A CREATOR OF OUR TIMES
Author:
Date: Thursday, April 17, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: EPg
When he was a young child, a "toad" of a boy, Jean-Paul Sartre spent days
wandering in the Luxembourg Gardens unsuccessfully searching for playmates.
Rebuffed and rejected, he retreated to his family's sixth-floor apartment, "on
the heights, where the dreams are," and began to copy interminable pages of
other men's writings, a process through which he learned to write.
And much later, a philosopher, dramatist and novelist who had become an
intellectual institution - a designation he specifically sought to avoid in
rejecting the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature - Sartre went out to factory
gates to hawk a succession of small radical journals, which attempted to
chronicle the upheavals of French society in the late 1960s. His explanation
was more than mere revolutionary rhetoric: "The intellectual who does not put
his body as well as his mind on the line against the system is fundamentally
supporting the system, and should be judged accordingly."
Somewhere between those two points, but defined by them and by similar
events, Jean-Paul Sartre set forth the existential philosophy that speaks so
directly to the human condition in our times. It fastened on the importance of
individual freedom and creativity, finding the essence of being in man's
freedom to "get drunk alone or (to be) a leader of nations." Certainly, when
we think of ourselves in terms of the actions we perform and the decisions we
make, those are perceptions shaped by Sartre, not by traditional western
philosophies that described man in terms of what he had been created as,
rather than what he could become.
He once said "the sole object of my life was to write." Yet, despite his
devotion to writing, it is hard to imagine that there will be anything more
than a memorial revival of Sartre's literary work, of his plays, "No Exit" and
"The Respectful Prostitute," or his early novel "Nausea."
But there will be no need for literary revivals to remind us of the major
achievement of Sartre's life. He believed that we can decide what be want to
be and how we will go about it and that we define ourselves by what we do,
rather than what we are. That appears to define modern society so perfectly
that you are forced to wonder whether Sartre was merely creating a philosophy
for our times, or whether our times were created by his thinking.
MKENNE;04/16,13:20 ANNMAC;04/18,09 B08024604
|
