Jean-Paul Sartre (born Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre June 21, 1905 in Paris - April 15, 1980, Paris) is a French philosopher and writer (playwright, novelist and short story writer) as well as critic of the 20th century, whose work marked the middle of the century and whose life as a committed intellectual aroused controversy and reluctance. Prolific and hyperactive, he is known as much for his work, in particular his philosophical paradigms which are grouped under the name of existentialism, as for his political commitment, of the radical left.
Intransigent and faithful to himself and his ideas, he always rejected honours, notably the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature. Sartre is also known as the companion of Simone de Beauvoir.
"I'm not trying to protect my life after the fact with my philosophy, which is filthy, nor to conform my life to my philosophy, which is pedantic, but really, life and philosophy are one and the same. » Diaries of the Phoney War
A prolific author, Sartre left behind him a titanic body of work, in the form of novels, essays, plays, philosophical writings and biographies. His philosophy marked the post-war period, and he remains the symbol, the archetype of the committed intellectual. From his engagement in the resistance in 1941 until his death in 1980, Sartre never ceased to make headlines. He was indeed in all battles, fully and totally committed to his time, embracing with fervor all the causes that seemed to him just. A sort of Voltaire[1] of the 20th century, Sartre was a tireless activist until the end of his life.
From genius to commitment
Childhood
Jean-Paul-Charles-Aymard-Léon-Eugène Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris; an only son, he comes from a bourgeois family:his uncle is a polytechnician, military, his mother comes from a family of Alsatian intellectuals and professors, the Schweitzers. His mother is the cousin of the famous Albert Schweitzer. Little Sartre will never know his father:he dies of yellow fever 15 months after his birth.
The image of the father is however there:it is his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a man with an imposing personality, who educates him before he enters public school at 10 years old. From 1907 to 1917, little "Pooulou", as he was called, went to live with his mother with her parents. He spent 10 happy years there. Little Poulou will be adored, pampered, congratulated every day, which will undoubtedly build a certain narcissism in him. In the large library of the Schweitzer house he discovered literature very early on, and preferred to read rather than socialize with other children (childhood mentioned in his autobiography Les Mots).
This period ended in 1917:his mother remarried Joseph Mancy, a naval engineer, whom Sartre, then aged 12, would never stop hating. They then moved to La Rochelle, where he remained until the age of 15, three years which would be years of ordeal for him:Sartre indeed passed from the narcissistic paradise of Schweitzer to the reality of violent and cruel high school students, while the child must share with the new husband a mother who was previously his sole property.
Around the summer of 1920, ill, Jean-Paul Sartre was urgently repatriated to Paris. Concerned about his education, which could be "perverted" by the bad boys of the high school in Le Havre, his mother decides to make him stay there.
Years of study
At 16, Sartre returned to the Lycée Henri-IV where he had been a sixth and fifth year student. There he met Paul Nizan, also an apprentice writer, with whom he forged a strong friendship until his death in 1940. Supported by this friendship, Sartre began to build a personality for himself. For the whole of the "elite class" - Latin and Greek "option" - in which he studies, Sartre becomes the SO, that is to say the "official satyr":he indeed excels in facetiousness. , the joke. Last image of the high school years:Sartre and Nizan, drunk, happy to celebrate their easy success in the baccalaureate, would have vomited on the feet of the headmaster of the Lycée Henri-IV, half under the effect of circumstances, half by provocation.
Sartre, still accompanied by Nizan, prepares for the entrance examination to the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Lycée Louis-le-Grand. There he made his literary debut, notably by writing two short tales, two sinister stories of provincial teachers, in which his irony and his disgust for conventional lives burst. At the same time Sartre resumes his role as public entertainer with Nizan, playing jokes and small scenes between classes. Two years after entering Louis-le-Grand, Sartre and Nizan both passed the competition.
