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  • Jean-Paul Sartre made thinking and philosophy glamorous.

  • He was born in Paris in 1905. His father, a navy captain, died when he was a babyand

  • he grew up extremely close to his mother until she remarried, much to his regret, when he was twelve.

  • Sartre spent most of his life in Paris, where he often went to cafes on the Left Bank. He

  • had a strabismus, a wandering eye, and wore distinctive, heavy glasses. He was very short

  • (five feet three inches) and frequently described himself as ugly.

  • By the 60’s Sartre was a household name in both Europe and the United States, and

  • so was his chosen philosophy, Existentialism.

  • Sartre is famous principally for his book Being and Nothingness (1943), which enhanced

  • his reputation not so much because people could understand his ideas

  • but because they couldn't quite.

  • Existentialism was built around a number of key insights:

  • One: Things are weirder than we think

  • Sartre is acutely attentive to moments when the world reveals itself as far stranger and

  • more uncanny than we normally admit; moments when the logic we ascribe to it day-to-day

  • becomes unavailable, showing things to be highly contingent and even absurd and frightening.

  • Sartre’s first novelNausea, published in 1938 – is full of evocations of such moments.

  • At one point, the hero, Roquentin, a 30-year-old writer living in a fictional

  • French seaside town, is on a tram.

  • He puts his hand on the seat, but then pulls it back rapidly. Instead of being the most

  • basic and obvious piece of design, scarcely worth a moment’s notice, the seat promptly

  • strikes him as deeply strange;

  • the wordseatcomes loose from its moorings, the object it refers to shines forth in all

  • its primordial oddity, as if he’s never seen one before. Roquentin has to force himself

  • to remember that this thing beside him is something for people to sit on. For a terrifying moment,

  • Roquentin has peered into what Sartre calls theabsurdity of the world.’

  • Such a moment goes to the heart of Sartre’s philosophy. To be Sartrean is to be aware

  • of existence as it is when it has been stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilising assumptions

  • lent to us by our day-to-day routines.

  • We can try out a Sartrean perspective on many aspects of our own lives. Think of what you

  • know asthe evening meal with your partner’.

  • Under such a description, it all seems fairly logical, but a Sartrean would strip away the

  • surface normality to show the radical strangeness lurking beneath.

  • Dinner really means that: when your part of the planet has spun away

  • from the energy of a distant hydrogen and helium explosion,

  • you slide your knees under strips of a chopped-up tree

  • and put sections of dead animals and plants in your mouth and chew,

  • while next to you, another mammal whose genitals you sometimes touch is doing the same.

  • Two: We are free

  • Such weird moments are certainly disorienting and rather scary, but Sartre wants to draw

  • our attention to them for one central reason: because of their liberating dimensions.

  • Life is a lot odder than we think, but it’s also as a consequence far richer in possibilities.

  • Things don’t have to be quite the way they are.

  • In the course of fully realising our freedom, we will come up against what Sartre calls

  • theangoisseoranguishof existence. Everything is (terrifyingly) possible because

  • nothing has any pre-ordained, God-given sense or purpose.

  • Humans are just making it up as they go along, and are free to cast aside the shackles at

  • any moment.

  • Three: We shouldn’t live inBad faith

  • Sartre gave a term to the phenomenon of living without taking freedom properly on board.

  • He called it BAD FAITH.

  • We are in bad faith whenever we tell ourselves that things have to be a certain way and shut

  • our eyes to other options.

  • It is bad faith to insist that we have to do a particular kind of work or live with

  • a specific person or make our home in a given place.

  • The most famous description ofbad faithcomes in Being and Nothingness, when Sartre

  • notices a waiter who strikes him as overly devoted to his role, as if he were first and

  • foremost a waiter rather than a free human being.

  • His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes

  • towards the patrons with a step that is a little too quick. He bends forward a little

  • too eagerly: his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order

  • of the customer…’

  • The man (he was probably modelled on someone in Saint-Germain’s Café de Flore) has convinced

  • himself that he is essentially, necessarily a waiter rather than a free creature who could

  • be a jazz pianist or a fisherman on a North Sea trawler.

  • Four: We're free to dismantle capitalism.

  • The one factor that most discourages people from

  • experiencing themselves as free is money. Most of us will shut down a range of possible

  • options (moving abroad, trying out a new career, leaving a partner) by saying,

  • that’s if I didn’t have to worry about money.'

  • This passivity in the face of money enraged Sartre at a political level. He thought of

  • capitalism as a giant machine designed to create a sense of necessity which doesn’t

  • in fact exist in reality:

  • it makes us tell ourselves we have to work a certain number of hours, buy a particular

  • product or service, and so on.

  • But in this, there is only the denial of freedomand a refusal to take as seriously as

  • we should the possibility of living in other ways.

  • It was because of these views that Sartre had a life long interest in Marxism.

  • Marxism seemed in theory to allow people to explore their freedom, by reducing the role played

  • in their lives by material considerations.

  • Sartre took part in many protests in the streets of Paris in the 60s. Arrested yet again in

  • 1968, President Charles de Gaulle had him pardoned, saying,

  • you don’t arrest Voltaire.”

  • Sartre also visited Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and admired them both deeply. As a result

  • of these connections and his radical politics, the FBI kept a large file on Sartre trying

  • to deduce what his suspicious philosophy might really mean.

  • Sartre is inspiring in his insistence that things do not have to be the way they are.

  • He is hugely alive to our unfulfilled potential, as individuals and as a species.

  • He urges us to accept the fluidity of existence

  • and to create new institutions, habits, outlooks and ideas.

  • The admission that life doesn’t have some preordained logic and is not inherently meaningful

  • can be a source of immense relief when we feel oppressed by the weight of tradition

  • and the status quo.

Jean-Paul Sartre made thinking and philosophy glamorous.

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