Troubles with Sartre and Existentialism.

[Yuppie Grinder]

So I recently read Sartre's Being and Nothingness. I was told that it is dense as fuck but found it to be mostly the sort of "well, duh" sort of stuff that every angsty snotty teenager out there, including myself, already knows. Here are some troubles I had with it and Sartre generally:
1. Sartre's "refutation" of Freud's conception of the self-conscious is pitiful. Won't go into details, but he tries to disprove all of psychoanalytic thought in 10 pages or so and its pitiful.
2. There are genuinely masochist and sadistic people out there. There is a conflict between living authentically and living freely sometimes.
3. Our perception of reality is not exact. Our sensory perceptions and reasoning abilities are both very, very limited.
4. In Critique of Dialectical Reasoning, Sartre rejects the traditional understanding of Class held by Marxian sociologists as well as sociologists in the tradition of Weber. He foolishly equates class with class spontaneity. The same thing happens here as with Freud, were Sartre comes off as a too self-assure dickhead who tries refuting entire schools of social science in one chapter.
5. Even after abandoning the traditional conception of class and class struggle in Critique of Dialectical Reasoning, Sartre remains a dickhead Stalinist who wrote about how it is virtuous to kill a white man in the intro to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, before becoming one of those numbskull "Socialist but not Communist!" people.

[JPSartre12]

1. Sartre's "refutation" of Freud's conception of the self-conscious is pitiful. Won't go into details, but he tries to disprove all of psychoanalytic thought in 10 pages or so and its pitiful.

Then you misunderstand what Sartre is trying to say when he goes over in Part Four, Chapter Two, Section One of Being And Nothingness, titled "Existential Psychoanalysis". Sartre doesn't attempt to provide a "refutation" of Freud's conception of self-consciousness, because he spends the previous 712 pages (if you're going by the Washington Square Press edition) putting forth his own conceptualization of consciousness, and he's merely comparing his to Freud's. To say that it is pitiful is more a declaration of misunderstanding than it is a legitimate critique.

A significant portion of what Freud said is dismissed nowadays by professional psychoanalysis and psychiatrists, particularly his theory that we have a subconscious desire to have intercourse with our parent of the opposite gender, and that that desire causes long-lasting tense relations with the parent of our gender.


2. There are genuinely masochist and sadistic people out there. There is a conflict between living authentically and living freely sometimes.

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say with this. Yes, there are masochistic and sadistic people on this earth, and there is a conflict between existential authenticity and inauthenticity, but what of it?


3. Our perception of reality is not exact. Our sensory perceptions and reasoning abilities are both very, very limited.

I think that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of existentialism itself. As Sartre puts it in (the Yale University Press edition of) Existentialism is a Humanism:


"What do we mean when we say that "existence precedes essence"? We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterwards defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only what he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principal of existentialism."

Also,


"It is also referred to as "subjectivity", the very word used as a reproach against us. But hat do we mean by that, if not that man has more dignity than a stone or a table? What we mean to say is that man first exists; that is, that man primarily exists - that man is, before all else, something that projects itself into the future, and is conscious of doing so. Man is indeed a project that has a subjective existence ... Thus, the first effect of existentialism is to make every man conscious of what he is, and to make him solely responsible for his existence. And when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men."

Sartre does not argue that our perception of reality is "not exact"; he says that the perception that we have of reality is what is exact. Reality is constructed based on perception, experience, and choice, not some Platonic and unchanging "pure" reality. Our sensory perceptions are the tools with which we construct reality, and because we create reality, we have the responsibility to act in a sober and self-aware manner to make it the best that we can.


4. In Critique of Dialectical Reasoning, Sartre rejects the traditional understanding of Class held by Marxian sociologists as well as sociologists in the tradition of Weber. He foolishly equates class with class spontaneity. The same thing happens here as with Freud, were Sartre comes off as a too self-assure dickhead who tries refuting entire schools of social science in one chapter.

In no way does Sartre reject the notion of classism, in either Critique of the Dialectical Reason or in any of his other works. Sartre was a dedicated revolutionary and was strongly influenced by both Marxism and anarchism, and he adhered very strongly to a class-analysis interpretation of society. He believed in it so strongly that when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature he refused it, because he did not want to become a victim of embourgeoisement and be incorporated into the ruling class. He remained profoundly anti-bourgeois his entire life.


5. Even after abandoning the traditional conception of class and class struggle in Critique of Dialectical Reasoning, Sartre remains a dickhead Stalinist who wrote about how it is virtuous to kill a white man in the intro to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, before becoming one of those numbskull "Socialist but not Communist!" people.

This is simply foolish. Sartre was in no way supportive of Marxist-Leninism, and adhered to a much more anarchist, decentralized, anti-collectivist approach to proletarian liberation. He was virulently anti-centralization and anti-bureaucratic. You can see elements of this in his desire for a perpetual revolution, one that constantly changes shape and tactics so that the revolutionaries do not become "institutionalized" and establish themselves as the new ruling class under the guise of vanguard leadership.

I would recommend that you re-read Sartre and attempt to do so with an open mind, but if you want to really understand where he's coming from, you have to read Heidegger's Being and Time and a great deal of Kierkegaard (at least Either/Or - A Fragment of Life, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness Unto Death. Being and Nothingness is based upon what Heidegger and Kierkegaard put forth, and you need to understand it well before jumping to the Critique of the Dialectical Reason, because that's where he tries to connect individualism with collectivism, and how to have unlimited personal liberty in a collectivist/socialist society.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Sartre was bourgeois dude. Doesn't mean his books aren't good, but you can't deny it.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Before the 60s Sartre associated the Soviet Union with Marxism and was big on Nat-Lib. Later he got into Maoism. He was a Stalinist in a qualified sense for most of his life.

[JPSartre12]

Before the 60s Sartre associated the Soviet Union with Marxism and was big on Nat-Lib. Later he got into Maoism. He was a Stalinist in a qualified sense for most of his life.

The Soviet Union was influenced by Marxism, there is no denying that. Without the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution would we have Leninism, Marxist-Leninism, etc? Would it have sparked the Luxemburg vs Bernstein revisionist debate? Would it have prompted the radicalization of socialist parties ? The SU was integral to the intellectual development of Marxism - with out it, we wouldn't have any history or material conditions upon which to base some of our theories.

And no, Sartre was never a Maoist. He was associated with the Proletarian Left, an organization that helped edit and distribute the Maoist-inspired newspaper Le Cause du Peuple, but he himself was never a follower of Maoism itself. He very strongly identified with the libertarian Marxist / class-analysis anarchism field, not Maoism or Marxist-Leninism.


Sartre was bourgeois dude. Doesn't mean his books aren't good, but you can't deny it.

I do deny it, and I deny it strongly. When he was a child, Sartre wrote short stories about decapitating the capitalist shipmasters near his home that were quelling workers strikes. He hated his strict, wealthy grandfather on the grounds that he mentally associated him with those shipmasters, and when his mother remarried to La Rochelle's M. Mancy, he hated him too for the same reason He had a deep contempt for the bourgeoisie throughout his entire life.

Was he born into a comfortable household? Yes, I'm not denying that. But to say that he was inherently bourgeois, despite the number of times that he was thrown in jail, established revolutionary underground groups, and wrote about violently overthrowing the State, is simply wrong.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

Sartre was bourgeois dude. Doesn't mean his books aren't good, but you can't deny it.
I really hated having to come to terms with this after being an angsty existentialist. Try telling an unemployed mother of 3 who lives in a crappy apartment in some council estate that she can define her existence.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Isn't that the same with almost every branch of metaphysics? - people recognise them for the BS that they are?