Insight Editions · No. 87
The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy
Selections from Kierkegaard to Fanon
Jonathan Webber (ed.)
An anthology of foundational existentialist texts traces the movement from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger to Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, and Camus.
A study guide to The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy by Jonathan Webber (ed.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
How the argument builds
- The frame (Ch 1). Webber's stipulative definition: behaviour is driven by chosen, changeable projects, freedom is the source of value, and the movement is Sartre and Beauvoir's from 1945.
- Inspirations (Ch 2-7). Kierkegaard on boredom and the levelling public; Nietzsche's death of God; Freud's unconscious; Heidegger's Dasein and anxiety.
- Being and Nothingness (Ch 8-12). Sartre on anguish, bad faith, the look and existential psychoanalysis.
- The offensive (Ch 13-17). Freedom after the war, popular wisdom, the anti-Semite as a chosen passion, the metaphysical novel.
- The Second Sex (Ch 18-22). Femininity as trap (a 1947 Vogue piece), myths of the Other, woman's situation, the case for fraternity.
- Race and colonialism (Ch 23-26). Fanon's lived experience and negrophobia; Sartre against the picturesque.
- The refusal (Ch 27). Camus: absurd, revolt, solidarity, but not existentialism.
Argument map
The anthology's main line of argument, from Sartre's ontology to Beauvoir's and Fanon's social theory.
| Ch | Selection (author) | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction (Webber) | Projects, freedom, value; how to read |
| 2 | Part 1 intro (Webber) | Why these four precursors |
| 3 | Crop Rotation (Kierkegaard) | Boredom and the aesthete's art of arbitrariness |
| 4 | The Present Age (Kierkegaard) | Reflection, levelling, the public |
| 5 | The Joyous Science (Nietzsche) | Death of God, useful errors, herd morality, giving style |
| 6 | Short Account of Psychoanalysis (Freud) | Repression, dreams, Oedipus, ego and id |
| 7 | Dasein and Anxiety (Heidegger) | Mineness, existence, anxiety versus fear |
| 8 | Part 2 intro (Webber) | Being and Nothingness in context |
| 9-12 | Sartre | Anguish; bad faith; the look; existential psychoanalysis |
| 13 | Part 3 intro (Webber) | The 1945 launch |
| 14 | The End of the War (Sartre) | Freedom without guarantees after the bomb |
| 15 | Popular Wisdom (Beauvoir) | Existentialism versus cynical proverbs |
| 16 | Portrait of the Anti-Semite (Sartre) | Antisemitism as chosen passion |
| 17 | Literature and Metaphysics (Beauvoir) | The metaphysical novel |
| 18 | Part 4 intro (Webber) | The Second Sex and its reception |
| 19-22 | Beauvoir | Femininity as trap; myths; situation and character; conclusion |
| 23 | Part 5 intro (Webber) | Race in existentialism; Fanon's path |
| 24-25 | Fanon | Lived experience; negrophobia |
| 26 | From One China to Another (Sartre) | Against the picturesque |
| 27 | Afterword; Delpech with Camus | "No, I'm not an existentialist" |
Anthology arc.
Definition to keep.
Thesis contrasts.
Signature selections.
Authors and selections (named)
What Existentialism Is and Why It Matters
Webber's editorial thesis.
A word that lost its moorings
In October 1945 Sartre complained that "existentialism" was applied so loosely it meant "nothing at all". Webber says he exaggerated: the word was naming a generation of artists after the war, once surrealist dreamscapes gave way to the earthly realities of individual and social life. Sartre's real point was that this movement had no shared outlook.
He and Simone de Beauvoir had been building a theory of human existence since they met at university sixteen years earlier. Its basic tenet: each person's behaviour is driven by evaluative attitudes, or "projects", chosen and changeable. Its ethical claim: this freedom is the foundation of all value, so nothing is more valuable than human freedom.
- The existentialist offensive. Beauvoir's phrase for their 1945 campaign: a new periodical, three novels, a new play, interviews and lectures, all within a couple of months.
- The drift, cause one: sexism. Beauvoir was assumed for decades to be Sartre's disciple, so foundational texts were ignored or misread.
- The drift, cause two: an invented tradition. Writers from the previous hundred years were labelled existentialist for sharing themes (mortality, godlessness, mass culture, self-opacity, other minds), not a theory.
- The result. The label stretched back two millennia and across continents, until serious readers could claim even Beauvoir was not an existentialist.
The theory in brief
Existentialism is a theory of what it is to be human in the ontological rather than biological sense: creative, imaginative individuals with aims and values, self-aware, and profoundly social. It is a kind of psychology, but it denies there is a "mind" or "psyche" studiable apart from body and world. We are bodies, brought into existence by other people in a particular place and moment.
The central claim is that our behaviour is ultimately driven by our projects, where a project is any evaluative attitude a person is committed to in their behaviour. Raising children is a project, but so is staying alive, which most people never deliberately chose. A project bundles a valued goal, behaviour aimed at it, and an understanding of the world as it seems to the person.
Existentialism is not the "plainly false" idea that we constantly deliberate. Projects, taken up deliberately or without much thought, colour experience. Situations seem to invite or forbid responses and the world seems to offer reasons for action, but that motivational structure is our own projects reflected back to us.
The existentialist loop as Webber states it: what looks like the world's demand is the mirror of our own commitments.
Two treatises, two pictures of freedom
| Question | Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943) | Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949) |
|---|---|---|
| Status of projects | "Nothingnesses" sustained only by continued pursuit | Become more deeply embedded the longer pursued |
| Freedom | Radical: can change the deepest roots at once | Operates by sedimentation; change is gradual |
| Childhood values | Central to an integrated network, revisable | Ingrained by adulthood; overcome by new commitments |
| Shared ground | Society teaches fixed identities suited to roles; accepting that image is itself a project: bad faith | |
One aim of existentialism is liberation from the conflict rooted in bad faith. This is not victim-blaming: Beauvoir shows how economic circumstances can shrink women's freedom to bare survival, and she assigns the duty of challenging male superiority to those whose situations allow it.
The moral claim is that freedom must be respected and promoted above all. Its only sustained argument runs across Beauvoir's Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944), which Webber concedes is "one of the least well developed aspects" of the theory, so the anthology concentrates on existence and liberation.
The anthology's route
- Part 3 essays rest on the ethic of authenticity: facing existence, bad faith in proverbs, bad faith in antisemitism, and a fourth on literature versus abstract theory.
- Part 5 opens with Frantz Fanon's essay from Black Skin, White Masks (1952), mixing first-person narrative, poetry and theory on racism in daily life and medical textbooks.
- Fanon as existentialist. Despite criticising Sartre and never citing Beauvoir, he roots racialization in upbringing and fixed-identity thinking, and locates liberation in overcoming them.
- Sartre on photography closes Part 5, on images that perpetuate or challenge racial bad faith.
Why read it now, and its limits
Webber argues the analyses still bite while women are unequal and "black lives matter" still needs saying. Existentialism explains human diversity (each outlook answers its own lived experience) and diagnoses social ills as the denial of that truth. Its tools for exposing cover-ups are as useful: talk of "historical forces" as though they were not aggregates of our choices, stereotyping images and stories, and disregard for truth in political discourse.
Four inspirations and an afterword
Four thinkers shaped the foundations: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger. Three are often called existentialists, but the excerpts were chosen for their influence, not as fair portraits. Freud is rarely listed, yet Sartre, Beauvoir and Fanon each place their theory in the psychoanalytic tradition. The Afterword explains why Camus, who said he had nothing in common with Sartre, is left out.
How to read this book
Texts run in chronological order, but Webber recommends starting with Part 3, written for general readers. Then work outwards: Part 4 applies the theory to sex, Part 2 goes deeper into Sartre's ontology, and the two complement each other. Part 5 and Part 1 read best once the core ideas are familiar. Read each part's introduction before its texts.
Part 1 Introduction: Inspirations
Inspiration chain Webber sets.
Originality as conversation
Descartes, hiding from a war he should have been fighting, still built on centuries of debate, and his "I think therefore I am" was prefigured by St Augustine over a thousand years earlier. Thinking is collaborative; originality means advancing the conversation. Beauvoir and Sartre were voracious readers, so any genealogy is partial and somewhat arbitrary. These four matter because Paris was arguing about them.
| Thinker | Key idea taken up | Where existentialism departs |
|---|---|---|
| Kierkegaard (Danish) | "Existence" for human life; commitment to an ideal over pleasure or conformity | Drops his Christian faith |
| Nietzsche (German) | Death of God unravels objective morality; against "herd morality" | Grounds value in freedom, not rare individuals |
| Freud (Austrian) | Hidden depths drive behaviour; interpretation reveals them | Depths are chosen attitudes, not innate drives |
| Heidegger (German) | Dasein, world as part of self; anxiety and "the they" | Moves from ontology into psychology and ethics |
Kierkegaard
Called "the father of existentialism", he holds only the "tiny grain of truth" of being apparently the first to use existenz for distinctly human existence: awareness of individuality and mortality, care about one's life, sense of one's role in shaping oneself. Nobody invented existential thought.
His theme: live neither for happiness nor conformity but by commitment to one ideal organising all activity. He used fictitious authors. "Crop Rotation" belongs to A, author of the first half of Either/Or (the second by B, edited by Victor Eremita); A's dismal pleasure-seeking exposes the limits of the "aesthetic" life. "The Present Age", from his review of Thomasine Gyllembourg's Two Ages, speaks directly against "levelling" into "the public", which Webber finds even more apt in the age of social media.
