We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939-1975

by Jean-Paul Sartre, Ronald Aronson (Editor), Adrian van den Hoven (Editor)

Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and
activist, Jean-Paul Sartre was also—and perhaps above all—a
great essayist. The essay was uniquely suited to Sartre because
of its intrinsically provisional and open-ended character. It is
the perfect form in which to dramatize the existential character
of our deepest intellectual, artistic, and political commitments.
This new selection of Sartre’s essays, the first in English to
draw on the entire ten volumes of his collected essays as well
as previously unpublished work, includes extraordinarily
searching appreciations of such writers and artists as Faulkner,
Bataille, and Giacometti; Sartre’s great address to the French
people at the end of the occupation, “The Republic of Silence”;
sketches of the United States from his visit in the 1940s;
reflections on politics that are both incisive and incendiary;
portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning
with his own career from one of the interviews that ill-health
made his prime mode of communication late in life. Together
they add up to an unequaled portrait of a revolutionary and
sometimes reckless thinker and writer and his contentious, difficult
but never less than interesting times.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction, Classics, France, French Literature, Literature

592 pages, Paperback

First published May 22, 2012

About the author

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Dos Passos’s world, like Faulkner’s, Kafka’s, or Stendhal’s, is impossible because it is contradictory. But therein lies its beauty. Beauty is a veiled contradiction. I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, On John Dos Passos and 1919

Thirty Jean-Paul Satre essays collected here, addressing topics ranging from a clarification of existentialism, Husserl’s phenomenology, Kierkegaard’s philosophy, the American working class, Vietnam war crimes to reflections on artists and literary writers such as Faulkner, Camus, Bataille, Calder and Giacometti.

As philosophy/scholar Ronald Aronson so aptly states in his illuminating Introduction to this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition, “Sartre writes with remarkable freedom, never settling into a single, predictable tone. He engages issues with extreme, attention-getting statements, vividly and forcefully taking a position on the question at hand.”

Rather than making more general statements, in the very spirit of Jean-Paul Sartre and his existential philosophy, I will be as specific as possible, commenting on direct quotes from one of his essays I find particularly vivid and forceful: On John Dos Passos and 1919.

“A novel is a mirror. Everyone says so. But what is it to read a novel? I believe that it is to jump into the mirror. Suddenly you find yourself through the looking glass, among people and objects that seem familiar.”

Ha! A novel is a powerful world we leap into, as if Alice through the looking glass, a complete world into itself, familiar yet unique. How many worlds have you leaped into and thus have expanded your sense of people and objects, expanded your entire sense of life? Sartre goes on to convey the power a novel can have on a reader when written by a first-rate author like John Dos Passos.

“This is not narrative: it is the jerky unwinding of a raw memory full of holes, which sums up a period of several years in a few words, then lingers languidly over some tiny fact. In this it is just like our real memories, a jumble of frescoes and miniatures.”

By Sartre’s reckoning, Dos Passos magically treats time in a way that parallels much of our own very human sense of time and memory. Even more effectively than Faulkner’s treatment of time - now that’s a real accomplishment!

“Nowhere, however, do we have the sense of novelistic freedom. Rather Dos Passos forces on us the unpleasant impression of an indeterminacy of detail. Acts, emotions, and ideas settle suddenly upon a character, make their nests, and then fly off, without the character himself having much to do with it.”

So, for Sartre, John Dos Passos has created a world where actions, feelings, sensations and even ideas become forces pressing against our more internal existential freedom. And for an author who famously wrote “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does,” it really is a tribute to John Dos Passos that Sartre judged him the finest living novelist.

“In his storytelling Dos Passos deliberately chose the perspective of history: he wants to make us feel that the die is cast. In Man’s Hope, Malraux says, more or less, that the tragic thing about death is that it “transforms life into fate.” From the first lines of his book, Dos Passos has settled into death. All the existence he retraces have closed upon themselves. They are like those Bergsonian memories that float around, after the death of the body, full of shouts and smells and light, in some sort of limbo.”

