Imagine being handed the steering wheel to a
car that is already speeding down a highway at
80 miles per hour. Oh, wow. Yeah. And a voice
right next to you tells you, you didn't ask to
be in this car, but you are completely in charge
of where it goes. And you have absolutely no
excuses if you crash. I mean, that's terrifying.
It really is. But that speeding car is basically
the perfect metaphor for how the 20th century
French philosopher Jean -Paul Sartre viewed human
existence. It's a massive level of responsibility
because you're entirely at the wheel, but without
a map. And without any destination programmed
into the GPS, you know, you literally have to
invent the destination as you drive. Exactly.
So today we are taking a deep dive into the life
of this incredibly complex figure. We're using
his extensive Wikipedia biography to really explore
a massive paradox. And it is a huge paradox.
Right. Because how does a man who built an entire
philosophical system around absolute, unyielding
individual freedom, like navigate one of the
messiest, most restrictive centuries in human
history? Yeah, the 20th century was it was not
kind to individual freedom. Not at all. We are
talking about a life spanning global wars, brutal
military occupations and just extreme political
movements. It's the ultimate stress test of a
worldview, I think, because it's one thing to
sit in a Parisian cafe and write abstract essays
about absolute freedom. Sure. But it's an entirely
different thing to apply those theories when
the actual gears of history are actively trying
to crush you. Totally. But before we drop Sartre
into the middle of, like, World War II, we really
need to understand the core rule book he operated
by. Right, the foundation of it all. Yeah. And
the phrase that pretty much everyone associates
with him is, uh, existence precedes essence.
Which is, it's a dense phrase. Yeah. But to unpack
that, let's actually look at an analogy he used
in his own writings, which is the paper cutter.
Okay, a paper cutter. Yeah. So think about an
object like a paper cutter before it ever physically
exists on a desk. And artisan had a concept of
it. Like a blueprint in their head. Exactly.
They knew its purpose. It was made to cut paper.
So that purpose is its essence. Got it. So for
any object, its essence precedes its existence.
It's designed to be a specific thing, to serve
a specific function. OK, let's unpack this. Because
Sartre's argument is that humans are completely
different, right? Yes, fundamentally different.
Because in his atheistic view, There is no creator.
There's no divine artisan who drew up a blueprint
for what a human being is supposed to be. Right.
We just arrived. We exist first. We just show
up in that speeding car. Exactly. Without a predefined
purpose. Yeah. And because there is no creator
to give us an essence, we just have to invent
our own essence through our actions. Which is
heavy. It is. We are, as he famously put it,
condemned to be free. Condemned to be free. But
wait, even if there's no divine creator, we still
have like... biology and psychology and social
conditioning, right? Well, sure. I mean, I didn't
choose my genetics. I didn't choose the era I
was born into. Doesn't all of that act as a sort
of blueprint we have to follow? He definitely
acknowledged that. Because if I'm completely
free, does that mean I'm responsible for literally
everything I do? Isn't that? Utterly exhausting.
It is entirely exhausting and Sartre recognized
that those limitations exist He actually called
them our facticity, you know the facts of our
condition But he argued that your true freedom
lies in what you actually do with those facts
Oh, I see like you didn't choose your genetics,
but you choose how you live with them but yes
carrying the weight of every choice is an immense
burden and Because it brings such immense anguish
people try to escape it How do they escape it?
They do what he called acting in bad faith, or
in French, mauves fois. They lie to themselves.
So think about a time you told yourself, I have
to stay in this terrible job because the economy
is bad. Right. A classic excuse. Sartre would
look right at you and say, that is bad faith.
Absolutely. You are choosing the security of
the job over the terror of quitting. You're pretending
you are like the paper cutter, just an object
reacting to the world rather than a free subject
shaping it. What's fascinating here is the mechanism
Sartre actually suggests we use to break out
of this bad faith, to achieve what he called
authenticity. How do we do that? He points to
the concept of death consciousness. That sounds
intense. It is. He says we spend most of our
lives distracted, pretending we have infinite
time. which allows us to just defer our choices
forever. We just put things off. Exactly. But
he argued that truly realizing our mortality
understanding that one day we will permanently
become static objects in the ground, devoid of
choice, is the only way to wake up. Because it
puts a ticking clock on everything. Right. Facing
death forces a localized crisis. It turns that
exhausting burden of freedom into the ultimate
act of taking ownership of your life, you know,
while you still have the agency to actually do
so. The concept of death consciousness isn't
just like... a fun cafe thought experiment for
Sartre. No, not at all. He is forced into the
ultimate test of it when World War Two breaks
out. Because how do you practice absolute freedom
when your country is literally conquered by a
fascist army? It's the ultimate paradox. He actually
gets drafted as a meteorologist and is captured
by German troops. He spends nine months as a
prisoner of war. Yeah, but he manages to get
released in 1941 and the historical accounts
in And the sources suggest he may have pulled
this off by faking poor balance due to his wandering
right eye. Oh, really? Yeah. He had a condition
called sensory exotropia. So he supposedly uses
this medical discharge to regain his civilian
status and just, uh... returned to occupied Paris.