Nietzsche
Where Kierkegaard wrote from Christian faith, Nietzsche saw Christianity as the problem. If God exists, the world has an objective order, and we seek true knowledge of it and of objective moral value. For Nietzsche, God, reality, morality and knowledge are one fabric that unravels when God is removed; the scientific revolution has made God unnecessary. We inherited a "herd morality" that serves the mass and restricts individual flourishing, to be replaced by a "fröhliche Wissenschaft", gay or joyous science.
Nietzsche's single fabric, as Webber summarises it.
Freud
The founder of psychoanalysis held that beneath conscious thought lie chaotic, irrational drives, some taboo. Repressed, they press for expression in symbolic behaviour: first neurotic symptoms like psychosomatic paralysis, then dreams, free associations and slips of the tongue, then normal life, art and the myths and rituals of communities.
Heidegger
Being and Time transformed phenomenology, the new study of appearances, into a study of our kind of being, which he called Existenz after Kierkegaard. He seems not to have known Freud, yet shared the method of analysing experience for deeper truth, read ontologically not psychologically. The excerpts give Dasein ("being-there") and the analysis of anxiety (Angst), an attunement to our individuality and a motive to flee into what "they" do.
Existentialism is the theory that each individual's existence is structured by commitments that are deep and sometimes hidden, shaped by social approval, and yet ultimately each person's to accept or change. It then adds the moral step: freedom is the source of all value, but first we must grasp why people deny it, especially as they are categorized by sex and race.
Crop Rotation (Søren Kierkegaard)
Kierkegaard aesthetic strategy.
The principle of boredom
A opens with an epigraph from Aristophanes' Plutus ("There is too much of everything") and a mock-scholastic principle: "all men are boring." Its power is repulsive, giving "infinite momentum". If idleness is called the root of evil, A replies that "Boredom is a root of all evil." The evidence is a parody of history: the gods were bored, so they made man; Adam was bored, so Eve was made; boredom grew with population, built Babel, and was held off in Rome only by panis et circenses.
- The nursemaid test. Parents dismiss a nursemaid who cannot amuse children, yet no one may divorce a boring wife or depose a boring king.
- Danish politics. A proposes Denmark borrow fifteen millions for public pleasure (free theatre, streetwalkers, funerals), keeping 100 dollars a day for himself in the Bank of London; then kidnap the Shah of Persia and sell him to the Turks.
- Social animal? "Basically he is a beast of prey"; sociability is inherited hypocrisy and calculated deceit.
Two kinds of bore
| Type | Who | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Bore others | The plebeians, "the mass", the busy who never bore themselves | Most insufferable; multiply "beyond belief" |
| Bore themselves | The elect, the nobility | Amuse others; at the zenith die of boredom or shoot themselves "out of curiosity" |
Idleness is not the evil but "a truly divine way of life", as with the Olympian gods. Work cannot cure boredom, since the busiest "humming insects" are the dullest. A turns the Latin proverb otium est pulvinar diaboli against itself. Boredom is "demonic pantheism", resting on "the nothingness that winds its way through existence", giddy like gazing into an abyss. Its talent is innate in English travellers who live on one interjection, and acquired through badly chosen diversion.
Crop rotation, vulgar and artistic
A's two methods: extensive novelty is "the bad infinite"; intensive variation inside limits is the art.
The vulgar method chases extensive change, "europamüde, one goes to America", and ends in a dream of travel "from star to star". Marcus Aurelius ("Antonine") was wiser: review your life from a new angle. "The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become": limitation is "the only saving" principle.
Remembering and forgetting
All changes fall under the rule relating remembering and forgetting. First, throw hope overboard: hope is "a faithless steersman", a dubious gift of Prometheus. Nil admirari is life's wisdom: each situation should matter little enough to forget at will, enough to recall at will. Childhood remembers best and forgets most. Remembering poetically removes the pain. Enjoyment must be reined in from the start; pausing mid-pleasure to remember spoils excess.
- Forgetting is an art, not forgetfulness; most people only want to forget the unpleasant, a one-sidedness.
- Forgetting the pleasant too, since the past pleasant breeds privation.
- Flatter misfortune: "even Cerberus accepted honey-cakes"; one forgets in order to remember.
- The Archimedean point. Memory and forgetting made identical lift the whole world.
| Domain | Rule |
|---|---|
| Friendship | Avoid it; a friend is "the superfluous third", not the necessary other |
| Acquaintance | Keep speed in hand to run away; let land lie fallow |
| Marriage | Never; vow "until Easter" not "forever"; you lose freedom to order travelling boots |
| Eros | Poetic infinitude in an hour; break off when you feel "made for each other" |
| Vocation | Never; you become "Mr Anybody", a pivot in the corporate state; a title cannot be shed |
| Occupation | "Breadless skills", intensive not extensive |
| Moods | See them coming like a sailor sees a squall; teasing as exploration |
The secret is arbitrariness
Vary the soil a little, but mainly vary yourself. The secret lies in arbitrariness practised without losing oneself: see the middle of a play, read the third part of a book. A's example: a bore lecturing him became delightful once A watched sweat gather and drop from the man's nose. Baggesen objected to a decent man only that nothing rhymed with his name. Like the Neo-Platonists who reincarnated retail traders as bees, or the painter Tischbein who drew people as animals (too seriously), A turns accidents into absolutes and keeps "expeditus" for chance.
The Present Age (Søren Kierkegaard)
Present Age diagnosis.
The public, a phantom
"The public" could not exist in antiquity, where a people gathered in corpore and took responsibility; it is an abstraction created by the press out of "unreal individuals" who never meet. It is "more numerous than all the people together", yet can never be marshalled for inspection or have a single representative.
- Treacherous consolation. Siding with a real majority or minority means sharing their risk; siding with the public shares nothing, for "if someone adopts the public opinion today, and tomorrow is booed, it is the public that boos".
- No shame. A people or assembly can be ashamed of inconstancy; the public can become its opposite "and is still the same".
- Belonging part-time. One belongs to the public "for a few hours a day, that is, during the hours when he is nothing".
- Anyone can own one. Even a drunken sailor with a peep-show has the same right to a public as the most distinguished, "placing zeros before his number one".
Yet this cruel abstraction has a religious use: repelled by it, the individual is "educated" to find rest "in himself before God", or destroyed. Antiquity discouraged because the distinguished man was what others could not be; the coming age inspires because the religious self is "no more than what all can be".
Levelling and the dog
Kierkegaard's mechanism of levelling through a contemptible third party.
The public is a well-fed, bored Roman emperor craving laughter. It keeps a dog, "literary contempt", set on anyone distinguished until the public says "That will do now". Levelling works through a third party already "less than nothing", so nobody repents: they only subscribe. Kierkegaard pities not the victim, who is strengthened, but the many who gain shallow self-importance from sympathy: "Weep not for him, but weep for yourselves."
Diseases of passionlessness
Each vice is a "repealed passionate distinction", a once-sharp opposition blurred.
| Vice | Distinction erased | Illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Chatter | Silence vs speaking | Mr Madsen's Persian shawl; Miss Gusta and the actor's slip |
| Formlessness | Form vs content | Acting "for the sake of principle"; a sixty-foot cap peak |
| Superficiality | Hiddenness vs revelation | Show-off Mrs Waller |
| Flirtation | Loving vs dissolute | "All adding is a subtracting" |
| Reasoning | Subjectivity vs objectivity | Opinion about all things possible |
| Anonymity | Person vs speech | Sensible remarks with no speaker; manuals for lovers |
Silence is inwardness: "only the person who can remain essentially silent can essentially speak" or act. A great event gives a passionate age one thing to talk about; chat dreads silence that would expose emptiness. Kierkegaard's thought experiment: a law that everything be spoken of as if fifty years ago would ruin chatterers and leave real speakers untouched. The poet must keep his private actuality silent (his "aduton", guarded like a door by crossed bayonets) or be recognisable by one-sided preference.
"For the sake of principle" a man may back a brothel or a new hymnal and nothing follows about him, like police entering anywhere "in the line of duty": everything is permitted and responsibility evaporates. Speech becomes so objective that it no longer matters who says it, as machines make workers redundant.
Everyone knows, no one acts
The age "knows more on average than any previous generation; but it is devoid of passion". Proposals to consider meet enthusiasm; proposals to act meet lethargy, envy, armchair critique and bets. The emblem: two English lords wager a hundred guineas that a bolting rider will fall, then gallop ahead to open the gates. Association and solidarity strengthen numerically and weaken ethically; "twenty-five signatures to the silliest notion is an opinion", while the best mind's view is "a paradox".
The unrecognizables and the leap
Old orders had visible officers and heroes. Now the excellent become "unrecognizables", like plain-clothes police who help only negatively. They must not lead, teach or decide for the crowd, or they betray God by "playing at authority". They help through suffering, and each person must "Leap, then, into the embrace of God" alone; not even a mother or beloved can help. Kierkegaard ends by calling the prophecy a prank, like bowls.
The Joyous Science (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Nietzsche joyous science arc.
Subduing God's shadow (108 to 109)
After the Buddha died, his shadow was shown in a cave for centuries; "God is dead", but his shadow may be shown for millennia, "and we, we still have to subdue His shadow!" Section 109, "Let Us Beware!", lists the shadows to remove from our picture of the universe:
- Not a living being. Organic life is "derivative, late, rare and accidental".
- Not a machine. It is not built for any purpose.
- Not orderly. Our solar system's cycles are an exception; the Milky Way suggests rougher motions.
- Chaos, not lawless. "From all eternity chaos", meaning lack of order, form, beauty, wisdom, not lack of necessity.
- No laws. "There are only necessities": no one commands, obeys or transgresses; without intentions, nothing is accidental.
- Death not life's opposite. "The living is only a species of the dead, and a very rare one."
- No enduring substance. Matter is as much an error as the god of the Eleatics.
The aim: to "demythologize nature" and then naturalize ourselves.