By these words, Sartre conveys his admiration for Dos Passos and his ability to deal with death face-to-face. Personally, it never occurred to me that John Dos Passos was a key existentialist. On the strength of Sartre’s words I now plan to read his U.S.A. trilogy.

“Dos Passos reports all his character’ words in the style of press releases. They are, as a result, immediately cut off from thought; they are pure words, simple reactions to be registered as such, after the fasion of the behaviorists, from whom Dos Passos takes occasional inspiration. But at the same time utterances assume a social importance: they are sacred, they become maxims.”

What’s fascinating is how words in the style of a press release can then take on a dimension of the sacred. For me, a novelistic turn worth exploring since never in my life have I read a press release that I discerned having even a shred of commonality with the sacred. Or, for that matter, ever becoming a universal maxim.

“Yesterday you saw your best friend and told him of your passionate hatred of the war. Now try to tell yourself that story in the style of Dos Passos.”

Thank you, Jean-Paul Sartre! This is a challenge for all of us – to recast and transform our passion into a story we can tell ourselves in the style of this John Dos Passos novel. And I would even go further – what Sartre asks us to do with 1919, we can attempt with any novel having a profound effect on us.


1919 is the second of American author John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. The trilogy consists of The 42nd Parallel (1930); 1919 (1932); and The Big Money (1936).

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you remember Jean-Paul Sartre? Only kidding, of course you do. This collection will make you remember him better, however. There is one basic theme here that I would describe as wrestling. Sartre wrote about nothing and no one without wrestling, grappling, twisting...employing a powerful analytic mind in the service of at least not saying anything false if he could not be sure he arrived at the truth.

His best work in this collection shows up in odd places. His essay on his impressions and relationship with New York City is wonderful. At first he disliked New York because it wasn't all twisted up and overlaid by history like a European city. Ultimately, he captured the powerful sweep of the place (we're talking about Manhattan, of course). Except for Times Square and swaths of Broadway, New York doesn't feel compelled to talk about itself; it knows who it is. Sartre liked that: New York waiting to be decoded.

Another fine piece is an interview he gave when he was 70 and finally too blind to read or write. His wit and composure is quite striking. His wrestling days at this point are over.

The breech with Camus the moralist is here along with a good succinct definition of existentialism: the willingness to accept responsibility for one's freedom, or, to put it more it succinctly, the willingness to be free.

Whenever the French communists show up, Sartre hits the mats. Despicable people who didn't like him, either.

On a tour through the US Sartre makes notebook entries on the mystery of the American workers' contentment with capitalism. He wouldn't write that today, but then he marveled at how proud auto workers were of the Ford plants they worked in. Europeans had cathedrals, Americans had factories.

Working through Sartre's essays, one often comes upon feuds and fissures. He describes at length the rise and fall he experienced with fellow philosopher Merleau-Ponty. This is a somewhat elegiac piece. When one thinks of Sartre's era, one thinks of him at the top of his class. Sartre didn't think that, however. He placed Merleau-Ponty above himself, perhaps not so much for achievement but certainly for fidelity to his intellectual quest.

At times Sartre is excessively concerned with the ins and outs of a subject. Some old arguments and debates are just that: old arguments and debates. But in the main this collection displays Sartre's extraordinary versatility and talent as a writer. Beyond that, it lets us see how often he took risks as a public intellectual. To his credit, he does not always insist that he was right all along.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd collection, which might be more useful for intellectual historians than readers, like me, who just wanted a bit of Sartre to read after lunch. The important essays are almost all here, but the book suffers a bit by stuffing too many into one volume. Sartre's style is often oratorical to an absurd degree, perfect for declaiming on a Parisian street corner, perhaps, but not so good for, you know, reading.

"No one has the right to say that the events in Hungary made the intervention inevitable. No one; not even those who decided it."

NO ONE, DO YOU HEAR ME???

On the other hand, the essays on Bataille and Kierkegaard will be gobbledygook to anyone not well acquainted with their work.

