Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time asJean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Many thousands of Parisians packedinto his public lecture,Existentialism is a Humanism,towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2. Thatlecture offered an accessible version of his difficult treatise,Being and Nothingness (1943), which had been published twoyears earlier, and it also responded to contemporary Marxist andChristian critics of Sartre’s “existentialism”.Sartre was much more than just a traditional academic philosopher,however, and this begins to explain his renown. He also wrote highlyinfluential works of literature, inflected by philosophical concerns,likeNausea (1938),The Roads to Freedom trilogy(1945–49), and plays likeNo Exit (1947),Flies (1947), andDirty Hands (1948), to name just afew. He founded and co-editedLes Temps Modernes andmobilised various forms of political protest and action. In short, hewas a celebrity and public intellectual par excellence, especially inthe period after Liberation through to the early 1960s. Responding tosome calls to prosecute Sartre for civil disobedience, the then FrenchPresident Charles de Gaulle replied that you don’t arrestVoltaire.

While Sartre’s public renown remains, his work has had lessacademic attention in the last thirty or so years ago, and earlier inFrance, dating roughly from the rise of“post-structuralism” in the 1960s. Although Gilles Deleuzededicated an article to his “master” in 1964 in the wakeof Sartre’s attempt to refuse the Nobel Prize for literature(Deleuze 2004), Michel Foucault influentially declared Sartre’slate work was a “magnificent and pathetic attempt of a man ofthe nineteenth century to think the twentieth century” (Foucault1966 [1994: 541–2])^[1]. In this entry, however, we seek to show what remains alive and ofongoing philosophical interest in Sartre, covering many of the mostimportant insights of his most famous philosophical book,Beingand Nothingness. In addition, significant parts of his oeuvreremain under-appreciated and thus we seek to introduce them. Littleattention has been given to Sartre’s earlier, psychologicallymotivated philosophical works, such asImagination (1936) orits sequel,The Imaginary (1940). Likewise, few philosophershave seriously grappled with Sartre’s later works, including hismassive two-volumeCritique of Dialectical Reason (1960), orhis various works in existential psychoanalysis that examine the worksof Genet and Baudelaire, as well as his multi-volume masterpiece onFlaubert,The Family Idiot (1971–2). These are amongstthe works of which Sartre was most proud and we outline some of theircore ideas and claims.

• 1. Life and Works
• 2. Transcendence of the Ego: The Discovery of Intentionality
• 3. Imagination, Phenomenology and Literature
• 4. Being and Nothingness
  • 4.1. Negation and freedom
  • 4.2 Bad faith and the critique of Freudian psychoanalysis
  • 4.3 The Look, shame and intersubjectivity
• 5. Existential Psychoanalysis and the Fundamental Project
• 6. Existentialist Marxism: Critique of Dialectical Reason
• 7. Politics and Anti-Colonialism
• Bibliography
  • A. Primary Literature
  • B. Secondary literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Works

Sartre’s life has been examined by many biographies, startingwith Simone de Beauvoir’sAdieux (and, subsequently,Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre’sown literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized inbothWords andBeing and Nothingness, summed up byhis claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living”(Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first toundertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of hisown childhood inWords (1964a)—in which Sartre appliesto himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, therebycomplicating this life/death binary.

Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of majorcultural and historical events that his existential philosophyresponded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory thatthe Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “age ofextremes”, a period that was also well-described in the middleof that century in Albert Camus’The Rebel,notwithstanding that the reception of Camus’ book inLesTemps Modernes in 1951–2 caused Sartre and Camus to verypublicly fall out.

The major events of Sartre’s life seem relatively clear, atleast viewed from an external perspective. A child throughout WorldWar 1, he was a young man during the Great Depression but born intorelative affluence, brought up by his grandmother. At least aspresented inWords, Sartre’s childhood was filled withbooks, the dream of posterity and immortality in those books, and inwhich he grappled with his loss of the use of one eye and encounteredthe realities of his own appearance revealed through hismother’s look after a haircut—suffice to say, he was notclassically beautiful.

Sartre’s education, by contrast, was classical—theÉcole Normale Supérieure. His education at the ENS wasoriented around the history of philosophy, and the influentialbifurcation of that time between the neo-Kantianism of Brunschvicg andthe vitalism of Bergson. While Sartre failed his first attempt at theaggregation, apparently by virtue of being overly ambitious, onrepeating the year he topped the class (de Beauvoir was second, at herfirst attempt and at the age of 21, then the youngest to complete).Sartre then taught philosophy at various schools, notably at Le Havrefrom 1931–36 and while he was composing his early philosophy andhis great philosophical novel,Nausea. He never entered aclassical university position.

Although Sartre’s philosophical encounter with phenomenology hadalready occurred (around 1933), which de Beauvoir described as causinghim to turn pale with emotion (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 112]), with theonset of World War 2 Sartre merged those philosophical concerns withmore obviously existential themes like freedom, authenticity,responsibility, and anguish, as translated into English from theFrenchangoisse by both Hazel Barnes and Sarah Richmond. Hewas a Meteorologist in Alsace in the war and was captured by theGerman Army in 1940 and imprisoned for just under a year (seeWarDiaries). During this socio-political turmoil, Sartre remainedremarkably prolific. Notable publications include his play,NoExit (1947),Being and Nothingness (1943), and thencompletingExistentialism is a Humanism(1946),Anti-semite and Jew (1946), and founding andcoeditingLes Temps Modernes, commencing from 1943(Sartre’s major contributions are collected in hisseriesSituations, especially volume V).

Sartre continued to lead various social and political protests afterthat period, especially concerning French colonialism (seesection 7 below). By the time of the student revolutions in May 1968 he was nolonger quite the dominant cultural and intellectual force he had been,but he did not retreat from public life and engagement and died in1980. Estimates of the numbers of those attending his funeralprocession in Paris range from 50–100,000 people. Sartre hadbeen in the midst of a collaboration with Benny Levy regarding ethics,the so-called “Hope Now” interviews, whose status remainsomewhat controversial in Sartrean scholarship, given the interviewswere produced in the midst of Sartre’s illness and shortlybefore he died, and the fact that the relevant audio-recordings arenot publicly available.

2. Transcendence of the Ego: The Discovery of Intentionality

One of the most famous foundational moments of existentialism concernsSartre’s discovery of phenomenology around the turn of 1932/3,when in a Parisian bar listening to his friend Raymond Aron’sdescription of an apricot cocktail (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 135]).From this moment, Sartre was fascinated by the originality and noveltyof Husserl’s method, which he identified straight away as ameans to fulfil his own philosophical expectations: overcoming theopposition between idealism and realism; getting a view on the worldthat would allow him “to describe objects just as he saw andtouched them, and extract philosophy from the process”. Sartrebecame immediately acquainted with Emmanuel Levinas’s earlytranslation of Husserl’sCartesian Meditations and hisintroductory book on Husserl’s theory of intuition. He spent thefollowing year in Berlin, so as to study more closely Husserl’smethod and to familiarise himself with the works of his students,Heidegger and Scheler. With Levinas, and then later withMerleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Tran Duc Thao, Sartre became one ofthe first serious interpreters and proponent of Husserl’sphenomenology in France.

While he was studying in Berlin, Sartre tried to convert his study ofHusserl into an article that documents his enthusiastic discovery ofintentionality. It was published a few years later under the title“Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’sphenomenology”. This article, which had considerable influenceover the early French reception of phenomenology, makes explicit thereasons Sartre had to be fascinated by Husserl’s descriptiveapproach to consciousness, and how he managed to merge it with hisprevious philosophical concerns. Purposefully leaving aside theidealist aspects of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology,Sartre proposes a radicalisation of intentionality that stresses itsanti-idealistic potential. Against the French contemporary versions ofneo-Kantianism (Brochard, Lachelier), and more particularly againstthe kind of idealism advocated by Léon Brunschvicg, Sartrefamously claims that intentionality allows us to discard themetaphysical oppositions between the inner and outer and to renounceto the very notion of the interiority of consciousness. If it is true,as Husserl states, that every consciousness is consciousnessof something, and if intentionality accounts for thisfundamental direction that orients consciousness towards its objectand beyond itself, then, Sartre concludes, the phenomenologicaldescription of intentionality does away with the illusion that makesus responsible for the way the world appears to us. According toSartre’s radicalised reading of Husserl’s thesis,intentionality is intrinsically realistic: it lets the world appear toconsciousnessas it really is, and not as a mere correlate ofan intellectual act. This realistic interpretation, being perfectly intune with Sartre’s lifelong ambition to provide a philosophicalaccount of the contingency of being—its non-negotiable lack ofnecessity—convinced him to adopt Husserl’s method ofphenomenological description.

While he was still in Berlin, Sartre also began to work on a morepersonal essay, which a few years later resulted in his firstsignificant philosophical contribution,Transcendence of theEgo. With this influential essay Sartre engages in a much morecritical way with the conception of the “transcendentalego” presented in Husserl’sIdeas and defends hisrealistic interpretation of intentionality against the idealistictendencies of Husserl’s own phenomenology after the publicationofLogical Investigations. Stressing the irreducibletransparency of intentional experience—its fundamentalorientation beyond itself towards its object, whatever this object maybe—Sartre distinguishes between the dimensions of our subjectiveexperiences that are pre-reflectively lived through, and thereflective stance thanks to which one can always make their experiencethe intentional object towards which consciousness is oriented. One ofSartre’s most fundamental claims inTranscendence of theEgo is that these two forms of consciousness cannot and must notbe mistaken with one another: reflexive consciousness is a form ofintentional consciousness that takes one’s own lived-experiencesas its specific object, whereas pre-reflexive consciousness need notinvolve the intentional distance to the object that the act ofreflection entails. In regard to self-consciousness, Sartre arguesthere is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, aswell as reflective forms of self-consciousness. The latter is unableto give access to oneself as thesubject of unreflectedconsciousness, but only as the intentionalobject of the actof reflection, i.e., the Ego in Sartre’s terminology. The Ego isthe specific object that intentional consciousness is directed uponwhen performing reflection—an object that consciousness“posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the actof reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead ofa transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as atranscendent object similar to any other object, with the onlydifference that it is given to us through a particular kind ofexperience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “isoutside,in the world. It is a being of the world, like theEgo of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).

