J-P Sartre

in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre was born. A philosopher and writer as well as political activist of the left. No philosophe mandarin he. Does anyone still read Sartre? Does he have anything to teach us?

I had a professor of political science who said he was "a disciple of Hannah Arendt". And he read her constantly. He was totally in to the study of the sociology of science. Physics and biology. How does the knowledge from science affect society? He was also into Brecht. Anyway, one of his mantras was "The three most important 20th century philosophers were "Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Camus." (For him, philosophy meant "How to live a better life.") Once, after he ran his mantra, I said, what about Simone's partner (Sartre)?" He said, "That's a bunch of boolean algebra." Then he was sort of apologetic about it.

I am fairly familiar with Chomsky's political thought. He is common sense clear, so this is no great intellectual achievement. Chomsky is critical of French intellectual culture, as a recent Chris Hedges post reminds us once again. Hedges talks about recent developments, with liberal and centrist philosophers. The sorts of people that Sartre had contempt for (and vice versa). In the early 1980s, when a flap arose between the French and Chomsky, Chomsky remarked that the French intellectual culture was a mixture of stalinism and dada, with a war guilt stemming to their passive acceptance of the Nazi occupation, which included atrocities committed against low-level collaborators after the war. there is a lot of emotional baggage that should be dealt with but is instead being projected as a dysfunctional intellectual culture. (Another aspect of the French intellectual culture is their view on Israel. I remember during the 1990-1 anti-Gulf War movement, the French had huge demonstrations against the war. But when a few scud missiles hit Tel Aviv, the anti-war movement stopped. Why? Why is Israel so exalted in French intellectual circles and activist circles. It might be interesting to check out commentary from France concerning the recent flotilla hijacking and massacre.

Unfortunately, Sartre shared this lack of criticalness towards Israel. Edward Said wrote a memoir piece about Sartre and the Palestinians. In the late 1970s, Said got a message from Simone de Beauvoir saying that there was to be a meeting of international intellectuals concerning Israel/Palestine. How to resolve it. The meeting was to take place in Foucault's Paris apartment. (It turns out Foucault was a bigger zionist than Sartre. It stemmed from guilt about Europe's long history of anti-semitism.)

I will post it here.

I am trying to see where I am going with this.

Diary
Edward Said
Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/edward-said/diary

PHILOSOPHY appears to some people as a homogeneous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist. In whatever form we consider it, this shadow of science, this Gray Eminence of humanity, is only a hypostatised abstraction. Actually, there are philosophies. Or rather-for you would never at the same time find more than one living philosophy-under certain well-defined circumstances a philosophy is developed for the purpose of giving expression to the general movement of the society. So long as a philosophy is alive, it serves as a cultural milieu for its contemporaries. This disconcerting object presents itself at the same time under profoundly distinct aspects, the unification of which it is continually effecting.

A philosophy is first of all a particular way in which the arising class becomes conscious of itself. This consciousness may be clear or confused, indirect or direct. At the time of the noblesse de robe and of mercantile capitalism, a bourgeoisie of lawyers, merchants, and bankers gained a certain self-awareness through Cartesianism; a century and half later, in the primitive stage of industrialisation, a bourgeoisie of manufacturers, engineers, and scientists dimly discovered itself in the image of universal man which Kantianism offered to it.

But if it is to be truly philosophical, this mirror must be presented as the totalisation of contemporary Knowledge. The philosopher effects the unification of everything that is known, following certain guiding schemata which express the attitudes and techniques of the rising class regarding its own period and the world. Later, when the details of this Knowledge have been, one by one, challenged and destroyed by the advance of learning, the over-all concept will still remain as an undifferentiated content. These achievements of knowing, after having been first bound together by principles, will in turn-crushed and almost undecipherable-bind together the principles. Reduced to its simplest expression, the philosophical object will remain in “the objective mind” in the form of a regulative Idea, pointing to an infinite task. Thus, in France one speaks of “the Kantian Idea” or in Germany of “Fichte's Weltanschauung.” This is because a philosophy, when it is at the height of its power, is never presented as something inert, as the passive, already terminated unity of Knowledge. Born from the movement of society, it is itself a movement and acts upon the future. This concrete totalisation is at the same time the abstract project of pursuing the unification up to its final limits. In this sense philosophy is characterised as a method of investigation and explication. The confidence which it has in itself and in its future development merely reproduces the certitudes of the class which supports it. Every philosophy is practical, even the one which at first appears to be the most contemplative. Its method is a social and political weapon. The analytical, critical rationalism of the great Cartesians has survived them; born from conflict, it looked back to clarify the conflict. At the time when the bourgeoisie sought to under nine the institutions of the Ancien Regime, it attacked the outworn significations which tried to justify them.' Later it gave service to liberalism, and it provided a doctrine for procedures that attempted to realize the “atomisation” of the Proletariat.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.ht...

Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 31 January 2003

What is it about the nature of Zionism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left? Why have the Palestinians received so little sympathy from prominent leftist intellectuals such as Jean- Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault or only contingent sympathy from others like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Zizek? Edward Said wrote once about his encounters with Sartre and Foucault (who were anti-Palestinian) and with Gilles Deleuze (who was anti-Zionist) in this regard. The intellectual and political commitments inaugurated by a pro-Zionist Sartre and observed by Said, however, remain emblematic of many of the attitudes of leftist and liberal European intellectuals today.

While most of these intellectuals have taken public stances against racism and white supremacy, have opposed Nazism and apartheid South Africa, seem to oppose colonialism, old and new, most of them partake of a Sartrian legacy which refuses to see a change in the status of European Jews, who are still represented only as holocaust survivors in Europe. The status of the European Jew as a coloniser who has used racist colonial violence for the last century against the Palestinian people is a status they refuse to recognise and continue to resist vehemently. Although some of these intellectuals have clearly recognised Israeli Jewish violence in, and occupation of, the West Bank and Gaza, they continue to hold on to a pristine image of a Jewish State founded by holocaust survivors rather than by armed colonial settlers.

In an interview with the Revue d'etudes palestiniennes in 2000, the late Pierre Bourdieu said: "I have always hesitated to take public positions...because I did not feel sufficiently competent to offer real clarifications about, what is undoubtedly, the most difficult and most tragic question of our times (how to choose between the victims of racist violence par excellence and the victims of these victims?).
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1134.shtml

Jean-Paul Sartre made a two-week visit to Egypt (25 February-13 March 1967). The purpose of the visit was to acquaint the European philosopher with the Egyptian view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as to offer him first-hand experience of the "Arab path to socialism" Egypt was embarked on at the time. Right, pictures of the visit from the archive of Al-Ahram and the personal collection of Lilianne El-Kholi, to whose kind help Al-Ahram Weekly is much indebted.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/477/bk6_477.htm

I thought I wrote something about Sartre, but never evidently sent cuz I can't find... so I will just say, "Ahhh Sartre...". ;)