JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Sartre in the world13at dawn by a Fascist firing squad in the Spanish Civil War story ‘Le Mur’which gives the collection its title. Two very different kinds of bad faith, orrefusal to recognise one’s own freedom and its consequent responsibility,are exhibited by Lulu in ‘Intimité’ (‘Intimacy’) and by the young Lucien Fleurierin ‘L’Enfance d’un Chef’ (‘Childhood of a Leader’). Lulu feels unable to quiteleave her husband, Henri, or quite commit herself to the new lover, Pierre,and by choosing neither allows herself to be manipulated by her friendRirette. Lucien becomes an anti-semite and a fascist French nationalistleader, thus committing that double act of bad faith that Sartre calls ‘being aswine’ (salaud): not only denying one’s own freedom by the adoption of aready-made ideology, but denying others their own freedom.In The Wall Sartre experiments stylistically, for example by unexpectedlychanging tenses or changing grammatical person, sometimes within asingle sentence. He is unable to do this with the confidence and lack ofartificiality that one finds in Dos Passos or ,Joyce who are Sartre’sinfluences. 8 It is, however, the beginning of that disavowal of the mastery ofthe author over the authored that will be essential to the mature literarytheory of Qu’est que la Littérature? (What is Literature?) (1948).In Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Sketch For a Theory of Emotions)(1938) Sartre criticises the scientific or pseudo-scientific psychology of histime, including psycho-analysis, introduces us to phenomenologicalpsychology and advances the provocative thesis that we choose ouremotions. Rather than my being involuntarily subject to a wave of emotion,I choose, say, to be sad and to cry at a strategic moment, to control another’sbehaviour or evade the other’s control of myself.The culmination of Sartre’s fusion of existentialism and phenomenologyis the massive and complex philosophical treatise L’Etre et le Néant (Beingand Nothingness) (1943). The book can be read in many ways: as areconciliation of Heidegger’s thought with much of what Heidegger rejectedin Husserl, as an antidote to the positivism and pseudo-science thatdominates twentieth-century philosophy, as the imposition of the ontologicalconstraints of ‘existentialism’ on phenomenological ‘essentialism’, as anatheistic metaphysics, as a series of profound psychological and sociologicalobservations.The ‘being’ of the book’s title is divided by Sartre into two types, roughlyspeaking subjective being and objective being, which he labels ‘l’être-poursoi’(‘being-for-itself’) and ‘l’être-en-soi’ (‘being-in-itself’). This neo-Hegeliandistinction is between the active existing of a free conscious human individual,and the passive being of inert non-human reality. The ‘nothingness’ of thebook’s title is introduced into the world by human reality. Only human beingshave the power to imaginatively negate their surroundings. I am myself akind of nothingness at the heart of being.