This critique of the transcendental Ego is less opposed to Husserlthan it may seem, notwithstanding Sartre’s reservations aboutthe transcendental radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology.The neo-Humean claim that the “I” or Ego is nowhere to befound “within” ourselves remains faithful to the 5thLogical Investigation, in which Husserl had initiallyfollowed the very same line of reasoning (see Husserl 1901 [2001: vol.2, 91–93]), before developing a transcendental methodology thatsubstantially modified his approach to subjectivity (as exposed inparticular in Husserl 1913 [1983]). However, for the Husserl of theIdeas Pertaining to a Phenomenology (published in 1913), thesense in which a perceptual object, which is necessarily seen from oneside but also presented to us as a unified object (involving otherunseen sides), requires that there be a unifying structure withinconsciousness itself: the transcendental ego. Sartre argues that suchan account would entail that the perception of an object would alwaysalso involve an intermediary perception—such as some kind ofperception or consciousness of the transcendental ego—thusthreatening to disrupt the “transparency” or“translucidity” of consciousness. All forms of perceptionand consciousness would involve (at least) these two components, andthere would be an opaqueness to consciousness that is notphenomenologically apparent. In addition, it appears thatHusserl’s transcendental ego would have to pre-exist all of ourparticular actions and perceptions, which is something that theexistentialist dictum “existence precedes essence”, whichwe will explicate shortly, seems committed to denying. Withoutconsidering here the extent to which Husserl can be defended againstthese charges, Sartre’s general claim is that the notion of aself or ego is not given in experience. Rather, it is something thatis not immanent but transcendent to pre-reflective experience. The Egois the transcendentobject of one’s reflexiveexperience, and not the subject of the pre-reflective experience thatwas initially lived (but not known).

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal(or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, whichstems from its non-egological structure and results directly from theabsence of theI in the transcendental field. According tohim, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves ananonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendentobject:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I amabsorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is noI.[…] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is theywhich constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] butme, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There isno place forme on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004:8])

The tram appears to mein a specific way (as“having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that isexperienced as itsown mode of phenomenalization, and not asa mere relational aspect of its appearing tome. The objectpresents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that arestrictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. Thestreetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way thatobliterates andoverrides, so to speak, the subjectivefeatures of conscious experience; its“having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to mysubjective experience of the world but to theobjective description of the way the world is (see alsoSartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after thestreetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to itsintentional object, “thestreetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace ofthe “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to beaware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itselfappears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of myexperience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. Theyare lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject(or to the fact that this experience has to be experiencedbysomeone). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousnessof lived-experiences. In a different example of this, Sartre arguesthat when I perceive Pierre as loathsome, say, I do not perceive myfeeling of hatred; rather, Pierre repulses me and I experiencehim as repulsive (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13]).Repulsiveness constitutes an essential feature ofhisdistinctive mode of appearing, rather than a trait ofmyfeelings towards him. Sartre concludes that reflective statementsabout one’s Ego cannot be logically derived from non-reflective(“irréfléchies”) lived-experiences:

Thus to say “I hate” or “I love” on theoccasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is tocarry out a veritable passage to the infinite […] Nothing moreis needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it iscertain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain foreverdoubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceedsthe power of reflection. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13])

This critique of the powers of reflection forms one important part ofSartre’s argument for the primacy of pre-reflectiveconsciousness over reflective consciousness, which is central to manyof the pivotal arguments ofBeing and Nothingness, as weindicate in the relevant sections below.

3. Imagination, Phenomenology and Literature

For many of his readers, the book on theImaginary thatSartre published in 1940 constitutes one of the most rigorous andfruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenologicalinvestigations. Along withThe Emotions: Outline of aTheory which was published one year before (Sartre 1939b), Sartrepresented this study of imagination as an essay in phenomenologicalpsychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in psychologicalstudies and brought to completion the research on imagination he hadundertaken since the very beginning of his philosophical career. Withthis new essay, Sartre continues to explore the relationship betweenintentional consciousness and reality by focusing upon the specificcase of the intentional relations to the unreal and the fictional, soas to produce an in-depth analysis of “the great‘irrealizing’ function of consciousness”. Engagingin a detailed discussion with recent psychological research thatSartre juxtaposes with (and against) fine-grained phenomenologicaldescriptions of the structures of imagination, his essay proposes hisown theory of the imaginary as the corollary of a specific intentionalattitude that orients consciousness towards the unreal.

In a similar fashion to his analysis of the world-shaping powers ofemotions (Sartre 1939b), Sartre describes and highlights howimagination presents us with a coherent world, although made ofobjects that do not precede butresult from the imagingcapacities of consciousness. “The object as imaged, Sartreclaims, is never anything more than the consciousness one has ofit” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 15]). Contrary to other modes ofconsciousness such as perception or memory, which connect us to aworld that is essentially one and the same, the objects to whichimaginative consciousness connects us belong to imaginary worlds,which may not only be extremely diverse, but also follow their ownrules, having their own spatiality and temporality. The island ofThrinacia where Odysseus lands on his way back to Ithaca needs not belocated anywhere on our maps nor have existed at a specific time: itsmode of existence is that of a fictional object, which possesses itsown spatiality and temporality within the imaginary world it belongsto.

Sartre stresses that the intentional dimension of imagingconsciousness is essentially characterised by itsnegativity.The negative act, Sartre writes, is “constitutive of theimage” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 183]): an image consciousness is aconsciousness of something thatis not, whether its object isabsent, non-existing, or fictional. When we picture Odysseus sailingback to his native island, Odysseus is given to us “as absent tointuition”. In this sense, Sartre concludes,

one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certainnothingness. […] However lively, appealing, strong the image,it gives its object as not being. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 14])

The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediateconsciousness of the nothingness of its object. Sartre’s essayinvestigates how imaging consciousness allows us to operate with itsobjects as if they were present, even though these very objects aregiven to us as non-existing or absent. This is for instance whathappens when we go to the theatre or read a novel:

To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors,the forest ofAs You Like It on the cardboard trees. To readis to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. In thisworld there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initiallythose mentioned in the book and then a host of others that are notnamed but are in the background and give this world its depth. (Sartre1940 [2004: 64])

The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator orreader from projecting herself into this worldas if it wasreal. The acts of imagination can consequently be described as“magical acts” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 125]), similar toincantations with respect to the way they operate, since they aredesigned to make the object of one’s thought or desire appear insuch a way that one can take possession of it.

In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophicalsignificance of the relationship between imagination and freedom,which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world.Imagination, Sartre writes, “is the whole of consciousness as itrealizes its freedom” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imagingconsciousness posits its object as “out of reach” inrelation to the world understood as the synthetic totality withinwhich consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginarycreation is only possible if consciousness is not placed“in-the-midst-of-the-world” as one existent among others.

For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escapefrom the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back fromthe world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940[2004: 184])

In that respect, the irrealizing function of imagination allowsconsciousness to “surpass the real” so as to constitute itas a properworld: “the nihilation of the real isalways implied by its constitution as a world”. This capacity ofsurpassing the real to make it a proper world defines the very notionof “situation” that becomes central in Sartre’sphilosophical thought after the publication of theImaginary.Situations are nothing but “the different immediate modes ofapprehension of the real as a world” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]).Consciousness’ situation-in-the-world is precisely that whichmotivates the constitution of any irreal object and accounts for thecreation of imaginary worlds—for instance, and perhaps aboveall, in art:

Every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord toend up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in asense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particularpoint of view. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185])

With this conclusion, which prioritises the question of the world overthat of reality, Sartre begins to move away from the realistperspective he was initially aiming at when he first discoveredphenomenology, so as to make the phenomenological investigation of our“being-in-the-world” (influenced by his careful rereadingof Heidegger in the late 30s) his new priority.

Although Sartre never stated it explicitly, his interest in thequestion of the unreal and imaging consciousness appears to beintimately connected with his general conception of literature and hisself-understanding of his own literary production. The concludingremarks of theImaginary extend the scope of Sartre’sphenomenological analyses of the irrealizing powers of imagination, byapplying them to the domain of aesthetics so as to answer the questionabout the ontological status of works of art. For Sartre, any productof artistic creation—a novel, a painting, a piece of music, or atheatre play—is just as irreal an object as the imaginary worldit gives rise to. The irreality of the work of art allows us toexperience—though only imaginatively—the world it givesflesh to as an “analogon” of reality. Even a cubistpainting, which might not depict nor represent anything, stillfunctions as an analogon, which manifests

an irreal ensemble ofnew things, of objects that I havenever seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects.(Sartre 1940 [2004: 191])

Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irrealobjects through verbal analogons.