Sartre immediately stood out in what Nizan called “the so-called normal and so-called superior school”. Sartre remains the formidable instigator of all the jokes, of all the heckling, going so far as to cause a scandal by playing an anti-militarist sketch with his friends in the ENS review of 1927, after which Gustave Lanson, director of the school, will resign. The same year, he signed with his classmates, and following Alain, Lucien Descaves, Louis Guilloux, Henry Poulaille, Jules Romains, Séverine..., the petition (published on April 15 in the magazine Europe), against the law on the general organization of the nation for the time of war which abrogates all intellectual independence and all freedom of opinion. Sartre thus already has a taste for provocation and the fight against moral authority. He thus acquired great notoriety among his teachers and received a standing ovation each time he arrived at the refectory. If Sartre is willingly a teaser, he is also a great worker, devouring more than 300 books a year, writing songs, poems, short stories, novels with a vengeance. Sartre made friends who would later become famous, such as Raymond Aron or Merleau-Ponty.
However, during these four years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Sartre did not seem to be interested in politics. Spontaneously anarchizing, he does not go to any demonstration, does not get inflamed for any cause.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in front of the statue of Balzac in Paris in the 1920s
To the surprise of his admirers, who wondered about a possible error by the jury, Sartre failed in 1928 in the philosophy aggregation competition in which Raymond Aron was ranked first (Sartre himself would say that he had shown too much originality) . Preparing hard for the competition for the second time, he met in his working group Simone de Beauvoir, introduced by a mutual friend, André Herbaud, who nicknamed her "beaver", in reference to the English beaver (which means "beaver":on the one hand, this animal symbolizes work and energy; on the other, the sound of the word beaver is close to that of the name "Beauvoir"). This nickname will be adopted by Sartre and she will become his companion until the end of his life. She will be his “necessary love” as opposed to the “contingent loves” that they will both come to know. Sartre is received first in the aggregation competition at the second attempt, Simone de Beauvoir winning second place.
After his military service, the young professor (he was then 26 years old) asked to be transferred to Japan, which had always interested him. Dream shattered, since he was sent to the Lycée du Havre, today Lycée François-Ier, from March 1931. It was a test for Sartre, he who so feared tidy lives and who criticized so much in his writes the boring life of a provincial teacher.
The years in Le Havre:crossing the desert
Sartre then falls straight into real life, work and daily life. If he somewhat shocks parents and teachers with his manners (coming to class without a tie), he will seduce five generations of students, for whom he is an excellent teacher, warm and respectful, and often a friend. From there is born his complicity with adolescence, a contact that he will always like to have throughout his life.
In the meantime, he took over from Raymond Aron at the French Institute in Berlin in 1933 and 1934, where he completed his initiation into Husserl's phenomenology.
Glory, he thought he would get it since he was very young, these years in Le Havre call it into question since his writings are refused by publishers. She will however achieve this glory, and begins with her first book published in 1938 by Gallimard, La Nausée, a philosophical ("phenomenological") and somewhat autobiographical novel, recounting the existential torments of Antoine Roquentin, a 35-year-old bachelor and historian at his hours. In the meantime, he was transferred to the teacher training college of Laon in Picardy, from which came Alexandre Dumas and, later, Christian Nique, Education Advisor to President François Mitterrand.
Second good news:he was transferred in October 1937 to the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly. Then began a brief phase of notoriety for him, with La Nausée which narrowly missed out on the Goncourt Prize and the publication of a collection of short stories, Le Mur. This phase will be abruptly stopped by the Second World War, where he is mobilized in Nancy.
War and engagement
Before the war, Sartre had no political conscience. A pacifist but without campaigning for peace, the anti-militarist Sartre nevertheless assumes war without hesitation. The experience of war and community life will transform him completely. During the phoney war, he was hired as a meteorologist soldier. His function leaves him a lot of free time, which he uses to write a lot (on average twelve hours a day for nine months, i.e. 2000 pages, a small part of which will be published under the title of Diary of the Phoney War). He first writes to avoid contact with his traveling companions because he does not support the serious and hierarchical relations that are those of the army.
