Sartre Flashcards
Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism was built around a number of key insights:
1/ 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.
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.
“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. “
2/ We are free
These 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. We’re freer than we allow ourselves to imagine amidst the ordinary press of commitments and obligations.
We are usually full of reasons why none of that would be possible. But through his descriptions of moments of disorientation, Sartre wants to give us access to a different way of thinking. He wants to push us away from the normal, settled perspective to liberate our imaginations: we might not have to keep taking the bus to work, saying things we don’t mean to people we don’t like or sacrificing our vitality for false notions of security.
In the course of fully realising our freedom, we will come up against what Sartre calls the ‘anguish’ of 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.
3/ We shouldn’t live in ‘Bad 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.
Realising one’s freedom in an existential sense should not be confused with the American self-help idea that we’re all free to be or do anything without suffering pain or sacrifice. Sartre is far gloomier and more tragic than this. He merely wants to point out that we have more options than we normally believe – even if in some cases the leading option (which Sartre defended vigorously) might be to commit suicide.
4/ We’re free to dismantle Capitalism
The one factor that most discourages people to experience 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, pay people a specific low fee for their work. But in this, there is only the denial of freedom – and a refusal to take as seriously as we should the possibility of living in other ways.
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. Sartre is especially useful to us in adolescence, when parental and social expectations can crush us – and in the darker moments of mid-life, when we recognise there is still a little time to make a change, but no longer quite so much.