This original conception of the nature of the work of art dominatesSartre’s critical approach to literature in the many essays hededicates to the art of the novel. This includes his critical analysesof recent writers’ novels in the 30s—Faulkner, Dos Passos,Hemingway, Mauriac, etc.—and the publication in the late 40s ofhis own summative view,What is literature? (Sartre 1948a[1988]). In a series of articles gathered in the first volume of hisSituations (1947,Sit. I), Sartre defends a strongversion of literary realism that can, somewhat paradoxically, be readas a consequence of his theory of the irreality of the work of art. Ifimagination projects the spectator within the imaginary world createdby the artist, then the success of the artistic process isproportional to the capacity of the artwork to let the spectatorexperience it as a reality of its own, giving rise to a full-fledgedworld. Sartre applies in particular this analysis to novels, whichmust aim, according to him, at immersing the reader within thefictional world they depict so as to make her experience the eventsand adventures of the charactersas if she was living them infirst person. The complete absorption of the reader within theimaginary world created by the novelist must ultimately recreate theparticular feel of reality that defines Sartre’sphenomenological kind of literary realism (Renaudie 2017),which became highly influential over the following decades in Frenchliterature. The reader must be able to experience the actions of thecharacters of the novel as if they did not result from the imaginationof the novelist, but proceeded from the character’s ownfreedom—and Sartre goes as far as to claim that this radical“spellbinding” (“envoûtante”, Sartre1940 [2004: 175])) quality of literary fiction defines the touchstoneof the art of the novel (See “François Mauriac andFreedom”, in SartreSit. I).

This original version of literary realism is intrinsically tied to thequestion of freedom, and opposed to the idea according to whichrealist literature is expected to provide a mere description ofrealityas it is. InWhat is Literature?, Sartredescribes the task of the novelist as that of disclosing the world asif it arose from human freedom—rather than from a deterministicchain of causes and consequences. The author’s art consists inobliging her reader “tocreate what [she]discloses”, and so to share with the writer theresponsibility and freedom involved in the act of literary creation(Sartre 1948a [1988: 61]). In order for the world of the novel tooffer its maximum density,

the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also bean imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the moredisposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be.

The conception of the writer’s engagement that resulted fromthese analyses constitutes probably the most well-known aspect ofSartre’s relation to literature. The writer only has one topic:freedom.

This analysis of the role of imaginative creations of art can alsohelp us to understand the role of philosophy within his own novels,particularly inNausea, a novel which Sartre began as he wasstudying Husserl in Berlin. In this novel Sartre’spre-phenomenological interest for the irreducibility of contingencyintersects with his newly-acquired competences in phenomenologicalanalyses, makingNausea a beautifully illustrated expressionof the metaphysical register Sartre gave to Husserl’s conceptionof intentionality. The feeling of nausea that Roquentin, the maincharacter of Sartre’s novel, famously experienced in a publicgarden while obsessively watching a chestnut tree, accounts for hissensitivity to the absolute lack of necessity of whatever exists.Sartre understands this radical absence of necessity as the expressionof the fundamental contingency of being. Roquentin’s traumaticmoment of realisation that there is absolutely no reason for theexistence of all that exists illustrates the intuition that motivatedSartre’s philosophical thinking since the very beginning of hisintellectual career as a student at the Ecole NormaleSupérieure, as Simone de Beauvoir recalls (1981 [1986]). Itconstitutes the metaphysical background of his interpretation ofintentionality, which he would come to develop and systematise in theearly dense parts ofBeing and Nothingness. While theexperience of nausea when confronting the contingency of the chestnuttree does not give us conceptual knowledge, it involves a form ofnon-conceptual ontological awareness that is of a fundamentallydifferent order to, and cannot be derived from, our conceptualunderstanding and knowledge of brute existence.

4. Being and Nothingness

4.1. Negation and freedom

Being and Nothingness (1943) remains the defining treatise ofthe existentialist “movement”, along with works from deBeauvoir from this period (e.g.,The Ethics of Ambiguity). Wecannot do justice to the entirety of the book here, but we canindicate the broad outlines of the position. In brief, Sartre providesa series of arguments for the necessary freedom of “humanreality” (his gloss on Heidegger’s conception of Dasein),based upon an ontological distinction between what he callsbeing-for-itself (pour soi) and being-in-itself (ensoi), roughly between that which negates and transcends(consciousness) and the "pure plenitude" of objects. That kind ofmetaphysical position might seem to “beg the question” byassuming what it purports to establish (i.e., radical human freedom).However, Sartre argues that realism and idealism cannot sufficientlyaccount for a wide range of phenomena associated with negation. Healso draws on the direct evidence of phenomenological experience(i.e., the experience of anguish). But the argument for hismetaphysical picture and human freedom is, on balance, an inference tothe best explanation. He contends that his complex metaphysical visionbest captures and explains central aspects of human reality.

As the title of the book suggests, nothingness plays a significantrole. While Sartre’s concern with nothingness might be adeal-breaker for some, following Rudolph Carnap’s trenchantcriticisms of Heidegger’s idea that the “nothingnoths/nothings” (depending on translation from the German),Sartre’s account of negation and nothingness (the latter ofwhich is the ostensible ground of the former) is neverthelessphilosophically interesting. Sartre does not say much about thegenesis of consciousness or the for-itself, other than that it iscontingent and arises from “the effort of an in-itself to founditself” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 84]). He describes the appearance ofthe for-itself as the absolute event, which occurs throughbeing’s attempt “to remove contingency from itsbeing”. Accordingly, the for-itself is radically and inescapablydistinct from the in-itself. In particular, it functions primarilythrough negation, whether in relation to objects, values, meaning, orsocial facts. According to Sartre this negation is not about anyreflective judgement or cognition, but an ontological relation to theworld. This ontological interpretation of negation minimises thesubjectivist interpretations of his philosophy. The most vivid examplehe provides to illustrate this pre-reflective negation is theapprehension of Pierre’s absence from a café. Sartredescribes Pierre’s absence as pervading the whole café.The café is cast in the metaphorical “shade” ofPierre not being there at the time he had been expected. Thisexperience depends on human expectations, of course. But Sartre arguesthat if, by contrast, we imagine or reflect that someone else is notpresent (say the Duke of Wellington, an elephant, etc.), theseabstract negative facts are not existentially given in the same manneras our pre-reflective encounter with Pierre’s absence. They arenot given as an “objective fact”, as a “component ofthe real”.

Sartre provides numerous other examples of pre-reflective negationthroughoutBeing and Nothingness. He argues that theapprehension of fragility and destruction are likewise premised onnegativity, and any effort to adequately describe these phenomenarequires negative concepts, but also that they presuppose more thanjust negative thoughts and judgements. In regard to destruction,Sartre suggests that there is notless after the storm, justsomething else (Sartre 1943 [1956: 8]). Generally, we do not need toreflectively judge that a building has been destroyed, but directlysee it in terms of that which it isnot—the building,say, in its former glory before being wrecked by the storm. Humansintroduce the possibility of destruction and fragility into the world,since objectively there is just a change. Sartre’s basicquestion is: how could we accomplish this unless we are a being bywhom nothingness comes into the world, i.e., free? He poses similararguments in regard to a range of phenomena that present as basic toour modes of inhabiting the world, from bad faith through to anguish.In all of these cases Sartre argues that while we can expressly posenegative judgements, or deliberately ask questions that admit of thepossibility of negative reply, or consciously individuate anddistinguish objects by reference to the objects which they are not,there is a pre-comprehension of non-being that is the condition ofsuch negative judgements.

Although the for-itself and the in-itself are initially defined veryabstractly, the book ultimately comes to say a lot more about thefor-itself, even if not much more about the in-itself. The picture ofthe for-itself and its freedom gradually becomes more“concrete”, reflecting the architectonic of the text,which has more sustained treatments of the body, others, and action,in the second half. Throughout, Sartre gives a series of paradoxicalglosses on the nature of the for-itself—i.e., a “beingwhich is what it is not and is not what it is” (Sartre 1943[1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction,Sartre’s claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existenceof the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stableidentity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather,“existence precedes essence”, as he famously remarks inbothBeing and Nothingness andExistentialism is aHumanism.

In later chapters he develops the basic ontological position in regardto free action. His point is not, of course, to say we are free to door achieve anything (freedom as power), or even to claim that we arefree to “project” anything at all. The for-itself isalways in a factical situation. Nonetheless, he asserts that thecombination of the motives and ends we aspire to in relation to thatfacticity depend on an act of negation in relation to the given. As heputs it: “Action necessarily implies as its condition therecognition of a “desideratum”; that is, of an objectivelack or again of a negatité” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 433]).Even suffering in-itself is not a sufficient motive to determineparticular acts. Rather, it is the apprehension of the revolution aspossible (and as desired) which gives to the worker’s sufferingits value as motive (Sartre 1943 [1956: 437]). A factual state, evenpoverty, does not determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack.No factual state, whatever it may be, can cause consciousness torespond to it in any one way. Rather, we make a choice (usuallypre-reflective) about the significance of that factual state for us,and the ends and motives that we adopt in relation to it. We are“condemned” to freedom of this ontological sort, withresulting anguish and responsibility for our individual situation, aswell as for more collective situations of racism, oppression, andcolonialism. These are the themes for which Sartre became famous,especially after World War 2 andExistentialism is aHumanism.

InBeing and Nothingness he provides various examples thatare designed to make this quite radical philosophy of freedomplausible, including the hiker who gives in to their fatigue andcollapses to the ground. Sartre says that a necessary condition forthe hiker to give in to their fatigue—short of fainting—isthat their fatigue goes from being experienced as simply part of thebackground to their activity, with their direct conscious attentionfocusing on something else (e.g., the scenery, the challenge,competing with a friend, philosophising, etc.), to being the directfocus of their attention and thus becoming a motive for directrecognition of one’s exhaustion and the potential action ofcollapsing to the ground. Although we are not necessarily reflectivelyaware of having made such a decision, things could have been otherwiseand thus Sartre contends we have made a choice. Despite appearances,however, Sartre insists that his view is not a voluntarist orcapricious account of freedom, but one that necessarily involves asituation and a context. His account of situated freedom in thechapter “Freedom and Action” affirms the inability toextricate intentions, ends, motives, and reasons, from the embodiedcontext of the actor. As a synthetic whole, it is not merely freedomof intention or motive (and hence even consciousness) that Sartreaffirms. Rather, our freedom is realised only in its projections andactions, and is nothing without such action.

