Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett Book

About the death of his father when Sartre was age one, he says, "the greatest event of my life. . . . Had he lived my father would have lain down on top of me and squashed me." He also claims, "I hate my childhood and everything that survives from it."

A philosophy teacher perceptively remarked about Sartre's "excessive elaboration of insufficiently clarified ideas."

Rather than bathe, Sartre took up pipe smoking to mask his odor, an idea he got from Simone de Beauvoir.

Here's where I think Sartre really goes off the deep end in his philosophy for me. We have no right to bemoan our fate. We must take complete responsibility for our lives. Every individual wills his own destiny: he wills his character and even the circumstances under which his character acts. That means that Sartre himself was responsible for WWII and must accept responsibility and act accordingly. "This is my war; it is in my image, and I deserve it . . . everything happens as if I carried the entire responsibility for this war . . . So I am this war."

In some ways, it surprises me that I think I understand why he says that. I took responsibility for the Vietnam War and volunteered to go there, as long as it was under my own conditions. I made the best of my life. However, I am a loyal follower of the NH philosopher Genetopsis. He denied free will. We are products of three forces beyond our control: heredity, environment, and chance.

Sartre worked as a meteorologist in the French army. He was captured and sent to Germany where he studied Heidegger in POW camp. For Heidegger, the utmost certainty was my dasein, literally "being there" but more helpfully translated as "being-in-the-world." My fundamental sense of being is frustrated by the distractions of everyday existence. "Only in the anticipation of death" do we grasp "the finitude of one's existence, it pulls one away from the unending multiplicities of possibilities which immediately present themselves--possibilities such as comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly." We must be "free for death." Heidegger himself did not seem to live this way. He was a university professor with a free lodge in the Black Forest. He never apologized for his silence on the Nazi regime.

For Sartre, we must choose what we do. Increase my consciousness. Become more self aware and more aware of my predicament. Accept responsibility for my predicament, my actions, and the self I create with those actions. With no ultimate Good or Evil, no human activity is intrinsically better than any other. We must accept our equivalency. We choose to make one act better than another by our own choice. We act in bad faith when we delude ourselves, especially when we attempt to rationalize human existence by imposing on it meaning or coherence. This can be done by accepting religion or any set of given values. It even includes science if it imposes an overall meaning on life. Therefore, acting in bad faith means avoiding responsibility for one's actions by shifting this on to some outside influence.

"There is no such thing as human nature, because there is no all-seeing God to have a conception of it. . . . A human being is nothing else but what he makes of himself; he exists only as much as he realizes himself. He is thus nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is."

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre says, "What I am is nothingness, which is an absence of being. What I long for is the being that surrounds me, which I lack." Our actions and desires are "tributaries of this flow toward being." We desire the world, to possess it, to be it. In some sense, I become the objects I possess. By possessing something, my nothingness becomes being. I will also thus become being in the eyes of others. So when I publish a poem and someone praises me, I have become something in the world. I can avoid the nothingness.

The same thing happens when I destroy or consume something. Sartre smoked two packs a day.

"My freedom is choosing to be God, a choice which is manifest and echoed in all my actions."

"Existence is futile."

"Man is a useless passion."

Juliette Greco became famous singing existentialist songs in the Latin Quarter. She wore a black dress. He sat at his table writing. Both became tourist sights.

"We are alone, without excuses. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free."

Gide has a man spontaneously push a man from a train. And Camus had his famous murder in The Stranger "because of the sun."

"Man is condemned to be free."

"The world of explanations and reasons is not that of existence."

"The essential thing is contingency. In other words, by logical definition, existence is not necessity. To exist just means to be there; what exists just simply appears and lets itself be encountered. You can never deduce it."

"The first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence upon his own shoulders."

"It is inadmissible that a man should pass judgment on Man. Existentialism does away with this sort of judgment; an existentialist will never take Man as the end, since Man is still to be determined."

"Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, maintains that if God doesn't exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence--that is, a being which can exist before it can be defined before any conception of it. That being is Man--or, as Heidegger calls it, human reality. . . . Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world--and defines himself afterwards. . . . Man is not definable because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself."

"Consciousness is complete emptiness (because the entire world is outside it)."

"My acts cause values to spring up like partridges."

"Hell is other people."