Sartre: The Road to Freedom
April 19, 2008
Jean-Paul Sartre: Human All Too Human.
What I find ironic is that BBC couldn’t find anyone better than the clown Bernard-Henry Levy, a man who is perhaps the antithesis of everything Sartre stood for.
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Levys presence should not be that big a surprise.
If ,as stated, the philosophy offers a “valueless society” the the Levys would be amongst the first to sign up.
I think Sartre’s existentialism lacked Merleau-Ponty
FYI, interesting paper by Kristin Ross on role of the “New Philosophers” in France.
Nice article.
One point about the 1974 break it misses is that after detente the USSR stopped taking an overt interest in the french Communist Party , which in turn started to be more imperialist minded than the CPSU and then the whole French Left scene became a brazen neo-colonial spectrum.
From this it was a simple step for right of centre-rightist philosophers to make themselves established in an environment in which they could be equally cosy with either “socialist” or right French parties where the attitude to the 3rd world was either neo-liberal or neo-con.
Hitchens and co are trying to set the same course for the UK , but have failed in that the UK Left , to its credit, had a good relationship with Muslim organisations which , despite strains , is still holding.
The BBC film captured the post-war appeal of Sartre’s existentialism but was lamentably lame in its treatment of his third worldism and support for anti-imperialism.
In a 1946 retrospective piece for Partisan Review Hannah Arendt reminded readers that the most challenging and original thought in the work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger derived from the German Existenz school of the previous century.Sartre’s existentialism was a French literary movement of much more recent pedigree.
It was the Dane,Kierkegaard’s notion of angst or dread
as being men’s natural response to the uncertainty of God’s existence that attracted the German Existenz philosophers and proved foundational to the twentieth century existentialist extension of this idea.Existenz thinkers placed man at the centre of the world bereft of the moorings previous universalist philosophy had ascribed to him.Thus man was a forlorn and essentially melancholy figure in the midst of an unintelligible universe in which he must invest a meaning specific to his needs.
The uncompromising and uncomfortable this-world aspects of Existenz philosophy,its insistence on man confronting the fearful prospect of his being in the world is the life-enhancing outlook that gives post-war existentialism its appeal.
While the film captured some of this existentialist frisson and its attraction for the public intellectuals of the twentieth century it did so without acknowledging the debt thinkers like Sartre owed to the earlier Existenz school.
Unsurprisingly,the film also glossed Sartre’s thoroughly visceral brand of third worldism.
This commitment to the cause of anti-imperialism in Algeria in particular meant that Sartre would never be a co-opted public intellectual like those with whom we are familiar today.
Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth leaves us in no doubt that he understood the existentialist nature of the life and death struggle
that constituted the decolonisation wars in the third world.No quarter would be given in the cleansing and redemptive violence that would end in ejection of the settlers.He brazenly took issue with the failure of the French left to embrace the liberation struggles in France’s last colony.
That the focus on the power of violence again owed much to the fascistic thinking of Heidegger and could regrettably be co-opted for nihilistic or reactionary agendas instead of the liberatory goals Sartre and Fanon envisaged was a charge that could
constructively be made against these thinkers.
Instead,by dismissing Sartre’s commitment to Third World liberation by referring only to his support for Palestinian terrorism at the Munich olympics the film simply and vainly tried to marginalize its subject.
The militancy of public intellectuals like Fanon and Sartre galvanized the anti-imperialist cause in the last century and the purity of the stance they assumed is now sadly lacking among their co-opted New Philosopher descendants.
One has to also remember that there is Existentialism and Establishment Existentialism.
Just like the left has been taken over by neo-liberal pro establishment figures so has existentialism.
This programme pays tribute to the establishment representation of him as much as they cannot ignore him but must own him in the same way they must own democracy as a gift for which they are sole guardians and can use it or abuse it for their own “sacred” purposes.
The abject failure of euro-left is that they have stripped the Human of the spiritual dimension and therefore reduced Humanity into a Commodity , once you do that , no matter how Left you think you are , you are just another Hue in the spectrum of Capitalism.
Again we must look to The Islamic World and south America and the African concept of “Ubuntu” to find the real fully rounded Existentialism.
Picasso and Matisse are excellent examples of how Europeans found that missing Ubuntu in their art by allowing African and Islamic Art to enter their psyche and literally add colour and (three dimensional) Cubes into their lives.