SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF JEAN PAUL SARTRE.

Jean Paul Sartre was born in 1905 by Jean Batiste, a naval officer and Anne Marie Schiveitzer. He was educated at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris where he proved himself as an academician. While still at the Ecole Normale Sartre was attracted to philosophy through the inspiration of Henri Bergson whose “Essai Sur les donnees immediates de la conscience’ made him (Sartre) feel that philosophy is absolutely terrific, you can learn the truth through philosophy. He studied Husserl’s phenomenology at the Institute Francais in Berlin between 1934-35. in 1936 Sartre wrote his “Transcendental Ego” m Germany. He also published his novel “Nausea” while still in Berlin which he ever considered as his best work even at the end of his profession.

During the World War II, Sartre was active in the French Resistance Movement and became a German prisoner of war. While in the prisoner-of-war camp, he read about Heidegger’s philosophical work and the notes he took on Heidegger at the time strongly influenced Sartre. According to him, these notes were full of observations which later found their way into Being and Nothingness. For a period, he taught at the Lycee of Havre, the Lycee Henri IV and the Lycee Cordorcet, afterward resigning to devote himself exclusively to his writings which ultimately numbered over thirty volumes. As a sequel to “Being and nothingness” (1943), Sartre wrote another work entitled “critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). His last book was the three-volume work on Flaubert: (The idiot of the family 1971 – 72)

Although Sartre was deeply influenced by Marxism and continued to be a political activist, he was never a member of the communist party. Because of his commitment as an activist, he resisted personal acclaim and when he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1964, he refused to accept it on the ground that he did not want to be “transformed into an institution. In declining health and virtually blind, Sartre died on April 15, 1980 at the age of seventy four.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The topic of this thesis is Sartre’s notion of freedom. The notion of freedom has raised a lot of dust in different philosophical epochs yet it remained problematic. Man’s experience of his own behaviour seems to reveal to him that he is free, that he has ability to decide for himself, to deliberate on what to do in various situations and to come to his own conclusions about what to do or believe what he does. Also everyday experience leads man to believe that he often has a choice between alternative courses of action. We punish, condemn, or blame individuals for making certain choices and decisions and insist that they ought to have done something else, and if they had had, they would then be deserving of rewards praise.

However, at a time, what we believe to be a free decision seems to have been influenced in way or another by various psychological and social factors, so that it may look as if we did not actually decide what we do “freely”. So the notion of freedom makes one to ask some basic questions like; what is freedom? Is man actually? To what extent can we decide what to do? Does he really decide what to do, or does he simple do what he has been programmed to do by certain antecedent conditions? These and many other questions preoccupy and puzzle our minds while discussing the notion of freedom. So it is an attempt to answer these questions and a whole lot of others that this thesis is devoted.

Sartre in his philosophy advocates for freedom. He holds that man is absolutely and necessarily free. Man is the creator of himself and man is condemned to be free, condemned because he finds himself thrown into the world yet free because as soon as he is conscious of himself, he is responsible for everything he does. We will equally notice the influence of Sartre’s predecessors in Sartre’s philosophical thought great philosophers like Nietzsche, kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl etc. really had a remarkable influence on Sartre.

Sartre’s atheism could be compared to Nietzsche’s idea of God. Nietzsche asserts that God is dead hence man has to create meaning in his life. Sartre was highly confinable with this idea since for him (Sartre) appearance is the only reality, man is condemned to be free and as there is no God, anything is permissible. He was of the view that existence precedes essence. This is the core of his philosophy.

This work is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, we shall concentrate on the existentialists idea of being. We shall then treat Sartre’s meaning of being which is divided into two, namely being-in-itself and being-for-itself. We shall also put into consideration the third mode of being which is concerned with the relationship between a being-for-itself and another being-for-itself.

In chapter two, we shall try to expose the general meaning of freedom which will lead us to x–ray some of the philosophers’ views on concept of freedom and try to differentiate between different kinds of freedom. Also in this chapter, we shall treat the problem of freedom and determinism since some people are of the view that human actions and decisions are influenced by various psychological and social factors.

Having established the general idea of freedom, we shall then dwell in chapter three on Sartre’s idea of freedom which is the central theme of this work. But according to Sartre, this freedom cannot exist without absolute responsibility hence freedom and responsibility are prerequisite for human existence. He sees authentic existence as a resultant fact of life lived in freedom and responsibility. The second part of this chapter will try to expose Sartre’s idea of inanthentic existence which he called bad faith.

In order to defend his philosophical thoughts, Sartre denied the existence of God which we shall elaborate clearly in last part of this chapter. Finally in chapter four, we shall critically evaluate Sartre’s philosophical thoughts and then arrive at a conclusion.

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 MODES OF BEING IN JEAN PAUL SARTRE

1.1 MEANING OF BEING.

Being in all its fullness, and as the ground of all beings remains a great mystery. All the philosophical epochs have tried in diverse ways without success, to expound a wholesome review of this question. According to L. Okika, he stated that,

The initial difficulty about being or reality is that, it is so very obvious, so that it is preternaturally easy to overlook; and yet at the same time, we find that if we try to construct a strictly logical argument to demonstrate what being is, we cannot do so .

It is never a doubt that, history of philosophy is a history of problem; hence the question of being is never a new question. Though the problem of being is as old as time, it has continued to arouse the curiosity of many philosophers. The question of being remained unsolved because, it has no logical status or possesses a logical status so reduced that it cannot be what it appears to be, consequently, it has no logical status.

Some philosophers of different epochs came up with the aim of providing a permanent solution to this problem. Prominent among are Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas et cetara. Parmenides declared that ‘what is, is’ and ‘what is not, is not’ in relation to being, so also other philosophers continued to explore and expose this question of being.

Etymologically, being has a Latin and Greek derivative ‘Ens and ‘ons’ meaning; ‘which is’ and ‘that which exists’ respectively. Due to the fact that being lacks univocal definition, it could only be described, hence different philosophers have their views about being. For instance, Thomas Aquinas and Martin Heidegger gave their own definition of being. Thomas Aquinas defined it as, “that whose act is to be” But for Heidegger, “Being is the most universal and the emptiest of all concepts. As such, it resists every attempt at definition”

We are here concerned primarily with the question of being in the existentialist philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. The question of being proved problematic for Sartre like every other philosopher. In his utmost desire to locate and situate being, he came in contact with existence hence he writes:

…Usually existence hides himself. It is there around us, it is in us, you cannot say a couple of words without speaking of it but finally you cannot touch it.

Sartre after locating the question of existence began fully to treat the problem of being. He categorizes existence into two major kinds of being namely; Being-in- itself (L’etre-en-soi) and Being-for-itself (L’etre-pour-soi). In his major philosophical text, Being and Nothingness, being-in-itself is one of the key concepts. However, it may not be surprising that most of this work is devoted to being-in-itself, for according to Sartre, being-in-itself is opaque, massive, self identical and of this existence, there is little that can be said about it. Moreover, Sartre being an existentialist is primarily concerned with the beingness of man or as he prefers to put it, “the human reality”.