French Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Gaukroger & Knox Peden

Author:Stephen Gaukroger & Knox Peden [Gaukroger, Stephen & Peden, Knox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192564511
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Sartre and Beauvoir

Arguably the greatest philosopher of 20th-century France was Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). He’s certainly the one who achieved the greatest renown. Not only did he win the Nobel Prize for Literature, he refused it, contemptuous of its tendency to turn writers into institutions. An accomplished novelist and playwright, he also produced a series of major philosophical works that served to define existentialism for readers worldwide. Drawing on 19th-century authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, Sartre integrated an outlook in which existence was devoid of any pre-given meaning with a recondite philosophical methodology drawn from Husserl. It’s been debated how well Sartre understood Heidegger, and even to what extent he cared for Heidegger’s work. Per Heidegger’s own account in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, which appeared shortly after Sartre’s widely publicized 1945 lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, not very well. But there is no doubt about Sartre’s enthusiasm for phenomenology. Legend has it that shortly after his friend Raymond Aron explained to him that there was a new German movement that would allow you to make philosophy out of your experience of a cocktail glass, he rushed to the bookstore to purchase Emmanuel Levinas’s book on Husserl and started reading it before the pages were cut.

Existentialist themes run through Sartre’s writings. His novel Nausea (1938) follows the writer Antoine Rocquentin around Bouville (‘Mudville’—a stand-in for Le Havre, where Sartre was teaching high school) as he becomes increasingly disgusted by the thingly qualities of the objects and nature around him. The Roads to Freedom (1945–9) was a trilogy of novels in which Sartre reckoned with the fall of France and the political shame it generated for a republic that had lost its way. Among other things we see in these fictions the playing out of the central thesis of his most significant philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness (1943): that existence precedes essence.

If we take a long view on the history of philosophy, the notion that essence precedes existence seems to be a given. In a Platonist outlook, things that exist are instances of essences that are ontologically prior to them or at any rate independent of them. The essence of chairness is in some sense prior to all the existing chairs. How can you recognize a chair if you don’t know what a chair is? You can see how this framework can accommodate a Christian outlook. The essence of man—his soul—is prior to or at any rate independent of the concrete existing man. God precedes the world. In fact, God is the only entity for which it is the case that essence and existence perfectly coincide.

The priority given to essence survived the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. The cogito as the essence of one’s self is certainly deemed prior to the body, at least to the extent that its creation by God is independent of the material causes that produced one’s body. With the challenges to faith in a creator-God growing over the centuries, such a view became harder to sustain. What

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.