these novels, plays, and essays that Sartre really is able to articulate the nuances of political, moral, and existential dilemmas that console the reader into an epiphany on existence. Each word carries the philosophical power of his convictions and each literary work wastes little time in illustrating the magnitude of what he wants to say. Most of his writings deal with the effort to break away from the walls of social reputation, language, and moral obligation while structuring his works to embody his beliefs drawn out in The Imaginary (1940).
He used the combination of realistic characters and dialogue along with fictional scenarios to create a setting for his philosophy to thrive and to engage his audience. Engaged Literature captivates the reader into an imaginary world of the familiarly real. The reality of the setting would compel the reader to question their own lives as they draw upon aspects they could relate to. He used his novels, plays, and essays as a way to influence society on the varying degrees of contingency and freedom further extrapolated upon in Being and Nothingness.

Nausea (1938)
Sartre's first book, Nausea, launched him into celebrity as a philosophical icon and a stylized novelist. He wrote this book sporadically throughout the late 1930's and eventually published it in 1938. His fame for the book is based on the philosophical excellence of explaining his ideas on "contingency" and the ease at which he is able to write the subtleties of his phenomenology. However, only students and attendees of his lectures on philosophy at the lycée would be able to understand the complexities of his writings through this book, which would be later distinguished his magnum opus Being and Nothingness five years later. Although some of his passages in Nausea might be a bit long-winded, his thoughts are fluid and sentences contrite.
Sartre uses Nausea as a way to get his ideas of existence across to the general public. This is his most celebrated book written, regarding a realization of our absurd being. I will be pointing out various aspects of Sartre's "contingency" in order to emphasize how he uses books as a bridge to existential thought found through Being and Nothingness. It should be noted that there is much more going on in the book than Sartre's view on contingency, but in order to grasp his other opinions, like social judgment and "bad faith", one must first understand the density of the former topic.
Existence is the foundation for the book, and it is the reality of an absurd existence that gives the main character, Antoine Roquentin, surging bouts of nausea. Roquentin is struggling with a number of different issues of his life ranging from sexual frustration to simple apathy over writing a biography of Marquis de Rollebon. However, he continually experiences a sort of blossoming "strangeness" to random moments of his life. In the coffee shop, in the park, or even in his own apartment, Roquentin is haunted to an over-stimulated sense of reality. He can't quite understand the reason for why he becomes immersed in such a stroke of feeling and he uses his diary as a way to better understand what is happening to him. But his Nausea eventually culminates to a point where "the words had vanished, and with them the significance of things…which men had traced on their surface". He finds that not only words, but entire series of thoughts and situations are completely arbitrary and therefore, unnecessary. Unnecessary, in this case, would mean a lack of concrete reasons to why one thing happened over another. He is distraught over the complexity of existence and struggles to maintain a firm grasp on his reality.
When sketching the early drafts of this book, Sartre was playing with the idea of a world devoid of objects where consciousness would consequently have to exist in its own realm. It's a fairly difficult world to envision, but Roquentin acts as the person who slowly transcends into a view that looks beyond his existing environment. Roquentin realizes that in order to make sense of this world, our personal rationalization is the only thing to use. Random chores or anticlimactic situations like walking on the pier, watching the "unenthusiastic" bourgeois, the gripes of writing a history book, and even sporadic fantasies of his lost lover Anny, all illicit moments of sheer superfluity of life. There is no rational reason for these events to be happening. He is living in an absurd world, one that is not grounded to anything but a momentary feeling or random strokes of meaning. However, each situation holds immense importance in illustrating a sense of unequivocal freedom which leads Roquentin to a sense of dread and anguish.
Roquentin's muse over a chair illustrates the idea of language's role in an absurd existence. It can be assumed that the only thing a person may use to sit is a chair, but when Roquentin tries to explain the chair's existence, "the word stays on [his] lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing". The essence of the object eludes the linguistic representation of its existence. Language only favors a certain frame of mind over another where objects, such as a chair, are given meanings that fit a sense of purpose for that object. Yet, its existence is only defined through our need for its purpose; its essence, what it actually is, remains hidden beyond words.