Knowledge as embodied error (110 to 113)
Section 110, "Origin of Knowledge": the struggle inside the modern thinker.
For "immense stretches of time" the intellect produced only errors; the useful ones were inherited: enduring things, identical things, bodies, appearances as real, free will, and "what is good for me is intrinsically good". Truth emerged late as "the least powerful form of knowledge". The strength of a belief depended on its age and embodiment, not its truth. The Eleatics invented the impersonal sage, deceiving themselves about their own instincts. Nietzsche's experiment is one question: "How far does truth admit of embodiment?"
- Logic from illogic (111). Creatures that treated similar as identical quickly survived; those who saw everything "in flux" perished, though nearer the truth.
- Cause and effect (112). We describe better but explain no more; cause and effect is a continuum we chop into pieces; nobody has explained impact.
- Poisons (113). Doubt, denial, waiting and collecting were poisons alone; "many hecatombs" died before they combined in science. A future union with art and practical wisdom would make today's scholar, physician, artist and legislator relics.
Morality as herd instinct (114 to 120)
| Section | Claim |
|---|---|
| 114 Extent of the moral | Every perception is interpreted through past experience: all experiences are moral |
| 115 Four errors | Partial self-view; fictitious qualities; false superiority over animals; ever-new "tables of goods" taken as eternal |
| 116 Gregarious instinct | Morality ranks impulses by herd advantage; "Morality is the gregarious instinct in the individual" |
| 117 Herd conscience | Once, being separate was punishment; free will lay near bad conscience |
| 118 Benevolence | The strong appropriate, the weak wish to become a function; pity is appropriative |
| 119 Not altruism | Some, e.g. women who become a man's "purse, politics, sociability", crave being a function |
| 120 Health of the soul | Ariston of Chios amended: "Your virtue is the health of your soul"; no normal health |
Life is no argument (121): bodies, lines, causes and form are articles of faith we cannot live without, yet "error might be one of the conditions of life". Christianity taught moral scepticism (122), wiping out antiquity's self-satisfied prigs like Seneca and Epictetus, then the worm turned on religion itself. Knowledge more than a means (123): Pope Leo X, writing to Beroaldus, praised science yet ranked it below revealed truth; the novelty is knowledge wanting to be an end.
The madman (124 to 125)
"We have left dry land": no land remains to be homesick for, and infinity is terrible. In the marketplace a madman with a lantern at morning cries "I seek God!" to mocking unbelievers. "We have killed Him, you and I!" How did we drink up the sea, wipe the horizon, unchain the earth from its sun? Are we falling, straying "through an infinite nothingness"? "Must we not become gods ourselves" to be worthy? Unheeded, he smashes the lantern: "I have come too early", for the deed is farther than the farthest star. He sings a requiem aeternam deo in churches, "the tombs and sepulchres of God".
Nietzsche, section 125
Giving style (289, 290, 327)
All aboard (289): a philosophical justification of a way of living works like a private sun; even the evil and exceptional deserve their own, not pity or confessors. "The moral earth is also round!" with its antipodes. One thing is needful (290): "to 'give style' to one's character", surveying strengths and weaknesses and fitting them to an artistic plan, adding second nature, hiding or reinterpreting the ugly, until "it is enough that it be a singular taste". Strong natures enjoy being bound by their own law; weak ones prefer to see themselves as free nature. Either way, one must reach satisfaction with oneself, since the dissatisfied take revenge on others. Taking things seriously (327) mocks the creaking machine of solemn thought; joy and thinking go together.
A Short Account of Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)
Freud short account spine.
I. From hypnotism to catharsis
Psychoanalysis was "born with the twentieth century": The Interpretation of Dreams is dated 1900. It began narrowly, with the "functional" nervous diseases, above all hysteria. Neurologists, impressed by brain-localisation work (Hitzig and Fritsch, Ferrier, Goltz), left the psychical to "philosophers, mystics and quacks". At the Salpêtrière in 1885 Freud heard hysterical paralyses explained as slight damage to the same brain areas. Treatments were "hardening", threats and electrotherapy (Erb's instructions, full of "phantasy").
- Hypnotism's two lessons. Thanks to Liébeault, Bernheim, Heidenhain and Forel: mental influence alone can cause somatic change, and unconscious mental processes are real and testable.
- Charcot produced hysterical paralyses by suggesting trauma under hypnosis; Pierre Janet tied symptoms to unconscious idées fixes and a constitutional failure of synthesis ("dissociation").
- Breuer's case (1881). A gifted girl fell ill while nursing her father; every symptom had a meaning and stood in for a suppressed action. Recalling the traumas under hypnosis with strong affect made symptoms vanish.
Studies on Hysteria (1895) stated the theory: strangulated affect is diverted into bodily "conversion" and released ("abreacted") under hypnosis, a procedure called catharsis. It remains the nucleus of psychoanalysis.
II. Free association and repression
Breuer, an internist, withdrew. Freud dropped hypnosis for two reasons: he could not hypnotise enough patients despite training with Bernheim at Nancy, and cures were impermanent and too dependent on the doctor relationship. He substituted free association, the "fundamental rule": report every idea, however disagreeable or senseless. "Free" association proved unfree, steered by unconscious material.
Freud's model of neurosis: conflict, repression, substitute.
Patients' resistance revealed the force that had once succeeded in repressing the material, filling the gap Janet explained by weakness. Repression comes from the ego on aesthetic and ethical grounds; what is repressed is selfishness and cruelty, "but above all sexual wishful impulses". Childhood conflicts leave "ineffaceable dispositions", revealing infantile sexuality, which forced a widened concept of the sexual.
| Element | Content |
|---|---|
| Drives | Emphasis on affectivity |
| Dynamics | Interplay of mental forces |
| Meaning | Every obscure phenomenon has meaning and cause |
| Conflict and repression | Repression is pathogenic |
| Symptoms | Substitutive satisfactions |
| Sexuality | Aetiological role, beginning in infancy |
| Unconscious | The mental does not coincide with the conscious |
| Oedipus complex | Nucleus of every neurosis; transference to the analyst |
III. Normal life: slips and dreams
If such machinery exists, it must show outside hysteria. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) showed forgotten names and slips as one intention disturbed by a suppressed one. Dreams are built like symptoms: from manifest content to latent dream thoughts. The formula: "a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (repressed) wish", distorted by the ego's censorship through the "dream work". Sleep paralyses movement, so repression relaxes into censorship; a dream that oversteps limits wakes us in fright. From 1900 psychoanalysis was a new psychology, not just a therapy.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| c.1900 to 1907 | Ten years of neglect |
| 1907 | Bleuler and Jung in Zürich draw attention; storm of indignation in Germany |
| 1909 | G. Stanley Hall invites Freud and Jung to Clark University, Worcester |
| 1909 to 1914 | Jahrbuch (Bleuler, Freud; ed. Jung) |
| 1911 | Havelock Ellis reports practice in US, England, India, Canada; Zentralblatt (Adler, Stekel) |
| 1911 to 1913 | Secessions of Jung and Adler |
| 1912 / 1913 | Imago (Rank, Sachs); Internationale Zeitschrift; Psychoanalytic Review (White, Jelliffe) |
| 1920 | International Journal (Ernest Jones); Eitingon's Berlin clinic with training analysis |
IV. Technique, libido and psychosis
Technique became "as definite and delicate" as any medical speciality; untrained readers practising it caused abuses, especially in England and America. Libido is the measurable force of sexual drives; beside object-libido sits narcissistic or ego-libido. Transference neuroses (hysteria, obsessional neurosis) are treatable; narcissistic ones resist. Freud rejects the charge of pan-sexualism as trading on the vulgar sense of "sexual". No hard line separates neurosis from psychosis: Freud's paranoia case, Bleuler's "Freudian mechanisms", Jung (1907) on dementia praecox, and Bleuler's schizophrenia study; Abraham (Berlin) and Ferenczi (Budapest) led.
V. Depth psychology of culture
- Contraries. As dreams fuse opposites, Karl Abel (1884) claimed old languages did: Egyptian "strong/weak", German Boden, Latin altus (high and deep).
- Religion. Obsessive rituals mirror religious ceremonial; religion as a universalised obsessional neurosis, rooted in the relation to the father.
- Civilization rests on renunciation of drive; some drives are sublimated into culture, others press for distorted satisfaction.
- Art and myth are substitute wish-fulfilment; Otto Rank; the artist's kinship with, and difference from, the neurotic.
- Oedipus complex reflects two biological facts: long dependence and a sexual peak at three to five then latency to puberty. Religion, law, ethics and civic life help master it (Freud, Reik, Pfister).
- Postscript. Education; Groddeck and Jelliffe on organic illness.
Finally, with the new division into ego (conscious, facing the world) and id (drive needs), psychoanalysis is "a psychology of the id" whose contributions need completing by ego psychology.
Dasein and Anxiety (Martin Heidegger)
Heidegger extract spine.
§4: Why Dasein comes first
Sciences are ways human beings behave, so they share our kind of being, which Heidegger names Dasein. Dasein "does not simply occur among other beings": "in its being this being is concerned about its very being". It always has some understanding of being, so its ontic distinction "lies in the fact that it is ontological", or more precisely pre-ontological.
- Existence. The being to which Dasein relates; its essence is not a "what" but having to be its being "as its own".
- Existentiell understanding. Each Dasein decides its existence by seizing or neglecting possibilities, chosen, stumbled upon or grown up in.
- Existential analysis. The theoretical study of the structures of existence, their coherence called existentiality.
| Priority | Ground |
|---|---|
| Ontic | Dasein is defined by existence |
| Ontological | Because it exists, Dasein is itself "ontological" |
| Ontic-ontological | It understands the being of all other beings: condition of all ontologies |
Hence "fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can originate, must be sought in the existential analysis of Dasein." The roots of that analysis are themselves existentiell: philosophy is a possibility of an existing person.