But the Paris he returns to completely short
circuits his expectations. Oh, so? Well, he writes
about the correct polite behavior of the German
occupiers. The soldiers weren't like striding
through the streets with revolvers drawn, shoving
civilians into the gutters. Right, they weren't
acting like cartoon villains. No, they were offering
their seats to old ladies on the metro. They
were politely asking for directions in this German
accented French. And this polite occupation was
a highly calculated form of psychological warfare
it totally was if we connect this to the bigger
picture of his philosophy Sartre recognized that
this correctness caused a really deep moral corruption
among the Parisians. It's like a burglar breaking
into your house, but instead of tying you up,
they start doing your dishes and politely asking
where you keep the good silverware. That's a
great way to put it. It completely short circuits
your ability to naturally resist, you know? Exactly.
Because the occupiers were acting so civilized,
it kind of tricked the occupied citizens into
passivity. It gave them an excuse to just go
about their day -to -day lives. But going about
your normal day was aiding the occupation. Right.
The German war machine needed a passive functioning
French population to make their new order actually
work. So Sartre observed that it made everyone
complicit. Because even small interactions felt
dirty. Exactly. If a soldier politely asked you
for directions, even if you just mumbled that
you didn't know and walked away, you felt ashamed.
The very act of interacting with them on their
terms felt like collaboration. You could no longer
act naturally in your own city. And he describes
this chilling atmosphere in Paris as A sham.
A sham. Yeah, because the physical architecture
of the city looked exactly the same. But it was
completely hollowed out. Like, shock windows
had empty wine bottles on display because all
the actual wine had been requisitioned and shipped
to Germany. Wow. There were barely any cars.
People survived on awful rations. I mean, Sartre
himself was living off rabbits sent from the
countryside by a friend. And he noted these rabbits
were often so rotting and full of maggots, he
just had to throw them away. Ugh, that's brutal.
Honestly, the physical hunger was secondary to
the paranoia. The psychological toll. Right.
You'd go to the cafe to floor and the intellectual
conversations were totally stifled. There was
just this constant fear of informers. People
were mysteriously vanishing. Just disappearing
without a trace. Yeah. You'd call a friend, get
no answer, go to their flat, force the door,
and just find two chairs with German cigarette
butts between them on the floor. That is terrifying.
And when the family asked the Gestapo where they
went, they were politely sent away with comforting
words. It was maddening. And this is actually
the origin of one of his most famous quotes from
his play No Exit. Hell is other people. Oh, I've
heard that. The French population often referred
to the Germans as the others, and Sartre intended
that line partially as a dig at the occupiers
who were just constantly watching, judging, and
constraining the freedom of the French. And because
Sartre realized in occupied Paris that passive
inaction was actually a choice to collaborate,
he was backed into a philosophical corner. He
had to do something. Right. He realized his philosophy
couldn't just exist in a vacuum. It demanded
action. Doing nothing is a choice to let the
oppressors win. Yes. That realization just hurls
him directly into the messy, highly polarized
politics of the Cold War. It does. He decides
that a writer, a philosopher, absolutely must
be politically engaged. You cannot stand on the
sidelines. But bringing pure philosophical ideals
into real world geopolitics gets incredibly messy.
It creates severe cognitive dissonance. Because
he embraces Marxism, though he doesn't officially
join the Communist Party, he enters what one
contemporary called his ultra -Bolshevik phase.
And so what does this all mean? I mean this is
where the contradictions start piling up to an
almost uncomfortable degree. How so? How does
a guy who literally wrote the book on individual
freedom become what critics called a useful idiot
who justifies authoritarian regimes? Well to
understand the mechanism of how he justified
this we really have to look at what you could
call the existentialist political trap. Okay.
