Inadvertent Guru to an Age

Jean-Paul Sartre: 1905-1980

He looked like a toad, as he said of himself. His sexual life was more intricate than the plot of a Restoration comedy; and he once remarked, with a humor rare in his profession, that sex preoccupied him far more than philosophy. He did not write like a philosopher either, for he commanded a graceful prose style that could turn the subtlest concept into a memorable aphorism or a playable drama. But Jean-Paul Sartre managed to become an influential philosopher at a moment in history when philosophers had ceased to influence almost anybody.

That moment was the bitter aftermath of World War II. Exhausted Europe, shaken by the absolute evil Adolf Hitler seemed to represent and by the paralyzing fear of nuclear annihilation, had been delivered not into peace but into the ambiguous stalemate of the cold war. Looking for guidance when most moral values seemed questionable and all ideals suspect, the postwar generation found solace in the austere arms of existentialism. Sartre did not invent the term, and he owed a heavy intellectual debt to more profound European thinkers, notably the opaque German Philosopher Martin Heidegger. But in Sartre's prose, abstract ideas were translated into demands for decision. "Man is free," he wrote. "The coward makes himself cowardly. The hero makes himself heroic."

Because God does not exist, said Sartre, man defines what he is, his essence, through his own actions. Each individual is responsible for choosing one course of action over another. It is the choice that gives value to the act, and nothing that is not acted upon has value. Lending a moral dimension to an otherwise indifferent universe, Sartre declared that a person cannot define himself by "disappointed dreams, miscarried hopes or vain expectations." Most people seek to evade responsibility by blaming something or somebody else for their fate. Sartre regarded this as "bad faith." It is the real curse of the characters in his most famous play, No Exit (1944), who whine, "Hell is other people."

Sartre expounded his ideas in nine plays, four novels, five major philosophical works, innumerable lectures, and essays written for Les Temps Modernes, the magazine he helped found in 1945. Among its contributors was another action-oriented writer, Albert Camus, who subsequently broke with Sartre in a bitter dispute over the nature of Stalinism, which Camus deplored. Sartre led demonstrations, fired off protests and manned almost every political barricade raised by the left. Ironically, his most conspicuous disciples--the young, the bitter and the cynical--did little or nothing and understood Sartre least. Had he not proclaimed life absurd, reality nauseating and man free--of moral laws, religious commandments, restricting obligations either to ideals or family? The long-haired beatniks became part of Sartre's mystique.

This inadvertent guru had an opinion on everything, painfully considered, elaborately reasoned, often changed. But for most of his life he was convinced of the ineluctable corruption of the bourgeoisie, even though he was to the bourgeoisie born. His father was a naval officer who sickened and died when Jean-Paul was only two. The boy was brought up in the house of his grandfather, a linguistics professor who doted on him. His prim Roman Catholic mother he loved but did not respect, because nobody else in his free-thinking Lutheran grandfather's household did ("My mother and I were the same age," Sartre later recalled).

At the Ecole Normale Superieure he studied philosophy and met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong love, mistress and intellectual alter ego. The war found him a secondary school teacher in Le Havre. In 1940, as a clerk in the army weather service at the front, he was captured by the Germans. After six months he got a release by passing himself off as a civilian too weak-eyed to be of military use. He returned to Paris and sweated out the Nazi Occupation.

He risked imprisonment by writing for the underground press. He also wrote a play, The Flies (1943). Ostensibly a reworking of Aeschylus' drama in which Orestes avenges the death of his father at the hands of his mother and her lover, it was actually a philosophical tract with a message: every man has a right to commit any crime (even matricide) if he will freely take responsibility for it. French audiences correctly took this to mean that any act of resistance was justified in the struggle for freedom. The Germans eventually got the message and banned the play.

Sartre was naturally drawn to the Communists, mainly because he was a revolutionary. But they also played a strong role in the French Resistance against the Germans, and they had come through the war relatively untainted by suspicions of collaboration. Reluctant to believe that the Communists could not tolerate dissent, he became the most conspicuous fellow traveler of his time. He wrote labored excuses for the Soviet purges and Siberian labor camps ("Communist violence is no more than the childhood disease of a new era"). Sartre denounced the Soviets for sending their tanks to suppress the Hungarian rebellion in 1956; three months later, though, he was defending the Party as a "necessary" reality.

In 1960 Sartre risked arrest in France for espousing the cause of the Algerian rebels and for denouncing the use of torture by the French in Algeria. He refused the Nobel Prize in 1964 because, he said, he did not want to be a tool in the cultural struggle between East and West. "If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' " he told one interviewer, "there is no longer any possibility of political action." He sometimes seemed ready to quit on the revolution ("There is no salvation anywhere"), but he finally took solace from the Maoists. Because they professed to take their leadership directly from the masses, he perceived them as the purest of revolutionaries.

Sartre was never in robust health. Blind in his right eye from the age of three, he lost most of the sight in his one good eye after a heart attack in 1973 and had to give up the last volume of a huge biography of Gustave Flaubert that he had worked on for 16 years. Nursed by the faithful Beauvoir, he spent his last years in seclusion in Paris or wintering in Italy. His death last week, from pulmonary congestion after acute heart failure, came after a brief hospitalization.

Sartre has been called the conscience of his generation. Unquestionably he was too often wrong for that. In a lifetime of search for a place where man could put his feet, he never found a place for his own --and he knew it, which is more than most people know or care to admit. He did care, and it is the eloquence and intensity of that caring (for himself and on behalf of others) that is Sartre's monument. qed

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