Jean Paul Sartre ( 1905-1980 ) …. For Parisians , Sartre remains full of contradictions yet profoundly influential …
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."Jean Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, novelist, playwright, polemicist, political activist, the secular messiah of existentialism, the prototype of the "engaged" French intellectual, died 43 years ago . He created existentialism, a philosophy that could be lived . His treatises and novels sold in the millions; his plays were watched by crowds and his public lectures were mobbed. He rejected the Nobel Prize saying,“I have always declined official honours. A writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution”. He founded Libération, which was to become France’s most powerful left-wing newspaper, and Les Temps Modernes, for years its premier intellectual journal. He also wrote philosophical essays , short stories ,biographies and screenplays .
As an intellectual superstar and monstre sacré , Sartre has no equal in the English-speaking world. Even in France you would have to go back to Voltaire to find a figure of comparable stature. He was a philosopher who spent his life testing the limits of traditional thinking. “The fact that life is meaningless gives us the opportunity to give it a meaning. It is precisely because it doesn’t have a meaning in advance that we are justified in creating one.”This is accurately what he believed in. In a world with increasing anguish and despair, Sartre teaches us that we are in control of our lives, that we are allowed to build it the way we want with our own values. Our life is our own work of art.
In his book No Exit, Sartre illustrates the difficult coexistence of people, because we are unable to escape the watchful gaze of everyone around us, which alienates us and locks us in a particular kind of being, which in turn deprives us of our freedom.“ All those eyes intent on me. Devouring me . What? Only two of you ? I thought there were more; many more. So, this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people !”
Some critics say that in creating existentialism he simply took the ideas of Heidegger and gave them sheen. Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ , they complain, is just Heidegger’s Being and Time. But this is not fair. It is certainly true that Sartre, who grew up in a bilingual household, owed a great debt to German thought. But the starting point for his philosophy, as he always insisted, was the Cartesian formula “I think, therefore I am.” Consciousness, the core of our being, is an emptiness or “negativity” that must fill out its nature through arbitrary choices—that is the idea behind Sartre’s celebrated aphorism “We are condemned to be free.” Despite the phenomenological complexities of his philosophy, Sartre managed to make it exciting. Even Posthumously ,Sartre churns out best-sellers . His war diaries and three volumes of letters to De Beauvoir were a critical and commercial success.
Sartre had some discreditable moments too. He broke with Albert Camus because the latter condemned totalitarianism. Sartre was envious of the idolized and good-looking French Algerian, the "street urchin from Algiers," as he later called him. He was silent on the Gulag (“ the Soviet labour camps”), and he excused the purges of Stalin and later Mao. When the defector Victor Kravchenko published’ I Chose Freedom’, the first inside account of the horrors of Stalinism, Sartre wrote a play implying that Kravchenko was a creation of the CIA. Viktor Andriyovych Kravchenko was a Ukrainian-born Soviet defector, known for writing the best-selling book ‘ Chose Freedom’, published in 1946 .
In opposing the war in Vietnam, Sartre urged the Soviet Union to take on the Americans, even at the risk of nuclear war. And in championing Algerian independence, he wrote (in his preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth) that for an African “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.” His support for Stalinism in the early 1950s, for Maoism in the 1970s, his defence of civilian massacres in Algeria and at the 1972 Munich Olympics, obscured the range, versatility and ambition of his writing. The profound thinker, who believed in the individual's duty to redefine constantly his own road to freedom, sold a Maoist newspaper on the streets of Paris in the 1970s that advocated the random assassination of policemen and bosses. The "war-hero", who was captured by the Germans while sending up weather balloons, became a "resistance hero", whose chief act of resistance was to write unpublished tracts and heavily coded plays. The man, who never did a day of physical labour in his life, stood on a box outside a Renault factory in 1971 lecturing car workers on the Maoist paradise that awaited them.
Sartre’s philosophy of freedom was found inconsistent with the Marxist doctrine of historical necessity. He tried to make the two cohere in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) but ended up drowning in a sea of verbiage. In any case, existentialism had drifted out of fashion by the 1960s. It was superseded by the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and Althusser, which said that man, far from being radically free, was just a locus of social and linguistic forces. Sartre was criticized when he visited the Red Brigade terrorist leader, Andreas Baader, during a hunger strike in a German prison, and then told reporters that Baader’s actions were “necessary to achieve a new organization of the masses.” Sartre’s literary works, often the vehicle for his political ideas, have gradually turned out of fashion, with the notable exception of “The Words,” his autobiography. Inspite of all this ,Sartre continued to fascinate intellectuals outside France. According to Sorbonne professor Helene Vedrine, Japanese, African and Latin American students produce the majority of doctoral thesis on his work.