None of this is to say that the book isn't worth buying, just that you might not want to read the whole thing. Philosopher types will enjoy the Bataille/Kierkegaard/Merleau-Ponty essays; literary types will enjoy the early reviews, the Black Orpheus essay, the spat with Camus; historians will get something, at least, from the various political essays. But there's very little in here about Sartre's own thought or its development, and that's a real shame. I suspect it would have clarified much of the obscurity that isn't lifted by the generally excellent annotations.

[Briana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never thought much about Jean-Paul Sartre because I don’t tend to enjoy 20th-century western philosophy, especially not existentialists with their thoughts on Marxism but I was pleasantly surprised with this read. We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939-1975 by Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Adrian van den Hoven and Ronald Aronson is a book I didn’t have a ton of high expectations for. I like books that challenge my way of thinking and make me wonder how other people think about certain topics. While I live in 2022, I believe that a lot of what Sartre was discussing is relevant today.

The most interesting essay for me was the one about the American working class and what Sartre observed while here. As a Marxist and pro-Communist, Sartre was fascinated with the individualism in the fabric of American culture along with the working class in the postwar United States. I agree with a lot of what he said about how people are unwilling to sacrifice comfort to achieve a means to an end. I am unfamiliar with a lot of Sartre’s personal life and this book doesn’t go into that but I can agree with some of what he’s said here.

Initially, I think it’s easy for people to have an attitude about philosophy, especially at this time because they come off as privileged and detached from everyday life while preaching to people. I had this attitude towards Sartre but I could be interested in reading more in the future as well as reading more about him as a person. So far, the main thing I know is his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir which was tumultuous and passionate.

Regardless, there are some interesting things here that one could take with them in their everyday life.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A record of a mind honestly grappling with the world and grappling with his own developing thought as the world changes. With Sartre, more than any other writer, you can see a mind that refuses to calcify into either this or that. His mind is pure movement and every piece is a serious stock-taking, even with himself. And that's the merit of this collection: it charts his own dialectical development in between all of the major treatises he's most known for.

The NYRB editors do their best to humiliate him here by, first, clutching their pearls at Sartre's early calls for violence and then dragging him through the mud of the Stalinist show trials and the revelations of the gulags. By the time you've gotten to "The Socialism that Came in from the Cold," a piece that overloads this collection and tilts it overboard into the liberal bourgeois cesspool the editors are trying to drag him into, this book almost starts to feel like a struggle session. Here you get the agonizing coming-to-grips with the realities of the failed socialism in the USSR and the broader communist bloc, more of that than would strictly be required to chart his developing thought. Did he publicly come out against it? Does he feel bad about his strategic alliances? At least they were honest enough to include all of the material that shows someone who still believed in socialism consistently advocate for a more democratic form, writing and synthesizing history so as to reinvoke the revolution but not in this awful form in which we know it. Instead of someone chastened by his early (though equivocal) alliances, he's still calling for the complete overthrow of Western capitalism in the final interview even though he's now blind and his health is failing.

I would skip the last part of the introduction, which is just disgusting. Trotting out Bernard-Henri Levy to speak against Sartre almost feels as gross as having David Duke have a say in a book about Jesse Jackson. Sartre is a more painfully frank critic of himself than any racist rightwing chud would ever be.

This collection pairs well with the Verso collection (with which there is slight overlap) BETWEEN EXISTENTIALISM AND MARXISM. There's a great spread in this volume covering the development of his thought and it includes many precursors to the hallmarks of his later thought that would get more development in THE FAMILY IDIOT and the CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM. Essential for Sartre stans.

[Mykolas Degutis · Rating 2 out of 5]

As soon as it starts to get good he spits out some communist nonsense. Disappointed, no genuine philosophy.

