JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

1 Sartre in the worldStephen PriestLiberty, Equality, FraternityJean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) is one of the greatest French thinkers. Apolemical 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 genrebreachingbreadth of his imagination.In the 1970s, the French journalist Michel Rybalka delivered a lecture onSartre which divided his intellectual development into three stages: liberty,equality and fraternity. The three concepts of the slogan of the Frenchrevolutionaries of 1789 were used to denote three kinds of philosophy whichSartre endorsed: existentialism, from the mid-1930s, Marxism, increasinglyfrom the Second World War, and anarchism, in the last few years before hedied in 1980.Rybalka’s threefold taxonomy is too neat, too clean and, howeverappealing, it is an over simplification. The adult Sartre was always anexistentialist, a practitioner of that style of philosophising which addressesthe fundamental problems of human existence: death, anxiety, political,religious and sexual commitment, freedom and responsibility, the meaningof existence itself. It follows that Sartre remained an existentialist during hislong Marxist phase and during his final overtly anarchist phase.Sartre’s existentialism was never a pure existentialism. One of hisoutstanding philosophical syntheses is the fusing of existentialism withphenomenology. The Moravian, German-speaking philosopher EdmundHusserl (1859–1938) and his Austrian teacher, the psychologist andphilosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917), are the founders ofphenomenology. Phenomenology is the attempt to explain the possibility ofall knowledge, including philosophy, by describing the content and structureof consciousness. It was Husserl’s hope that this partly Cartesian andpartly Kantian project would place all knowledge on indubitable andincorrigible foundations. Husserlian phenomenology is Cartesian because