The best description of Sartre the man comes in Ronald Hayman's biography: "Sartre felt most at home in cafes and restaurants where he could annex space by dominating the conversation and exhaling smoke ... To reassure his mind that it had nothing to fear from sibling rivalry with his maltreated body he constantly ignored all messages (that his body) sent out . He resented the time he had to spend on washing, shaving, cleaning his teeth, taking a bath, excreting and he would economise by carrying on conversations through the bathroom door" (Sartre: a Biography, Carroll and Graf).
Sartre was probably alcoholic . He and Simone de Beauvoir were famous as a couple with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables, and were free to enjoy other relationships, but who maintained a kind of soul marriage. Sartre was always surrounded by women--his beloved "Beaver" ( Simone de Beauvoir), Arlette, Wanda, Alice, Sylvie, Liliane, Michele and Melina .
Sartre was born with a form of congenital blindness called retinitis pigmentosa, which caused him to have poor eyesight for most of his life. During last years of his life ,Sartre had diabetes, abscessed teeth , hypertension, arteritis, uremia, and almost complete blindness. He lost control of his bladder and bowels. He felt sleepy, almost glum, with a fixed smile of universal kindness on his lips (a smile caused by a slight paralysis of the facial muscles.). In his last years of life, Sartre’s physical condition deteriorated, rapidly not only because of his workaholism, but also because he was a notorious chain smoker. He died in 1980 from swelling of the lung. However, Simone de Beauvoir remained fiercely committed to her man, Jean Paul Sartre till his end. A wrenching scene the night he died shows her uncensored depth of feeling for him:
"At one point I asked to be left alone with Sartre, and I made as if to lie down beside him under the sheet. A nurse stopped me. 'No. Take care . . . the gangrene.' It was then that I understood the real nature of the bedsores. I lay on top of the sheet and I slept a little."
In Paris , I came to know that Sartre was first cremated and later the ashes were carried to the Montparnasse cemetery for burial . Official estimates say that over 50,000 people took to the streets of Paris to follow his coffin and millions watched on television. In Paris , many people told me that more than 50,000 were waiting at the cemetery while a crowd of about 60,000 walked with his funeral procession. No philosopher had ever had a bigger following. On the day of my visit to the Montparnasse cemetery , Baudelaire’s and Sartre’s final resting places were busy with visitors who had brought flowers and bouquets . Sartre's grave is a modest affair with a simple white marble tomb, befitting a man who (so he claimed) hated monuments and cared nothing for his own legacy. Some visitors had thrown unused Metro tickets on his tomb. I could not understand the purpose behind throwing the tickets on his tomb. Perhaps Le Petit Homme ( Sartre was 5 feet tall) and Castor (Simone de Beauvoir ) might like to return to the Cafe de Flore to drink coffee, smoke Gauloises, discuss their many infidelities, mock their friends and ponder, from a new perspective, the difference between "Being and Nothingness". On the grave, also the last resting place of Sartre's lifelong "companion" Simone de Beauvoir, there was an anonymous, scribbled note: " Both of you changed the meaning of existence “. On his death , The Los Angeles Times wrote this :-
“Historians had to go back more than 100 years, to the funeral of Victor Hugo, to find such a public outpouring of grief. About 200,000 mourners, great and small, flooded into Paris streets, marching in dignified silence behind the casket of Jean-Paul Sartre. Teen-agers wept, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifetime companion, fainted, and the zoom lenses and television cameras recorded it all for posterity.”
I saw 42 -Rue Bonaparte in St-Germain-des-Pres (Paris ) , Sartre’s modest apartment. Sartre moved in here when he was forty-one years old to live with his mother, following the death of her second husband Joseph Mancy. They were joined by Eugénie, the mother’s longstanding faithful family maid, who insisted on referring to the now-famous adult Jean-Paul as she always had — by his childhood pet name of ‘Master Poulou’. I visited Café de Flore where he spent his time . I visited Sorbonne University with which Simone de Beauvoir was associated . Simone de Beauvoir was a student at this venerable institution in 1929 when she met Jean-Paul Sartre. It was here that she met Sartre and studied for and passed the agrégation, the highly competitive national examinations in philosophy. True, France still has writers on philosophical questions who also march in demonstrations. (One of them, Luc Ferry, has even been made the nation’s minister for education.) But there will never again be a combination of totalizing theoretician, literary colossus, and political engagé like Sartre. Today’s French intellectuals look like puny technocrats by comparison. Despite the criticism, there is a consensus that Sartre is irreplaceable. And Annie Cohen-Solal , noted French historian and writer says , “Intellectual debate doesn’t exist without Jean Paul Sartre.”
( Avtar Mota )
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