I read Sartre's Being and Nothingness when I was 19, and that's what it's good for - to shake up a teenager. But all of Sartre's novels are humorless and tedious, his philosophy is mostly a popular assemblage of the ideas of others, and most of all, Sartre, the Stalinist, was a despicable human being, and he warped his philosophy to make his own wretched conduct sound cool and free and principled. He was a scumbag, and his teachings fall apart because he has no foundation other than his lust for personal fame and gratification. He is the Andy Warhol of philosophy, and his work, like Warhol's, will fade and disappear.
I can't argue against any of that.
I recall in high school how I thought Nietzche the most appealing of the non-Christian philosophers. Perhaps I would not know, but I still hold him to be the most important philosopher of the last few hundred years- and for this reason only: he showed the only possible destination of the enlightenment means of doing philosophy.
"Stalin had ordered massacres and transformed the country of socialist revolution into a police state; he had been truly convinced that the Soviet Union could only reach communism by passing through a concentration-camp socialism. ... Stalin was an evil man? Indeed. But how could Soviet society have raised him to his throne and kept him there for a quarter of a century? ... The trials, the confessions, the deformation of thought, the institutionalized mendacity, the atomization, the universal mistrust -- these were not abuses; they were the inescapable consequences of a prefabricated socialism. No improvement, no patching could make them disappear. ... The machine cannot be repaired; the peoples of Eastern Europe must seize hold of it and destroy it."
--Sartre, writing in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
"He broke with Camus because the latter denounced totalitarianism. He was silent on the gulag ("It was not our duty to write about the Soviet labor camps"), and he excused the purges of Stalin and later Mao. When the defector Victor Kravchenko published I Chose Freedom, the first inside account of the horrors of Stalinism, Sartre wrote a play implying that Kravchenko was a creation of the CIA. Even when Sartre was on the right side, he could be morally tone-deaf. In opposing the war in Vietnam, he urged the Soviet Union to take on the Americans, even at the risk of nuclear war. And in championing Algerian independence, he wrote (in his preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth) that for an African "to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time."
Jim Holt, Slate Magazine (left-wing internet magazine)
Lévy is at his most subtle in describing how "the totalitarian temptation" was present in Sartre all along. His compulsion to get to the bottom of everything, expressed in his manically prolific writing (aided by amphetamines), was itself a will to domination. Here the book understates the obvious: the desire of this undeniably brilliant and enormously vain man for a commanding role, and his worship of power, all too familiar among intellectuals. And so he slid into communism. Other great minds - Gide, Orwell - outgrew the "totalitarian temptation". Sartre grew into it.
An assiduous fellow-traveller, he broke with his friend Camus, whom he had always considered his inferior. He parroted the Soviet lie about American "germ warfare" in Korea - although he had once been a jazz-loving admirer of the USA - and returned from his first trip to Moscow in 1952 insisting that freedom to criticise the regime was total and that Russian living standards would overtake the West by 1960.
In 1956 he denounced Khrushchev for denouncing Stalin, and subsequently turned on Solzhenitsyn. Dissidents were criminals, deserving of the violence meted out to them. He toadied to Castro, and when he began losing faith in Moscow's revolutionary ardour, it was to toady to Chairman Mao, endorsing the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics along the way.
-Review of book by Bernard Henri-Levy, in the Telegraph, London.
Let us repeat: Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher of freedom, publicly ENDORSED THE MURDER OF JEWS.
Actually, he was a typical university professor:
Embracing Maoism, he demanded that capitalist bosses be bled like pigs. “A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it and I see no other means for this than death; it is always possible to get out of a prison; the revolutionaries of 1793 probably didn’t kill enough people,” he said.
Even as Sartre praised totalitarian dictators, he was describing the United States as “rabid” and Nazi-like, urging France to break off all relations with it. During the Vietnam War, he went so far as to wish for a nuclear strike on America to put an end to its imperialist tendencies.
What Sartre actually offers us is a paradigmatic example of the leftist mind, in all its dodgy enthusiasms. Sartre’s early existentialism presents a nihilistic conception of human freedom that still informs some forms of liberal thought; his later political writings seethe with the pathologies of the far left, including an admiration for bloodletting, so long as it targets democrats and capitalists and Westerners generally. Sartre may indeed have been “the absolute intellectual,” but only in a negative sense: His oeuvre stands as an absolute warning about the wrong turns that moral and political thought can take when untethered from nature or any sense of reality. Were Sartre alive today, he doubtless would place the blame for September 11 and Palestinian suicide bombings on their victims — defending, as he frequently did, the indefensible.
- Brian C. Anderson, senior editor of City Journal.
Best e-mail tagline ever:
"God is dead": Nietzsche, 1887
"Nietzsche is dead": God, 1900
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