Sartre Explained: From Bad Faith to Authenticity

by David Detmer

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905u1980) was the major representative of the philosophical movement called oexistentialism, OCO and he remains by far the most famous philosopher, worldwide, of the postuWorld War Two era. This book will provide readers with all the help they will need to find their own way in SartreOCOs works. Author David Detmer provides a clear, accurate, and accessible guide to SartreOCOs work, introducing readers to all of his major theories, explaining the ways in which the different strands of his thought are interrelated, and offering an overview of several of his most important works. Sartre was an extraordinarily versatile and prolific writer. His gigantic corpus includes novels, plays, screenplays, short stories, essays on art, literature, and politics, an autobiography, several biographies of other writers, and two long, dense, complicated, systematic works of philosophy ("Being and Nothingness" and "Critique of Dialectical Reason"). His treatment of philosophical issues is spread out over a body of writing that many find highly intimidating because of its size, diversity, and complexity. A distinctive feature of this book is that it is comprehensive. The vast majority of books on Sartre, including those that are billed as introductions to his work, are highly selective in their coverage. For example, many of them deal only with his early writings and neglect the massive and difficult "Critique of Dialectical Reason," or they address only his philosophical work and ignore his novels and plays (or vice versa). The present book, by contrast, discusses works in all of SartreOCOs literary genres and from all phases of his career. An introductory chapter provides an overview of SartreOCOs life and work. The next chapter analyzes several of SartreOCOs earliest philosophical writings. Each of the next six chapters is devoted to an in-depth examination of a single key book. Two of these chapters are devoted to philosophical works, two to plays, one to a biography, and one to a novel. These chapters also contain some discussion of other writings insofar as these are relevant to the topics under consideration there. A final chapter considers important concepts and theories that are not found in the major works discussed in earlier chapters, briefly introduces other important works of SartreOCOs, and offers some final thoughts. The book concludes with a short annotated bibliography with suggestions for further reading. Central to all of SartreOCOs writing was his attempt to describe the salient features of human freedom, responsibility, the emotions, relations with others, work, embodiment, perception, imagination, death, and so forth. In this way he attempted to bring clarity and rigor to the murky realm of the subjective, limiting his focus neither to the purely intellectual side of life (the world of reasoning, or, more broadly, of thinking), nor to those objective features of human life that permit of study from the ooutside.OCO Instead, he broadened his focus so as to include the meaning of all facets of human existence. Thus, his work addressed, in a fundamental way, and primarily from the oinsideOCO (where SartreOCOs skills as a novelist and dramatist served him well) the question of how an individual is related to everything that comprises his or her the physical world, other individuals, complex social collectives, and the cultural world of artifacts and institutions.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 28, 2008

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-done analysis of Sartre's writings, with especially good sections on Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre's philosophies of violence and inauthenticity are intriguing, and Detmer's discussion is quite good.

[Heather Pagano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book knowing almost nothing about Sartre- I had some misconceptions about existentialism and continental philosophy, and I knew the plot of Huis Clos- and that was the extent of my knowledge. Having read this book I now have a grasp of some of the concepts that were important to Sartre's philosophy, like bad faith and authenticity. I was often surprised by how well Sartre's ideas lined up with what I've studied about Buddhism, cognitive science, and the more analytic schools of philosophy. Sometimes I had moments of deeply resonating with Sartre's observations and conclusions. This is an example of a book that delivers exactly what it promises, I feel as though an expert has done a great job explaining to me the fundamentals of Sartre's philosophy.