4.2 Bad faith and the critique of Freudian psychoanalysis

Sartre’s account of bad faith (mauvaise foi) is ofmajor interest. It is said to be a phenomenon distinctive of thefor-itself, thus warranting ontological treatment. It also feeds intoquestions to do with self-knowledge (see Moran 2001), as well asserving as the basis for some of his criticisms of racism andcolonialism in his later work. His account of bad faith juxtaposes acritique of Freud with its own “depth” interpretiveaccount, “existential psychoanalysis”, which is itselfindebted to Freud, as Sartre admits.

We will start with Sartre’s critique of Freud, which is bothsimple and complex, and features in the early parts of the chapter onbad faith inBeing and Nothingness. In short, Freud’sdiffering meta-psychological pictures (Conscious, Preconscious,Unconscious, or Id, Ego, Superego) are charged with splitting thesubject in two (or more) in attempting to provide a mechanisticexplanation of bad faith: that is, how there can be a“liar” and a “lied to” duality within a singleconsciousness. But Sartre accuses Freud of reifying this structure,and rather than adequately explaining the problem of bad faith, heargues that Freud simply transfers the problem to another level whereit remains unsolved, thus consisting in a pseudo-explanation (whichtoday might be called a “homuncular fallacy”). Rather thanthe problem being something that pertains to an embodied subject, andhow they might both be aware of something and yet also repress it atthe same time, Sartre argues that the early Freudianmeta-psychological model transfers the seat of this paradox to thecensor: that is, to a functional part of the brain/mind that bothknows and does not know. It must know enough in order to efficientlyrepress, but it also must not know too much or nothing is hidden andthe problematic truth is manifest directly to consciousness.Freud’s “explanation” is hence accused ofrecapitulating the problem of bad faith in an ostensible mechanismthat is itself “conscious” in some paradoxical sense.Sartre even provocatively suggests that the practice of psychoanalysisis itself in bad faith, since it treats a part of ourselves as“Id”-like and thereby denies responsibility for it. Thatis not the end of Sartre’s story, however, because he ultimatelywants to revive a version of psychoanalysis that does not pivot aroundthe “unconscious” and these compartmentalised models ofthe mind. We will come back to that, but it is first necessary tointroduce Sartre’s own positive account of bad faith.

While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre’s view, it is alsoimportant to recognise that the “germ of its destruction”lies within. This is because bad faith always remains at least partlyavailable to us in our own lived-experience, albeit not in a mannerthat might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge ofan external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that mylife is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have livedan inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it isgiven differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie andmore likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictlyequivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to bein bad faith (cf. Moran 2001). There is a distanciation involved incoming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformationof a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematised inBeing and Nothingness.

Sartre gives many examples of bad faith that remain of interest. Hismost famous example of bad faith is the café waiter who playsat being a café waiter, and who attempts to institutionalisethemselves as this object. While Sartre’s implied criticisms oftheir manner of inhabiting the world might seem to disparage socialroles and affirm an individualism, arguably this is not a fair readingof the details of the text. For Sartre we do have a facticalsituation, but the claim is that we cannot be wholly reduced to it. AsSartre puts it:

There is no doubt I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwisecould I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter? But if Iam one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiterin the mode ofbeing what I am not. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 60])

In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when wereduce the other to some ostensible identity (e.g.,Anti-semiteand the Jew).

It is important to recognise that no project of“sincerity”, if that is understood as strictly being whatone is, is possible for Sartre given his view of the for-itself.Likewise, in regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might beachieved through direct self-consciousness, our options are limited.On Sartre’s view we cannot look inwards and discover the truthabout our identity or our own bad faith through simple introspection(there is literally no-thing to observe). Moreover, when we have alived experience, and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g.,third-personally), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that isso posited. We transcend it. Or, to be more precise, we both are thatEgo (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also notreducible to it. This is due to the structure of consciousness and thearguments fromTranscendence of the Ego examined insection 2. InBeing and Nothingness, the temporal aspects of thisnon-coincidence are also emphasised. We are not just our past and ourobjective attributes in accord with some sort of principle ofidentity, because we are also our “projects”, and theseare intrinsically future oriented.

Nonetheless, Sartre argues that it would be false to conclude that allmodes of inhabiting the world are thereby equivalent in terms of“faith” and “bad faith”. Rather, there arewhat he calls “patterns of bad faith” and he says theseare “objective”. Any conduct can be seen from twoperspectives—transcendence and facticity, being-for-itself andbeing-for-others. But it is the exclusive affirmation of one or theothers of these (or a motivated and selective oscillation betweenthem) which constitutes bad faith. There is no direct account of goodfaith inBeing and Nothingness, other than the enigmaticfootnote at the end of the book that promises an ethics. There aremore sustained treatments of authenticity in hisNotebooks for anEthics and inAnti-semite and Jew (see also the entry onauthenticity).

4.3 The Look, shame and intersubjectivity

Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity is often the subject ofpremature dismissal. The hyperbolic dimension of his writings on theLook of the Other and the pessimism of his chapter on “concreterelations with others”, which is essentially a restatement ofthe “master-slave” stage of Hegel’s struggle forrecognition without the possibility of its overcoming, are sometimestreated as if they were nothing but the product of a certain sort ofmind—a kind of adolescent paranoia or hysteria about the Other(see, e.g., Marcuse 1948). What this has meant, however, is that thesignificance of Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity, both withinphenomenological circles and more broadly in regard to philosophy ofmind and social cognition, has been downplayed. Building on theinsights of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre proposes a set ofnecessary and sufficient conditions for any theory of the other, whichare far from trivial. InBeing and Nothingness, Sartresuggests that various philosophical positions—realism andidealism, and beyond—have been shipwrecked, often unawares, onwhat he calls the “reef of solipsism”. His own solution tothe problem of other minds consists, first and foremost, in hisdescriptions of being subject to the look of another, and the way inwhich in such an experience we become a “transcendencetranscended”. On his famous description, we are asked to imaginethat we are peeping through a keyhole, pre-reflectively immersed andabsorbed in the scene on the other side of the door. Maybe we would benervous engaging in such activities given the socio-culturalassociations of being a “Peeping Tom”, but after a periodof time we would be given over to the scene with self-reflection andself-awareness limited to merely the minimal (tacit or“non-thetic” in Sartre’s language) understandingthat we are not what we are perceiving. Suddenly, though, we hearfootsteps, and we have an involuntary apprehension of ourselves as anobject in the eyes of another; a “pre-moral” experience ofshame; a shudder of recognition that we are the object that the othersees, without room for any sort of inferential theorising or cognising(at least that is manifest to our own consciousness). This ontologicalshift, Sartre says, has another person as its condition,notwithstanding whether or not one is in error on a particularoccasion of such an experience (i.e., the floor creaks but there isno-one actually literally present). While many other phenomenologicalaccounts emphasise empathy or direct perception of mental states (forexample, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre thereby adds somethingsignificant and distinctive to these accounts that focus on ourexperience of the other person as an object (albeit of a special kind)rather than as a subject. In common with other phenomenologists likeMerleau-Ponty and Scheler, Sartre also maintains that it is a mistaketo view our relations with the other as one characterised by a radicalseparation that we can only bridge with inferential reasoning. Anyargument by analogy, either to establish the existence of others ingeneral or to particular mental states like anger, is problematic,begging the question and having insufficient warrant.

For Sartre, at least in his early work, our experience of being whathe calls a “we subject”—as a co-spectator in alecture or concert for example, which involves no objectification ofthe other people we are with—is said to be merely a subjectiveand psychological phenomenon that does not ground our understandingand knowledge of others ontologically (Sartre 1943 [1956:413–5]). Originally, human relations are typified by dyadic modeof conflict best captured in the look of the other, and the sort ofscenario concerning the key-hole we just considered above. Given thatwe also do not grasp a plural look, for Sartre, this means that sociallife is fundamentally an attempt to control the impact of the lookupon us, either by anticipating it in advance and attempting toinvalidate that perspective (sadism) or by anticipating it andattempting to embrace that solicited perspective when it comes(masochism). In Sartre’s words:

It is useless for human reality to seek to escape this dilemma: onemust either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended byhim. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not theMitsein (being-with); it is conflict. (Sartre 1943 [1956:429])

5. Existential Psychoanalysis and the Fundamental Project

Sartre’s radical criticism of Freud’s theory of theunconscious is not his last word on psychoanalysis. In the lastchapters ofBeing and Nothingness, Sartre presents his ownconception of an existential psychoanalysis, drawing on some insightsfrom his attempt to account for Emperor Wilhelm II as a“human-reality” in the 14^th notebook from hisWar Diaries (Sartre 1983b [1984]). This existential versionof psychoanalysis is claimed to be compatible with Sartre’srejection of the unconscious, and is expected to achieve a“psychoanalysis of consciousness” (Moati 2020: 219),allowing us to understand one’s existence in light of theirfundamental free choice of themselves.

The very idea of a psychoanalysis oriented towards the study ofconsciousness rather than the unconscious seems paradoxical—aparadox increased by Sartre’s efforts to highlight thefundamental differences that oppose his own version of psychoanalysisto Freud’s. Sartre contends that Freud’s“empirical” psychoanalysis

is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche,which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject.