The Phoney War ends in May 1940, and the fake conflict becomes real. On June 21, Sartre was taken prisoner in Padoux in the Vosges, and was transferred to a detention camp in Germany of 25,000 prisoners. His experience as a prisoner marked him deeply:it taught him solidarity with men; far from feeling bullied, he joyfully participates in community life:he tells stories to his roommates in the evening, takes part in boxing matches, and finally writes and directs a play for Christmas Eve.
This life in the prison camp is important, because it is the turning point of his life:from now on, he is no longer the individualist of the 1930s, but a person conscious of a duty in the community.
In March 1941, Sartre was released thanks to a false medical certificate. His new desire for commitment led him, upon his return to Paris, to act by founding a resistance movement with some of his friends:the “Socialism and Freedom” movement. It will have about fifty members in June 1941. Sartre will be a modest but sincere resistance fighter. Some historians and philosophers, such as Vladimir Jankélévitch, who reproached him for his lack of commitment, see this movement as that of lazy and amateur philosophers faced with the professionalism of the communist and Gaullist resistance. However, the printing, the distribution of leaflets is not insignificant and Sartre and his friends fail to be arrested several times. In the summer of 1941, he crossed the province by bicycle to try in vain to extend the movement outside the capital and to rally other intellectuals like Gide or Malraux. After the arrest of two comrades, the group “Socialisme et liberté” disbanded towards the end of 1941.
In October 1941, Sartre was assigned to the Condorcet high school as a khâgne teacher, replacing Ferdinand Alquié. This position was initially occupied by Professor Henri Dreyfus-Le Foyer (until 1940) ousted because of his Jewish status. This fact, revealed in October 1997 by Jean Daniel in an editorial in Le Nouvel Observateur, will be blamed on Sartre. Ingrid Galster wonders about the quality of Sartre's commitment and remarks "whether he wanted it or not:objectively, he took advantage of the racial laws of Vichy[2]. At that time, he published several articles for the review Comoedia, founded on June 21, 1941 by René Delange, and controlled by Propaganda Staffel [3].
Despite the dissolution of the group “Socialisme et liberté”, Sartre did not give up the resistance that he continued with his pen. In 1943, he performed a piece he had composed, Les Mouches[4], taking up the myth of Electra and which can be interpreted as a call to resist. It was during the Premiere that he met Camus. In this period of occupation, the play did not have the expected impact:empty rooms, performances interrupted earlier than planned. For Jean Amadou, this representation is more ambiguous:“In 1943, in the darkest year of the Occupation, he had Les Mouches performed in Paris. That is to say, he did exactly what Sacha Guitry did, perform his plays before an audience of German officers, with the difference that at the Liberation Guitry was arrested while Sartre was a member of the Comité purge, which decided which writer still had the right to publish and which one should be banned. André Malraux, who himself had risked his life in the Resistance, did not believe himself authorized to be part of this self-proclaimed tribunal. Michel Winock believes that "it was Sartre's cunning to transform a theatrical failure into a political gain".
The same year, he published Being and Nothingness (influenced by Heidegger), where he took stock and deepened the theoretical bases of his system of thought. In the same way, in a few days, he wrote a play, The Others, which would become Huis clos, performed in May 1944 and which met with great success.
Towards the end of the war, Sartre was recruited by Camus for the resistance network Combat, he became a reporter for the newspaper of the same name, and described in the first pages the liberation of Paris. There begins his worldwide fame. He was sent to the United States in January 1945 to write a series of articles for Le Figaro, and was welcomed there as a hero of the resistance.
The war therefore cut his life in two in two:previously an individualist anarchist, little concerned with world affairs, Sartre became a committed and politically overactive militant. A Parisian professor known in the intellectual world, he became an international authority after the war.
The Glory Years
Existentialist madness
After the Liberation, Sartre enjoyed significant success and notoriety; he will, for more than ten years, reign over French letters. Advocating commitment as an end in itself, the dissemination of his ideas will be done in particular through the review he founded in 1945, Les Temps Modernes. Sartre shares his pen there, with among others, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. In the long editorial of the first issue, he lays down the principle of the responsibility of the intellectual in his time and of a committed literature. For him, the writer is in the game "whatever he does, marked, compromised even in his most distant retirement (...) The writer is in a situation in his time. This Sartrean position will dominate all intellectual debates in the second half of the 20th century. The journal is still considered one of the most prestigious French journals internationally.
