Starting with Sartre (review)

The title here is somewhat misleading. As the author acknowledges in the Introduction, this is the Sartre of L'Être et le néant and his earlier philosophical writings, together with the Cahiers pour une morale written in the late 1940s but unpublished during his lifetime. His subsequent writings, from the early 1950s onwards, and particularly the Critique de la raison dialectique, are not discussed; nor are his imaginative writings, his background, or his political activities, although in a work of this length such restrictions might be regarded as unavoidable. Within these limitations, this volume does constitute a useful guide to Sartre's early philosophy and its relation to his immediate predecessors — 'clear concise, insightful', as the encomium on the back cover has it. The heart of the matter, as the author accurately points out and develops, is summed up in the phrase 'we are not what we are and are what we are not'; in other words, human lives are at all times a potentiality pursuing a project, never a completed and static reality, whether ascribed or self-invented, 'always in the making and never an end in itself ' (p. 107). To imagine otherwise is an exercise in bad faith. Gail Linsenbard also addresses satisfactorily several persistent misunderstandings about Sartre's thought, such as that human freedom is quite unconstrained, or that his existentialism repudiates any notion of ethical principle. On the contrary, Sartre may be said to have been preoccupied with ethics, although admittedly he had a problem in finding a satisfactory ethical foundation within his philosophy. This problem and preoccupation Linsenbard highlights and discusses at length, and discusses it well, with illustration drawn from contemporary events, such as 9/11 and the Iraq war. The structure of her volume is, however, in some respects open to criticism (there are also a few unfortunate typos). Finding an affinity between Sartre and Socrates, as expounded in the first chapter, seems perverse. Socrates, as presented by Plato, was an unqualified upholder of aristocratic values and strict hierarchy, a passionate antidemocrat, his outlook the very reverse of Sartre's, regardless of the fact that they both happened to be philosophical gadflies. While Sartre's relationship with the ideas of Kant is certainly a relevant consideration, to devote an entire chapter to it in a short text of this nature would appear excessive. Overall, this volume could be said to discuss Sartre in the context of the philosophy that gave the title to his novel series 'Les Chemins de la liberté'. On the whole it succeeds in that purpose and can be recommended, in spite of certain shortcomings, as an introduction to his thought.