By contrast, Sartre’s own existential psychoanalysis aims toremain faithful to one of the earliest claims of Husserl’sphenomenology: that all psychic acts are “coextensive withconsciousness” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570]). For Sartre, however,the basic motivation for rejecting Freud’s hypothesis is less aninheritance of Brentano’s descriptive psychology (as was thecase for Husserl) than a consequence of Sartre’s fundamentalcritique of determinism, applied to the naturalist presuppositions ofempirical psychoanalysis and the particular kind of determinism thatit involves. In agreement with Freud, Sartre holds that psychic liferemains inevitably “opaque” and at least somewhatimpenetrable to us. He also stresses that the philosophicalunderstanding of human reality requires a method for investigating themeaning of psychic facts. But Sartre denies that the methodsand causal laws of the natural sciences are of any help in thatrespect. The humanpsyche cannot be fully analysed andexplained as a mereresult of external constraints actinglike physical forces or natural causes. The for-itself, being alwayswhat it is not and not what it is, remains free whatever the externaland social constraints. Sartre is consequently bound to reject anyemphasis on the causal impact of the past upon the present, which heargues is the basic methodological framework of empiricalpsychoanalysis. That does not mean that past psychic or physical factshave no impact on one’s existence whatsoever. Rather, Sartrecontends that the impact of past events is determined in relation toone’s present choice, and understood as the consequence of thepower invested in this free choice. As he puts it:

Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free,reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has givenitself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power ofa past. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 503])

Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, inagreement with the free project that orients his or her existencetowards the future. Conversely, determinist explanations that construeone’s present as a mere consequence of the past proceed from akind of self-delusion that operates by concealing one’s freeproject, and thus contributes to the obliteration of responsibility.Sartre hence seeks to redefine the scope of psychoanalysis: ratherthan a proper explanation of human behaviour that relies on theidentification of the laws of its causation, psychoanalysis consistsin understanding the meaning of our conducts in light of one’sproject of existence and free choice. One might wonder, then, why weneed any such psychoanalysis, if the existential project thatconstitutes its object is freely chosen by the subject. Sartreaddresses this objection inBeing and Nothingness, claimingthat

if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject andhence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must bythe same token be known by him; quite the contrary. (Sartre 1943[1956: 570])

What Freud calls the unconscious must be redescribed as theparadoxical entanglement of a “total absence of knowledge”combined with a “true understanding” (réellecomprehension) of oneself (1972,Sit. IX: 111). Thelegitimacy of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis ofconsciousness lies in its ability to unveil the original projectaccording to which one chooses (more or less obscurely) to develop thefundamental orientations of their existence. According to Sartre,analysing a human subject and understanding the meaning that orientstheir existence as a whole requires that we grasp the specific kind ofunity that lies behind their various attitudes and conducts. Thisunity can only appear once we discover the synthetic principle ofunification or “totalization” (totalisation) thatcommands the whole of their behaviours. Sartre understands thistotalization as an an-going process that covers the entire course ofone’s existence, a process which is constantly reassumed so asto integrate the new developments of this existence. For this reason,this never ending process of totalization cannot be fullyself-conscious or the object of reflective self-knowledge. Thesynthetic principle that makes this totalization possible isidentified by Sartre in terms of fundamental choice: existentialpsychoanalysis describes human subjects as synthetic totalities inwhich every attitude, conduct, or behaviour finds its meaning inrelation to the unity of a primary choice, which all of thesubject’s behaviour expresses in its own way.

All human behaviour can thus be described as a secondaryparticularisation of a fundamental project which expresses thesubject’s free choice, and conditions the intelligibility oftheir actions. On the basis of his diagnosis of Baudelaire’sexistential project, for instance, Sartre goes as far as to claim thathe is “prepared to wager that he preferred meats cooked insauces to grills, preserves to fresh vegetables” (Sartre 1947a[1967: 113]). Sartre legitimates such a daring statement by showingits logical connection to Baudelaire’s irresistible hatred fornature, from which his gastronomic preferences must derive, and whichSartre identifies as the expression of the initial free choice ofhimself that commands the whole of the Frenchpoètemaudit’s existence. In Sartre’s words:

He chose to exist for himself as he was for others. He wanted hisfreedom to appear to himself like a “nature”; and hewanted this “nature” which others discovered in him toappear to them like the very emanation of his freedom. From that pointeverything becomes clear. […] We should look in vain for asingle circumstance for which he was not fully and consciouslyresponsible. Every event was a reflection of that indecomposabletotality which he was from the first to the last day of his life(Sartre 1947a [1967: 191–192]).

Baudelaire’s choice of himself both accounts for thesubject’s freedom (insofar as it has been freely accepted as thesubject’s own project of existence) and exerts a constraint onparticular behaviours and attitudes towards the world, so that he isbound to act and behave in a way that must be compatible with thatchoice. Although absolutely free, such an initial choice takes theshape and the meaning of an inescapable and relentlessdestiny—a destiny in which one’s sense of freedomand their inability to act in any other way than they actually didcome to merge perfectly: “the free choice which a man makes ofhimself is completely identified with what is called hisdestiny” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 192]).

In the years following the publication ofBeing andNothingness, Sartre refines this original conception ofexistential psychoanalysis. He applies it methodically to thebiographical analysis of a series of major French writers (Baudelairefirst, then Mallarmé, Jean Genêt, Flaubert, and himselfinWords), warning against the dangers of all kinds ofdeterminist interpretations, from the constitution of psychologicaltypes to materialist explanations inherited from Marxian historicalanalyses. Sartre’s analyses become more subtle over time, as hesubstitutes fine-grained descriptions of the concrete constraints thatframe and shape the limits of human lives to the strongly metaphysicaltheses on freedom that he was first tempted to apply indistinctly toeach of these writers. Accordingly, existential psychoanalysis plays acentral role in the development of Sartre’s thought from theearly 40s up to his last published work on Flaubert. It allows him tounify and articulate two fundamental threads of his philosophicalthinking: his ontological analysis of the absolute freedom of thefor-itself inBeing and Nothingness; and his later attempt totake into consideration the social, historical and political factorsthat are inevitably involved in the determination of one’s freechoice of their own existence. Already in hisWar Diariesfrom 1940, the method of analysis of “human reality”arises from Sartre’s attempt tounderstand rather thanexplain (according to Dilthey’s famous distinction) EmperorWilhelm II’s historical situation and its relation to theaspects of his personal life that express his specific way ofbeing-in-the-world (Sartre 1983b [1984: 308–309]). Theapplication of his method to the specific cases of these Frenchwriters allowed him to refine the ahistorical descriptions of hisearlier work, by bringing the analysis of the subject’s freedomback to the material/historical conditions (both internal andexternal) of constitution of their particular modes of existing.

Sartre’s inquiries into existential psychoanalysis alsoanticipate and intersect with his philosophical investigations onhistorical anthropology. The progressive-regressive method presentedinSearch for a Method andCritique of DialecticalReason (Sartre 1960a [1976]) was first sketched and experimentedthrough Sartre’s essays in existential psychoanalysis.Sartre’s detailed analyses of Flaubert’s biography inThe Family Idiot can be read as synthesising thehermeneutical methodology theorised inSearch for A Methodand the conception of the freedom involved in one’s initialchoice of themselves that arose fromBeing and Nothingness.Moving discretely away from an all-too metaphysical doctrine ofabsolute freedom, Sartre goes back to the most concrete details ofFlaubert’s material conditions of existence in order to accountfor the specific way in which Flaubert made himself able, through thewriting of his novels, to overcome his painful situation as a“frustrated and jealous younger brother” and“unloved child” thanks to a totalizing project that madehim “the author ofMadame Bovary” (Sartre1971–72 [1987, vol. 2: 7]). If Flaubert’s novel andmasterpiece is consequently understood and described as the finalobjectivation of Gustave’s fundamental project, Sartre is nowcareful to point out the economic, historic and social conditionswithin which this project only finds its full intelligibility.Sartre’s psychoanalytic method is then expected to reveal,beyond what society has made of Flaubert, what he himself could makeof what society has made of him. In order to fly away from the painfulreality of his unbearable familial situation, the young Gustavechooses irreality over reality, and chooses it freely, thoughachingly. From that moment on, his dedication to literature commitshim to a fictional world that he couldn’t but choose to elect asthe realm of his genius.

6. Existentialist Marxism: Critique of Dialectical Reason

WhileSearch for a Method (1957) had been published earlier,it is not until 1960 that Sartre completed the firstvolume—“Theory of Practical Ensembles”—of whatis his final systematic work of philosophy,Critique ofDialectical Reason. The second volume, “The Intelligibilityof History”, was published posthumously in French in 1985. Itwould be 1991 before both volumes were to be available in English,which goes some of the way towards explaining their subsequentneglect. It is also a book that rivalsBeing and Nothingnessfor difficulty, even if some of its goals and ambitions can beexpressed straightforwardly enough. Never a member of the FrenchCommunist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cardson the table:

we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialismfurnished the only valid interpretation of history and thatexistentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. (Sartre1957 [1963: 21])

Critique offers a systematic attempt to justify these twoperspectives and render them compatible. In broad terms, some of themain steps needed to effect such a synthesis are clear, most notablyto deny or limit strong structuralist and determinist versions ofMarxism. Borrowing some themes from Merleau-Ponty’sHumanismand Terror, Sartre maintained that any genuinely dialecticalmethod refuses to reduce; it refuses scientific and economicdeterminism that treats humans as things, contrary to reductiveversions of Marxism. He pithily puts his objection to suchexplanations in terms of what we might today call the genetic fallacy.Sartre says,

Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But notevery petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacyof contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. (Sartre1957 [1963: 56])

Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor thatdetermines and orients history and the field of possibilities. Thereis human choice and commitment in class formation that is equallyfundamental. The way in which this plays out inCritique isthrough an emphasis on praxis rather than consciousness, which we haveseen is also characteristic of his existential psychoanalytic work ofthe prior decade.

