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5. Jean-Paul Sartre's Words on the Impact of Childhood

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5. Jean-Paul Sartre's Words on the Impact of Childhood 5. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words On the Impact of Childhood Life is nothing until it is lived. Jean-Paul Sartre: “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Walter Kaufmann, a professor of philosophy, has described existentialism as follows: The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism.1 This definition would suggest that existentialism was essentially close to life. And, in one sense, Sartre’s atheistic existentialism was a response to a spiritual crisis rooted in the World War II and post-war experience when Europe lay in ruins and its moral and cultural values were in question. For Sartre this meant building anew, on bare ground as it were, on nothing, out of pure existence uncontaminated by bourgeois civilization. His was a new philosophical way of thinking tied to his concept of nothingness which registered the disillusionment with Western European society. But though his rejection of European society was justified in his own eyes, his concept of nothingness also was far removed from actual life, and was certainly invalidated by historical continuity and social reality. As Edmund Wilson put it in the summer of 1947, writing on Sartre’s play Morts sans sépulture (Men without Shadows, 1946) which he considered his best drama: Here he has exploited with both cleverness and conviction the ordeal of the French Resistance, … But what you get are a virtuosity of realism and a rhetoric of moral passion which make you feel not merely that the fiction is a dramatic heightening of life but that the literary fantasy takes place on a plane that does not have any real connection with the actual human experience which it is pretending to represent.2 1 Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Edited, with an introduction, prefaces and new translations (New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960), p. 12. 2 Edmund Wilson, “Jean-Paul Sartre: The Novelist and the Existentialist,” in Sartre. A Collection of Critical Essays, Edited by Edith Kern (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall Inc., 1965), p. 48. 32 The Time before Death In Sartre’s philosophic realm human existence, or nothingness, preceded human essence, or being. Being, implied making something of your life in order to transcend nothingness or a spiritually bankrupt world. Sartre’s No to everything that had become doubtful and suspect, could only be overcome if man decided freely to build a meaningful essence out of nothingness. I have already pointed to one flaw in Sartre’s thinking, and that is that historical and social reality does not validate or corroborate Sartre’s view that sees our world as without essence. Another oversight on his part is that he seems to have forgotten that the systems of belief and of social guidance that he rejects on philosophic grounds, beliefs that may have become compromised in contemporary society, were in the past also based on free decisions to bring a meaningful essence into life, be it God or whatever else. In other words, what is missing in Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is the real feel for life as it was and as it is. A good example of this lack of connection and awareness of the concrete day to day lives of human beings with all their physical and spiritual needs, was his attitude to fellow prisoners in the German POW camp. In what is an excellent and informative biography of Sartre, Ronald Hayman writes: … Sartre spent most of his time in conversation with the priests,who all came from the bourgeoisie. Now, with easier opportunities than ever before or after for fraternizing with working-class men, he chose not to. He had a genuine love for the tough vulgarisms of working-class speech, but his liking for the people was generalized and theoretical. Except when eating or sleeping, he scarecely spent any time in the hut. He sat at a long table, writing or reading, and when he was with the priests, they dicussed such questions as the virgin birth.3 Philip Thody has made a similar observation about Sartre: “His intense interest in ideas has not always made him a better writer, for it has led him both to specialize in the theoretical writing which he finds so easy and to move away from the concern with ordinary men and women which is essential to the true novelist.” 4 The philosopher William Barrett said essentially the same thing about Sartre, namely that he was not able to experience what Barrett described as letting “Being be”: Hence he cannot do justice, either in his critical theory, or in his actual practice of literary criticism to poetry, which is precisely that form of human expression 3 Ronald Hayman, Writing Against. A Biography of Sartre (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 166. 4 See Philip Thody, Jean-Paul Sartre. A Literary and Political Study (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1960), p. 237. .
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