Further on in the book, Roquentin compares the chair to a dead donkey, emphasizing his claim on the role language plays in our absurd being. He is transfixed at how a chair had a premeditated purpose to its existence and how a dead donkey would have less of one, yet both things are just as qualified to sit upon. Roquentin finds that "things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: [he] is in the midst of things, nameless things". Our language is a structure of communication that allows our different points of view to be shared by the same referents. But what are those things? Roquentin is not questioning the existence of his surroundings but realizing that they do in fact exist, where the absurdity is drawn from the situation that a person finds themselves in. How ridiculous it is to be plunged into a phenomenon that uses arbitrary words to describe existing things! A chair could have just as well been a dead donkey. It becomes absurd like a "madman's raving, for example…in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his delirium".
Objects are denounced from the words that are assigned to them, or rather there are objects that exist beyond their linguistic counterpart. But how does this relate to conscious beings? We have names, so wouldn't that mean we have some sort of identity found through the arbitrariness of language? It be that when Roquentin confesses that he feels "in the way" he is alluding to the idea that in his relation to his environment he exist beyond his words. Things overflow from their linguistic restraints and exist in the way of other existing things. The things in reality escape an accurate relationship to language as words themselves are arbitrary and can be interpreted differently:

"Neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reason is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it."

To Sartre, existence was a huge part of his philosophy. He studied Descartes and his Cartesian duality and at an early age took keen interest in Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He became concerned with these forms of philosophy even more so after returning from Germany and studying Husserl which provided him with a perspective of consciousness to adopt. Sartre agreed that consciousness exists as a duality between the Being-in-itself and the Being-for-itself. The in-itself represents the unconscious objects in existence, and the for-itself represents conscious beings. A German Idealist would say all of reality exists because of the consciousness, but Sartre suggests that consciousness is a negative quality, a "nothingness" that is filled up by the pre-existing "fullness" of the in-itself. The Being-for-itself wouldn't understand its own existence without the Being-in-itself, giving the mentality of German Idealism a different spin epitomized in his famous statement "existence precedes essence". Consciousness needs to be conscious of something! Consciousness does not create the world but instead just interprets what already exists, then once that object is understood to be an existing object can we only then detect an essence. And as such, consciousness wouldn't exist without first interacting with an object already existing. Then the pre-existing in-itself reflects backs on the for-itself consciousness to support its existence.
The consciousness that recognizes an in-itself existence simultaneously implies a realization of its own existence apart from that object. Consciousness comprehends itself through the existence of another already existing object. In this sense, Sartre's consciousness is at the same time also self-consciousness. One must first interact with the Being-in-itself in order to realize it is a conscious Being-for-itself. It is a reflexive relationship where the nothingness of consciousness is constantly being dragged out of its oblivion through the fullness of inanimate objects, pulling the for-itself down into a state of mundane living among the unconscious. But through this mundane existence, human beings use language as a way to exist beyond their environment through symbols, metaphors, and abstract analogies, posing an interesting reality to our state of relation in the world. Through our use of language, we are obliged to use our own interpretations of each referent. Our subjectivity is not only a vital aspect, but it is the chief and singular aspect to confronting a situation. This means that our individual rationality to each situation influences the following chain of actions. The unraveling fray of reality becomes contingent on the momentary interpretations unique to each person.
Subjective thought composes the world as a collection of personal rationalities that are all dependent upon one's own opinion of a phenomenon. But "the disgust of existing" that sickens Roquentin is one that realizes there are an infinite amount of possibilities to negate in order to focus on just one percept when in a phenomenon. A situation rides on a momentary inclination to one facet of interpretation to a point where if a person where to encounter the same situation further on in life, their opinions will most likely be completely different. This change in stance makes the world absurd because there is no correct way, no ration reason for anything one thing to happen over another.
Everything is contingent because any other situation had just as much of a possibility of happening. "One cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them". As such, Roquentin begins to realize that he hadn't the slightest reason to exist. He was living sure, but the reason to why he came into existence was futile because he knew that he "had appeared by chance, existing like a stone, a plant or a microbe" (N 84). He goes to the café, a gallery honoring valued presidents, and even eavesdrops on various bourgeois conversation, demonstrating that topics of conversation and the memorialization of people are all contingent on opinions, more or less dependent on a certain linguistic frame of mind. But the essential thing being that "anything can happen, anything". Those portraits of valuable presidents mean nothing except that they lived up to a set of values that their society saw as worthy of praise. It is in this manner that Sartre believes that one cannot achieve any concrete understandings about life, because it is invariably flexible and absurdly contingent.