Symbol of this surreal glory and of the intellectual hegemony of Saint-Germain-des-Prés over the world:its famous conference of October 1945, where a huge crowd tries to enter the small room which has been reserved. People jostle, shots go off, women faint or fall into a faint. Sartre presents a summary of his philosophy, existentialism, which will be transcribed in Existentialism is a humanism. Its publication, by the publisher Nagel, is made without the knowledge of Sartre who judges the transcription ex abrupto, necessarily simplistic, incompatible with writing and the work of meaning that it implies.
All the beautiful people now want to “be” existentialist, “live” existentialist. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the place where Sartre lives, becomes the district of existentialism, at the same time as a high place of cultural and nightlife:people party there in smoky cellars, listening to jazz, or by going to the café-théâtre. A rare phenomenon in the history of French thought, a technical and austere philosophical thought finds, however, in a very large public, an unusual echo. This can be explained by two factors:first of all, Sartre's work is multifaceted and allows everyone to find their level of reading, then existentialism, which proclaims total freedom, as well as total responsibility for the acts of the man in front of others and in front of himself, lends itself perfectly to this strange post-war climate where celebration and memory of atrocities mingle. Existentialism thus becomes a real fashion phenomenon, more or less faithful to Sartrean ideas, and by the extent of which the author seems a little outdated.
The Communist Temptation
During this time, Sartre will affirm his political commitment by clarifying his position, through his articles in Les Temps Modernes:Sartre espouses, like many intellectuals of his time, the cause of the Marxist revolution, but without giving his favors to the Communist Party, at the orders of a USSR which cannot satisfy the demand for freedom. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre and his friends therefore continue to seek a third way, that of the double rejection of capitalism and Stalinism. He supports Richard Wright, a black American writer former member of the American Communist Party exiled in France since 1947.
In his review Modern Times, he took a stand against the Indochina War, attacked Gaullism and criticized American imperialism. He will go so far as to affirm, in this same magazine, that “every anti-Communist is a dog”.
It was then that Sartre decided to translate his thought into political expression:by founding with some acquaintances a new political party, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR). But despite the success of some demonstrations, the RDR will never reach a sufficient number to become a real party. Sartre resigned in October 1949.
The Korean War, then the muscular repression of an antimilitarist demonstration by the PCF pushed Sartre to choose his side:Sartre then saw in communism a solution to the problems of the proletariat. Which makes him say:“If the working class wants to break away from the Party (PCF), it has only one way:to crumble into dust. »
Sartre became a fellow traveler of the Communist Party between the years 1952 and 1956. From then on, he participated in its movement:he took the presidency of the Association France-URSS. He declares:"In the USSR, freedom of criticism is total" and becomes a member of the World Peace Council.
This ideal rallying of Sartre to communism also separates Sartre and Camus, who were very close before. For Camus, Marxist ideology should not prevail over Stalinist crimes, while for Sartre, who is aware of these crimes, these facts should not be used as a pretext for abandoning revolutionary commitment.
This loyalty to the PCF would last until the fall of 1956, when Soviet tanks crushed the Budapest uprising. After signing a petition of left-wing intellectuals and protesting communists, on November 9 he gave a long interview to the newspaper l'Express (a Mendesist newspaper), to dramatically distance himself from the party.
Structuralism, Flaubert and the Nobel Prize
After that, existentialism seemed to be on the decline:in the 1960s, Sartre's influence on French letters and intellectual ideology gradually diminished, especially in the face of structuralists such as the ethnologist Lévi-Strauss, the philosopher Foucault or the psychoanalyst Lacan. Structuralism is in a way the enemy of existentialism:in fact there is little room in structuralism for human freedom, each man being embedded in structures that go beyond him and on which he has no control. not taken. In fact, Sartre is elsewhere, he does not take the trouble to discuss this new current that is structuralism:he is all about a personal project, which is the analysis of the 19th century, of literary creation, and above all the study of an author who has always fascinated him, Flaubert. Also in the 1960s his health deteriorated rapidly. Sartre is prematurely worn out by his constant literary and political overactivity, worn out by the tobacco and alcohol he consumes in large quantities, as well as the drugs that keep him in shape (coridrane and amphetamines).