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

160515: not the best collection of essays by Sartre- perhaps there is a tendency towards talking about individuals, thoughts in conflict, rather than philosophies. but this works very well in long essay about Merleau-Ponty. it is heartening, romantic in some ways, to imagine intellectual contest being essential to life. this works less well, for me, in his essay on Kierkegaard, but this is because have not read him much. there are a lot of essays here, great sense of how wide-ranging were his interests, some intriguing works on l'etranger, on fanon, on Giacometti read before, on Faulkner, dos Passos, on his other perspective of mid-century America. his politics are here of its time, and place, about WW2, about Algiers, about labour camps in USSR, about the Arab-Israeli conflict, colonialism, exploitation, alienation, to the early editorial aspirations of the journal les temps moderne, to Camus, overall very good... so, this rating is sometimes two, more often four or five, and there is something sad, something honest, something modest, in the final interview, looking back, being Sartre at 70 in the interview that ends the book...

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was worried that reading Sartre for the first time in 2013 would feel stale and musty; not so. The obvious passion he feels for issues he chooses to take up keeps his essays fresh, aided by his ability to write with more of a novelist's pen than a philosopher's.

I most enjoyed his piece on THE STRANGER, in which in just three pages he was able to provide me with a better understanding of absurdism than was a full year of high school and another in college.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

The section on his relationship with Merleau-Ponty was the best part of the book.

[Patrick Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-curated & expansive collection of Sartre’s thoughts on literature, philosophy, politics, people, and art. The force of his thought is constantly bursting through these essays, sentence after sentence, each of which retained my interest even in regards to content I am less familiar with. I was not familiar with Paul Nizan or Merleau-Ponty prior to reading, and their respective passages were two of my favorites. Other standouts include “On John Dos Passos & 1919,” “On The Sound and the Fury: Temporality in Faulkner,” “On the American Working Class,” “Reply to Albert Camus,” “The Third World Begins in the Suburbs,” and “Elections: A Trap for Fools.” “The Wretched of the Earth” is included as well, though I read it along with its namesake. I would absolutely recommend this collection for anyone interested in Sartre, especially in his nonfiction, criticism, and political thought.

[Fer Aportela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book brings together essays written by Sartre over several decades, offering a clear view of the evolution of his thought: from existentialism focused on individual freedom to an increasingly marked political commitment. The early texts have an introspective tone. Sartre reflects on consciousness, anguish, art, and even cities—always from the perspective of the individual confronted with the absurd. But as the years, and the essays, go by, his writing becomes more historical and engaged. He analyzes regimes, revolutions, failures, and hopes, without ever abandoning his underlying ethical concern.

[DRugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of essays is a great reminder of the mysteries, complexity, and wholeness of life. Sartre's philosophy is about reality being greater than the sum of it parts and it doesn't make too much sense to analyze any one part for too long. The value of life is in appreciating infinity.

[Minister Jane Trivigno · Rating 4 out of 5]

didn’t care for most of the essays, but the ones i did care for were really brilliant, especially Republic of Silence and Existentialism: a Clarification. Also adding in the incredibly sentimental Self Portrait at Seventy

[Jose Roque Perez-Zetune · Rating 4 out of 5]

surprisingly great ! the liberation of paris was particularly slay

[Abeer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Typical Sartre . Takes you in a far placed land of thoughts , that make you feel exhausted and elated all the same .
As our trek across time will make clear , life is transient , all the understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion . And In the search for value and purpose , the only insights of relevance , the only answers of significance, are those of our own making . During our brief moment in the Sun , we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

[Ganna S · Rating 3 out of 5]

overall it's a collection of unrelated essays spanning from art and literary critic to philosophical & political essays. Some of the essays were particularly irrelevant and muddled, which forced me to skip them entirely or abandon half way. But there were several brilliant commentaries and engaging essays on politics, philosophy & art.

[Leena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I spent almost three months reading this book yet it doesn't say anything about how wonderful it is. But quite the contrary this defines its goodness that it doesn't need to be read sequently. I love how Sartre's philosophy and good sense of writing are being combined. I love that even the topics that I didn't use to be interested in are now way more interesting to me. I love how every social issue; either universal or particular, is being discussed beautifully and in depth.

[Rjurik Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review essay to come.