Existence is a presence that a being-for-itself can never abandon, and consequently we find reasons for why different things happen in different situations. This is where Sartre would agree with Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics which stated that beings have an instinct to explain their situations. Most of the time a meaning contained in a situation is found that only satisfies the needs of the person. One's own inversion on reality is the absurdity of our world because they have the choice to choose whether or not to interact a possibility or to nullify it. Furthermore, who is able to define how one person interacts with their reality over another? Without a God and a metaphysical standard there is nothing but the freedom of our consciousness to create our entire world. And through this freedom to assign any meaning to any thread of reality, we must assume complete responsibility for who we become and how we act. Roquentin's nausea flares once he recognizes this aspect of life: we must accept the responsibility of existing in a world that is absurd.

Sartre as a Solider (1939 – captured in 1940 – released in 1941)
Jean Paul Sartre realized the profound effect Second World War had on him: "the clearest thing about my life is that there was a break which means that there are two almost entirely separate moments…before the war and after". It was during this time he spent enlisted as a crudely defined meteorologist that he dedicated an exorbitant amount of time reading, writing, and questioning his social surroundings. His task as a man-of-action consisted of sending a balloon skyward, writing down a few calculations, and finding its speed and direction. But it was more rigorous than one might assume; he had to do this twice a day! It's hard to believe that he never returned with a purple heart. Sartre seemed to think little of his leisure as a time for cards and smokes as he spent most of it in disciplined diligence. He assigned himself to slogging through the phenomenological texts of Martin Heidegger, Gide, Henri Renard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Eugéne Dabit all of whom influenced his works and nascent ideas. But it didn't stop there, his reading was indiscriminate against genre and explored vast surveys of history (especially the rise of Nazism in order to better understand his context as a solider), second rate detective novels, and most regularly the letters from Simone de Beauvoir.
It was also in this time of war that Sartre was able to realize the power of play-writing. It was during his 35th birthday in 1940 when he was captured and taken prisoner. He went to Stalag XIID in Trier, Germany and in this time felt like he really blended beyond his former upbringing. He was part of the masses and was stripped from his elite status that came to insulate him while in France. He found a liberating identity as a prisoner of war. He arose out of this time in a rebirth of perspective and declared, himself, that this was the moment that severed the 'before-Sartre' with the 'after-Sartre'. In the Christmas of 1940 he wrote, produced and directed a play in 6 weeks, using the Nativity scene as a veneer to cover up his call for resistance and hope against their Germany captors. But it wasn't the overall message that convinced him to be a life-long play fanatic. It was seeing his fellow prisoners entranced by the play like a "great, collective religious phenomenon". He saw such a strong bond created from the actors to the audience that he realized this was the strongest medium to connect with the public. It launched him into an undying sympathy for the art. But beyond that, Sartre encountered a resounding sense of unity with his fellow prisoners and found the appreciation for humanity that would be a reoccurring theme in a number of his texts.
The Flies (1943)
Written two years after he returned from war in 1941 and published in the same year as Being and Nothingness, Sartre's play The Flies uses Ancient Greek Mythology to depict a person's attainment of freedom. At this time in his career Sartre had begun to shift his concerns to political sentiment and, most directly, toward the German troops then occupying Paris. It parallels the same structure as the play he directed when a prisoner of war in 1940, using a mythological setting to conceal contemporary problems. This modern revision to the Greek myth between Orestes and Agamemnon not only serves as political pressure for French citizens to find a sense of freedom under the German occupation but also assumes a theme on overcoming various forms of oppression through the absolute freedom of our consciousness. But much more than that, it addresses a vast array of topics, putting into a realistic and relatable context the assertions Sartre makes in Being and Nothingness. Following his beliefs on contingency, it is Sartre's intention for this play is to prove his point on one's ultimate freedom in life where "even if God were to exist it would make no difference". Our freedom to choose makes up the content of this world. A transcendental being does not force meanings upon our world, therefore we must take responsibility for our actions and thoughts, and if we don't we are not living "authentically". One must comprehend that nothing can save themselves from their own existence and we are beings who are condemned to be free.