The sources show he identified so strongly with
the ultimate goal, which was liberating the oppressed
working class masses of the world that he became
hyper focused on the ends over the means. So
the gold justified the violence. Basically, he
believed the bourgeois capitalist states were
fundamentally flawed by nature. Therefore. The
revolutionary states, like the Soviet Union,
were the only viable path forward, even if they
were actively failing to live up to their own
noble ideals. So he engages in extreme self -censorship.
Yes, he does. Like in 1950, he actively refuses
to write about the existence of Soviet labor
camps. And his justification is fascinating,
if, you know, baffling. What did he say? He famously
said the workers of Billincourt must not be deprived
of their hopes. Billancourt being a major industrial
suburb of Paris. He essentially decided it was
better to hide the brutal reality of the gulags
than to damage the revolutionary enthusiasm of
the French working class. Right. He felt that
criticizing the Soviet Union would only give
ammunition to the capitalist West. For Sartre
in this period, truth wasn't an abstract objective
ideal. It was a tool for liberation. If the truth
hurt the cause, hide it. Exactly. If broadcasting
a truth harmed the liberation movement, it must
be suppressed. But his views were constantly
shifting, trying to balance these geopolitical
scales. He went back and forth a lot. He did.
In 1954, after Stalin's death, he visited the
USSR and claimed it had complete freedom of criticism.
Which we know wasn't true. Right. But the reality
of Soviet actions continually tested his allegiance.
Because just two years later, he heavily condemned
the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Oh, OK.
And later on, he actively protested the expulsion
of the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn
from the Soviet Writers Union. And it wasn't
just the Soviets either. He was a fierce anti
-colonialist. He supported the FLN in Algeria,
which used violence to fight for independence
from France. Which made him a huge target back
home. Yeah. That stance resulted in his own apartment
in Paris being bombed twice by right -wing paramilitaries.
Wow. And he went to Cuba, met Che Guevara and
called him the Sartre's most perfect man. He
even destroyed his close friendship with fellow
writer Albert Camus over all this. And the split
with Camus is deeply illustrative of this political
trap. Camus rejected political violence entirely.
Why? He argued that revolutionary movements often
turn into the very tyrannies they sought to overthrow.
But Sartre believed violence was an unfortunate
but necessary mechanism for systemic change.
He argued that the status quo of colonialism
was already inherently violent, so violent resistance
was a justified response. Here's where it gets
really interesting. Honestly, pretty dark. Because
the tension between Sartre's grand ideals of
freedom and the real world harm they could cause
wasn't just political, it was deeply personal.
The private life. Right. We have to look at his
lifelong partnership with Simone de Beauvoir,
who is a brilliant philosopher and feminist in
her own right. They had a very famous lifelong
open relationship. They did. They actively and
intentionally challenged what they considered
oppressive bourgeois conformity and how people
were expected to live. live, love, and form families.
They wanted to build a relationship based on
an essential truth rather than societal rules.
But the biography outlines some deeply troubling
allegations about how they actually practiced
that freedom. Yes, it does. In 1993, an author
named Bianca Lamblin, who was actually a former
student of Beauvoir's, published a memoir alleging
sexual exploitation by both Sartre and Beauvoir.
And the accounts in the source text detail a
really predatory pattern, often referred to as
the trio. The trio. Multiple sources allege that
Beauvoir, in her capacity as a teacher, would
seduce young female students, groom them into
this avant -garde lifestyle, and then essentially
pass them on to Sartre. It's like finding out
the architect who designed a beautiful monument
to human rights used toxic materials that poisoned
the workers building it. That's a powerful analogy.
They are operating from this philosophy of radical
freedom, throwing off societal rules. But does
that philosophy just become a high -minded excuse
to ignore mass - of power imbalances? Does it
become an excuse for predation? This raises an
important question, and it is perhaps the most
critical way to apply Sartre's own philosophy
back onto him. We have to return to his cardinal
sin, which is bad faith. Lying to oneself. Exactly.
The listener has to critically analyze whether
Sartre and Beauvoir were operating in extreme
bad faith here regarding those relationships.
But how so? Isn't it just hypocrisy? Well, if
we view it strictly through his existential lens,
when celebrated, powerful, middle -aged intellectuals
enter into relationships with teenage students,
Is there truly an equal exercise of freedom happening?
