De Beauvoir did not know if Sartre was alive then. He was, jailed in POW camp Stalag 12D, in the Rhineland, reading Heidegger and plotting a "treatise" that would become Being and Nothingness. He finally gained his freedom on account of his poor eyesight. The rest is, well, history.
In the last stretch of his life, Sartre seemed to have lost any belief in political solutions. His last great passion was for the creative anarchy of 1968, the half-centenary of which will be celebrated in the coming year. At the time, he remarked: "If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist."
It's May 20, 1968. Picture Sartre speaking to at least 7,000 students occupying the Sorbonne's magnificent, statue-filled auditorium ("there were students sitting in the arms of Descartes and others on Richelieu's shoulders," Simone de Beauvoir memorably wrote). Sartre, almost 63 by now, is speaking to his virtual grandchildren, making sense of history, linking them to his own generation of angry students in the late 1920s and further down to a dynasty of philosophical rebels with a cause, from Nietzsche to Kierkegaard.
And yet to search the origins of Sartre's existentialism in Husserl, Heidegger and even Kierkegaard is beside the point. It's an absolutely original creation dictated by the specific context of European society's decadence, imperialism and colonialism (I have always wondered whether Sartre had read Conrad, from Heart of Darkness to Nostromo).
He was more Rousseau than Voltaire. And as far as Asia was concerned, it's not true that Sartre became a Maoist. He always regarded Maoism -- the Godard version, immortalized in movies such as La Chinoise -- as quite silly. But he defended Maoist intellectuals and accepted an invitation to be the (nominal) editor of their newspaper, to protect them from repression. Here's Sartre in a nutshell: whenever there was oppression, he sided with the oppressed.
The thermometer of Modern TimesSartre, near his death in 1980, was isolated ("we live as we dream, alone," Conrad wrote), brilliantly haranguing the cruelty and stupidity of human beings, but always ready to help them against oppression. In miniature, this is the best we all should aim at if we decide to live a decent existence.
His work is such a breath of fresh air to re-read, today -- Sartre as Sophocles displaying his fury against the imperial powers as he explores the agony of Biafra; the serene and melancholic Sartre dissecting what was made of the dreams of Lenin and Trotsky in The Ghost of Stalin; or the extraordinary foreword he wrote for Frantz Fanon's immensely influential The Wretched of the Earth, in which he stresses the notion that an anti-imperialist revolution must be violent because it helps the colonized to shake off the paralysis of oppression.
Simone de Beauvoir was absolutely seduced by the US when she first visited in the late 1940s: "Abundance, and infinite horizons; it was a crazy magic lantern of legendary images." And yet, along with Sartre and Camus, she was also horrified by the country's racial inequality. Sartre later wrote about black "untouchables" and "unseeables" haunting the streets and never meeting your gaze.
Millenials may not be aware that once upon a time not to read Les Temps Modernes, Sartre's magazine, was to be de facto cut off from progressive Western thought. Whole generations of Global South intellectuals, fabulous cinematic avant-gardists in the 1960s and 1970s, and a wave of leftist intellectuals emerging from Stalinism's anesthesia, were all influenced by the teachings of Sartre's magazine.
Critique of Dialectical Reason remains a stinging tour de force, and even with its many flaws (for which its ambition is a mitigating factor) is a must read for all of us who still (naively) believe -- against all evidence offered by the intractability of geopolitics -- that reason may be a force for good in the world.
Sartre and Bertrand Russell didn't get along well. And yet uber- rationalist Russell hit the streets and became a popular agitator while Sartre sold newspapers in the streets affirming the intellectual right of free expression. Their example remains.
So, dear reader, from my table at "his" Cafe' de Flore, now swamped by Asian tourists in search of an existential selfie, here's to the last humanist, the last Renaissance man of a bygone era. His generosity and wisdom will keep shining more than ever in our age of Hollow Men.
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