Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings

Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings ‘This immensely useful volume makes it possible for readers to get a substantial and comprehensive knowledge of Sartrean philosophy. It is a remarkable achievement.’ Hazel E. Barnes, University of Colorado at Boulder ‘. this is a worthwhile and illuminating book.’ Baroness Mary Warnock ‘. brings together just the right texts, ordered in the right way, to draw the student into Sartre.’ John J. Compton, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University ‘Stephen Priest’s succinct, analytical introductions are invaluable . a wide-ranging collection of extracts.’ Christina Howells, Wadham College, Oxford Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century. The principal founder of existentialism, a political thinker and famous novelist and dramatist, his work has exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and cultural studies. Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings is the first collection of Sartre’s key philosophical writings and provides an indispensable resource for all students and readers of his work. Stephen Priest’s clear and helpful introductions set each reading in context, making the volume an ideal companion for those coming to Sartre’s writings for the first time. A key feature of the anthology is that it includes the full text of Sartre’s famous Existentialism and Humanism. The selections are from: Existentialism and Humanism Being and Nothingness Transcendence of the Ego The Psychology of Imagination What is Literature? Search for a Method Notebooks for an Ethics The Family Idiot Critique of Dialectical Reason Stephen Priest is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a Visiting Scholar of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author of The British Empiricists, Theories of the Mind, Merleau-Ponty and The Subject in Question and also editor of Hegel’s Critique of Kant. Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings Edited by Stephen Priest London and New York First published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2001 Stephen Priest 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 hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905–80 [Selections. English, 2000] Jean-Paul Sartre : basic writings / [edited by] Stephen Priest. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Existentialism. I. Priest, Stephen. II. Title. B2430.S31 P75 2000 194–dc21 00–056017 ISBN 0-415-21367-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-21368-1 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-12964-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17972-2 (Glassbook Format) Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Sartre in the world 1 2 Existentialism 20 3 Phenomenology 58 4 Imagination and emotion 89 5 Being 106 6 Nothingness 135 7 The self 148 8 Temporality 163 9 Freedom 177 10 Responsibility 191 11 Bad faith 204 12 Others 221 13 Psychoanalysis 244 14 Writing 258 15 The work of art 289 16 Politics 300 Bibliography 334 Acknowledgements The editor and the publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism; translation and introduction by Philip Mairet. First published in Great Britain in 1948 by Methuen, now Methuen Publishing Limited, 215 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 1EJ. All rights reserved. Jean-Paul Sartre, Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Sketch for a theory of the emotions). Copyright © 1939. Paris, Hermann. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness; translated and with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes, 1956. Used by permission of the Philosophical Library, New York and International Thomson Publishing Services. “The Cogito As Reflective Consciousness” from “the I and the Me” from Transcendence of the Ego: an Existentialist Theory of Consciousness by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated and annotated with an introduction by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. Copyright © 1960, The Noonday Press, Inc., New York. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination. Copyright © 1948. Reprinted by permission of Philosophical Library Inc. and International Thomson Publishing Services. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?; translated from French by Bernard Frechtman. Copyright © 1950, Methuen. Used by permission of the Philosophical Library, New York and International Thomson Publishing Services. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage Books, 1963). Originally published in French as “Questions de Méthode” in Critique de la Raison Dialectique, viii Acknowledgements Vol. 1. Copyright © 1960 by Editions Gallimard. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. and by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, Inc. Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics; translated by David Pellauer. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, translated by Alan Sheridan Smith. London: Verso, 1991. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. 1 Sartre in the world Stephen Priest Liberty, Equality, Fraternity Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) is one of the greatest French thinkers. A polemical and witty essayist, a metaphysician of subjectivity, a political activist, a revolutionary political theorist, a humanistic novelist, a didactic playwright, his genius lies in his powers of philosophical synthesis and the genre- breaching breadth of his imagination. In the 1970s, the French journalist Michel Rybalka delivered a lecture on Sartre which divided his intellectual development into three stages: liberty, equality and fraternity. The three concepts of the slogan of the French revolutionaries of 1789 were used to denote three kinds of philosophy which Sartre endorsed: existentialism, from the mid-1930s, Marxism, increasingly from the Second World War, and anarchism, in the last few years before he died in 1980. Rybalka’s threefold taxonomy is too neat, too clean and, however appealing, it is an over simplification. The adult Sartre was always an existentialist, a practitioner of that style of philosophising which addresses the fundamental problems of human existence: death, anxiety, political, religious and sexual commitment, freedom and responsibility, the meaning of existence itself. It follows that Sartre remained an existentialist during his long Marxist phase and during his final overtly anarchist phase. Sartre’s existentialism was never a pure existentialism. One of his outstanding philosophical syntheses is the fusing of existentialism with phenomenology. The Moravian, German-speaking philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his Austrian teacher, the psychologist and philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917), are the founders of phenomenology. Phenomenology is the attempt to explain the possibility of all knowledge, including philosophy, by describing the content and structure of consciousness. It was Husserl’s hope that this partly Cartesian and partly Kantian project would place all knowledge on indubitable and incorrigible foundations. Husserlian phenomenology is Cartesian because 2 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings it shares with Descartes the ambition of methodically exposing pre- conceptions and grounding knowledge in certainty. It is Kantian because it shares with the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) the ‘transcendental’ ambition of showing how all knowledge is possible (notably in his Critique of Pure Reason, 1781 and 1787). The Danish protestant theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–59) and the German atheistic nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) are considered the initiators of existentialism. Profound dilemmas of human existence are explored in the works of the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoievski (1821–81). His Notes From the Underground (1864) particularly anticipates Sartrean themes. Sartre was not alone or wholly original in marrying phenomenology and existentialism into a single philosophy. Phenomenology had already undergone the profound transformation into ‘fundamental ontology’ at the hands of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his large, if incomplete, 1927 masterwork, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). The book is an examination of what it means to be, especially as this is disclosed through one’s own existence (Dasein). The 1945 synthesis of phenomenology and existentialism in Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la Perception) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s philosophical friend and political antagonist, follows hard on the heels of Sartre’s own 1943 synthesis, Being and Nothingness (l’Etre et le Néant), with which it is partly inconsistent. Sartre’s existentialism, like that of Merleau-Ponty, is ‘existential phenomenology’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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