[link|http://slate.msn.com/id/2088648/|Freedom from freedom]

Excerpt:

Despite the phenomenological complexities of his philosophy, Sartre managed to make it exciting. Anybody could become an existentialist, especially the young. The teutonic dread of Kierkegaard and angst of Heidegger gave way to Sartrean fun. In the underground caves of St. Germain-des-Pr\ufffds, jazz dancing was deemed the highest expression of existentialism. Never has a serious philosopher had such an impact on nightlife. Sartre even wrote a rather beautiful song for the great chanteuse Juliette Greco to sing at the Rose Rouge.

I say:

Hey, like, let's put some French philosophy on the hi fi.
Okay, but no Sartre, man.
Sartre? Like, why no Sartre?
Hey, the cat owes me some bread, dig?

Excerpt:

Sartre's classic period as a philosopher was over by the late 1940s. The war had politicized him. (After a brief internment in a stalag, he spent the rest of the war in Nazi-occupied Paris, where, in his imagination at least, he was part of the Resistance.) In the early 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, he realized that he was "living a neurosis"; despite his philosophy of action, he had been a mere bourgeois writer, like Flaubert. His interest in Marxism awakened, he decided to align himself with the Communist Party\ufffdthis at a time when the crimes of Stalin were being documented and other intellectuals were abandoning the party. The erstwhile philosopher of freedom morphed into Sartre totalitaire.

That is something of a caricature, but Sartre did have his shameful moments over the next two decades. 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."

Sartre's philosophy of freedom was flatly inconsistent with the Marxist doctrine of historical necessity. He tried to make the two cohere in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) but ended up drowning in a sea of verbiage. In any case, existentialism had drifted out of fashion by the 1960s. It was superseded by the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and Althusser, which said that man, far from being radically free, was just a locus of social and linguistic forces. Still, Sartre retained his aura of intellectual authority. Disenchanted with the French Communist Party, he took up Maoism and the cause of Third World liberation, agitating in the streets of Paris and before the gates of suburban Renault factories. Meanwhile, in a massive biography of Flaubert, The Idiot in the Family, he set about the most hopeless intellectual task of all: reconciling existentialism, phenomenology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. But his eyesight gave out in 1973, with only three of the projected five volumes completed, and by the end of the decade he was dead.

I say:

A man who is honest with himself never has to try to have it both ways.

Excerpt:

The impression I came away with was one of overwhelming nostalgia. Sartre was the Last Intellectual. True, France still has writers on philosophical questions who also march in demonstrations. (One of them, Luc Ferry, has even been made the nation's minister for education.) But there will never again be a combination of totalizing theoretician, literary colossus, and political engag\ufffd like Sartre. Today's French intellectuals look like puny technocrats by comparison. Luckily, they proved to be on the winning side of history, so they can afford to be gracious to him, to say, along with de Gaulle, Sartre, c'est aussi la France.

I say:

The fact that they're nostalgic about this morally vacuous, drug-addled hypocrite is the real indictment of modern French philosophy.

If Sartre was the last intellectual, it's because he killed intellect. He forgot to turn the lights out when he left. But it doesn't matter, because he'd already smashed the bulbs.