§9: Essence lies in existence; always mine
Two consequences follow. First, the "essence" of Dasein lies in its "to be". Heidegger reserves existence for Dasein and calls the traditional existentia "objective presence" (things like tables, houses, trees). Dasein's traits are possible ways to be, not attributes. Second, Dasein is always-being-mine (Jemeinigkeit): never an instance of a genus, so we must say "I am", "you are".
Because Dasein is its possibility, it can choose itself, win itself, lose itself, or only seem to win itself. Hence authenticity and inauthenticity. Inauthenticity is not a "lesser" being; it can fill Dasein "even in its fullest concretion, when it is busy, excited, interested, and capable of pleasure".
The analysis starts from average everydayness, a positive phenomenon. What is ontically nearest is "ontologically the farthest", as Augustine found: "What is closer to me than myself?... I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat." Dasein's characteristics are existentials; those of other beings are categories (from Greek "to accuse publicly"). Beings are either a who or a what.
§10: Not anthropology, psychology or biology
Descartes examined the cogito but left the sum ("I am") undiscussed. Talk of a subject, soul, consciousness, spirit or person smuggles in a "subjectum", a thing, so Heidegger avoids these terms and even "life" and "human being". A "philosophy of life" is like the "botany of plants": it never asks what life's being is. Traditional anthropology draws on the Greek definition and the theological guideline; modern versions take the res cogitans as given.
- Psychology shares anthropology's missing foundation.
- Biology cannot fill it: life is accessible only through Dasein, by privative interpretation; Dasein is not "life plus something".
- Foundations cannot be reached from empirical material by hypothesis; they are "always already there".
§40: Anxiety versus fear
Absorption in "the they" and the world of concerns is a flight of Dasein from itself. But flight presupposes that what is fled is somehow disclosed, so entanglement can still reveal it.
| Fear | Anxiety (Angst) | |
|---|---|---|
| About | A definite innerworldly threat approaching from a region | Being-in-the-world as such; "nothing and nowhere" |
| World | Relevance intact | Relevance collapses; world utterly insignificant |
| For | A particular potentiality | Authentic potentiality-for-being |
| Effect | Turns toward things | Individualizes: Dasein as "solus ipse" |
| Status | Anxiety "fallen prey to the world" | The more primordial; makes fear possible |
Heidegger's anxiety as both an attunement to freedom and a motive for inauthenticity.
What anxiety is about is "so near that it is oppressive and takes away one's breath, and yet it is nowhere". Afterwards we say "it was really nothing", which is ontically accurate. Anxiety reveals Dasein as "being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping itself". Its feeling is uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit), not-being-at-home; everyday familiarity is a mode of uncanniness, not the reverse. It can arise in harmless situations, needs no darkness, and may be physiologically triggered only because Dasein is anxious at its ground. Real anxiety is rare, yet that rarity suits its methodical role.
Part 2 Introduction: Being and Nothingness
Part 2 editorial map.
A one-kilo book
The "essay in phenomenological ontology" was at least ten years in the making: "thorough, sophisticated, and occasionally incomprehensible", and "in need of a careful editor".
| Date | Sartre's war |
|---|---|
| Sept 1939 | Conscripted into the meteorological corps on the German border, launching weather balloons; time to refine theories of emotion, imagination, perception |
| May 1940 | Germany invades France |
| June 1940 | Captured; held in Stalag XII-D in western Germany; loses most notebooks |
| c. March 1941 | Freed after nine months with a forged medical certificate; some Resistance activity in Paris |
| 1943 | Being and Nothingness published |
Anguish
Sartre's word angoisse is rendered "anguish", which fits poorly; it is the feeling Kierkegaard (angst) and Heidegger (Angst) described, hence English "angst". His method relies on vivid examples that readers re-live to see truths for themselves.
- The cliff path. Fear is of slipping; anguish is realising nothing in me stops me jumping.
- The gambler. A sincere resolution can simply be ignored at the next casino.
- The alarm clock. Its urgency reflects my values; stop caring about the job and it loses its demand.
Sartre's theory of freedom: reasons that seem to come from the world reflect our own values, and we can change those values; anguish is awareness of that ability. Society is arranged so that we rarely feel it.
Bad faith and the waiter
The café waiter exaggerates his role. Playing at being a waiter is the closest he can get, since he stays free to act otherwise; yet he is a waiter, not a diplomat. In acting our positions "we make ourselves be what we are". He behaves as though he were nothing but a waiter, so he simply has to open on time. Seeing oneself as fixed requires seeing others as fixed, so customers demand that waiters be only waiters. Sartre closes by arguing that sincerity, declaring the identity that explains one's behaviour, is just another form of bad faith.
Webber's reading: bad faith is socially reinforced, not merely private self-deception.
The look and existential psychoanalysis
Seeing another person makes my world disintegrate and reorganise around them. My approving self-image is disrupted when I am looked at. At the keyhole, footsteps produce shame, an external view of myself framed by values not mine. We cannot see others' values, like a poker player who cannot see opponents' cards, so we are "continually vulnerable to the unknown agendas" of others.
Existential psychoanalysis, set against Freud's "empirical" version, seeks the person's most fundamental chosen values through dreams, associations, questioning, and above all behaviour in all its forms. It claims the right understanding explains every act and experience, a daunting task. Sartre's fullest attempt is the Flaubert biography, three enormous volumes nearly thirty years later, left unfinished as his eyesight failed. Friends thought it quixotic amid late-1960s turmoil; Webber sees it echoing the occupation-era treatise: no liberation without understanding what it is to be human.
Anguish, Freedom, and Values (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Sartre anguish extract.
Anguish is freedom aware of itself
If freedom is the being of consciousness, consciousness must be conscious of freedom: "it is in anguish that man becomes conscious of his freedom". Kierkegaard saw anguish as facing freedom; Heidegger as apprehending nothingness. Sartre says each implies the other.
| Fear | Anguish |
|---|---|
| Of beings in the world | Before myself |
| Unreflective, about something transcendent | Reflective apprehension of oneself |
| Situation acts on me | I act on the situation |
| Soldier fears the barrage | Soldier wonders if he will "hold out": "fear of fear" |
| Ruined man fears poverty | He wrings his hands: "What am I going to do?" |
Each is born from the other's destruction, but anguish can occur pure: promoted to a delicate mission, I may doubt my capability without fearing failure's consequences.
Vertigo: anguish before the future
On a narrow path without a parapet, I first fear slipping or the path crumbling: I see myself as a thing under gravity. I escape fear by planning precautions, but these are my possibles, and their "being is a being-upheld" (twisting Berkeley). Contrary possibles, including throwing myself in, stand beside them, kept out only by me.
Sartre's vertigo sequence: fear gives way to anguish, which ends in a decision to walk on.
A nothingness slides between me now and the "me" at the bend of the path: separated by time, not his foundation, not strictly determining him. Anguish is "the consciousness of being one's own future, in the mode of not-being". Even reasons for suicide prove inefficacious, a "counter-anguish" that turns into indecision, then decision: "we move away from the edge".
The gambler: anguish before the past
The reformed gambler at the green baize finds his resolution "dissolve". This is not the moralists' "struggle between reason and the passions", and Dostoyevsky's letters show no inner debate. The resolution is still there, but "frozen, inefficacious, surpassed". To help, it must be re-created "ex nihilo, and freely"; it "stands behind me like a boneless ghost", needing my flesh. "Nothing can prevent me from playing."
- Objection: unconscious determinism. Sartre replies anguish is not offered as proof of freedom but as the way we are conscious of it.
- If we feared hidden motives, we would see ourselves as things and anguish would turn into fear.
Essence is what has been
Freedom means "a constantly renewed obligation to remake the Me". Hegel: "Wesen ist was gewesen ist", essence is what has been. Everything said of a person with "that is" belongs to the past; an act is human only insofar as it goes beyond any explanation. Our nature "remains behind us" and haunts us as "a demand, without being a resource".
Values have no foundation but me
The alarm clock's call is grasped by getting up, which avoids asking "Is work my possibility?" and so shields me from seeing that "it is me, and me alone" who gives it urgency. Everyday morality likewise excludes ethical anguish. A value founded on being would cease to be a value and make my will heteronomous.
In the world of immediacy we find ourselves amid requirements: "I am writing; I am going to smoke; I have an appointment with Pierre; I must reply to Simon; I have no right to conceal the truth from Claude." These derive from an initial project, my choice of myself. Alarm clocks, signposts, tax returns, policemen are "safeguards against anguish". When I step back, barriers crumble: I decide meaning "alone, without any justification or excuse".
The spirit of seriousness and the flight from anguish
Anguish is opposed to the spirit of seriousness, which reads values off the world and gives them "reifying substance". Our immediate response to anguish is to flee it.
| Strategy | How it works |
|---|---|
| Psychological determinism | Posits thing-like forces; fills the holes; a nature that produces acts; "foundation of every course of action that aims to excuse" |
| Disowning alternatives | Other possibles assigned to "some undifferentiated Other" |
| Self as object | My possible seen as generated by my "Self", described as another's person |
| Selective freedom | Keep responsibility's pride, retreat into determinism when an excuse is needed |
| Bad faith | Be anguish "in the form of not being it" |
We cannot eliminate anguish, "since anguish is what we are". Nor can we mask it like an external object: to avoid seeing it, "I am obliged constantly to think about it, in order to make sure I am not thinking about it". "I flee in order not to know, but I cannot be unaware that I am fleeing." That self-decentring nihilating power is bad faith, not an unconscious mechanism.
