never thought much about JeanPaul Sartre because I dont tend to enjoythcentury western philosophy, especially not existentialists with their thoughts on Marxism but I was pleasantly surprised with this read.
We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of JeanPaul Sartre, by JeanPaul Sartre, edited by Adrian van den Hoven and Ronald Aronson is a book I didnt have a ton of high expectations for.
I like books that challenge my way of thinking and make me wonder how other people think about certain topics.
While I live in, I believe that a lot of what Sartre was discussing is relevant today,
The most interesting essay for me was the one about the American working class and what Sartre observed while here.
As a Marxist and proCommunist, Sartre was fascinated with the individualism in the fabric of American culture along with the working class in the postwar United States.
I agree with a lot of what he said about how people are unwilling to sacrifice comfort to achieve a means to an end.
I am unfamiliar with a lot of Sartres personal life and this book doesnt go into that but I can agree with some of what hes said here.
Initially, I think its easy for people to have an attitude about philosophy, especially at this time because they come off as privileged and detached from everyday life while preaching to people.
I had this attitude towards Sartre but I could be interested in reading more in the future as well as reading more about him as a person.
So far, the main thing I know is his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir which was tumultuous and passionate.
Regardless, there are some interesting things here that one could take with them in their everyday life.
: not the best collection of essays by Sartre perhaps there is a tendency towards talking about individuals, thoughts in conflict, rather than philosophies.
but this works very well in long essay about MerleauPonty, it is heartening, romantic in some ways, to imagine intellectual contest being essential to life, this works less well, for me, in his essay on Kierkegaard, but this is because have not read him much.
there are a lot of essays here, great sense of how wideranging were his interests, some intriguing works on l'etranger, on fanon, on Giacometti read before, on Faulkner, dos Passos, on his other perspective of midcentury America.
his politics are here of its time, and place, about WW, about Algiers, about labour camps in USSR, about the ArabIsraeli conflict, colonialism, exploitation, alienation, to the early editorial aspirations of the journal les temps moderne, to Camus, overall very good.
. . so, this rating is sometimes two, more often four or five, and there is something sad, something honest, something modest, in the final interview, looking back, being Sartre atin the interview that ends the book.
. . essay to come. Do you remember JeanPaul Sartre Only kidding, of course you do, This collection will make you remember him better, however, There is one basic theme here that I would describe as wrestling, Sartre wrote about nothing and no one without wrestling, grappling, twisting, . . employing a
powerful analytic mind in the service of at least not saying anything false if he could not be sure he arrived at the truth.
His best work in this collection shows up in odd places, His essay on his impressions and relationship with New York City is wonderful, At first he disliked New York because it wasn't all twisted up and overlaid by history like a European city.
Ultimately, he captured the powerful sweep of the place we're talking about Manhattan, of course, Except for Times Square and swaths of Broadway, New York doesn't feel compelled to talk about itself it knows who it is.
Sartre liked that: New York waiting to be decoded,
Another fine piece is an interview he gave when he wasand finally too blind to read or write.
His wit and composure is quite striking, His wrestling days at this point are over,
The breech with Camus the moralist is here along with a good succinct definition of existentialism: the willingness to accept responsibility for one's freedom, or, to put it more it succinctly, the willingness to be free.
Whenever the French communists show up, Sartre hits the mats, Despicable people who didn't like him, either,
On a tour through the US Sartre makes notebook entries on the mystery of the American workers' contentment with capitalism.
He wouldn't write that today, but then he marveled at how proud auto workers were of the Ford plants they worked in.
Europeans had cathedrals, Americans had factories,
Working through Sartre's essays, one often comes upon feuds and fissures, He describes at length the rise and fall he experienced with fellow philosopher MerleauPonty, This is a somewhat elegiac piece, When one thinks of Sartre's era, one thinks of him at the top of his class, Sartre didn't think that, however, He placed MerleauPonty above himself, perhaps not so much for achievement but certainly for fidelity to his intellectual quest.
At times Sartre is excessively concerned with the ins and outs of a subject, Some old arguments and debates are just that: old arguments and debates, But in the main this collection displays Sartre's extraordinary versatility and talent as a writer, Beyond that, it lets us see how often he took risks as a public intellectual, To his credit, he does not always insist that he was right all along, surprisingly great ! the liberation of paris was particularly slay Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and
activist, JeanPaul Sartre was alsoand perhaps above alla
great essayist.
The essay was uniquely suited to Sartre because
of its intrinsically provisional and openended character, It is
the perfect form in which to dramatize the existential character
of our deepest intellectual, artistic, and political commitments.
This new selection of Sartres essays, the first in English to
draw on the entire ten volumes of his collected essays as well
as previously unpublished work, includes extraordinarily
searching appreciations of such writers and artists as Faulkner,
Bataille, and Giacometti Sartres great address to the French
people at the end of the occupation, “The Republic of Silence”
sketches of the United States from his visit in thes
reflections on politics that are both incisive and incendiary
portraits of Camus and MerleauPonty and a candid reckoning
with his own career from one of the interviews that illhealth
made his prime mode of communication late in life.
Together
they add up to an unequaled portrait of a revolutionary and
sometimes reckless thinker and writer and his contentious, difficult
but never less than interesting times.
Very Sartre didnt care for most of the essays, but the ones i did care for were really brilliant, especially Republic of Silence and Existentialism: a Clarification.
