On Sartre and How I Passed my Sorbonne Exam
During a day that nuanced the morning rain with a sunny afternoon of the mid 80's, I took my Sorbonne exam in Barranquilla (Colombia). I was slightly late for the exam, and had yet to make a payment with money that I had borrowed from someone, and I cannot remember exactly who. My Sorbonne exam included plenty of literary topics, involving Sartre, Camus and other contemporary writers and also several important literary figures such as Voltaire, Molière and Montesquieu. There were also important historic aspects related to the Quatrième and Cinquième Republiques (Fourth and Fifth [French] Republics.) Because I ended up having less time than others exam takers, my exam had probably many orthographic issues in the end, and a few grammatical issues, two major factors not to attain an honorific grade like in previous exams. The fact is that the exam was conceptually hard with the expectation to know enough about Camus, in particular, about his novels La Peste and L'Étranger.The contemporary relevance for that moment was the fact that Sartre and Camus were the brightest stars in French philosophy and literature of the time, and possibly relevant figures that match Hemingway, James, and Faulkner and other contemporary American writers in the perspective of culture and lifestyles of the 20th Century. In my view, Sartre was the master of dialectic and cognitive psychology, the master of what today is called emotional intelligence, the master of the spirit itself beyond religion believes. As Sartre was considered a non-believer, most likely beyond any comments he might have made, possibly because of his implicit association with the left thinking. As an adolescent, I never knew the political Sartre, and instead I actually learned about the purely philosophical French nationalist, it is clear from my comprehensive reading of Sartre that he had no significance in how I could possibly had learned about political ideas, primarily, from my few years in the law school. I had also felt quite attracted to existentialism after reading an excerpt from Sören Kierkegaard, a Christian existentialist, who had affirmed that “life is anguish and anxiety that ends with sin.”, meaning rather that anxiety ends when sin ends. In his series The Roads to Freedom (Les Chemins de la Liberté), Sartre is confronted with the fact that the individual must find freedom either following the dark path or fulfilling, like Pascal had suggested in his Peril, the divine path, as he emphasizes in Le Diable et Le Bon Dieu and L'Âge de Raison. The reference to the Bon Dieu clearly suggests that Sartre was not denying God's existence, at least the way Nietzsche did in many fashions, but he was instead a spiritual philosophical perspective away from any religious belief he might had. In fact, I believe he further addresses this issue in the L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Existentialism in a Humanism), probably the easiest book to read that he ever wrote, that the “important is not whether God exists [or not], but that man is abandoned to his chance...” In the difficulty that the naïve reader might have, this is simply explanation to free will, and an expression somewhat comparable to Pascal's theory of salvation in his Peril or rather a complementary way to state the same from an existentialist perspective. This was probably the statement that touched me the most. Instead of the existentialist principles of: 1) Existence precedes essence (essence is not destiny and one becomes what one wishes to be); 2) Time is of the Essence (as in Ortega y Gasset's famous sentence “life is the desperate struggle to become in reality what we are in project”); 3) Humanism (man is central to existentialism); 4) Freedom (is found in a the usage of a superior will, as in Kant, or Nietzche's will to power while being responsible for one's actions); 5) Ethical considerations driven by internal freedom.
The interpretation is clearly reflecting the emotional distress hindered by Kierkegaard, derived from life events. For instance, if we can think of a Christian who, in a today's global economic crisis, lost his or her job, house, car, and family, praying and trusting in Jesus could allow this person to overcome his or her distress, yet the experience is lived and cannot be disassociated with life itself, and it will be recorded in the intellect and it will affect that person at least subliminally. Should the person not believe [in God or follow Jesus otherwise], the experience would probably drive more anxiety.
I recently read a biography were Sartre had called himself “probably a Marxist” after listing a few matching items. But Sartre would love today to know how much greater than Marx he actually is. As a student, I had a great respect for socio-economic and political theories. However, Marx never encountered a special place in my heart, and my reading of Das Kapital was an unromantic one, simply because of some [diabolic] comments he made sometime, which I found quite offensive to my belief system. Foucault has called Sartre "the last of the Marxists." Unlike Marx or Nietzsche, the vitalist, Sartre seldom got involved into greater religious confrontation like in Nietzsche's Antichrist. Likewise, there is probably no Zarathustra, no spiritual transformation from child to camel, and from camel to lion, and from lion to child again. Instead, there is the human confrontation with the present and its rationale, the reasoning confronting the present. My point is that Sartre was not quite concerned with the problem of God's existence or believing in God, although he confronted the issue in his novels and philosophical writings with great care probably avoiding to touch the sensitivity of those who admired him beyond their own belief system. He was instead concerned with existence in the essence of how every experience creates and impresses image in our lives marking our destiny and when seen from social reality how the individual can perceive these impressions in relation to society itself, and the elements involved in being subject or object in each scenario. In his L'Etre et Le Néant, Sartre focuses on his principles of cognitive psychology, while in his Critique de la Raison Dialectique he is the master of reasoning beyond Kant or Hegel and drives very complex ideas through his theories. This is probably one of Sartre's books most difficult to read. As the novelist, Sartre had comparable success to that of a philosopher finding from Flaubert and possibly from Balzac the perfect mixture of social issues that conveyed his contemporary reality. Sartre is closer to perceiving the individual in the natural social scenario, while Camus is to place the individual's inner realm in conflict with the external world. Sartre's incomplete multi-volume work L'Idiot de la Famille is brilliantly written and one of the best and longest biographies ever written on Flaubert, including his childhood, where Gustave was, like Baudelaire, is depicted very close to his mother, and depending and relying on her, which according to Sartre “that becoming in love with her mother's character”, just like Baudelaire did, lead to the creation of Madame Bovary.
Finally, Sartre had also a significant relevance in my life since many of my short stories published by Colombian newspapers in the mid 80's were accompanied by articles related to his life, his thinking and his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, probably France's greatest feminist writer. When I visited Paris I got the opportunity to visit their favorite place to meet, Les Deux Magots cafe, in the sector of Saint-Germain de Prés. It was an interesting experience to recall the many books and articles that I read from both. While my readings of Beauvoir were somehow superficial at that time, her influence on Sartre's life was very deep, and together they created an era of thinking hard to repeat in France's and Europe's literature and philosophy. When I reread Le Deuxième Sexe a couple of years ago, I thought that this is a book for every [young] woman to read anywhere in the world.
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