Overall Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) considered himself a writer more than a philosopher. Almost as soon as he could read, he projected a career as a master of French literature, his idea of what this might mean changing as his taste moved from boys' adventure novels to the classics. In his mid-teens, he decided, following his excitement at first reading Bergson, to study philosophy at the École Normale; but that was because he regarded philosophy as “simply a methodical description of man's inner states, of his psychological life, all of which would serve as a method and instrument for my literary works … I thought that taking the agrégation exam in philosophy and becoming a professor of philosophy would help me in treating my literary subjects.” The idea was that philosophy would provide an intellectual foundation for literature.

When Sartre's philosophical thought developed and, predictably, took the direction of the new philosophy of existence, it is hardly surprising that he maintained a close tie between literature and philosophy.

The “revolted soul”

By the time Camus and Sartre were formally introduced in 1943, they were already familiar with, and had publicly expressed measured admiration for, each other's works. In 1938 and 1939 Camus had quite favourably reviewed Sartre's Nausea and The Wall (SEN: 167–72; E: 1417–22). In 1943 Sartre wrote favourably of The Outsider (Sartre 1962a: 108–21; Sartre 1993: 92–112). They first met in Paris in June 1943, at the opening of Sartre's play The Flies, and shortly thereafter Sartre became involved with Combat (where Camus was now editor), although he did not write for it until after the Liberation. In an interview in 1944, Camus declared himself to “have three friends in the literary world, André Malraux, even if I no longer see him because of his political positions, René Char, who is like a brother to me, and Jean-Paul Sartre”. In the same year Sartre asked Camus to direct and act in his play No Exit. In 1945 Camus offered Sartre the opportunity to travel to America to write a series of reports for Combat. While there he wrote of his friend in Vogue magazine:

When Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was arrested in 1970 for distributing seditious political literature in the streets of Paris, President de Gaulle vetoed the move to hold him in prison, reportedly saying: ‘You don't put Voltaire in prison.’ What he was alluding to by his comparison was that both men made themselves the radical consciences of their respective societies. Sartre – at once a philosopher, novelist, dramatist, literary critic, art critic, political theorist, political essayist and political activist – was as versatile and prolific as Voltaire, but more original. He dominated the intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century. He was the public intellectual par excellence.

Early years

The essential theme of Sartre's life and work is liberty. As a child, his rejection of authority was expressed in his rejection of his tyrannical grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, who ran a German school in Paris. He chose to become a writer precisely because his grandfather solemnly warned him against it. Sartre's brilliant account of his childhood, and of his relationship to culture and language, in Words (Les Mots, 1964) sheds much light on his later development. Sartre's father died when his son was fifteen months old, and Sartre and his mother were reintegrated into his grandfather's household, where they were both called ‘the children’ and brought up together almost as brother and sister. In Words he lays bare the forces that worked upon his consciousness a child, especially the bourgeois ideology embodied in his grandfather. The book is the judgement of the man on the child, but it is even more a judgement on a society that bred extreme forms of self-deception. Sartre presents himself as a young boy constrained to fit into an old-fashioned household and describes how he was constantly acting a part to please a dictatorial old man. At the heart of Sartre's work generally is a preoccupation with all forms of hypocrisy; playing roles, pretending to be someone or something one is not, came to represent a major crime in his eyes.

The purpose of this essay is to reflect on Sartre as a philosopher of the imagination in order better to describe and assess his approach to the philosophy of history. Sartre was, of course, an existentialist and we shall consider what it means to formulate an “existentialist” philosophy of history. But his was equally a philosophy of consciousness and the paradigm of consciousness for him was imaginative consciousness. Realizing this fact will open the door to a more adequate comprehension of his work as a whole, but especially his social thought, including his theory of history. For a basic thesis I wish to defend is that Sartre likens the intelligibility of history to that of an artwork because he considers the former as much the product of creative freedom as he does the latter. So we shall begin with a reading of major theses from his Psychology of Imagination and move through his posthumously published works, The War Diaries and the Cahiers pour une morale, in order to observe their expansion and application in both volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family Idiot. In so doing, we shall try to make sense of Sartre's claim that history in general and his Flaubert study in particular constitute “a novel that is true” (un roman vrai).

