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The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy 1. The Story of Analytic Philosophy 10. Hilary Putnam Plot and Heroes Pragmatism and Realism Edited by Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar Edited by James Conant and Urszula Zeglen 2. Donald Davidson Truth, Meaning and Knowledge 11. Karl Jaspers Edited by Urszula M. Zeglén Politics and Metaphysics Chris Thornhill 3. Philosophy and Ordinary Language The Bent and Genius of Our Tongue 12. From Kant to Davidson Oswald Hanfl ing The Idea of the Transcendental in Twentieth-Century Philosophy 4. The Subject in Question Edited by Jeff Malpas Sartre’s Critique of Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego 13. Collingwood and the Stephen Priest Metaphysics of Experience A Reinterpretation 5. Aesthetic Order Giuseppina D’Oro A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art Ruth Lorland 14. The Logic of Liberal Rights A Study in the Formal Analysis of 6. Naturalism Legal Discourse A Critical Analysis Eric Heinze Edited by William Lane Craig and J P Moreland 15. Real Metaphysics Edited by Hallvard Lillehammer and 7. Grammar in Early Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra Twentieth-Century Philosophy Richard Gaskin 16. Philosophy After Postmodernism Civilized Values and the Scope 8. Rules, Magic and of Knowledge Instrumental Reason Paul Crowther A Critical Interpretation of Peter Winch’s Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17. Phenomenology and Imagination Berel Dov Lerner in Husserl and Heidegger Brian Elliott 9. Gaston Bachelard Critic of Science and the Imagination 18. Laws in Nature Cristina Chimisso Stephen Mumford 19. Trust and Toleration 30. The Existentialism of Richard H. Dees Jean-Paul Sartre Jonathan Webber 20. The Metaphysics of Perception Wilfrid Sellars, Critical Realism and the Nature of Experience Paul Coates 21. Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action Praxeological Investigations Roderick T. Long 22. Ineffability and Philosophy André Kukla 23. Cognitive Metaphor and Continental Philosophy Clive Cazeaux 24. Wittgenstein and Levinas Ethical and Religious Thought Bob Plant 25. Philosophy of Time Time before Times Roger McClure 26. The Russellian Origins of Analytic Philosophy Bertrand Russell and the Unity of the Proposition Graham Stevens 27. Analytic Philosophy Without Naturalism Edited by A. Corradini, S. Galvan and E.J. Lowe 28. Modernism and the Language of Philosophy Anat Matar 29. Russell vs. Meinong One Hundred Years after “On Denoting” Edited by Nicholas Griffi n and Dale Jacquette The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre Jonathan Webber New York London First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2009 Jonathan Webber All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf- ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade- marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Webber, Jonathan (Jonathan Mark) The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre / Jonathan Webber. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in twentieth-century philosophy ; 30) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905–1980. I. Title. B2430.S34W43 2009 194—dc22 2008032501 ISBN 0-203-88317-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-41118-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-88317-9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-41118-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-88317-4 (ebk) To Suzi Contents Preface xi 1 Understanding Ourselves 1 2 The Reality of Character 16 3 Situations 30 4 Freely Chosen Projects 44 5 Radical Freedom 59 6 Anguish, Bad Faith, and Sincerity 74 7 The Project of Bad Faith 88 8 God and the Useless Passion 104 9 One Another 118 10 The Virtue of Authenticity 132 11 Being One Self 146 Bibliography 161 Index 165 Preface The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre is an account of the way that we humans exist, in contrast to the ways in which such things as chairs and tables, fl owers and trees, rocks and planets, and cats and dogs exist. It aims to elaborate the central structures of our lives, around which all the things that we do are built. This topic is interesting in its own right and Sartre’s consideration of it is among the most thorough and systematic available. But there is more reason than this to study it. For answering the question of exactly what we are is also central to addressing some of the pressing issues that we all face. This is what motivated Sartre. He intended his philosophy to be much more than an abstract theory to be studied in libraries. He wrote about it in the popular press and illustrated it in his fi ction because he saw the questions of how we should treat one another, how we should organise our societies, and how we should each think about our own plans and hopes and dreams as simply unanswerable unless we consider them within the framework of a theory of human existence and as receiving only disastrously wrong answers when the framework itself is wrong. The theory that he developed, however, has been interpreted in a variety of different ways. This is partly because he does not always express himself as clearly as he might. He seems to have found it necessary to develop a new conceptual repertoire in which to express his thought, but he could have been more careful to explain his terminology. But it is also partly because most commentators on his existentialist work focus on one aspect of it or another, or at least one aspect at a time, at the expense of the overall picture. It then often turns out that one commentator’s reading of one part does not sit easily with their own or someone else’s reading of another part. The aim of this book is to present a single coherent picture of the central themes of Sartrean existentialism. We will see that this philosophy is the elaboration of one basic idea, one that is rarely identifi ed as being even a part of it, and that this idea has much to offer to current debates over issues that we all face. The idea at the centre of Sartrean existentialism is simply that an individual’s character consists in the projects that person pursues. We should not understand this as claiming that actions result from noth- ing more than a decision about what to do, as though there were no such xii Preface thing as spontaneous action and as though one’s decisions did not anyway refl ect deeper facts about oneself. This is important because one common caricature of Sartre has him claiming that everything we experience and do is something we just choose there and then. It is sometimes even said that he thinks we can decide how something will look to us and what emotions to feel about it. This caricature comes about because Sartre likes to say that all of our experiences and actions are in some sense chosen, but he does not mean that when we are confronted with something we decide how it will look to us, how we will feel about it, what we will think about it, and what we will do about it. He uses the language of choice in this way to emphasise his view that we have refl ective control over the deeper aspects of ourselves that in turn determine how things will look to us, how we will feel in response to things, and the relative importance each consideration will have for us when we deliberate about what to do. Each person’s spontaneous and considered responses to their environ- ment fall into patterns that we have come to describe in the language of character traits. Sartrean existentialism is basically the claim that these patterns result from the set of projects the individual pursues. If this is right, then a person’s character, their traits such as honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, kindness and meanness, and so on, are rooted in the projects that they have adopted and that they can alter. This is not to say that each trait is something that the individual deliberately and know- ingly adopts, as though one cannot be a petty or bitter person without wanting to be. Neither is it to say that we are always very well aware of our character traits, as if one could not discover after careful refl ection that one is rather insensitive. It is just to say that the overall patterns in a person’s behaviour are determined by the overall set of projects that they are pursu- ing. It is to say that our characters are neither physically necessary effects of our genetic structures nor inescapable outcomes of formative experiences nor simply habits that have become entrenched by repetition, but rather manifest the purposive and goal-directed projects that we are engaged in and that we can change. This lack of solidity at the core of the individual, this dependence of one’s identity on merely contingent and changeable factors, this lightness of human being, is something that Sartre thinks we have covered over.

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