Jean-Paul Sartre

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905–d. 1980) was one of the most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century and one of the very few philosophers to share this distinction. His prominence was primarily due to the fact that he was a prolific writer of short stories, novels, and plays as well as the author of numerous journalistic interventions in domestic and international politics. His wide-ranging oeuvre played a seminal role in anchoring existentialism in French culture and in popularizing existentialist ideas globally. Scholarship on Sartre reflects the diversity of his interests and engagements. This article is limited to philosophical perspectives on his writings, including literary aesthetics and decolonial theory. In his early works between Transcendence of the Ego (TE) and Being and Nothingness (BN), Sartre develops an existential philosophy that is inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Later on, in his writings leading up to and including the Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR), Sartre adopts a historically informed stance that is in close dialogue with Marxist ideas and contrasts with the individualism of his earlier works. Owing to Sartre’s nonacademic style and bold revisionism, established readings even of his most important works are a rather recent phenomenon and do not reach beyond BN. A contributing factor to this uneven reception may be that defending or criticizing Sartre’s later attempts to fuse existentialism with Marxism is much less urgent today than at Sartre’s time of writing. Indeed, the heated debates about Sartre’s existentialism during his lifetime have left virtually no legacy. To the contrary, the polemics surrounding his work seem to have delayed the philosophical reception of Sartre’s philosophy. An exception to this rule is the long-standing presence of his writings in decolonial discussions and the philosophy of race. Sartre contributed introductions to foundational texts of this discourse, Senghor’s classic anthology of African and Caribbean poetry, Memmi’s reflections on colonialism, and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. These introductions, together with his essay on antisemitism, his programmatic lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, and his existential-phenomenological perspective on agency from BN, are still relevant for philosophical debates on race, racism, and the aftermath of colonialism. Furthermore, the recent renaissance of phenomenology, especially in the philosophy of mind, has generated renewed interest in Sartre’s non-egological conception of consciousness, his account of the emotions, his controversial views on self-deception, and his treatment of the topic of others.