Louise Wardle, “Human, All Too Human (Episode 3: Jean-Paul Sartre)” (1999)
The final episode in this 3-part BBC series on existential philosophy focusses on the daddy of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the influences on and aspects of his life that were to form his particular view of the world and his philosophy. Through his novels, plays, essays and political activities, Sartre, brought together ideas he gained from studying works by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger with his own to develop a distinctive philosophy of freedom and one’s responsibility for one’s freedom. In a nutshell, Sartre’s philosophy states that people are free to be what they wish to be and have no fixed character, yet at the same time they are afraid to recognise and accept their freedom and the burdens it imposes on them. Ultimately the goal of life is “authenticity” (an idea and concept borrowed from Heidegger that Sartre extended) which means choosing or not choosing a course of action, and this is something that people have to do all the time.
As with previous episodes, the documentary uses a biographical format to describe Sartre’s life and personality, the philosophy he developed and the culture and ideas that informed it. Interviews with his biographers and other philosophers who knew him, archival material and stills flesh out the narrative. Ironically the radical nature of his philosophy brought Sartre much fame which hampered his activities. As time went by, Sartre’s involvement in the Second World War and the French Resistance led him to take more interest in Marxism and to reconcile his philosophy with Marxist notions of collective struggle. His relationship with feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir also influenced his philosophy and in turn his philosophy led her to challenge notions of personal freedom with the reality of women’s second-class position in French society and culture. In later life, events such as the May 1968 student riots in France and elsewhere and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which led to the Munich Olympics hostage crisis in 1972 encouraged Sartre to re-evaluate his philosophy and politics, and to most people he appeared to become more extreme in his views and behaviour.
The episode does a much better job than previous ones did of delineating the philosophy as well as the man, partly because Sartre lived his philosophy: it was intended to be accessible and relevant to the general public. We come into the world as undetermined beings and have freedom and choice thrust upon us, and what we become is determined by the decisions we make and the actions we take – or don’t make and take. Although the film early on tries to tackle weak points in Sartre’s existentialism, such as the issue of how individuals with hugely different ideas of how they should live their lives can live together and co-operate, this challenge is not dealt with very well and problems such as how extreme individualism can co-exist with Marxist values and its quest for collective action and justice are ignored. The program also doesn’t address whether Sartre ever had to consider whether being a constant rebel against tradition and conformity in itself might also be a form of inauthenticity.
The issue of finding meaning in one’s life and how one can reconcile one’s freedom with one’s responsibility and duty to others turns out to be one that not only consumed Sartre all his life but one that each and every one of us has to confront; some of us do it with more self-awareness than others. Along the way we may discover that we must question everything we learnt as children to accept as “good” and that authority figures and institutions we were told to trust may not have our best interests in mind. Eventually we may realise that even the very structures, networks, values and ideologies that give rise to particular institutions and not others must be questioned, challenged and if necessary overthrown and replaced with something new and fresh. This challenge comes out quite clearly in the episode.