Also adding in the incredibly sentimental Self Portrait at Seventy An odd collection, which might be more useful for intellectual historians than readers, like me, who just wanted a bit of Sartre to read after lunch.
The important essays are almost all here, but the book suffers a bit by stuffing too many into one volume.
Sartre's style is often oratorical to an absurd degree, perfect for declaiming on a Parisian street corner, perhaps, but not so good for, you know, reading.
"No one has the right to say that the events in Hungary made the intervention inevitable.
No one not even those who decided it, "
NO ONE, DO YOU HEAR ME
On the other hand, the essays on Bataille and Kierkegaard will be gobbledygook to anyone not well acquainted with their work.
None of this is to say that the book isn't worth buying, just that you might not want to read the whole thing.
Philosopher types will enjoy the Bataille/Kierkegaard/MerleauPonty essays literary types will enjoy the early reviews, the Black Orpheus essay, the spat with Camus historians will get something, at least, from the various political essays.
But there's very little in here about Sartre's own thought or its development, and that's a real shame.
I suspect it would have clarified much of the obscurity that isn't lifted by the generally excellent annotations.
The section on his relationship with MerleauPonty was the best part of the book,
“Dos Passoss world, like Faulkners, Kafkas, or Stendhals, is impossible because it is contradictory, But therein lies its beauty, Beauty is a veiled contradiction, I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time, ” JeanPaul Sartre, On John Dos Passos and
Thirty JeanPaul Satre essays collected here, addressing topics ranging from a clarification of existentialism, Husserls phenomenology, Kierkegaards philosophy, the American working class, Vietnam war crimes to reflections on artists and literary writers such as Faulkner, Camus, Bataille, Calder and Giacometti.
As philosophy/scholar Ronald Aronson so aptly states in his illuminating Introduction to this New York Books NYRB edition, “Sartre writes with remarkable freedom, never settling into a single, predictable tone.
He engages issues with extreme, attentiongetting statements, vividly and forcefully taking a position on the question at hand.
”
Rather than making more general statements, in the very spirit of JeanPaul Sartre and his existential philosophy, I will be as specific as possible, commenting on direct quotes from one of his essays I find particularly vivid and forceful: On John Dos Passos and.
“A novel is a mirror, Everyone says so. But what is it to read a novel I believe that it is to jump into the mirror.
Suddenly you find yourself through the looking glass, among people and objects that seem familiar, ”
Ha! A novel is a powerful world we leap into, as if Alice through the looking glass, a complete world into itself, familiar yet unique.
How many worlds have you leaped into and thus have expanded your sense of people and objects, expanded your entire sense of life Sartre goes on to convey the power a novel can have on a reader when written by a firstrate author like John Dos Passos.
“This is not narrative: it is the jerky unwinding of a raw memory full of holes, which sums up a period of several years in a few words, then lingers languidly over some tiny fact.
In this it is just like our real memories, a jumble of frescoes and miniatures, ”
By Sartres reckoning, Dos Passos magically treats time in a way that parallels much of our own very human sense of time and memory.
Even more effectively than Faulkners treatment of time now thats a real accomplishment!
“Nowhere, however, do we have the sense of novelistic freedom.
Rather Dos Passos forces on us the unpleasant impression of an indeterminacy of detail, Acts, emotions, and ideas settle suddenly upon a character, make their nests, and then fly off, without the character himself having much to do with it.
”
So, for Sartre, John Dos Passos has created a world where actions, feelings, sensations and even ideas become forces pressing against our more internal existential freedom.
And for an author who famously wrote “Man is condemned to be free because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does,” it really is a tribute to John Dos Passos that Sartre judged him the finest living novelist.
“In his storytelling Dos Passos deliberately chose the perspective of history: he wants to make us feel that the die is cast.
In Mans Hope, Malraux says, more or less, that the tragic thing about death is that it “transforms life into fate.
” From the first lines of his book, Dos Passos has settled into death, All the existence he retraces have closed upon themselves, They are like those Bergsonian memories that float around, after the death of the body, full of shouts and smells and light, in some sort of limbo.
”
By these words, Sartre conveys his admiration for Dos Passos and his ability to deal with death facetoface.
Personally, it never occurred to me that John Dos Passos was a key existentialist, On the strength of Sartres words I now plan to read his U, S. A. trilogy.
“Dos Passos reports all his character words in the style of press releases, They are, as a result, immediately cut off from thought they are pure words, simple reactions to be registered as such, after the fasion of the behaviorists, from whom Dos Passos takes occasional inspiration.
But at the same time utterances assume a social importance: they are sacred, they become maxims, ”
Whats fascinating is how words in the style of a press release can then take on a dimension of the sacred.
For me, a novelistic turn worth exploring since never in my life have I read a press release that I discerned having even a shred of commonality with the sacred.
Or, for that matter, ever becoming a universal maxim,
“Yesterday you saw your best friend and told him of your passionate hatred of the war.
Now try to tell yourself that story in the style of Dos Passos, ”
Thank you, JeanPaul Sartre! This is a challenge for all of us to recast and transform our passion into a story we can tell ourselves in the style of this John Dos Passos novel.
And I would even go further what Sartre asks us to do with , we can attempt with any novel having a profound effect on us.
is the second of American author John Dos Passos's U, S. A. trilogy. The trilogy consists of Thend Paralleland The Big Money, .
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Jean-Paul Sartre