The "Existentialists": Part 2 - Jean-Paul Sartre - The Man of The 20th Century

1 - Introduction

"Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations." - Milton Friedman

Politics is the built of appearances using deception as its master tool, and Capitalism can't thrive without waste and corruption that kills democracy and eliminates justice and ethics.
There is no more justice in this world and equality is being swallowed by a centralized power speaking the language of money.
Justice today is the voice of the powerful privileged classes.
People are more and more questioning and judging justice because it is not anymore the pillar of equality in society.
Modern Justice is owned by politics and money, with a questionable law as well as its practice, that can't bring equality, and reveals a parallel with the big existential crisis of today's society values and foundations.
The hopes and aspirations of people are vanishing and this makes a questionable breach in the democratic processes because we all have the right to participate in the social change inside the system.

The Yellow Vests are still alive and have a lot in common with the existentialist, anarchist, and activist movements, because they have no organized structure but they attract a lot of centralized structures of the political apparatus, that infiltrate and destroy the spirit of the movement, where the violent factions are food for the state to reinforce its authority.
Macron is giving orders to shoot his own people that he represents, shows that muscle is gonna be replacing dialog.
This actual system of repression by army-police with aggression and fire against the Yellow Vests using their voice to say no to injustice and inequality, as the actual morality of Law and State.

Like at the end of the '60s, we are living in times of extreme ideology and human suffering, and like then the existential philosophy is back on the streets today, with more people joining the Yellow Vests and the Extinction Rebellion(XR) that are engaged in the social events in France and the UK, as political and historical movements in Europe.
The elites are entrenched in power, and non-violence is a must for political activism because we have a moral duty to resist and fight to find peace within us, and a meaning for life, then living in a faked reality that is not ours and alienates us.
I really like the existentialist and pacifistic speech and strategy of Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, because it seems the Ghost of Sartre is back to lead this movement, as he did in May 68 in France. I strongly suggest the two videos below with his interview with Chris Hedges.

"Violence, however it manifests itself, is always a defeat."- Jean-Paul Sartre

Pacific agents of social change have to find a way for non-violent movement against the insane, heavily armed police under the orders of the dominant elitist classes, living in their crystal towers.

2 - Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre - The Man of the XX century (Jun 1905 - April 1980)

"I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be." - Jean-Paul Sartre

I was feeling uncomfortable to write about Sartre because I knew it would be a very big post, but I've been cutting it, till the point it wouldn't be concentrated like a tin can of sardines, and I couldn't divide it into various parts because it would interfere with its global comprehension.

Existentialism was born in the post-second-world War in the '40s and '50s, mainly initiated by Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, playwright, and novelist that influenced a change on the interpretation and analysis of western civilization and its inherent thought.
All the actors of the history of the existentialist movement seemed to create initial big friendships but it always ended up in confrontations of ideas and ways to act in political activism, starting with the religious vs the atheists. and later Heidegger turned against his beloved and admired professor Edmund Husserl, Sartre fighting with his mentor Heidegger, Camus fighting Sartre, but publicly only Sartre and Beauvoir remained united in relation to their views for life and political activism sponsoring anti-conformism.
Anyway, all of them shared the belief that the individual must find a way to the despair of Existence and we have to commit to being responsible for the choices of our lives.

"One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life."- Jean-Paul Sartre

Some of the strong Sartre’s philosophical influential sources are Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, as well as many authors like Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Simone de Beauvoir.
In a short statement, Sartre stated that life is built upon choices and our Essence is swimming in the sea of Existence, and we can float on the surface or get drowned by the lack of determination to assume the responsibility for our actions, through which people judge and define us.
We act based on how we have been acting before, but we always have a choice to pick our actions with a deeper inner listening for the affirmation of our Essence.
His main question for life was to find out what meant to be a Human Being, and the meaning of Existence.

Jean-Paul Sartre is the Ministry of Truth in the trembling Society at the end of the 60s in France, and become a street leader of the students, that later joined hands with the workers, showing the most impressive social demonstration of the radical thinking of Existentialism, as a live philosophy on the street.
Sartre believed in the quest for Freedom and Truth, by assuming responsibility for our choices and actions in the face of ourselves and all man/woman.
We must break the traditional Jewish-Christian-Protestant patterns of culture and traditions, that inhabit our souls, like ghosts of ancient beliefs hidden in the ways of thinking, and that we are here on Earth to search for the meaning of life and being, instead of seeing us as some kind of puppet to fulfill God's commandments.