Conducts of Bad Faith (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Bad faith conducts.
The waiter plays at being a waiter
If man simply is what he is, bad faith is impossible and candour becomes his being. Sincerity's maxim, "One should be what one is", proposes an ideal of being: "absolute self-adequation".
The waiter's movements are "a bit too precise, a bit too quick", his solicitude "a bit too" much; he carries his tray with a tightrope walker's recklessness while imitating an automaton. "He is playing at being a café waiter." Play is research: the child explores the body, the waiter actualises his condition.
- Ceremonial trades. The public demands the "dance of the grocer, the tailor, the auctioneer"; "a grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer".
- The soldier-thing stands to attention, eyes "fixed at a distance of ten paces".
- Prisons of role. "We live in constant fear that he might escape from it."
From inside, he knows the role's meaning (up at five o'clock, sweep, start the coffee machine; rights to tips and union rights), but these are duties of a "legal subject" he must be and is not. He can be a waiter only "in a neutralized mode, in the way an actor is Hamlet", using gestures as an "analogon". "I am the waiter in the mode of being what I am not." Yet in some sense he is one, or he could equally call himself a diplomat or journalist.
Sartre's two modes of being underlying the bad faith analysis.
Not only roles
"I am never any of my attitudes." The seductive speaker plays at speaking; the attentive pupil, riveted on the teacher, exhausts himself playing attention until he can hear nothing. "Constantly absent from my body", I am Valéry's "divine absence". I cannot say I am here as "this box of matches is on the table" without confusing being-in-the-world with being in the midst of it.
Sadness
Even sadness is not what I am. It is the unity animating a lifeless gaze, hunched shoulders, lowered head. Let a stranger appear and I perk up, planning to return to sadness later. Being sad is making oneself sad, using "magic" in a pressing situation. "In consciousness, there is no inertia": sadness never runs on momentum; its being-in-itself haunts me "as a value that I cannot actualize".
The Other's consciousness and my own
As Husserl saw, my consciousness appears to the Other "as an absence". When Pierre looks at me, his eyes on my body are a fact; the meaning of his look is not, and that bothers me. Smile, promise or threaten, I cannot win the "free judgement I am seeking"; my acts become "presentations" waiting to be judged gracious or clumsy, sincere or insincere.
| Formula | Meaning |
|---|---|
| "The Other's consciousness is what it is not." | Given to me as a freedom, a constant question |
| "Consciousness is not what it is." | My consciousness makes itself; never maintained by being |
| Bad faith | Constituting human reality "as a being that is what it is not, and is not what it is" |
Sincerity as bad faith
Sincerity assumes Kant's "You must, therefore you can", but the structure of consciousness forbids progress toward "being what one is"; this impossibility is "our constantly experienced unease". Every attempt at self-examination turns me into a thing:
- Listing motives presupposes causal determinism in consciousness.
- Finding "tendencies" forgets they act only with my cooperation.
- Judging my character judges a past my present escapes.
Proof: the same man who sincerely says he is what he was will protest against another's resentment that he is no longer that person. We are saddened when courts punish a man who in his renewed freedom "is no longer the culprit that he was", yet demand he recognise himself as that culprit. Hence sincerity is "a phenomenon, precisely, of bad faith".
The Look (Jean-Paul Sartre)
The Look structure.
The man in the park
In a park I see a lawn, chairs and a man. Taken as a doll, he would be "beside" the chairs, 2.20 metres from the lawn, related to things by "purely additive" relations; removing him would change nothing. Seen as a man, he organises things around himself: the lawn now unfolds toward him, in a spatiality "that is not my spatiality".
- Probable, not certain. It is only probable he is a man, and that he sees the grass; he might be dreaming or blind.
- Objective yet escaping. "Pierre glanced at his watch" states a fact, but its centre escapes me.
- Spreading regrouping. Space reorganises around him: the statue, the chestnut trees, even the lawn's "deep, harsh green", which turns toward him "a face that escapes me".
"All of a sudden, an object has appeared that has stolen the world from me." The world is "pierced, in the middle of its being, by a drainage hole", constantly flowing out. Yet he is still my object, twenty steps away, so the bleeding is contained, an "internal haemorrhage". A man reading as he walks is a sealed, local leak: "reading-man", a closed Gestalt.
Being seen is the truth of seeing
The object-Other refers to a more original relation: "the constant possibility of my being seen by the Other". I cannot be an object for an object, nor for myself, since I am the one through whom there is a world. So "being-seen-by-the-Other" is "an irreducible fact", and "'Being-seen-by-the-Other' is the truth of 'seeing-the-Other'". Husserl called the Other an absence; Sartre specifies the absence of my world at the heart of my perceiving it.
A look need not be eyes: rustling branches, steps then silence, a half-open shutter, a moving curtain. In a coup de main, soldiers crawling through bushes fear "an entire white farm" on a hilltop. When I grasp a look, the eyes recede: "We can never judge eyes that are looking at you to be beautiful or ugly." As one cannot perceive and imagine at once, one cannot perceive the world and apprehend a look directed at oneself. Branches breaking behind me tell me I am vulnerable, have a body that can be hurt, "in short, that I am seen".
The keyhole
The keyhole scene in six steps.
Through jealousy, curiosity, or vice I put my eye to a keyhole. Alone, there is "no me inhabiting my consciousness". The door and keyhole are instruments "to be handled with caution"; I let things soak me up "like ink by a piece of blotting paper". The end organises the means; my jealousy organises this structure, yet "I am this jealousy; I do not know it". This twofold whole is the situation: it reflects both my facticity and my freedom.
Footsteps: "someone is looking at me." Now the self haunts unreflected consciousness, not as something I know but as "a pure reference to the Other". I discover it in shame (or pride). "Shame is shame of oneself": recognising that "I really am this object that is looked at and judged". The connection is "not originally a connection of knowing but of being".
| The Other as object | The Other as subject (looking) |
|---|---|
| World drains toward him but is retrieved | "The world flows away out of the world, and I flow away out of myself" |
| Internal haemorrhage, contained | Flight "without end" |
| Probable | The look on me is lived with certainty |
| I am master of my situation | "I am no longer master of the situation" |
My being-for-others
My shame is an admission; even bad faith admits it by fleeing. This being is mine, but neither "having to be" nor "was": I cannot produce it, unlike my shadow or mirror image. It is indeterminate because the Other is free. It is "the limit of my freedom, its hidden side", like "the hidden side of the cards", a shadow cast on moving material whose distortions cannot be calculated. Yet in shame I affirm "a profound unity of consciousnesses", not a harmony of monads but a unity of being.
The devil's share
Alone, an accident (tugging a plank knocks a bronze statue that smashes a vase) could have been foreseen with attention. The Other introduces an aspect that escapes me "as a matter of principle": what Gide called "the devil's share". Kafka's The Trial and The Castle describe it: K. and the land surveyor succeed in their actions, yet their true meaning forever escapes them. Kafka aimed at divine transcendence, but "God is the concept of the Other pushed to its limit".
Existential Psychoanalysis (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Existential psychoanalysis.
Why a new method
Ontology can show that any person is open to such inquiry, but not predict a free act. Empirical description yields only lists and "pseudo-irreducibles" (the desire to write, to swim, a taste for risk, jealousy). We must decipher them.
| Element | Statement |
|---|---|
| Principle | "Man is a totality and not a collection": no taste, tic or act fails to reveal something |
| Goal | Decipher empirical behaviour and determine its revelations conceptually |
| Starting point | Experience; everyone has an a priori sense of gestures' meaning: a hermeneutic, not a hunt for the source of the Nile |
| Method | Comparative: each behaviour symbolises the same choice under accidental guises |
| Ancestor | Freud and his disciples gave "a first sketch" |
What it shares with Freud
- Symbolisation. All manifestations of psychic life symbolise fundamental structures of the person.
- No primary data. No inherited inclinations or character; Freud's initial affectivity is "virgin wax", libido nothing outside its fixations.
- History. The person is a constant historialization; inquiry rebuilds a life from birth using letters, testimonies, diaries.
- Situation. The target is a dyad: the childhood event and the crystallisation around it; a fact acts only as it is taken up.
- Pre-logical totality. Freud seeks the complex; Sartre the original choice, totalising and prior to logic.
- No privilege for the subject. Self-analysis means interrogating oneself "exactly as if he were someone else".
Where it parts company
| Issue | Empirical (Freud) | Existential (Sartre) |
|---|---|---|
| The unconscious | Postulated | Rejected: psychic facts coextensive with consciousness |
| Irreducible term | Decided in advance: libido (or Adler's will to power) | A choice, contingent yet legitimately final |
| Generality | Abstract drive, then complexes | Unique and concrete from the start |
| Environment | Acts mechanically | Acts only as understood: situation |
| Symbolism | Universal (faeces = gold, pincushion = breast) | Reinvented for each case, even each instant |
| Choice | Fixed | Living, revocable; symbols can change meaning |
Consciousness is not knowledge. The fundamental project is fully lived, so fully conscious, but not known. Reflection is "penetrated by a great light without being able to express what the light illuminates": a "mystery in full light", not a Freudian puzzle. It supplies raw material; only an objective stance can conceptualise. Hence both analyses grasp the project as being-for-the-Other, even when analyst and subject are one person; the project-for-itself "can only be enjoyed".
Libido and will to power are not the bottom: sexuality expresses the attempt to retrieve one's being alienated by the Other, and will to power presupposes being-for-the-Other. "There is no difference for human-reality between existing and choosing itself."
The recognition argument
Sartre's argument that the patient's moment of recognition refutes the unconscious.