It begins with the protagonist, Orestes, regarded as a stranger to his birthplace: the city of Argos. He arrives as a wandering student from Athens, "a mere shadow of a man" who had travelled city to city along the same path as every other traveler both physically and metaphorically. And although he became "free from prejudice and superstition" though his tutor's most earnest education, Orestes feels detached from his own identity. Orestes had no sense of individuality or belonging, being torn away from his birthplace and ennobled name as an infant. He experiences a type of freedom that would normally be constrained by the duties and obligations imposed through family, religion, and social status but, in this, he feels lost and without motive. He fantasizes about the burdens of growing up as the heir to the throne and the memories of potential failures and successes that would have molded his character. But Orestes feels isolated in his "gloriously aloof" mind, free from commitment, and eventually craves to share the same despair as the people of Argos, convinced that it would have been a despair that belong to him as something he could identify with. He stumbles upon his sister Electra, and becomes inspired by her rogue passion and her desire to be free from her demoted role as chamberlain. He pledges to avenge his fallen father, Agamemnon, King of the Golden Fleet that won the Trojan War, from the usurper Aegistheus and retake ownership of his birthright kingdom.
Orestes coincidentally arrived on the very anniversary of his fallen father, called the "day of the dead". It is on this day that the city wallows in their guilty conscious and opens the gates of the dead to wreak havoc upon the living. Repenting to the gods and suffering a haunting anguish for being blamed for all deaths, the people of Argos call out: "Forgive us for living while you are dead". Aegistheus continues to subordinate the people of Argos and detract their self-awareness into repentance for all the deaths that they have accumulated: "those who starved to death, and those who hanged themselves are because of you". He does this to prevent a revolution to his usurped power, masking his subjects in a pit-less despair of anguish and shame. He distracts the people of Argos from realizing their freedom and ability to insurrect a change, using the wrath of the gods as a manner of crowd control. Just like another principal character in the play, the Greek God Zeus, Aegistheus uses his power to bind his subjects away from their free will and consciousness.
Zeus feeds off the guilt-stricken citizens trying to atone for their sins: those people feel indebted to appease the Gods and have adjusted their attitudes to conform accordingly. They do this by severing their own values on a situation and substituting the inhibitions the Gods have created for them. And this becomes the threat that Orestes has over Zeus. Zeus says that the "bane of gods and kings is the bitterness of knowing men are free". Orestes realizes he is a completely free man and has the freedom to act and think against the authority of his creator, Zeus. He acts against the image that Zeus imposes over him. He knows his freedom to accept all of his actions and claim all responsibility for his existence. His conscious being does not deal with the "will of God" as an abstract standard of living, but rather, within his own existence he constructs an ethic that is unique to him: "the gods are powerless against him". As Zeus vehemently directs Orestes to realize his blasphemy against the God of Gods, Orestes responds; "no sooner had you created me than I ceased to be yours" (F 121). Nothing can determine a being in consciousness to think or act in a certain manner. Beings derive their own magnificence and meaning into their world: they are their own creators.
Religion, to Sartre, indoctrinates a type of moral standard that differs to the reality of our world, constricting a being's consciousness to an existence that is both metaphysical and unsolid. In his essay, Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre says that "in order for any truth to exist, there must first be an absolute truth" (exist. Is a hum. 40). His absolute truth respected the Cartesian claim: "I think therefore I am". This truth neither includes God nor a universal moral standard to Sartre but is rather a point of departure that concretizes his beliefs on subjectivity. Our thoughts are the only basis of truth. The foundation of Cartesian philosophy is that everything in the physical world is a skeptical existence and arguably a façade of deception. But the only thing that is inarguably clear is that we have thoughts and those thoughts are unique to ourselves. That is our subjectivity: varying differences that isolate our perspectives from one another. And from our discussion on Nausea, we understand that human reality has the ultimate freedom to use our subjectivity however we want. Consequently, our subjectivity is the only thing that can be relied upon in order for a person to act in an authentic manner but, like the people of Argos, there are moments where people try and escape the responsibility of having a free will.
In Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Sartre responds to one of the objections to existential thought: "Since all our choices are arbitrary, you receive into one hand what you grant with the other" (exist. Is a hum. pg. 45). This objection illustrates the give-and-take reaction of choices and how we invent values to dictate the order of our subjective world. Just as arbitrary words and languages are, so too are values and the systems of rationality, and that is the cornerstone to our absurd world; we must accept it. Contraries would say that without a universal ideal to act by, there would be no way to judge or legitimize the good or bad aspects of a person's actions or principals. In a world without determinism or God, "we are left alone and without excuse" (exist is a hum 29) and we must be responsible for all the meanings that we invent for ourselves. Here, Sartre claims that we are condemned to be free. One can only rely upon themselves and their own knowledge of themselves within a certain phenomenon.
Religion's "hegemony" of ideals deconstructs the reality of a person's own existence as they start living by the directives of another existence: the God's existence. Proverbs and Bible verses become the alibi to a person's actions. They no longer are working as "a consciousness in being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being"; they are in a state of self-negation. While I don't believe Sartre would be against reading the bible, he would say that there are people who justify their actions as an extension of some almighty power in order to escape the responsibility of living in a contingent world. They slip out of an authentic manner of living and avoid the responsibility that accompanies a life of contingency. This is called "bad faith" or "inauthenticity".
Sartre follows the footsteps of his progenitor Friedrich Nietzsche by reminding the individual to create a new self in this modern age. A "superman", as Nietzsche declares, which transcends religion and all of its shackled catechisms where new values are based off one's own conscious behaviors instead of the directives of some metaphysical authority. The metaphysical aspect of existence cannot be as absolute as Immanuel Kant assumed (although Kant made a very convincing effort otherwise). "No code of ethics on record can answer" an a priori standard, Sartre claims, but rather, "we have no choice but to rely on our instincts". It is our own desire and will, along with our own measurement of feelings that will ultimately decide the outcome of a situation and its subsequent actions. In our ultimate freedom we must avoid acting in a way that negates ourselves from our own conscious being, and that presumes that there is no definite manner to act given a situation. The possibilities in a situation are endless, and our choices are contingent. We must take responsibility to "seek within [ourselves] some authentic state of being that will compel [us] to act, any more than [we] can expect any morality to provide the concepts that will enable [us] to act".
Orestes is the caricature of Sartre's ideal free man that he seeks to define in Being and Nothingness. He vows to be the "guilt-stealer, and heap on [himself] all the remorse" of the city of Argos, setting its town-folk back to the freedom of choice. He kills Aegitheus. He feels no remorse and no shame for committing an act of murder and labels his deed as an act of Justice to "restore to them their sense of human dignity". He has no excuse for his actions but instead welcomes the mass weight of anguish that falls on his realization of being responsible for his action and free being. Orestes declares that "there [is] nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give [him] orders" and pledges to emancipate his people into a similar freedom. The end of the play is a drawn out coronation speech by Orestes telling the citizens of his intentions. He becomes the King of Argos but rejects the throne and crown saying he "wishes to be a king without a kingdom, without subjects". It is his wish to leave the citizens of Argos under the freedom of their own decisions, not the constitution of a ruling king, so the people could reshape their lives to their own accord.
Sartre encapsulates his themes on the ethics of freedom through this play and the responsibility of accepting anguish as a way for an individual to admonish inauthenticity. But he also makes the claim that freedom is not an individual ambition. Through Orestes' choice to free his citizens of Argos, Sartre is exemplifying his proposition that says, "[we] cannot set [our] own freedom as a goal without also setting the freedom of others as a goal". The realm of social interaction and human relationship is second to "contingency of life" in Sartre's philosophical exploits. Social praxis, or the reflexive relationship theories have with action in a social setting, is a symbiotic obligation that humans have with each other. "The Other", or anyone that is not oneself, depicts an aspect of existence that must be reckoned with, and more than that, it must be set as a duty in order to idealize one's own conscious existence.