Sartre embraced philosophy writing and political activism, and he has never hidden his sympathy for the Left (but he never joined the Party, that ceased with the invasion of Hungary by the Soviets in 1956), making him a target for the French communist party (PCF), accused of being a propagandist preventing the youth with anti-communist ideas.
He kept dating Maoism, and he rejected the centralized communist state authority, but in the end, he makes the most important statement of his existentialism.
Throughout his life, Sartre found connections between Existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and even with Maoism in order to finally realize that he had always been an anarchist.

"If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly and that I have always remained an anarchist." - Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre was an apologist of the formation of the European Community as an autonomic power to counterbalance the control of neoliberalism and collectivism of US and Russia.
He refused almost all prizes given by the western civilization (including the Nobel prize) and had a lifestyle totally detached from material possessions, explaining why he never had a house and always lived in hotels and he didn't have any attachment to material possessions.

‘My life and my philosophies are one and the same.” - Jean-Paul Sartre in a Diary

3 - The Existential Dialectic of Sartre.

"The framework of humanity is matter." - charlie777pt

I draw attention to the difficulty of reading this text by its conceptual density, which was the product of a great synthesis of thought, in my personal point of view, after reading almost all of Sartre's publications.
I will try to move beyond Sartre's controversial political connections, to try to explain the true existential dialectic in philosophical and metaphysical terms of the relation of the Human and biological Being to the material world.
Man's relation to materiality is an example of the spiral of dialectical thinking.
Sartre considers that Man is mediated by things to the same extent that things are mediated by Man, and that man is always related to materiality in and through other Men.

Materiality linked to affectivity and the cognitive processes imply two different logics, respectively the logic of contradiction and the logic of non-contradiction.
In this logic of contradiction, affirmation and negation are simultaneously applied to the same object by the same subject, creating a situation of ambivalence to which Sartre refers as the anguish of choice.

This is the type of analysis necessary for Man's interpretation in the "Human Scenery".
This reasoning allows us to understand the means by which a plurality is constituted as a Total, (a "totalization" as Sartre would say), whether as a subject-whole or an object-whole.
Sartre sees a totalization as a unifying organization of a plurality and humanity is a plurality of such organizations.
The totalizing relation of the material being, the Man, to the material world is defined by necessity, which detotalizes totality by creating a dialectic of totalization-detotalization-re-totalization.

4 - Praxis of the individual and Matter as Totality

"My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking." - Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre refers to Detotalization as "an injection of Nothingness in the World" creating with it a univocal and non-reciprocal relationship, which translates into individual Praxis. Man is always related to the matter in and through other men.
Interpersonal relationships are intermediated in and through the material field and are conditioned by external factors.

The materiality is inert (total of possible praxis) and is circulating because of it "flees" us by virtue of the multiplicity of other unicities or totalization(s), made by others and that complement ours or not.
The totality of my possible praxis is detotalized because it is the field of a totalization of the praxis of another, in which we are only part of his totalization.
In this dialectic, materiality will become a vehicle of meaning.
In other words, the degree to which other people's actions confirm our expectations about them and the extent to which our behavior satisfies the expectations others have about us depends on the ability and willingness to behave in a way regular and predictable (with the consequent introjection of commitment or violence). In reciprocity, each can make the ends of the other a vehicle for himself, just as the other for himself a vehicle of our ends.

"I exist only through those who are nothing but your being through me." - Jean Genet (quoted in "Reason and Violence by Ronald D. Laing")

Reciprocity will have the character of exchange, which in the field of materiality, is established by the relation of the concept of the value of use - the value of exchange.
So in reciprocity, we are of the same time, object and instrument of the ends of the other, by the fact that we become the object and instrument of our purposes, while each is preserved as a product of his product.
In this exchange, there is the totalization of self-concept and the organizing unity of multiplicity, the looking-glass-self.
It is always necessary to emphasize the field of materiality where the exchange is always conditioned by the totality of history.
Unification is found in mutual recognition, as two agents, each integrating the whole Universe.
However, the unification that is constituted about a relation of materiality, the class of objects (classification) and its use (serialization), transforms the person and determines their relationship.
The totalization of human actions always mediated by matter is a totalization made to matter by human relations on the one hand and on the other hand totalization made to human relations by matter.

5 - Matter as a totalized totality is a first experience of necessity

"Dialectics is the law of totalization Collective organizations, societies, history, are realities imposed or imposed on the individual." -Ronald D. Laing in Reason and Violence

Human history is totalization (in) present from the past and orientation of the future, for men make history based on previous conditions.
The idea becomes a thing signified by things and not a signifying act.
Matter, as a negation of Man, is nevertheless the only totalizing reality of history.
The relation of a multiplicity of subjects to the field where praxis emerges by necessity (born in the relations of each with the field and reciprocities between the subjects) and yet the fundamental relation of our history and the reciprocity of need-scarcity ( value of use-exchange value).
The dialectic of need-scarcity is the factor that enables the explanation of history.
The individual himself is simultaneously redundant and scarce when inserted within a group.
Conditioned by matter, man acts not only by necessity but also reacts to the demands of the object (thing) upon him. These requirements also influence the creation of groups.