In 1964, a fact that will have a great impact in the world, he refuses the Nobel Prize because, according to him, "no man deserves to be consecrated during his lifetime". He had likewise refused the Legion of Honor in 1945, or even a chair at the College de France. These honors would, according to him, have alienated his freedom, by making the writer an institution. This action will remain famous because it illustrates well the state of mind of the intellectual.
The years of commitment
If Sartre has distanced himself from the Communist Party, he continues to engage in many causes. He was one of the targets of the Congress for the Freedom of Culture, an anti-communist cultural association founded in 1950.
The Indochina War
In 1950, the Henri Martin affair broke out, a sailor and militant of the French Communist Party was arrested for an act of sabotage in favor of the Viet Minh. When the “traitor” was released in 1953, Sartre signed L’Affaire Henri Martin.
The Algerian War
From 1956, Sartre and the review Les Temps Modernes took sides against the idea of a French Algeria and supported the Algerian people's desire for independence. Sartre speaks out against torture, claims freedom for peoples to decide their fate, analyzes violence as gangrene, a product of colonialism. In 1960, during the trial of the FLN support networks, he declared himself to be the "suitcase carrier" of the FLN.
This position is not without danger, his apartment will be plasticized twice by the OAS and Les Temps Modernes seized five times.
Cuba
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre meet Ernesto Che Guevara, in Cuba in 1960
Sartre actively supported the Cuban revolution from 1960, like a large number of Third World intellectuals. In June 1960, he wrote 16 articles in France Soir entitled “Hurricane on sugar”. But he will break with the líder máximo in 1971 because of the "Padilla affair", when the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla is imprisoned for having criticized the Castro regime. He will say of Fidel Castro:"I liked him, it's quite rare, I liked him a lot. »
May 68
Sartre, in decline, will nevertheless be able to afford a new youth thanks to the events of May 68. Already in 1967, he returns to the front of the stage by presiding with Bertrand Russell the Russell tribunal, a fictitious, self-proclaimed tribunal, which is an international assembly of intellectuals, activists, and witnesses charged with judging American war crimes in Vietnam. If he was not the inspiration of the events of May 68, he will be an active militant, echoing the revolt in the streets, on the platforms, in the newspapers, and even at the doors of the factories on strike. He interviews the leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit in the Nouvel Observateur, giving him the opportunity to explain himself in a major weekly. Now 63, he goes to the Sorbonne invested by students, to discuss with them. He then denounces de Gaulle's "stupid elections".
Internationally, he strongly condemns the Soviet Prague Spring intervention in Czechoslovakia.
The man on the left
Increasingly tired and worn out, Sartre will continue the leftist struggle by supporting the Mao movement. The revolutionary newspaper La Cause du Peuple being threatened with disappearance under the pressure of the Pompidou authorities, he decided in 1971 to become the director of the newspaper in order to protect it, and took to the streets, with Simone de Beauvoir, to sell it. He will do the same with two other Maoist newspapers, Tout and J'accuse. In 1973, Sartre will launch, with Serge July, Philippe Gavi, Bernard Lallement and Jean-Claude Vernier, a popular daily, Liberation, which appears in the spring. Suffering from vascular dementia, he resigned from his leadership on May 24, 1974. Throughout this period he linked up with various other leftist and feminist movements, willingly lending his name to help them.
The Israeli-Palestinian problem
Sartre will deal, as he comes to the end of his life, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While recognizing the legitimacy of the State of Israel, he denounces the deplorable living conditions of the Palestinians which would explain the recourse to terrorism.