When analysis approaches the fundamental choice, the patient suddenly recognises himself. On Freud's premises this is inexplicable: an unconscious complex cannot understand, and a conscious subject could only judge the interpretation a probable hypothesis, like a third party, which could not break the "dyke". But "the subject's illumination is a fact": he "touches and sees what he is". That makes sense only if the drives are consciousness itself; analysis turns consciousness into knowledge.
Criteria and programme
- Success criteria. The number of facts explained and unified; an evident intuition of irreducibility; where possible, the subject's decisive testimony.
- Material. Not only dreams, slips, obsessions and neuroses but "the person's thoughts from the night before, his well-adapted and successful actions, his style".
- Classification of individuals' ultimate ends may then yield general claims about human reality as an empirical choice of ends.
- Status. "This psychoanalysis has not yet found its Freud"; glimpses appear in accomplished biographies; Sartre promises studies of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky. What matters "is that it should be possible".
Part 3 Introduction: The Existentialist Offensive
Offensive map.
A moment of renewal
In October 1945 French women voted for the first time in a general election; the same day a referendum backed drafting a new constitution by 96 per cent. Sartre and Beauvoir meant their philosophy to shape the renewal. Les Temps modernes joined art, literature, philosophy and politics; Sartre was editor-in-chief, Beauvoir on the committee. It was named after a Charlie Chaplin film, its masthead designed by Pablo Picasso.
| Piece | Author | Issue | Core move |
|---|---|---|---|
| The End of the War | Sartre | No. 1, Oct 1945 | War and peace are gradations; the bomb hands humanity its own death |
| Existentialism and Popular Wisdom | Beauvoir | No. 3, Dec 1945 | Proverbs are "bullshit" resting on fixed human nature |
| Portrait of the Anti-Semite | Sartre | No. 3, Dec 1945 | Racism as a chosen value system of a "natural elite" |
| Literature and Metaphysics | Beauvoir | Apr 1946 (lecture Dec 1945) | Fiction captures lived experience better than treatises |
Sartre's history, and climate
For Sartre, war has no clean beginning or end; it concentrates struggles that run much longer. In war our aims are clear; otherwise we must invent goals that collectively decide whether we slide back. The atom bomb makes the species able to destroy itself, so we cannot rely on future generations to give our work meaning, and any nuclear war would culminate a process we all shaped.
The famous lecture, and why Beauvoir's essay is better
At the end of October 1945 Sartre gave a public lecture in "utter chaos": an overcrowded hall, a jammed entrance, people fainting. He pushed onto the stage and spoke impromptu; notes became Existentialism is a Humanism. Webber calls it "confusing and occasionally contradictory", asserting objective moral values while arguing values cannot be objective. It is "rather unfortunate" that it became the most widely read existentialist text, since Beauvoir's essay answers the same critics far more coherently.
Beauvoir and the bullshit of proverbs
Critics said existentialism preached nihilism and despair; Beauvoir says they really object to the opposite, its demand for unrelenting commitment. Proverbs carry no coherent picture: people cite whichever fits, which is Harry Frankfurt's later "bullshit", asserting without caring whether it is true. Beneath the contradictions lies one idea: an optimistic mood of natural virtues and a pessimistic mood of selfish instincts both assume fixed human nature. That comfort excuses us from deciding what to value, yet a false picture makes life disappointing and miserable.
Sartre and the antisemite
Webber's reconstruction of Sartre's motivational chain for racism.
Two kinds of bullshit: thoughtless remarks for identity or acceptance, which keep tropes circulating; and committed antisemites who admit weak evidence or anecdote "and declare that this does not matter", because antisemitism, like all racism, is not a response to its target but a value system that shapes perception. In collective action this hatred yields violence and genocide, with victims blamed; alone, perpetrators humiliate.
Beauvoir on fiction
Philosophy of existence must study how we experience the world: phenomenology. Treatise prose clarifies some aspects by obscuring others; fiction can explore lived textures that "skeletal abstract description" cannot. Literature is most philosophical as a voyage of discovery, not illustration. Fittingly, the first item after Sartre's editorial in issue one was Richard Wright's "Fire and Cloud", on racism and starvation in the rural American South, serialised over two issues.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1945 | Launch; Sartre editor-in-chief |
| 1980 | Sartre dies |
| 1986 | Beauvoir dies; Claude Lanzmann takes over |
| 2018 | Lanzmann dies |
| 2019 | Closure after seventy-four years |
The End of the War (Jean-Paul Sartre)
End of the War.
An abstract ending
"People had been told to put out flags. They did not." The war ended "in indifference and anxiety". A "puny gun coughed" on a dull summer afternoon while people with lifeless eyes went about their chronic hunger. The war had drifted off to die near islands "whose name reminds us of double almonds" (Philippines) amid unrest: Japan's army counter-attacking in Manchuria, China near civil war, and two emergent powers sizing each other up like wrestlers stroking forearms.
An official at a microphone "with a piece of paper in his hand" declares peace; we have learned to disbelieve such men. "Is this all that Peace is?"
War and peace as gradations
"It isn't Peace. Peace is a beginning. We are living through death throes." We once thought war and peace distinct, like black and white; 1934 to 1939 taught that peace can end without war, through "armed neutrality, intervention, and pre-belligerency". On the most optimistic view we must climb back by gradations.
Sartre's continuum: no clean switch between war and peace in either direction.
- Peace as return? People confuse youth and peace; it is always a different peace, now an enormous world peace with France in a small place.
- France's slide. The veil masking France's real importance "for fifty years" tore at the Japanese capitulation. Men of forty speak of France not as an ageing actress but as a star passing incognito.
- Generations. A more austere youth, knowing only a humiliated France, are "the men of the Peace"; Sartre's generation are men "of a lost battle", facing the end of their youth.
Consent to war
We believed "on no evidential basis" that peace was the universe's natural state. Now "the end of the war is quite simply the end of this war"; news of a new conflict would bring a shrug. Among the best men Sartre finds "a silent consent to war". Unlike pacifists who hoped for heaven on earth, thoughtful young people claim no right even to hope; some hid ill health from the recruiting board so as not to "look an idiot at the next war". This war, more atrocious, left less bad memories because fighting German imperialism did not seem stupid.
Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito now look like "petty tyrants" of the weakest nations; "two giants stand alone".
The bomb and the death of man
The bomb "that can kill a hundred thousand at a stroke and which, tomorrow, will kill two million" confronts us with responsibility. An exploded earth would leave forever unanswered whether humanity could overcome racial hatred or class struggle. Yet "humanity had, one day, to come into possession of its death"; before, it lacked even the means of suicide.
To "we are at the mercy of a madman", Sartre replies that the madman would have to be a Hitler, "and we would all be responsible" for his rise.
Gambling on France and the earth
A young Russian-born naturalised Frenchwoman wept on victory day: "I'm from a little country!" Sartre understands but cannot condone. France is our concrete situation; personal development still happens within national frameworks, and internationalism is now "the stubborn illusion of a few Trotskyites". To deny the French community is to deny ourselves, so we must gamble on France and on the earth, "simply because that is where we are".
Tristan Bernard, on being arrested; Sartre says Japan's surrender licenses the opposite
God, "sacred, inalienable rights" and the war's alibis are dead. Man is left "naked and without illusions", knowing "he has only himself to rely on": the only good news that "thin, ceremonious burst of gunfire" brought.
Existentialism and Popular Wisdom (Simone de Beauvoir)
Beauvoir popular wisdom.
The charges
Critics say existentialism shows only man's misery ("miserablism"), denies friendship, fraternity and love, and traps the individual in egoistic subjectivity with no objective justification for values. Gloomy authors were often well received before; why such outrage now?
Two portraits of man
In public, people want a retouched portrait: heroic films, edifying speeches, epitaphs; children are shown Pasteur (patient), Bernard Palissy (selfless), Bara the drummer boy (heroic). Like a madman furious at "You are not Napoleon", the official person bristles at any hint of weakness: a judge told a lawyer "You are insulting all the women of France!" when he noted a prisoner's wife faced temptation. In private, the same people laugh at a far darker image: after Cyrano and Déroulède, they savour the "human truth" of Labiche's Perrichon and Maupassant.
| Theme | Popular wisdom says | Sources Beauvoir cites |
|---|---|---|
| Flesh | Man is bestial; no honest friendship between the sexes | Church fathers, Pascal, Bossuet, Massillon; a general's widow who backed brothels |
| Motive | "Man always seeks his own interest"; "No one does something for nothing" | La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine, Saint-Simon, Chamfort; utilitarianism |
| Love | Manipulation or "sensual folly"; "Possession kills love"; "Out of sight, out of mind"; long couples "pasted together" | Farce since the Middle Ages |
| Friendship | Habit on a core of indifference; vanishes with poverty | Ovid's "solus eris"; La Fontaine's Monomotapa; Princess Mathilde |
| Solitude | "Consciousnesses are incommunicable"; "Homo homini lupus" | Maurice Chevalier's viscounts; Lucretius' "suave mari magno" |
| Happiness | "Happiness is not of this world"; prefer "respectable mediocrity" | Shakespeare's "tale told by an idiot"; Ferdousi; faience plates |
| Death | "Take it easy": nothing matters much | Songs of Damia, Yvonne George |
People excuse villainy once they see tangible profit, and are only revolted by gratuitous evil: they condemn Weidmann and Hitler partly because the crimes were useless ("a triumphant Hitler would have surely incited much less outrage"). Both great criminals and unrecognised heroes are called "madmen". Women's magazines teach that "to know how to get a man" means treating him as a mechanism. Too much kindness is blamed: Van Gogh was relieved of his post in the Borinage for living with aid recipients as an equal.
