JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

2Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsit shares with Descartes the ambition of methodically exposing preconceptionsand grounding knowledge in certainty. It is Kantian because itshares 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 theGerman atheistic nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) are consideredthe initiators of existentialism. Profound dilemmas of human existence areexplored in the works of the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoievski (1821–81).His Notes From the Underground (1864) particularly anticipates Sartreanthemes.Sartre was not alone or wholly original in marrying phenomenology andexistentialism into a single philosophy. Phenomenology had alreadyundergone the profound transformation into ‘fundamental ontology’ at thehands of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his large, if incomplete,1927 masterwork, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). The book is anexamination of what it means to be, especially as this is disclosed throughone’s own existence (Dasein). The 1945 synthesis of phenomenology andexistentialism in Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de laPerception) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s philosophical friend andpolitical 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 ‘existentialphenomenology’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) offers a phenomenologyof the body which eschews mind–body dualism, reductivist materialismand idealism. He influenced Sartre politically and collaborated in editingLes Temps Modernes but broke with Sartre over what he saw as the latter’s‘ultrabolshevism’. 1Sartre’s Marxism was never a pure Marxism. Not only did he never jointhe PCF (Parti Communiste Français), the second massive synthesis of hisphilosophical career was the fusion of Marxism with existentialism. Thelarge 1960 first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de laRaison Dialectique I) is an attempt to exhibit existentialist philosophy andMarxist political theory as not only mutually consistent but as mutuallydependent: as dialectically requiring one another for an adequateunderstanding of human reality. This neo-Hegelian ‘totalising’ philosophypromises us all the intellectual apparatus we need to understand the directionof history and the unique human individual in their complex mutualconstitution. The German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)thought that philosophical problems could be exhibited as apparentcontradictions that could be relieved, overcome or ‘synthesised’(aufgehoben). Hence, for example, human beings are both free and causally