A Defense of Jean-Paul Sartre
His politics may have been bad, but his philosophy was compelling.
Written by Bo Winegard.
The French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, is often ridiculed by conservatives and analytical philosophers. By conservatives, because he was a political radical who railed against the West, despised bourgeois normalcy, lauded Che Guevera and refused to criticize Stalin long after his brutality was widely known. And by analytical philosophers, because his philosophy seems not only wrong but almost meaningless, full of gnomic prose and puzzling, paradoxical assertions. He was at times a dazzling writer, but also a charlatan. Even today, criticism of Sartre regularly makes the rounds on Twitter, with recent tweets mocking him for his physical appearance.
I am both a conservative and a fan of analytical philosophy, so I might be expected to share this disdain of Sartre. But I do not. In fact, I have long been attracted to his philosophy, and still find his greatest work, Being and Nothingness, invigorating (even if, at some 700 pages of difficult prose, it is a little taxing.)1 In what follows, I will defend Sartre’s philosophy from accusations that it is meaningless, obvious, purposefully obscurantist or simply irrelevant in a Darwinian world.2