Never drawing the conclusion
Stendhal: "All sound reasoning is offensive." People list a man's faults but protest "I didn't say that" at "he is a bad man". They never synthesise the heroic public image with the bestial private one, and believe neither. Thoughts are circumstantial weapons: a mother calls love a delusion to stop her son's marriage though she married for love; an old man sends youths to die for their country while saving his skin. La Rochefoucauld cultivated friendship, Swift cherished Stella. So their first complaint is that existentialism is a coherent system demanding full adoption.
Immanence versus transcendence
"Men fear responsibilities above all... they are so afraid of engaging their freedom that they prefer to renounce it." Those who accuse existentialism of subjectivism love Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld and Maupassant, a "psychology of immanence" where all projects turn back on a thing-like self with needs to satisfy.
Beauvoir's diagnosis: critics object not to subjectivity but to subjectivity equated with freedom.
Man "may not be naturally good, but he is not naturally bad either; he is nothing at first." Facts are facts. The separation of consciousnesses is real but can be surmounted through the world; love, friendship and fraternity must be conquered. Death denies nothing, since undertakings take their value from freedom. The "bastards" of Nausea chose to be so; that responsibility terrifies readers.
Virtue possible and difficult
People accept virtue as easy (smiling martyrs) or impossible, but not possible and difficult. Life as magnificent adventure or farce both let us "eat and sleep in peace". The engineer wants the dam, the mother her children, to justify her existence for good; the failure quotes Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity". But "no success saves me" and no failure excuses me. The hero wants a star on his forehead; the coward settles into cowardice like comic valets with "no honour to defend".
Why tell the truth?
Kant and Hegel never asked what one gains by being Kantian. Truth is not a foreign light but reality, and evasion manifests it, as psychoanalysis shows with an adolescent's hidden hatred of his father: one frees oneself by recognising and surpassing it. People live in an abyss between what they do and what they say, "crushed by the weight of clichés".
Such examples deny anyone the excuse of being an "irremediable coward". Existentialism refuses "the consolations of lies and resignation; it has confidence in men".
Portrait of the Anti-Semite (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Anti-Semite portrait.
Not an opinion
Someone who blames his or his country's misfortunes on Jews and would strip, exclude, expel or exterminate them holds "anti-Semitic opinions". But "opinion" is the hostess's word for ending a quarrel; it reduces ideas to tastes. The analytic spirit since the Revolution treats character as a mosaic: a man may be a good father, cultivated, philanthropic, generous about "natives in Central Africa", and also detest Jews, as if this were a separate molecule caused by experience or charts "from 1870 to 1944". Sartre calls both views "dangerous and false".
One may have an opinion on Algerian wine imports, an administration of things. A doctrine "aimed directly at particular persons and that seeks to suppress their rights or to exterminate them" is not protected opinion. It is "first of all a passion": the "moderate" antisemite soon admits, "there must be something about the Jews; they upset me physically". Compare: "There must be something about tomatoes, for I have a horror of eating them." Disgust enters the body from the mind, as in hysteria; some men become impotent on learning a lover is Jewish.
Experience does not cause it
Sartre says he questioned a hundred people. Most recited traditional defects; asked if they knew Jews: "Not if I can help it!"
- A painter: Jews' critical habits make servants insubordinate.
- An untalented actor: Jews kept him in minor roles.
- A young woman robbed by furriers: "they were all Jews." Why hate Jews rather than furriers?
- A lycée classmate: failed the agrégation "the year a Jew passed", though he scorned and never studied for it. He ranked twenty-seventh: twelve passed and fourteen failed ahead of him. Why eliminate the Jew Weil rather than the Norman Mathieu or the Breton Arzell?
"Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
History and social facts do not cause it
French Jews were oppressed until 1789 and have committed no treason; the claim of too few Jewish soldiers in 1914 came from someone consulting statistics, not from experience in the trenches. Sartre's test case: in the bloody Polish revolts, Warsaw Jews, favoured by the tsars, stayed lukewarm. Sartre does not know if this is true, but finds a vicious circle: tsars massacred Jews in Moscow and Kiev and favoured them in Warsaw for the same reason, seeing them as inassimilable; Poles scorned them for the same reason. Blaming children for grandfathers presumes inherited character. "Too many Jewish lawyers?" Nobody complains of too many Norman lawyers.
The choice behind the passion
| Choice | What it buys him |
|---|---|
| Passion over reason | "A longing for impenetrability", the durability of a stone; fear of truth's form, "indefinite approximation" |
| Hate as faith | Words devalued; he "lends himself but does not give himself"; plays with absurd reasons to discredit serious opponents |
| Being terrifying | Finds his being in others' fear, never looks within |
| Mediocrity | Man of the crowd; "I hate the Jews" is said "in chorus"; an elite of the ordinary |
| Real property | Mystical ownership of soil; Maurras: no Jew can understand Racine's "Dans l'Orient désert" |
| Birth-elite | Superiority that cannot be earned or lost: "It is a thing" |
| Manichaeism | Evil located in the Jew; Good already given |
| Sadism | Evil incarnated in the unarmed; "It is fun to be an anti-Semite" |
"His conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious." A fishmonger who in 1942 denounced two Jewish competitors was said to be mild and jovial; Sartre does not believe it: "You cannot confine passion to one sphere."
Property, class and the mob
The antisemite concedes Jews are intelligent and hard-working: those virtues are "in parentheses", making them more dangerous. Intelligence is Jewish; the true Frenchman needs inherited property and tradition "twenty centuries old". Securities and money are abstractions, so Jewish. As Barrès argued against scholarship holders: "he has spoken this language for only twenty years, and I for a thousand." Most antisemites are lower middle class who own nothing; by casting the Jew as robber they become proprietors of all France. Antisemitism is "a poor man's snobbery", as with Germany's petty bourgeoisie in 1925, a "white-collar proletariat".
He needs the Jew: exterminated, he would be "nothing but a concierge or a shopkeeper". His equality is that of a lynch mob, held together by anger at a "temperature" of fusion; Proust showed hatred of Dreyfus bringing duke and coachman together. In a democracy it is a covert revolt against authority: Jews vote and govern, so the law is void, and he can riot "out of love of obedience". "Anti-democratic, he is a natural product of democracies."
Sartre contrasts two "synthetic" views of society; Politzer: "I don't give a damn for your eternal essence."
Satan, Manichaeism and sadism
The Jew contaminates all he touches: a Jewish bridge is bad "from the first to the last span"; the Germans first barred Jews from swimming pools. The Jew's freedom is limited to doing evil, like Satan. Blamed for both capitalism and Bolshevism, he explains all crises so the antisemite need not see that "the world is ill-contrived". Céline preaches catastrophe and collective suicide; Maurras and the Parti Populaire Français foresee "Ormazd against Ahriman". The revolutionary aims to build; the antisemite only to destroy, so the mob is a safety valve for the owning classes.
His Manichaeism hides an attraction to evil: Drumont's La France juive is "a collection of ignoble or obscene stories". Sartre compares a Berlin Protestant whose desire took the form of indignation at swimming pools. He keeps "exceptional Jews" as friends through inverted sadism; the phrase "beautiful Jewess" carries an aura of rape and massacre, from Rebecca of Ivanhoe to Ponson du Terrail.
Literature and Metaphysics (Simone de Beauvoir)
Literature and metaphysics.
Torn between Spinoza and Tess
At eighteen, Beauvoir read "naively and passionately". After Spinoza or Kant she asked how anyone could write novels; after Julien Sorel or Tess of the d'Urbervilles, why build systems. "There is only one reality; it is in the midst of the world that we think the world through." Today's reconciliation continues a long tradition; why the distrust?
What a novel does
Opponents rightly say a novel's meaning cannot be translated into concepts, or why build the fiction? The philosopher offers an intellectual reconstruction of experience; the novelist reconstitutes the experience itself "as it appears prior to any elucidation". An object's meaning is not a concept but the object as disclosed in action, emotion and feeling. Readers want "life's opacity, ambiguity, and impartiality", to react with their whole being before judging.
"One can no more detach its meaning from it than one can detach the smile from a face." As a dream shatters when the dreamer notices it, belief in fiction vanishes once the author's hand shows.
Three objections answered
| Objection | Beauvoir's answer |
|---|---|
| A thesis betrays the author's hand and breaks the spell | A matter of tact; the author always "cheats and lies" by seeming absent |
| Readers refuse to be tricked into pre-set conclusions | Right: the novel has value only as "a living discovery for the author as for the reader" |
| Philosophy is a finished system; fiction can only illustrate it | Then reject the psychological novel too; but metaphysics is an attitude, not a system |
The romantic saying that characters escape their author misstates a truth: the freedom admired in Dostoevsky's characters is the novelist's freedom toward his own projects, and the opacity of events is the resistance met in creation. Like a scientific experiment, the author confronts sketches with their realisation and discovers "truths... previously unknown to him". This authenticity separates a great work from a merely clever one.
The psychological novel as precedent
No one objects to psychological novels, though theoretical psychology exists. A novel illustrating Ribot, Bergson or Freud would be useless. "As Ribot's disciple, Proust bores us"; as a real novelist he finds truths no theorist had stated.
Metaphysics as an attitude
"To 'do' metaphysics is 'to be' metaphysical": to posit oneself in one's totality before the totality of the world. Every event has a metaphysical meaning. Children feel their being-in-the-world with astonishment: the discovery of "ipseity" in Lewis Carroll's Alice or Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica reveals presence, abandonment, freedom, the opacity of things, the resistance of other minds.
Two ways to make metaphysical experience explicit, and philosophers who needed both.
- Systems without subjectivity. No Aristotelian, Spinozan or Leibnizian novel is imaginable.
- Plato banishes poets while the Forms reign, but turns poet when describing the dialectical ascent, setting dialogues among fields, at a table, at a deathbed.
