Introducing Sartre

What I would have liked to be is not a lonely and fatherless child who grew up to be a great writer and a famous philosopher.

What would really have made him happy would have been to be a member of a large and vigorous family, kept in order by a father of granitic solidity, and compelled from his earliest years to learn to mix with his natural equals in the normal rough and tumble of the primary school and of children’s games.

Refusing the Nobel Prize
It was nevertheless this feeling of disillusionment with his own profession which led Sartre to become the first author, and so far the only one, to refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature when it was offered to him in October 1964

Whereas capitalism is the breeding ground for fascism, socialism aims to create a society in which everyone is free.
One of the ideas which recurs most frequently in Sartre’s political writing is that no society is free unless all its members enjoy the same degree of freedom.

And since, as he argues, this is not the case in capitalist society, where members of the working class are far less free than those of the middle class – or, as he always called it, the bourgeoisie – the first task of the writer who wishes to increase human freedom is to try to produce a socialist society.

So long as we are alive, we are free to alter our personality by what we do, and are not reliant solely on the way that other people look at us.

When two people are together, according to Sartre and Hegel, each is trying to force the other to look at him – or her – in the way that they would like to be seen.
All of us have our own vision of ourselves which we want other people to endorse, and this leads us to see them first and foremost as possible supporters of this view of ourselves.
But they, in turn, are trying to do the same to us, and the result of this clash of egotistical self-visions is the permanent conflict which characterizes all human relationships.

We fall into the inauthenticity of what Heidegger calls “Theyness”: “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, we see and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; we find shocking what they find shocking. The ‘they’, which all are, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.”

What you immediately notice is that the desire to do, which Sartre dismisses as relatively trivial, is far more important than the longing to be.

A man may well say that he wants to be a good golfer, or a superb pianist, or a successful lover. But this is merely a form of words.
What I really want is to play golf well.
To produce beautiful sounds.
To make his lover enjoy the sexual act as much as he does himself.

Why should we all want to achieve the contradictory status of being absolutely what we are while remaining fully aware of ourselves?
The only being able to combine total coincidence with itself “being”, with total self-awareness, is God.

And, in a sense, we are all like that.

Because of the awareness which we always have of ourselves, we can never be completely ourselves. We therefore play at being ourselves, which is one way – and a dishonest or “inauthentic” way – of dealing with the problem.

One of the best-known passages in Being and Nothingness describes a café waiter who is so ill-assured of his own identity that he plays at being a café waiter. His gestures are just a little too precise, his politeness to the customer – this is in France – just a little too ingratiating, to be genuine and spontaneous