Without being able to adequately summarise the vastCritiquehere (see Flynn 1984), one of the book’s core conceptualinnovations is the idea of the practico-inert. Sartre defines this as“the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and divertedby inorganic inertia” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 556]). The concept isintended to capture the forms of social and historical sedimentationthat had only minimally featured inBeing and Nothingness. Itis the reign of necessity,

the domain … in which inorganic materiality envelops humanmultiplicity and transforms the producer into its product. (Sartre1960a [1976: 339])

For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Anyreaffirmation of humanity, in which genuine freedom resides, must takethe form of the negation of this negation (negation is productivehere, as it also was inBeing and Nothingness). For Sartre,then, there are two fundamental kinds of social reality: a positiveone in which an active group constitutes the common field; and anegative one in which individuals are effectively separated from eachother (even though they appear united) in a practico-inert field. Inthe practico-inert field, relations are typified by what Sartre callsseriality, like a number, or a worker in a factory who is allocated toa place within a given system that is indifferent to the individual.Sartre’s prime example of this is of waiting for a bus, orstreet-car, on the way to work. If the people involved do not knoweach other reasonably well there is likely to be a kind of anonymityto such experiences in which individuals are substitutable for eachother in relation to this imminent bus, and their relations areorganised around functional need. If the bus is late, or if there aretoo many people on it, however, those who are waiting go from beingindifferent and anonymous (something akin to what Heidegger callsdas Man inBeing and Time) to becoming competitorsand rivals. In a related spirit Sartre also discusses the serial unityof the TV watching public, of the popular music charts, bourgeoisproperty, and petty racism and stereotyping as well. These collectiveobjects keep serial individuals apart from one another under thepretext of unifying them. Sartre thus appears to accept a version ofthe Marxian theses concerning commodity fetishism. This competitive orantagonistic dimension of the practico-inert is amplified insituations of material scarcity. This kind of seriality is argued tobe the basic type of sociality, thus transforming the focus on dyadicconsciousnesses ofBeing and Nothingness. In theCritique, otherness becomes produced not simply through thelook that Sartre had previously described as the original meaning ofbeing-for-others, but through the sedimentation of social processesand through practico-inert mediation. Society produces in us serialbehaviour, serial feelings, serial thoughts, and “passiveactivity” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 266]), where events and historyare conceived as external occurrences that befall us, and we feelcompelled by the force of circumstance, or “monstrousforces” as Sartre puts it. It is the practico-inert, modified bymaterial and economic scarcity, which turns us into conflictualcompetitors and alienates us from each other and ourselves. Only anend to both material scarcity and the alienating mediation of thepractico-inert will allow for the actualisation of socialism.

While Sartre is pessimistic about the prospects for any sort ofpermanent revolution of society, he maintains that we get a fleetingglimpse of this unalienated condition in the experience of the“group in fusion”. This occurs when the members of a grouprelate to each other through praxis and in a particular way. The groupin fusion is not a collectiveà la the practico-inert,but a social whole that spontaneously forms as a plurality of serialindividuals respond to some danger, pressing situation, or to thelikelihood of a collective reaction to their stance (Flynn 1984: 114).We could consider what happens when an individual acts so as to makemanifest this serial otherness, like Rosa Parkes when she refused togive up her seat and thus drew attention to the specific nature of thecolonialist seriality at the heart of many states in the USA. Thissometimes creates a rupture and others might follow. Sartre’sown prime example is of a crowd of workers who were fleeing during theFrench Revolution in 1789. At some point the workers stopped fleeing,turned around and reversed direction, suddenly energised alongsideeach other by their practical awareness that they were doing somethingtogether. For this kind of “fusion” to happen it mustfulfil the following four key conditions for genuine reciprocity thatFlynn summarises as follows:

1. That the other be a means to the exact degree that I am a meansmyself, i.e., that he be the means towards a transcendent goal and notmy means;
2. That I recognize the other as praxis at the same time as Iintegrate him into my totalizing project;
3. That I recognize his movement towards his own ends in the verymovement by which I project myself towards mine;
4. That I discover myself as an object and instrument of his own endsby the same act that makes him an object and instrument of mine.(Flynn 1984: 115, also see previous version of this entry [Flynn 2004[2013]] and cf. Sartre 1960a [1976: 112–3]).

Sartre calls the resurrection of this freedom an“apocalypse”, indicating that it is an unforeseen and(potentially) revolutionary event that happens when serial abuse andexploitation can no longer be tolerated. The group in fusion has amaximum of praxis and a minimum of inertia, but serial sociality hasthe reverse.

Unfortunately, Sartre insists that this group in fusion is destined tomeet with what he calls an “ontological check” in the formof the institution, which cannot be escaped as some versions ofanarchism and Marxism might hope. The group relapses into serialitywhen groups are formalised into hierarchical institutional structures.Serial otherness comes to implicate itself in interpersonal relationsin at least three ways in the institution: sovereignty; authority; andbureaucracy (see Book 2, Chapter 6, “The Institution”).From the co-sovereignty of the group in fusion, someone inevitablybecomes sovereign in any new social order. Similarly, acommand-obedience relation comes about in institutions, to greater andlesser extents, and there will be exhortations to company loyalty, todo one’s duty, etc. (Flynn 1984: 120). Bureaucratic rules andregulation also inevitably follow, partly as a reaction to fear ofsovereignty, and this installs what Sartre calls verticalotherness—top-down hierarchies, as opposed to the horizontal andimmanent organisation of the group in fusion (Sartre 1960a [1976:655–663]). As such, the revolutionary force of the group infusion is necessarily subject to mediation by the practico-inert, aswell as the problems associated with institutionality just described.Although is it still structured through a series of oppositions, theCritique delivers a sophisticated social ontology that bothaddresses some weaknesses in Sartre’s earlier work and unifiesthe social and political reflections of much of his later work.

7. Politics and Anti-Colonialism

Although it is not possible to address all of Sartre’s rich andvaried contributions to ethics and politics here, we will introducesome of the key ideas about race and anti-colonialism that wereimportant themes in his postBeing and Nothingness work andare currently significant issues in our times. Sartre was generallystridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating amulticulturalismavant la lettre, as Michael Walzer hasargued in his Preface toAnti-semite and Jew (Walzer 1995:xiv). His books and more journalistic writings typically call out whathe saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens.

The issue of race was part of Sartre’s French intellectualscene, and Sartre himself played a major role in facilitating that inthe pages ofLes Temps Modernes,L’Express,and elsewhere. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race,and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. Theseconcerned not only the French Algerian and African“colonies” but also Vietnam via Tran Duc Thao, who hadchallenged Sartre’s efforts to bring phenomenologicalexistentialism together with Marxism. Initially at least,Sartre’s arguments here typically drew on and extended some ofthe categories deployed inBeing and Nothingness. There is anobvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues fromSartrean existentialism. Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre,since it typically (perhaps necessarily) involves believing inessences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. HisNotebooks suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. Inracism, in particular, there is an “infernal circle ofirresponsible responsibility, of culpable ignorance and ignorancewhich is knowledge” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 49]),as well as what Sartre callspassive complicity. Many of us (or Sartre’s own French society)may not obviously be bigots, but we sustain a system that isobjectively unjust through our choices and sometimes wilful ignorance.In relation to colonialism, Sartre likewise contends that we have allprofited from colonialist exploitation and sustained its systems, evenif we are not ourselves a “settler”.

This is also the key argument ofAnti-semite and the Jew,composed very quickly in 1944 and without much detailed knowledge ofJudaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passiveanti-semitism of many French citizens. The text was written followingthe Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust werewidely known. Sartre was aiming to understand (and critique) thesituation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of theFrench Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all.The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit orimplicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excludingothers, notably the Jew. Now, of course, few of his contemporarieswould admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to beingracist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks areclear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma ofauthenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choosebetween their concrete practical identities (religious and cultural)and more universal ascriptions (liberty, etc.) in a way that cannot bereadily navigated within the terms of the debate. Sartre consistentlyascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectivesare ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him,it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Naziregime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviouslyegregious activities were sustained by their society and theindividuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of badfaith.

Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface toBlack Orpheus (1948), an anthology of negritude poetry. Hecalled for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on theside of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged suchinterventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category ofrace itself as an example of bad faith. Here the reception from FrantzFanon and others was mixed. InBlack Skin, White Masks(1952), Fanon argues this effectively undermined his ownlived-experience and its power (see entries onnegritude andFanon; cf. also Gordon 1995). Sartre continued to address colonialism andracism in subsequent work, effecting a rapprochement of sorts withFanon that culminated in his “Introduction” toFanon’sThe Wretched of the Earth (1961), where alsoSartre appears to endorse a counter-violence.

Although we have not given much attention to Sartre’s literaryand artistic productions sincesection 3 above, he continued to produce artistic work of politicalsignificance throughout his career. Continuous with insights from hisWhat is Literature?, Sartre argues that in a society thatremains unjust and dominated by oppression, the prose-writer (if notthe poet) must combat this violence by jolting the reader and audiencefrom their complacency, rather than simply be concerned with art forits own sake. His literary works hence are typically bothphilosophical and political. Although the number of these worksdiminished over time, there is still a powerful literary explorationof the philosophical and political themes of theCritique inthe play,The Condemned of Altona (1960).