Commitment to the end
As he turned 66 (he will be on June 21, 1971), Sartre suffered a stroke on May 18, 1971[13]. All the details regarding Sartre's health are told in Simone de Beauvoir's book "The Farewell Ceremony". This attack leaves him very weak. On March 5, 1973, a second attack saved his life, but almost completely took his sight away. Sartre enters his shadow years. Already diminished, he is then forced to decide "freely" that his work is complete, and will therefore never finish volume IV of his Flaubert. However, this did not prevent him from continuing to think and produce:he hired as secretary a young normalien, Benny Lévy, whom he had known when the latter was in charge of the Maoist group La Gauche prolétarienne, who was responsible for reading to him , and debate, sometimes violently, with this young Maoist. A year later, the book On a raison de se revolt was released, a book of interviews with the young man and Philippe Gavi, in which Sartre evokes, among other things, the problems linked to protest engagement.
Nor did his blindness prevent him from pursuing his duty of moral commitment, which he held to the end:a few political interventions, such as a visit to Andreas Baader, the German revolutionary imprisoned near Stuttgart, and a trip of support for the Carnation Revolution in Portugal rekindled sympathy for the old man in European extreme left circles.
He also signed various calls for the release of Soviet dissidents, and, during the meeting between Brezhnev and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in Paris in 1977, Sartre organized a meeting with Soviet dissidents at the same time. That evening, for Sartre surrounded by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, André Glucksmann, Simone Signoret and of course Simone de Beauvoir, there were 105 radio and television stations from all over the world, i.e. immensely more than at the Élysée for Brezhnev .
Last media stunt for Sartre in 1979, which will move the general public:accompanied by his best enemy, Raymond Aron, and the young philosopher André Glucksmann, a Sartre, more diminished than ever, goes to the Élysée to ask Valéry Giscard to Estaing to welcome refugees from Indochina, who drowned by the hundreds while trying to leave Vietnam (this is the business of the boat people). Regardless of the differences of political opinion to which he now attaches less importance, Sartre affirms in the twilight of his life the need to save lives wherever they are threatened. Sartre also joined, with Simone de Beauvoir, the support committee for Ayatollah Khomeini, when the latter was received in exile in Neauphle-le-Château, the main opponent of the Shah's imperial regime.
Grave of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
In March 1980, Le Nouvel Observateur published three issues of a series of interviews with Benny Lévy which would be published after his death under the title "Hope now":"I feel, not like dust that appeared in the world, but as a being expected, provoked, prefigured, as a being which seems to be able to come only from a creator and this idea of a saving hand which would have created me sends me back to God”. Jean Guitton held such statements as a denial of his atheism and saw in them the influence of his new and last secretary. "History of an old man" will accuse Olivier Todd, so different does Sartre's words seem in these interviews on the Judaic religion. The lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who has been a very close friend of the philosopher since 1957, returned to these remarks in 2005, stating:“This interview is incontestably a fake (…). Ce n’est pas du Sartre libre jouissant de toutes ses facultés. »
Atteint d’urémie, Jean-Paul Sartre s’éteint le 15 avril 1980 à près de 75 ans à l’hôpital Broussais de Paris, suite à un œdème pulmonaire.
Dans le monde entier, l’annonce de sa mort provoque une émotion considérable. Pour son enterrement, le 19 avril 1980, cinquante mille personnes descendent dans les rues de Paris, accompagnant son cortège pour lui rendre un ultime hommage. Une foule énorme, sans service d’ordre, pour celui qui aura su captiver trois générations de Français. Parmi eux, les anciens élèves des années du Havre ou de Paris, les camarades de la libération et les communistes des années 1950, les anciens militants de la paix en Algérie, enfin les jeunes maos. Mot d’un jeune homme à son père en fin de journée :« Je suis allé à la manif contre la mort de Sartre ».
Il est enterré au cimetière du Montparnasse à Paris (14ème), dans la 20e division - juste à droite de l’entrée principale boulevard Edgar Quinet. Simone de Beauvoir, décédée le 14 avril 1986, a été inhumée à ses côtés. Sur la tombe, une plaque porte cette inscription :« Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905-1980 ».