"Acting is happy agony". -Jean-Paul Sartre

The contradiction of class interests (the Marxist sense) reveals the individual's attempt to find the original bond with matter.
Action to satisfy the need is restricted by the Other, creating a change from "my-action-to-me" to "my-action-to-self".
"Otherness" will be the structural aspect of the transition from "self-to-self" to "other-to-other."
The movement will be the change, the relation of underlying materiality is the objectification of the materialized praxis.
Man is thus found in the dialectic created between objectification (appropriations of matter) of material praxis and its alterations as "other-to-other".
In the relationship of the cognitive subject with the appropriation of the field of materiality comes from the need / (desire as affectivity).
The realities of praxis in so far as they carry out in and of themselves, the interpenetration of a multiplicity of individuals organized into a totality, are the product of human labor.
A group is a form of integration, the multiplicity of individuals through a joint action produces a way of being, created as a unit or series.
Seriality will be the internal-external relationship. The metamorphosis of the multiplicity of a series will be "serialization".
The series becomes perceptible only through the apprehension of the formal and universal structure of otherness. There will also be another "serial" as "common-to-all".
The social field of the series is the unity of the "other-being" and a semi-plurality.
A social class seen in the practical-inert field, it is a series and "being-of-class" is the status of seriality imposed on the multiplicity of the individuals composing it.

The structure of each relation is in each as well as the internalized of this relation, having a double property: to be inert (considering the structure as a sketch) and to be dynamic (effective, realized by the praxis of each and everyone).
The relational system is therefore both an instrument and a limit of thought since the system is constituted by generalized logical relations, whose logical principles are the underlying commitment of the relation itself. Interpersonal action exists in each individual praxis as the internalized unity of multiplicity.

"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience."- Jean-Paul Sartre

Each individual praxis as an internalized unity of multiplicity appears as ubiquitous and ubiquitous action of the group.
In the constitution of the group or series, the degree to which the actions of other people confirm our expectations about them, and the extent to which our behavior satisfies the expectations others have about us, should be played.
In addition, talk of a "serialized" self-concept as the product of individual self-concepts.
Social roles also involve performance according to the expectations of others, and people validate their opinions and abilities by comparing personal performances and values with those of others.

The question of expectations, or of being-another-to-other, poses the problem of conformity and violence perpetrated by society-group-work-school-mother-family in a hierarchical structuring of class society.
Expectations and conformisms are established in the dialectic between culture and the occupation of the various social positions (The Class Being), which require "performances" and appropriate formal role, which is found in every individual in the evaluation that he does to himself through others (looking-glass-self).

6 - Sartre on Drugs

Sartre didn't go well with psychedelics (mescaline) as we can see in his documented bad trip speaking to the crabs, that later served as material for the therapy with Jacques Lacan when they found out it meant fear of loneliness.

"What crabs? Are you mad? What crabs? Ah! Yes. Well, yes… The crabs are men. And so? Where did I get that idea? Real men, good and beautiful, on all the balconies of the centuries. As for me, I was crawling in the yard; I imagined I heard them speaking: "Brother, what's that?" That was me. Me the Crab…"– Sartre in The Condemned of Altona

He was saved from the bad trip by a providential phone call from Simone de Beauvoir, that stopped the battle with a lot of marine creatures.
The psychotic hallucinations where related the his recurring attacks of anxiety,like he said "I know what the matter with me is.I'm on the verge of a chronic hallucinatory psychosis.",although he recognized that the drug was not the guilty party, but himself.
He was a daily regular consumer on Corydrane (amphetamine plus aspirin) for a long time, what as a chain smoker of pipe and cigarettes, making his existence on Earth shorter, not to mention deep alcohol consumption from wine to vodka and whiskey, barbiturates, coffee and tea , and a lot of toxic food, making his health go down several times, when he had to stop the consumption of some of these drugs, but he never stopped for good.

I'm sure that the amphetamine contributed a lot to the prolific writings but on the other hand, it was eating Sartre's health at a fast pace. The excessive work with these daily cocktails of drugs and alcohol helped to feed his frenzy to write in long and heavy load working sessions making his health sink and he died leaving two finishing books, Critique and the Family Idiot.

"One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day."- Jean-Paul Sartre