We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, likeSartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, withthe benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre’s interventionsare prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century(à la Foucault). They certainly presage issues thatare in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. Thatdoesn’t mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whateverthat might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-politicallife. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the majorsocio-political issues of one’s time, as Sartre did, it isinevitable that history will not look kindly on them all.Sartre’s life and writings hence present a complex and difficultinterpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thoughtand action today.

Bibliography

This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre andsecondary literature that are relevant for this article. For acomplete annotated bibliography of Sartre’s works see

• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1974,The Writings ofJean-Paul Sartre, two volumes, Richard C. McCleary (trans.),(Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & ExistentialPhilosophy), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Updated in

• 1975,Magazine littéraire, 103–4:9–49,

and by Michel Sicard in

• 1979, special issue on Sartre,Obliques,18–19(May): 331–347.

Michel Rybalka and Michel Contat have complied an additionalbibliography of primary and secondary sources published sinceSartre’s death in

• Rybalka, Michel and Michel Contat, 1993,Sartre: Bibliographie1980–1992, (CNRS Philosophie), Paris: CNRS andBowling Green, OH:: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling GreenState University.

A. Primary Literature

A.1 Works by Sartre

A.1.1 Individual works published by Sartre

• 1936a,La Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’unedescription phénomenologique, Paris: J. Vrin. Translatedas
  • 1957,The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theoryof Consciousness, Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick(trans.), New York: Noonday Press.
  • 2004,The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for aPhenomenological Description, Andrew Brown (trans.), London:Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203694367
• 1936b [2012],L’imagination, Paris: F. Alcan.Translated asThe Imagination, Kenneth Williford and DavidRudrauf (trans.), London: Routledge, 2012.doi:10.4324/9780203723692
• 1938 [1965],La Nausée: Roman, Paris: Gallimard.Translated asNausea, Robert Baldick (trans.), Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1965.
• 1939a [1970], “Une idée fondamentale de laphénoménologie de Husserl:l’intentionnalit”,La Nouvelle Revuefrançaise, 304: 129–132. Reprinted inSituations 1. Translated as “Intentionality: AFundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, Joseph P.Fell (trans.),Journal of the British Society forPhenomenology, 1(2): 4–5, 1970.doi:10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118
• 1939b [1948],Esquisse d’une théorie desémotions, Paris: Hermann. Translated asThe Emotions:Outline of a Theory, Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York:Philosophical Library, 1948.
• 1940 [2004],L’Imaginaire: PsychologiePhénoménologique de l’imagination, Paris:Gallimard. Translated asThe Imaginary: A PhenomenologicalPsychology of the Imagination, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (ed.),Jonathan Webber (trans.), London: Routledge, 2004.
• 1943 [1956, 2018],L’être et le néant:Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris:Gallimard. Translated as
  • 1956,Being and Nothingness: An Essay on PhenomenologicalOntology, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: PhilosophicalLibrary.
  • 2018,Being and Nothingness: An Essay in PhenomenologicalOntology, Sarah Richmond (trans.), London: Routledge.
• 1945–49,Les Chemins de la liberté (Theroads to freedom), Paris: Gallimard. Series of novelsL’âge de raison (The age of reason, 1945),Lesursis (The reprieve, 1945), andLa mort dansl’âme (Troubled sleep, 1949).
• 1946a [2007],L’existentialisme est un humanisme,(Collection Pensées), Paris: Nagel. Translated asExistentialism is a Humanism, John Kulka (ed.), CarolMacomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• 1946b [1948/1995],Réflexions sur la questionjuive, Paris: P. Morihien. Translated asAnti-semite andJew, George J. Becker (trans.), New York: Schocken Books, 1948(reprinted with preface by Michael Walzer, 1995).
• 1946c [1955], “Matérialisme et RévolutionI”,Les Temps Modernes, 9: 37–63 and 10:1–32. Reprinted inSituations III, Paris: Gallimard,1949. Translated as , “Materialism and Revolution”, inLiterary and Philosophical Essays, Annette Michelson(trans.), New York: Criterion Books, 1955.
• 1947a [1967],Baudelaire, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asBaudelaire, Martin Turnell (trans.), London: H. Hamilton,1949. Reprinted, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1967
• 1947b [1949],Huis-Clos, Paris: Gallimard. First produced1944. Translated asNo Exit, inNo Exit, and Three OtherPlays, New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1947c [1949],Les Mouches, Paris: Gallimard. Firstproduced 1943. Translated asThe Flies, inNo Exit, andThree Other Plays, New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1948a [1988], “Qu’est-ce que lalittérature?”,Les Temps modernes. Collected inSituations II. Translated in“What IsLiterature?” and Other Essays, Bernard Frechtman (trans.),Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• 1948b [1967], “Conscience de soi et connaissance desoi”,Bulletin de la Société françaisede Philosophie, n° 3, avril-juin 1948. Translated as“Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self”, inReadings in Existential Phenomenology, Nathaniel Lawrence andDaniel O’Connor (eds), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,1967.
• 1948c [1949],Les mains sales: pièce en septtableaux, Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1948. Translated asDirty Hands, inNo Exit, and Three Other Plays, NewYork: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1952a [1963],Saint-Genêt, Comédien etmartyr, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asSaint Genet: Actorand Martyr, Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: GeorgeBraziller, 1963.
• 1952b [1968]. “Les communistes et la paix”, publishedinSituations VI. Translated as “The Communists andPeace”, inThe Communists and Peace, with A Reply to ClaudeLefort, Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk (trans.), New York:George Braziller, 1968.
• 1957 [1963/1968],Questions de méthode, Paris:Gallimard. Later to be a foreword for Sartre 1960. Translated asSearch for a Method, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York:Knopf, 1963. Reprinted New York: Random House, 1968.
• 1960a [1976],Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome 1,Théorie des ensembles pratiques, Paris, Gallimard.Translated asCritique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1: Theory ofPractical Ensembles, Alan Sheridan-Smith (trans.), London: NewLeft Books, 1976. Reprinted in 2004 with a forward by Fredric Jameson,London: Verso. The second unfinished volume was published posthumouslyin 1985.
• 1960b,Les Séquestrés d’Altona (Thecondemned of Altona), Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1959.
• 1964a [1964],Les mots, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asThe Words, Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Braziller,1964.
• 1969, “Itinerary of a Thought”, interview with PerryAnderson, Ronald Fraser and Quintin Hoare,New Left Review,I/58: 43–66. Partially published inSituations IX.
• 1971–72 [1981–93],L’Idiot de la famille.Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857, 3 volumes, Paris:Gallimard. Translated asThe Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert,1821–1857, 5 volumes, Carol Cosman (trans.), Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1981/1987/1989/1991/1993.
• 1980 [1996], “L’espoir, maintenant”, interviewwith Benny Lévy,Le Nouvel observateur, n° 800,801, 802. Reprinted asL’espoir maintenant: les entretiensde 1980, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1991. Translated asHope Now: The1980 Interviews, Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Chicago, IL: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1996.

A.1.2 Collections of works by Sartre

References toSituations will be abbreviated asSit.followed by the volume, e.g.,Sit. V.

• 1947,Situations I: Critiques littéraires, Paris:Gallimard. Partially translated inLiterary and PhilosophicalEssays, Annette Michelson (trans.), London: Rider, 1955.Reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1962.
• 1948,Situations II, Paris: Gallimard.
• 1949,Situations III: Lendemains de guerre, Paris:Gallimard.
• 1964b,Situations IV: Portraits, Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964c,Situations V: Colonialisme etnéo-colonialisme, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asColonialism and Neocolonialism, Azzdedine Haddour, SteveBrewer, and Terry McWilliams (trans), London: Routledge, 2001.doi:10.4324/9780203991848
• 1964d,Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1,Paris: Gallimard.
• 1965,Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme 2,Paris:, Gallimard.
• 1971,Situations VIII: Autour de 68, Paris:Gallimard.
• 1972,Situations IX: Mélanges, Paris:Gallimard. Material fromSituations VIII et IX translatedasBetween Existentialism and Marxism, John Mathews (trans.),London: New Left Books, 1974.
• 1976,Situations X: Politique et autobiographie, Paris:Gallimard. Translated asLife/Situations: Essays Written andSpoken, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (trans), New York: Pantheon,1977.
• 1981,Œuvres romanesques, Michel Contat, MichelRybalka, G. Idt and G. H. Bauer (eds), Paris: Gallimard,Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
• 1988,“What is Literature?” and Other Essays,[includingBlack Orpheus] tr. Bernard Frechtman et al.,intro. Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• 2005,Théâtre complet, Paris: Gallimard,Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

A.1.3 Posthumous works by Sartre

• 1983a,Cahiers pour une morale, Paris: Gallimard.Translated asNotebook for an Ethics, David Pellauer(trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1983b [1984],Carnets de la drôle de guerre, septembre1939 - mars 1940, Paris: Gallimard. Reprinted in 1995 with anaddendum. Translated asThe War Diaries: Notebooks from a PhoneyWar, Quinton Hoare (trans.), New York: Pantheon, 1984.
• 1983c,Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres,Simone de Beauvoir (ed.), Paris: Gallimard
  • Tome 1: 1926–1939
  • Tome 2: 1940–1963
  Some translated inQuiet Moments in a War. The Letters ofJean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1940–1963, Simonede Beauvoir (ed.) and Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (tr. andintro.), New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993.
• 1984,Le Scenario Freud, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asThe Freud Scenario, Quinton Hoare (trans.), Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• 1985,Critique de la raison dialectique, tome 2,L’intelligibilité de l’histoire, Paris:Gallimard. Translated asCritique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2:The Intelligibility of History, Quintin Hoare (trans.), London:Verso, 1991. Reprinted 2006, foreword by Frederic Jameson, London:Verso. [unfinished].
• 1989,Vérité et existence, Paris: Gallimard[written in 1948]. Translated asTruth and Existence, Adrianvan den Hoven (trans.), Ronald Aronson (intro.), Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1990,Écrits de jeunesse, Michel Contat and MichelRybalka (eds), Paris: Gallimard.