Even though Sartre repeatedly emphasized the divergences between Hegel and himself, this chapter discusses their convergences. It will be seen, moreover, that these often conflict with Sartre's own stress on the differences between them.

Sartre does not refer to Hegel in his early works; he seems to have become familiar with him only from Being and Nothingness onward, where Hegel, along with Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, is one of his chosen interlocutors and adversaries. This essay deals with certain specifically philosophical aspects of the debate: the conception of being-for-itself and being-for-others in Sartre and Hegel. Being and Nothingness also discusses the dialectical conception of nothingness. Juliette Simont has analyzed this question in an important footnote to her article "Sartre et Hegel: le probleme de la qualite et de la quantite." I shall not therefore return to it directly.

In Sartre's analysis of being-for-itself and for-others, the most significant references are to the two Logics (the Science of Logic and the first part of the Encyclopedia) and to the Propédeutique. Sartre's perceptiveness with respect to these dry texts leads one to conjecture that he had more than a merely academic knowledge of Hegel - did he perhaps discuss him with some of Kojève's pupils, with Jean Wahl, Lefèbre, and Hartmann, authors of a collection of selected texts from Hegel, Hyppolite, and Maurice de Gandillac? It is possible, but as yet unproven.

How does one of the twentieth century's great thinkers help us illuminate one of its great paradoxes? What does Sartre contribute toward clarifying the problem of thinking about history as it has emerged in the late twentieth century? After a century and a half of celebrating and living by the idea of progress, amidst staggering scientific-technological progress, almost no one in the West continues to believe in progress. In the current climate of intellectual disillusionment no serious thinker is willing to defend Bury's formulation that the world is slowly advancing in “a definite and desirable direction” leading to a “condition of general happiness”that will “justify the whole process of civilization.” On the one hand, the postmodernist temper shows, as Lyotard says, “incredulity toward metanarratives” such as the idea of progress. On the other, the current mood seems sympathetic toward negative metanarratives - those that suggest that things are getting worse. Witness, for example, the remarkable success of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, or the works of Christopher Lasch - which suggest that as time goes by, we are losing the most vital of values, attitudes, and skills. The negative mood is starkly captured in Theodor Adorno's claim: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”

An Introduction

Ernest Hemingway has long been considered either a nihilist or a secular existentialist. “A vast number of critics,” writes Joseph Prud’homme, “have deemed Ernest Hemingway a nihilist. As an individual, they contend, Hemingway spurned religious truth and espoused absurdist nihilism… . The art and artist express the same worldview.” Robert Penn Warren writes that Hemingway's protagonist in the 1933 short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is “obsessed by … the meaninglessness of the world, by nothingness, by nada.” William Bache likewise asserts that the story's protagonist represents a “nihilistic way of life.” And Judith P. Saunders argues that the story's protagonist experiences “existential panic” in the face of his mortality when confronted with the old man's suicide. She says that his “cynical parody” of two Roman Catholic prayers—the Hail Mary and the paternoster—is “insistently blasphemous.” But existentialist interpretations of Hemingway's fiction extend far beyond “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” One can look to a handful of his better-known short stories—like “The Killers,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—to see that Hemingway at the very least sympathized with an existentialist worldview. As Warren states elsewhere, “The typical Hemingway hero is the man aware, or in the process of becoming aware, of nada.” Hemingway's own confrontation with mortality, meaninglessness, and the freedom to make of this life whatever one chooses profoundly shaped his worldview, and you can see this influence throughout his body of work. As José Antonio Gurpegui notes in Hemingway and Existentialism, a search of the combined “words ‘Hemingway’ and ‘existentialism’ in Google showed 354.000 results on August 2013.” As of December 2022, that number has grown to 481,000.

Writing decades apart, Ben Stoltzfus and John Killinger take an existentialist interpretation of Hemingway's fiction a step further. As an unbeliever, Hemingway was not a Kierkegaardian existentialist, but neither would he align himself with Nietzsche, despite the considerable overlap in their views. Rather, Hemingway's own brand of existentialism resembled that of his contemporary, the twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Like Sartre, Hemingway did not believe in God or a spiritual afterlife.