No Exit (1944)
Sartre's own passion for showmanship, along with his strange upbringing, nurtured his critique on people, social roles, and social judgment. Mostly under the guardianship of his grandfather, a German teacher named Charles Schweitzer, Sartre grew up in a household that honored the good conscious of the intellectual class and a sort of sentimental humanism, both of which were the embers for most of his attacks against "inauthenticity". We can see this commentary on "inauthenticity" infused with most of his works, yet No Exit is seen as one of Sartre's best examples of social interaction and an individual's relation to their social environment. It is one of the more linked plays with the philosophical points proposed in Being and Nothingness and has be acclaimed as his most preformed play on stage. It is also considered one of Sartre's best depiction of his style of play writing that had minimal character changes and depended heavily on character monologue. This play, absent of all the political motifs that one might assume during the Second World War, was first sketched out when thinking about how three people would act when trapped in a bomb shelter.
No Exit was written in the early Forties and first debuted on stage in 1944. It begins with the setting as both a physical and metaphorical purgatory for the characters. Sartre eludes actually defining the setting as Hell but with the introduction to each character (Garcin, Inez, and Estelle) consistently dreading the fear of a nameless torturer, the audience gradually comes to an understanding. Joseph Garcin is the first to be escorted into the semblance of a hotel room; decorated with three colored couches, a paper knife, and an immovable bronze mantel piece. There are no light switches, no windows, no paintings, and a malfunctioning bell that can be answered by the whim of the valet. It is a completely enclosed room with no chance of escape.
In a room without mirrors the characters must rely on each other through words and gestures to find their own appearance. This capitalizes on Sartre's belief that the human reality is one that is based off social interplay, where each individual's identity is one that is an accumulation of qualities barrowed from other people. However, our interdependence on others makes us vulnerable and malleable to judgment. We must understand that our social relationship to other people is so intimate that the road to self-discovery and self-identity is simultaneously a road to our fellow being's existence.
Garcin, Inez and Estelle find each other in the confines of the same hotel room, persecuting each other's position in Hell. And although each character has their own story to tell, Joseph Garcin's story resurrects the most suspense and attention in Sartre's writing. Garcin is trying to cope with the shame of being memorialized as a coward even after a life-long dedication to courage and heroic behavior. He contemplates the honor and integrity of his death, hoping that his lingering reputation on earth can be deemed as anything but the "cowardly" act of running away from his enlistment into war. He repeatedly asks for the trust and condolence of Estelle who never abides but rather just goads Garcin about his reasons for acting. And although he wearily reassures them that he had reasons while living, in the vacuum of Hell, a place with no concept of time or context, he struggles to answer if "they were real reasons…was that [the] real motive?". He attempts to prove to the other two of his noble character for the rest of the play until he realizes his place in Hell and welcomes his eternal damnation end with the famous line, "Hell is other people".
Sartre's main focus behind this play is the topic of "the other" and an individual's relation to their social surrounding. Where "the other is essential to [our] existence, as well as to the knowledge [we] have of [ourselves]", Sartre asserts that it is only through our social interaction that humans become both vulnerable and dependent on another's existence in order to sculpt one's own. We each contain the presence of "the other" when going about our day and even in our solitude. We are always in a state of becoming and we use the aspects of our fellow human beings as traits to aspire to. This describes the desire to be god. "The other" is understood through two distinctions of perspective.
Sartre differentiates between two attitudes that a conscious being can express: a subject or an object. The subject distinction is where one interprets a judgment on their situation. The object distinction is where one is the object of someone else's judgment. Furthermore, if we attain some emotional or spiritual understanding of ourselves, such as shame or viciousness, it would only be through another's acknowledgement of such a trait and the fact that we can see that trait existing outside of ourselves in society. The subject-object relationship affects each other simultaneously creating a vicious circle where "nothing remains for the For-itself except to re-enter the circle and allow itself to be indefinitely tossed from one to the other of the two fundamental attitudes". It is this aspect of "the other" that Sartre tries to exemplify through his setting. No mirrors or any sort of way to find their self-identity except for the one that is extracted by the other two prisoners. The identity of one character relies on the judgment of another.
