Sartre

This book is a nice introduction to Sartre. The chapters lead us through Sartre's thought on certain topics, discussing the relevance of his books and plays, explaining what his ideas were and what he meant by them. The main ideas that really interested Sartre were Time, the Self, Others, the subject and the object, and Freedom. Some of his fictional work has a lot in common with the writings of Camus, both being existentialist, but Sartre is the more rigorously philosophical of the two. I agreed with a lot of this book, there were several moments when I thought "Yes, that is exactly how it is", but there was also a fair bit I did not agree with. For one thing, Sartre's concept of the self extends only really as far as the conscious, show more and he more or less denies that any unconscious exists in the human individual, as part of the self or otherwise. Tangentially bearing on this is a quote from the book: "If love and hate are present together, says Sartre, the result might be compared to a coffee thoroughly mixed with cream, but not to pure coffee with a layer of cream on top". Modern neuroscience, traditional and contemporary psychology, and anatomy, all support the idea that the brain can contain conflicting and separate thoughts, drives, and emotions, which arise from separate parts. Whether these come from different physical locations in the brain, or from different pyschologically defined areas such as the Id, Ego, and Superego is irrelevant, it is evident that we are not one unified self, but a number of interacting and conflicting subsystems. Sartre's conception of self does not seem to acknowledge this. This isn't to say that Sartre doesn't describe our being as being of more than one type. He describes us as "Being-in-itself", which is the type of being we share with animals, and a "Being-for-itself", which is the human reflective type. But he more or less denies the existence of the unconscious, as far as the author of this book would lead us to believe.
Secondly, there seems in certain places to be an implicit denial of absolute truth, of the kind that Plato discusses.
The last chapter discusses Sartre and Marxism. Sartre was a huge Marxist, and sought to integrate Existentialism into the Marxist philosophy. Sartre changed his opinion a lot, but towards the later years said that role of the philosopher was to aid the worker and support the revolution. Without reading his works, or those of Marx, I don't understand the justification of this, but this seems roughly equivalent to Plato saying that the philosopher should contribute to the good governance of society, if you take the ideas of Marx as given.
This book is a good introduction to Sartre, and covers a lot of his work. A problem that will always be encountered with works like these is that one does not know if the author is misrepresenting the views of the philosopher who is being analysed, without having read the original works. I disagreed with a lot of what she claimed that Sartre was saying, but without reading the original works it is not possible to know who is to blame for this. show less