Sartre

by Arthur C. Danto

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Autobiography

150 pages, Paperback

About the author

Arthur C. Danto was Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. He was the author of numerous books, including Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, After the End of Art, and Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective.

Reviews

[Jon Stout · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Philosophical Lexicon, a jokey vocabulary of philosophical terms, defines an “arthurdantist” as “One who straightens the teeth of exotic dogmas.” This is the reputation of Arthur Danto, a philosopher of the analytic persuasion, who has written about Sartre and Nietzsche and Eastern mysticism, and has translated them into the analytic tradition.

Danto, my one-time professor and adviser, has done exactly that in this book on Sartre, which I read at the same time as I was reading Sartre’s own work. The book has five sections, each with two titles, one using Sartre’s language of existentialism and phenomenology, and the other using Danto’s native language of analytic philosophy.

I won’t belabor the point, except to quote parallel passages that Danto finds in Sartre and in Wittgenstein, a philosopher who, in his Tractatus period, is as far from Sartre as one could imagine.

Sartre writes, “The very apprehension of the world as totality causes the appearance alongside the world of a nothingness which sustains and encompasses this totality.”

Wittgenstein writes, “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.”

In a remarkably interesting parallel, both philosophers have come to a similar way of describing consciousness as beyond the world as we experience it. Danto has similar insights for much of Sartre’s work, which are a pleasure to read.

[Philip Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But in any case, that existence precedes essence has a fairly clear meaning in the case of human beings: they are not determined to be what they are through a fixed human nature in which they participate; it is their nature not to have a nature in this sense, and their lives are spent in quest of a self-definition which they cannot find in the terms in which they seek it. If they do find a definition, it will be a matter not of discovery but of decision: whatever we are is what we have decided to be, and we cannot therefore really be it since the option is always available to decide otherwise. If Sartre has a central philosophical anthropology it is this, but I cite it here in order to stress that while it may explain what it means for our existence to precede our essence, no such explanation can be given of how this might apply to things. 'Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself,' Sartre writes. 'That is the first principle of existentialism.'"

"[Sartre] condemns and approves with the confidence of a pope. And I suppose he feels infallible in a way, but only because the notion of fallibility has no application, and his opponents might recognize, were they to accept his theory, that they are no less authoritative than he. Truth or falsity have no possible bearing. And since values have no connection with understanding the world, they can only concern changing it. It happens that the changes Sartre has endorsed are intuitively humane, and that his heart is as a matter of spontaneity in the right place. But his schedule of values has no more an objective grounding, if he is right, than the values of his enemies: oppressors and dictators and
torturers and exploiters. Sartre, of course, puts his own light on these matters. Since it is through me that values exist, since I am the foundation of my values, as, and for the same reason as, I am the foundation of my world, I myself can have no foundation whatever. For my being is not grounded in the being of any other thing or person, this being part of the meaning of freedom."

"Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool,
but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered" ( Pr 28:26).

Super helpful wee primer on Sartre's thought.

[Josiah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to Sartre. All the information is here and well explained, but it is very inaccessible as Danto uses all the technical terms of European philosophy. This is the main issue with the book (and, to an extent, with existentialism and phenomenology): all of the technical language disguises ideas known to Buddhism in general and Zen Buddhism in particular for hundreds of years, ideas which are far more accessibly written, and which provide a much more structured approach, by followers of those philosophies. Those who need these ideas the most are simply unable to understand them in the Western tradition, which is a complete failure.

[Philip Coulter · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 rounded up. Idiosyncratic introduction.

[John Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this short account of Sartre rather boring and not too sympathetic. There are better than this in print.