Philosophie
Sartre est considéré comme le père de l’existentialisme français et sa conférence de 1946, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, est un texte clé de ce mouvement philosophique. Toutefois, la pensée de Sartre, en 20 ans, a évolué de manière naturelle et l’on note une distance apparente entre l’existentialisme de L’Être et le Néant (1943) et le marxisme de Critique de la raison dialectique (1960).
L’être en-soi et l’être pour-soi
Dans L’Être et le Néant, Sartre s’interroge sur les modalités de l’être. Il en distingue trois :l’être en-soi, l’être pour-soi et l’être pour autrui. L’être en-soi, c’est la manière d’être de ce qui "est ce qu’il est", par exemple l’objet inanimé "est" par nature de manière absolue, sans nuance, un. L’être pour-soi est l’être par lequel le néant vient au monde (de l’en soi). C’est l’être de la conscience, toujours ailleurs que là où on l’attend :c’est précisément cet ailleurs, ce qu’il n’est pas qui constitue son être, qui n’est d’ailleurs rien d’autre que ce non être. L’être pour-autrui est lié au regard d’autrui qui, pour le dire vite, transforme le pour soi en en soi, me chosifie.
L’homme, se distingue de l’objet, en ce qu’il a conscience d’être, conscience de sa propre existence. Cette conscience crée une distance entre l’homme qui est et l’homme qui prend conscience d’être. Or toute conscience est conscience de quelque chose (idée d’intentionnalité reprise de Husserl). L’Homme est donc fondamentalement ouvert sur le monde, « incomplet », « tourné vers », existant (projeté hors de soi) :il y a en lui un néant, un « trou dans l’être » susceptible de recevoir les objets du monde.
« Le pour soi est ce qu’il n’est pas et n’est pas ce qu’il est »
- Sartre, L’Être et le Néant
« Il n’y a pour une conscience qu’une façon d’exister, c’est d’avoir conscience qu’elle existe »
- Sartre
« En fait, nous sommes une liberté qui choisit mais nous ne choisissons pas d’être libres :nous sommes condamnés à la liberté. »
- Sartre
L’existence précède l’essence
Alors que l’artefact est conçu dans un objectif précis, son essence (l’essence du verre est de contenir un liquide), l’être humain existe sans que soit encore définie sa fonction, son essence. C’est ainsi que, pour Sartre et les existentialistes, « l’existence précède l’essence ».
Liberté et aliénation
Selon Sartre, l’homme est ainsi libre de choisir son essence. Pour lui, contrairement à Hegel, il n’y a pas d’essence déterminée, l’essence est librement choisie par l’existant. L’Homme est absolument libre, il n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il fait de sa vie, il est un projet. Sartre nomme ce dépassement d’une situation présente par un projet à venir, la transcendance.
L’existentialisme de Sartre s’oppose ainsi au déterminisme qui stipule que l’homme est le jouet de circonstances dont il n’est pas maître. Sartre estime que l’homme choisit parmi les événements de sa vie, les circonstances qu’il décidera déterminantes.
Au nom de la liberté de la conscience, Sartre refuse le concept freudien d’inconscient remplacé par la notion de « mauvaise foi » de la conscience. L’Homme ne serait pas le jouet de son inconscient mais librement choisirait de se laisser nouer par tel ou tel traumatisme. Ainsi, l’inconscient ne saurait amoindrir l’absolue liberté de l’Homme.
Selon Sartre, l’homme est condamné à être libre. L’engagement n’est pas une manière de se rendre indispensable mais responsable. Ne pas s’engager est encore une forme d’engagement.
L’existentialisme de Sartre est athée, c’est-à-dire que, pour lui, Dieu n’existe pas (ou en tout cas « s’il existait cela ne changerait rien »), donc l’homme est seul source de valeur et de moralité; il est condamné à inventer sa propre morale et libre de la définir. Le critère de la morale ne se trouve pas au niveau des « maximes » (Kant) mais des « actes ». La « mauvaise foi », sur un plan pratique, consiste à dire :« c’est l’intention qui compte ».