Probably not. Right. Or were Sartre and Beauvoir
blinding themselves to the inherent coercion
of their academic and cultural power just to
justify their own desires? They were ignoring
the reality of the situation. Yes. If you pretend
a massive power imbalance doesn't exist, you
are acting in bad faith. You are pretending the
situation is an equal meeting of free subjects
when it clearly is not. And the biography also
notes that in 1977, Sartre and Beauvoir both
actually signed a petition to decriminalize consensual
sex between adults and minors in France. They
did. It really forces you to ask where the boundary
is between intellectual radicalism and real -world
harm. That tension is absolutely central to evaluating
his life. His ideas gave immense power to the
individual, but his application of those ideas
often seemingly disregarded the collateral damage.
And that is the ultimate existential question
for his legacy. But despite these massive contradictions,
like the political blind spots, the personal
exploitation sartre remained an absolute global
icon. A towering figure. And what's wild is that
a lot of that enduring fame came from what he
refused to do. Yes. His legacy is heavily defined
by refusal. He spent his entire life trying to
avoid being captured by institutions. Because
institutions represent a static essence. Exactly.
And the most famous example of this refusal,
of course, being the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1964. This is crazy to me. He wins the biggest
prize in the literary world and he becomes the
first person to ever voluntarily decline it.
He did. And his reasoning was very consistent
with his early philosophy. He stated that a writer
should not allow himself to be turned into an
institution. He didn't want the label. Right.
He also said he didn't want to take sides in
the East versus West cultural struggle by accepting
an award from a prominent Western organization.
He wanted to maintain his absolute independence,
his unyielding freedom to criticize both sides.
Though the biography includes this amazing, slightly
humorous detail. Oh, about the money. Yeah. Years
later, in 1975, someone close to Sarch, or possibly
Sarcher himself, it's not totally clear, allegedly
contacted the Swedish Academy to ask if he could
still get the prize money. And what do they say?
The academy refused. It's so funny. It really
highlights the constant tension between his lofty
ideals and practical reality. Money is a very
practical reality, but he kept fighting for his
ideals right to the end, getting physically involved
in the world. Like in 1968, during the massive
student and worker strikes in Paris, Sartre was
out there in the streets. As an older man? Yes.
He actually got arrested for civil disobedience.
And the president of France, Charles de Gaulle,
actually steps in and pardons him. De Gaulle
famously said, you don't arrest Voltaire. Which
is such an incredible quote. It tells you exactly
how monumental Sartre's status had become in
French culture. He was untouchable. Despite his
radical politics, he was seen as the inheritor
of the great French intellectual tradition of
speaking truth to power. He passed away in 1980
from pulmonary edema and the reaction to his
death was just staggering. 50 ,000 Parisians
descended on the streets to follow his funeral
cortege. 50 ,000. 50 ,000 people shutting down
the streets of Paris. And if we step back and
look at that image. The massive crowds, the halted
traffic, it points to a really profound irony.
It really does because he spent decades refusing
honors, refusing to be tied down, terrified of
becoming a rigid institution. And yet a funeral
with 50 ,000 mourners proves he'd become exactly
that. He was the ultimate French institution,
the ultimate object of national reverence. He
became the very thing he spent his life trying
to avoid. Exactly. So we've covered a lot of
ground today. We've seen Sartre as a - man of
extreme brilliance and extreme contradiction.
A very complicated figure. Very. He gave the
world the vocabulary to take ownership of their
lives, to stop making excuses, to embrace the
terror and the beauty of being completely free.
Yes. And yet his own choices, both in justifying
authoritarian regimes and in his deeply flawed
personal relationships, show how messy that freedom
gets in practice. The philosophy is often clearer
than the philosopher. Well said. But for you,
listening right now, the beauty of this deep
dive is that you don't have to agree with Sartre's
politics or excuse his personal life to use the
philosophical tools he built. You can take what
works. Right. Tomorrow, when you feel tracked
by your job, by your relationships, or by the
expectations of your circumstances, you can ask
yourself that core question. Am I acting in bad
faith? Exactly. Am I pretending I have no choice?
Or am I owning my freedom and taking the wheel
of the car? Sartre argued fiercely that we are
entirely responsible for our actions, that we
are the authors of our own essence. But if we
look at his life, and our own. It leaves us with
one final lingering question based on these accounts.
If we are shaped by a society that normalizes
terrible things, like the passive Parisians sitting
next to polite German occupiers, or the accepted
academic power dynamics of the 1930s, at what
point does our radical freedom simply become
a mirror of the flawed era we happen to live
in? Are we ever truly completely free from the
times that shape us?