Sartre distinguishes the difference between the subject-object duality through a metaphor of a person spying through a keyhole. A person hides behind a door and watches a scene unfold through the keyhole without anybody realizing their concealed existence. This person spying is subject; everything and everybody is the object of their consciousness. The spy suddenly hears footsteps approaching and adjusts into another stance, preparing for social interaction that doesn't expose their mischief. The approaching person confronts the spy and reverses the positions of the situation, or rather, makes the spy realize the object side of his existence. The spy becomes the object to another consciousness and embodies just as much of an existence as the being-in-itself. But we recognize that this object of our consciousness is also just as free as we are and they "are a set of values distinct from the material world". This claim has a Kantian flare to it alluding to the idea that we must acknowledge a person as more than a means to an end. Other people are beings in consciousness who are just as able to process and perceive the being-in-itself in a distinctive manner than oneself and they should be treated as an extension to oneself. The spy looking through the keyhole realizes that his subjectivity can be judged by another person's spectrum of values, unlike some materialistic being-in-itself, and he attunes his behavior to confront this person in order to preserve his identity.
One projects "the other" being-for-itself onto themselves to help solidify their own existence: "we each attain ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves". Inez, the brash and surly character of the play, continuously reminds the other two of this aspect of "the other" and is first to realize that they are each other's torturer. She ardently implores for the other two to realize that even in negating each other's presence, they are still solidifying their existence: in order to negate something one must first recognize its existence. She is the legislator between the Garcin and Estelle, making them both understand the extent of each other's presence. We are thrust into a world where the discovery of the self is an extension of another's existence. So when Garcin begins self-doubting his legacy, he is actually reflecting upon the identity that he has created for himself in his "cowardly" death defined by the Other's judgments. He is ashamed of his death because he has built a life based off courage but his dying action, the one that people will remember, was based of his skittish reflex.
Becoming-into-being is an aspect of Sartre's philosophy that is influenced heavily by his contemporary, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was one of Edmund Husserl's students, elaborating upon his teacher's positions and developing the study of phenomenology into the profound structure of philosophy people understand today. After reading Being and Time (1927) by Heidegger, Sartre was enthralled and agreed with Heidegger's concept of Dasin and the idea that an individual is always in a state of becoming. Also termed as "secular transcendence", this belief says that human beings are in a reality that is always in a state of transcending towards a trait or standard that they lack but it is something that one can never apprehend. We all have a "free project" that we incorporate into our life that we choose for ourselves to become. And since every action and negation would suggest an existence, where "to cease to act is to cease to be", we are always in the process of becoming into a being. We choose who we want to be in such a way that we are the ones to pull ourselves out the nothingness of consciousness to live in a life that is trivial, absurd, and contingent.
Sartre says that "human reality is not what it is, and is what it is not", meaning that a person is never what they are because they are always in a state of becoming that person. A person cannot be expected to anything until that action is completed, only then can another interpret that person as such. A hero has just as much of a possibility of acting like a coward, as the coward can raise to heroic glory. One can never assume any personality to act in a certain way because we are conscious beings with a free will to impose a meaning to our ever-changing situations. Life is contingent and can never be consistently predicted with reason. However, it is the judgment of the other that congeals a person into a manner of acting, restricting one's own freedom in a way to avoid the shame of acting "inappropriately". Because words are arbitrary and illicit a subjective understanding, one's relation to a word such as "inappropriate" could be completely different to another's. But this is where we must comprehend the Other as a consciousness with a unique spectrum of values, capable of interpreting another person's values and actions. Garcin realizes that it is in this concept of the Other's judgment constrains his free will into a Hellish relationship with Estelle and Inez. People act a certain way because it is only through another that we are able to find our own existence, and consequently, how our legacy will be remembered.
Conclusion
Sartre used literature and play writing as a way to provide his highly complex ideas regarding contingency, theories of existence, ethics on freedom, inauthenticity and religion, and the gyre of "the Other" a context in which to comprehend, using his magnum opus Being and Nothingness as the source to his philosophical propositions. And although Sartre has been associated with "ignoring beauty and the brighter side of human nature", he is first and foremost a humanist, trying to set human beings free from their own constraints out the love he has for humanity. Without Sartre, philosophy, literature, sociology and many more topics of study would not be what they are today. He died in 1980 as one of the most recognized intellectual of the 20th century leaving behind a legacy that will never be forgotten.



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