Selon Sartre, la seule aliénation à cette liberté de l’homme est la volonté d’autrui. Ainsi fait-il dire à Garcin dans Huis clos « L’Enfer c’est les Autres ».
Marxisme
Sartre présente le marxisme comme « horizon philosophique indépassable de notre temps[16] ». Après avoir observé et analysé l’existence et la liberté de l’homme en tant qu’individu, Sartre s’est interrogé sur l’existence d’une conscience collective et son rapport avec la liberté individuelle. Dans sa Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) Sartre affirme que la liberté de l’homme est aliénée par les sociétés féodales ou capitalistes. Il analyse comment, dans les sociétés aliénées, les libertés individuelles peuvent conduire à un effet opposé à l’intention générale et à l’aliénation de la liberté collective. Il suggère alors d’inverser le processus :le groupe doit pouvoir décider de regrouper les libertés individuelles pour permettre le développement de l’intention générale. Sartre pense que cette sorte d’aliénation de la liberté individuelle doit être librement choisie et s’oppose ainsi à toute forme de totalitarisme.
Œuvres
Romans et nouvelles
* La Nausée (1938)
* Le Mur (1939) nouvelles (Le mur, La chambre, Érostrate, Intimité, L’enfance d’un chef) Lauréat 1940 du Prix du roman populiste
* Les chemins de la liberté (1945) :
o L’âge de raison
o Le sursis
o La mort dans l’âme
* Les jeux sont faits (1947)
* Œuvres romanesques (1981)
Théâtre
* Bariona, ou le Fils du tonnerre (1940)
* Les Mouches (1943)
* Huis clos (1944)
* La Putain respectueuse (1946)
* Morts sans sépulture (1946)
* Les Mains sales (1948)
* Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (1951), Éditeur :Folio, Publication
* Kean (1954)
* Nekrassov (1955)
* Les Séquestrés d’Altona (1959)
* Les Troyennes (1965)
Adaptation TV de Huis clos par Michel Mitrani en 1965.
Mise en scène originale de Huis Clos par Didier van Cauwelaert à Nice en 1977.
Autobiographie, mémoires et correspondance
* Les Mots (1964)
* Carnets de la drôle de guerre - Septembre 1939 - Mars 1940 (1983-1995)
* Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres, tome I et II (1983)
Essais
* Situations I (1947)
* Situations II (1948)
* Situations III (1949)
* Situations IV (1964)
* Situations V (1964)
* Situations VI (1964)
* Situations VII (1965)
* Situations VIII (1972)
* Situations IX (1972)
* Situations X (1976)
Essais politiques
* Réflexions sur la question juive (1946)
* Entretiens sur la politique (1949)
* L’Affaire Henri Martin (1953)
* Préface aux Damnés de la Terre de Frantz Fanon (1961)
* On a raison de se révolter (1974)
Critique littéraire
* La république du Silence (1944)
* Baudelaire (1946)
* Qu’est-ce que la littérature ? (1948)
* Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952)
* L’Idiot de la famille (1971-1972) sur Flaubert
* Un théâtre de situations (1973)
* Critiques littéraires
Philosophie
* L’imagination (1936)
* La Transcendance de l’Ego (1937)
* Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (1938), Éditeur :LGF, juillet 2000,
* L’imaginaire (1940)
* L’Être et le Néant « essai d’ontologie phénoménologique » (1943)
* L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1945) (ISBN 2070329135)
* Conscience et connaissance de soi (1947)
* Critique de la raison dialectique I :Théorie des ensembles pratiques précédé de Question de méthode (1960)
* Cahiers pour une morale (1983)
* Critique de la raison dialectique II :L’intelligibilité de l’histoire (1985)
* Vérité et existence (1989)
Scénarios
* Les jeux sont faits de Jean Delannoy (1947)
* L’Engrenage (1948)
* Le Scénario Freud (1984)
* Typhus (1943) (écrit durant l’occupation et édité en 2007 par Gallimard), ISBN 978-2-07-078490-5