A.2 Works by others

• Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat (directors), 1978,Sartreby Himself: A Film Directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat withthe Participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, AndreGorz, Jean Pouillon, transcription of film, Richard Seaver(trans.), New York: Urizen Books.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1947 [1976],Pour une morale del’ambiguïté, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asThe Ethics of Ambiguity, Bernard Frechtman (trans.), NewYork: Philosophical Library, 1948. Translation reprinted New York:Citadel Press, 1976.
• –––, 1960 [1962],La force del’âge, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asThe Primeof Life, Peter Green (trans.), Cleveland, OH: World Publishing,1962.
• –––, 1963 [1965],La force des choses,Paris: Gallimard. Translated asForce of Circumstance,Richard Howard (trans.), New York: Putnam, 1965.
• –––, 1981 [1986],La cérémoniedes adieux: suivi de, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre,août-septembre 1974, Paris: Gallimard. Translated asAdieux: A Farewell to Sartre, Patrick O’Brian (trans.),New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Translation reprinted London and NewYork: Penguin, 1988.
• Carnap, Rudolf, 1931, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durchlogische Analyse der Sprache”,Erkenntnis, 2(1):219–241. Translated as “The Elimination of MetaphysicsThrough Logical Analysis of Language”, Arthur Pap (trans.), inLogical Positivism, A. J. Ayer (ed.), New York: The FreePress, 1959, 60–81. doi:10.1007/BF02028153 (de)
• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1970,Les écrits deSartre: Chronologie, bibliographie commentée, Paris:Gallimard. Translated asWritings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 1: ABibliographical Life, Richard C. McCleary (trans.), Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 1974.
• Deleuze, Gilles, 2004,Desert Islands and Other Texts,1953–1974, David Lapoujade (trans.), Los Angeles, CA:Semiotext(e).
• Derrida, Jacques, 1992 [1995],Points de Suspension:Entretiens, Elisabeth Weber (ed.), (Collection la philosophie eneffet), Paris: Editions Galilée. Translated asPoints:Interviews, 1974–1994, Peggy Kamuf (trans.), (Meridian),Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Fanon, Francis, 1952,Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris,Seuil. Translated asBlack Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox(trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2008.
• –––, 1961,Les damnés de laterre, Paris: Maspero. Translated asThe Wretched of theEarth, Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books,2005.
• Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1994], “L’homme est-ilmort?” (interview with C. Bonnefoy),Arts et Loisirs,no. 38 (15–21 juin): 8–9. Reprinted inDits etÉcrits, Daniel Defert, François Ewald, &Jacques Lagrange (eds.), 540–544, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.2001,Dits et Écrits, volume 1,Paris: Gallimard.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1957 [1962],Sein und Zeit,Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Translated asBeing and Time,John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans), London: SCM Press.
• Husserl, Edmund, 1913 [1983], Ideen zu einer reinenPhänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie,Halle: Niemeyer. Translated asIdeas Pertaining to a PurePhenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, volume 1, F.Kersten (tr.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
• –––, 1950 [1960],CartesianischeMeditationen eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie, TheHague: Nijhoff. Translated asCartesian Meditations: AnIntroduction to Phenomenology, Dorion Cairns (trans.), The Hague:Nijhoff, 1960.
• –––, 1900/1901, 1913/1921 [1970, 2001],Logische Untersuchungen, two volumes, Halle: M. Niemeyer.Second edition 1913/1921. Translated asLogicalInvestigations, 2 volumes, J. N. Findlay (trans.), London:Routledge and K. Paul, 1970. Revised English edition, 2 volumes,London: Routledge, 2001.
• Levinas, Emmanuel, 1930 [1963],La théorie del’intuition dans la phénoménologie deHusserl, Doctoral dissertation, Université de Strasbourg.Published Paris: Vrin, 1963.
• Marcuse, Herbert, 1948, “Existentialism: Remarks onJean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et Le Neant”,Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8(3):309–336. doi:10.2307/2103207
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1947 [1969],Humanisme et terreur:essai sur le problème communiste, (Les Essais [2sér.] 27), Paris: Gallimard. Translated asHumanism andTerror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, John O’Neill(trans.), Boston: Beacon Press.
• Moran, Richard, 2001,Authority and Estrangement: An Essay onSelf-Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

B. Secondary literature

• Anderson, Thomas C., 1993,Sartre’s Two Ethics: FromAuthenticity to Integral Humanity, La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Aronson, Ronald, 1987,Sartre’s Second Critique,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Baring, Edward, 2011,The Young Derrida and French Philosophy,1945–1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CBO9780511842085
• Barnes, Hazel Estella, 1981,Sartre & Flaubert,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Bell, Linda A., 1989,Sartre’s Ethics ofAuthenticity, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Busch, Thomas W., 1990,The Power of Consciousness and theForce of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy, Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press.
• Cabestan, Philippe, 2004,L’être et la conscience:recherches sur la psychologie etl’ontophénoménologie sartriennes (Ousia 51),Bruxelles: Editions Ousia.
• Catalano, Joseph S., 1974,A Commentary on Jean-PaulSartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (HarperTorchbooks 1807), New York: Harper & Row. New edition Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• –––, 1986,A Commentary on Jean-PaulSartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory ofPractical Ensembles, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Churchill, Steven and Jack Reynolds (eds.), 2014,Jean-PaulSartre: Key Concepts, New York: Routledge.doi:10.4324/9781315729695
• Cohen-Solal, Annie, 1985 [1987],Sartre, Paris:Gallimard. Translated asSartre: A Life, Norman MacAfee(ed.). Anna Cancogni (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
• Coorebyter, Vincent de, 2000,Sartre face à laphénoménologie: Autour de“L’Intentionnalité” et de “LaTranscendance de l’Ego” (Ousia 40), Bruxelles:Ousia.
• –––, 2005,Sartre, avant laphénoménologie: autour de “La nausée”et de la “Légende de la vérité”(Ousia 53), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• Cox, Gary, 2019,Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Timesof Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Bloomsbury.
• Detmer, David, 1988,Freedom as a Value: A Critique of theEthical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre, La Salle, IL: OpenCourt.
• Dobson, Andrew, 1993,Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics ofReason: A Theory of History., New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Fell, Joseph P., 1979,Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Beingand Place, New York: Columbia University Press.
• Flynn, Thomas R., 1984,Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: TheTest Case of Collective Responsibility, Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press.
• –––, 1997,Sartre, Foucault and HistoricalReason: volume 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2004 [2013], “Jean-PaulSartre”, inThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/>
• –––, 2014,Sartre: A PhilosophicalBiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gardner, Sebastian, 2009,Sartre’s “Being andNothingness”: A Reader’s Guide (ContinuumReader’s Guides), London: Continuum.
• Gordon, Lewis R., 1995,Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
• Henri-Levy, Bernard, 2003,Sartre: The Philosopher of theTwentieth Century, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Howells, Christina (ed.), 1992,The Cambridge Companion toSartre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CCOL0521381142
• Jeanson, Francis, 1947 [1980],Le problème moral et lapensée de Sartre (Collection “Pensée etcivilisation”), Paris: Éditions du myrte. Translated asSartre and the Problem of Morality, Robert V. Stone (trans.),(Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Judaken, Jonathan (ed.), 2008,Race after Sartre: Antiracism,Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Philosophy and Race),Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• McBride, William Leon, 1991,Sartre’s PoliticalTheory, (Studies in Continental Thought), Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press.
• –––, (ed.), 1997,Sartre andExistentialism, 8 volumes, New York: Garland.
  • Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness
  • Sartre’s French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences:Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Debeauvoir & Enduring Influences
  • Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde
  • Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics
  • Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche,Jaspers, Heidegger: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers,Heidegger
  • Existentialist Ethics: Issues in ExistentialistEthics
  • Existentialist Politics and Political Theory
  • The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-CenturyExistentialism
• Moati, Raoul, 2019,Sartre et le mystère en pleinelumière (Passages), Paris: Les éditions duCerf.
• Morris, Katherine J., 2008,Sartre, (Blackwell GreatMinds 5), Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Mouillie, Jean-Marc and Jean-Philippe Narboux (eds.), 2015,Sartre: L’être et le néant: nouvelleslectures, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
• Murphy, Julien S. (ed.), 1999,Feminist Interpretations ofJean-Paul Sartre, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press.
• Renaudie, Pierre-Jean, 2017, “L’ambiguïtéde la troisième personne”,Revue Philosophique deLouvain, 115(2): 269–287.doi:10.2143/RPL.115.2.3245502
• Reynolds, J. and P. Stokes, 2017, “ExistentialistMethodology and Perspective: Writing the First Person”, inThe Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology,Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard (eds.), Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 317–336.doi:10.1017/9781316344118.017
• Santoni, Ronald E., 1995,Bad Faith, Good Faith, andAuthenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy, Philadelphia,PA: Temple University Press.
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Other Internet Resources

• Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism, by Christian J. Onof at theInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• U.K. Sartre Society
• North American Sartre Society
• Groupe d'Études Sartriennes
• Flynn, Thomas, “Jean-Paul Sartre”,Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition),Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/sartre/>. [This was the previous entry on this topic in theStanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy — see theversion history.]

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Acknowledgments

Jack would like to acknowledge Marion Tapper, who taught him Sartre asan undergraduate student. In addition, he would like to thank StevenChurchill, with whom he has worked on Sartre elsewhere and the workhere remains indebted to those conversations and collaborations.Thanks also to Erol Copelj for feedback on this essay.