- Hegel's Phenomenology uses Don Juan and Faust for the unhappy consciousness.
- Kierkegaard recreates Abraham in Fear and Trembling and writes Diary of a Seducer.
- Kafka can only use fiction: to speak of the transcendent, even as inaccessible, would claim access; fiction keeps "this silence".
Why existentialists write both
Existentialism seeks to reconcile "the objective and the subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical". Philosophy describes essence; the novel evokes "the original upspringing of existence in its complete, singular, and temporal truth". No naturalistic objectivity fools us now: every novelist has a world-view. A metaphysical character (anguish, revolt, will to power, fear of death) need be no more rigid than a miser or coward.
The reader's share
Readers often presuppose a key and translate instead of entering, then "complain that he has been given a corpse", as a Russian critic called Karamazov a treatise in dialogue. Maurice Blanchot says that in Kafka one understands "either too much or too little", true of every metaphysical novel. The reader must accept uncertainty, since the novel "appeal[s] to his freedom". Honestly written and read, it achieves what "pure literature and pure philosophy" cannot: humanity's destiny "inscribed both in time and in eternity".
Part 4 Introduction: The Second Sex
Part 4 map.
A best-seller that began with hesitation
"I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new." The book sold over twenty thousand copies in its first weeks, has been translated into forty languages and sold millions. Beauvoir's lens is existentialist: the world presents opportunities and demands reflecting chosen values, so systematic sex differences are a puzzle.
Volume one: neither biology, psychology nor economics alone
Beauvoir draws on the three currents of her time without joining any. Procreation, the shaping of minds by expectation, and material necessity all contribute, but what drives social evolution is our striving for valued goals. In the earliest communities, she thinks, repeated pregnancies kept females from inventing tools, hunting techniques, buildings and transport; men conquered nature and everyone celebrated, so male supremacy was set from the outset.
Webber's summary of Beauvoir's causal story.
The four extracts
| Extract | Source | Main claim |
|---|---|---|
| Femininity: The Trap | Vogue, 1947 (title likely by editors) | Femininity is a myth justifying subordination; success costs women femininity |
| Myths | Vol. 1 | Man, a "god" in an animal body, casts woman as the Other: intermediary with nature, peer and opponent |
| Woman's Situation and Character | Vol. 2, ch. 10 | Domestic conditioning explains women's traits, tears and outbursts |
| Conclusion | Vol. 2 | Liberation needs biology, economics and culture to change together |
- Femininity. The supposed quality fitting women for domestic tasks and unfitting them to change the world; men set their own goals, women's are "set by nature" to maintain life.
- Childhood. Stories make heroes male and the rescued female; boys learn ambition, girls charm; by adolescence all have internalised it.
- Not a sentence. Women can choose goals against the myth, but at a cost: the more successful, the less feminine she seems, and men want the expectation to continue.
- The Other. A hybrid figure, man's peer whom he needs and fears, and a creature of nature; the source of archetypes like the good mother and wicked stepmother.
- Mystery. Archetypes personify clusters of emotion; any woman fits contrary ones, so seems mysterious, charming yet capricious. Marginality makes secrecy and deception among women's few sources of control.
"One is not born, but rather becomes, woman": the opening premise of volume two.
Volume two and the conclusion
Nine chapters trace biology, myth and domestic economy through childhood, adolescence and adulthood; chapter ten draws the portrait. Domestic work (cooking, cleaning, childcare) teaches responsiveness to rhythms and processes, fostering the "affinity with nature". Crying is a form of rebellion, a retreat into the body; hysterical outbursts express fury with no outlet. Training to associate power with men, patient responsiveness, and isolation in separate homes explain why women formed no counter-mythology and have not overthrown male supremacy.
The Conclusion is optimistic: French women could vote and many earned incomes, though they could not yet hold their own bank accounts. Rights alone are insufficient.
| Domain | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Biology | Effective contraception, safe abortion, paid maternity leave, social childcare |
| Economics | Equal obligation to work outside the home, equal pay and conditions |
| Culture | New children's stories, same games, mixed schools fostering creativity and independence |
| Ethics | Destroy the myth of the godlike male and natural female; "fraternity between the sexes" |
Webber notes that in the seventy-five years since, some conditions have come about in many countries, partly because of the book; some have been removed again. The book warns emancipation is not inevitable; it depends on the goals people choose.
Femininity: The Trap (Simone de Beauvoir)
Femininity trap.
The eternal feminine
"There is no myth more irritating and more false than that of the eternal feminine", invented by men with women's help. When men say sensitivity they mean lack of intelligence; charm, foolishness; caprice, treachery. Only "on legal papers and in civil registries" are the sexes equal; "Man" means both male and humanity.
- "You think that because you are a woman." Her answer: "I think that because it is true." Man is the ideal type; difference is woman's fault.
- Glands. Women "think with their glands"; men forget their own hormones.
- "Nature." Women are weaker and bear children, and are clumsy in a man's world because they are guests in it.
Once the world ran on muscle; now "the pressure of a finger" commands machines, so physical inequality has "almost entirely lost its importance". Men alone invented the future; women, guardians of home, faced "the dead past". Housework does not build but "struggles against destruction": like the valet who would not polish boots ("They will only be dirty again tonight"), "every housewife is Penelope".
Stories and upbringing
Myths and fairy tales cast women as Ariadne abandoned, Penelope at her needlework, Andromeda in chains, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty: "the ones who wait". Had Shakespeare had an equally gifted sister, without culture or independence she would have ended tragically.
"A vicious circle begins to tighten": Beauvoir's account of girlhood.
Boys win adult esteem by being strong and adventurous; girls by being seductive, gracious, well dressed, which spoils spontaneous play. At the Sorbonne women told her: "It's a book for men. We just aren't able to get through it." Believing it made inferiority real.
Acceptance, a fault
Genius presupposes solitude, pride and daring without searching faces for approval; education teaches women timidity, so they lack "the seed of folly". Women, frivolous or grave, stay "serious": they accept the world and seek a place in it.
| A woman who succeeds | A man who succeeds |
|---|---|
| Loses "femininity"; feels less charming beside other women | Gains masculinity in love and sensuality |
| Risks alienating men | Fights "on only one level" |
| Must split her personality or her seductive power | "Perfect unity" of personality |
Men must change first
"Men are the first who must be indoctrinated." Each man seeks proof of superiority through someone inferior. Plants and beasts stay silent; woman is "both nature and consciousness: flower, fruit, bird, and precious stone", so she can be dominated "without sense of injustice". Men cast themselves as cavaliers, but "it is possible only to deliver Andromeda if she is not free". Men's resistance, admitted or denied, is "the greatest obstacle" women face, in the world and in their own hearts.
Myths (Simone de Beauvoir)
Myths chapter.
Why man needs an Other
Men have always held concrete power and set their codes against woman, making her the Other. This served economic interests and also ontological and moral ambitions. Man's life is "lack and movement, it is combat". Nature cannot satisfy him: it is a foreign obstacle or is consumed; "he is alone when touching a stone, alone when digesting a piece of fruit". True alterity is another consciousness, separate and identical, which confirms my freedom and fights it: Hegel's unhappy consciousness, master and slave. The way out is reciprocal recognition through friendship and generosity, "man's highest accomplishment", but a struggle "endlessly begun, endlessly abolished".
Man dreams of "restfulness in restlessness"; this embodied dream is woman, "the perfect intermediary between nature that is foreign to man and the peer who is too identical to him". She is consciousness yet seemingly possessable in the flesh, an escape from the master and slave dialectic.
- Not a slave caste. Free women with religious and social dignity always existed; they accepted male sovereignty, so man never feared revolt. She is the inessential "without reciprocity".
- Genesis. Eve was drawn from Adam's flank and given him to end his loneliness: "his complement in the inessential mode".
- "No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women." "Thank God for creating woman."
When the myth fades
Woman is not the only Other. Spartan women ranked higher but were not transfigured by male dreams; cults of Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler exclude rivals. In rich America, uncertain of life's meaning, woman is divinised; in Marx's democracy "there is no place for the Other". Yet German soldiers wrote sentimental letters to French prostitutes, and communist writers Aragon and Vittorini foreground lover and mother. Women have no myth of their own: they "dream through men's dreams"; heroes are Hercules, Prometheus, Parsifal. Woman is called "sex"; that for her man is carnal "has never been proclaimed because there is no one to proclaim it".
The Other's contradictory faces
Dalilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena, Eve and the Virgin Mary: idol and servant, life and darkness, truth and lies, healer and witch. Kierkegaard: being a woman is "so strange, so confused and so complicated" that only a woman could stand it. The ambiguity is that of the Other itself: Evil needed for Good, door to infinity and measure of finitude.
The double-faced figures of Mother Earth in Beauvoir's account.
Aeschylus, Aristotle and Hippocrates made the male principle the true creator: Demeter multiplies corn but its origin is in Zeus; she is earth and water, he seed and fire. Yet fertility goddesses (Cybele) kept their worship. Beauvoir piles up testimonies: Goethe's Faust II, Blake's "matron Clay", an Indian prophet forbidding ploughing as cutting "my mother's breast", the Baidya of central India, Sophocles' "paternal furrows", an Egyptian song ("I am the earth!"), Islamic "field... grapevine", St Francis, Michelet in the mud baths of Acqui.
Man as fallen god. He wishes to be pure Idea yet finds himself in a contingent body that dooms him to death. The embryo's "quivering gelatine" recalls carrion; birth taboos burn the placenta; Leviticus imposes purification; visitors to Dupuytren's museum stare at foetuses as at a defiled grave. The adolescent blushes to meet his mother with friends and wishes he had sprung armed like Athena. The Parcae and Moirai weave and cut life's thread; Death is a woman. Yet death also promises rebirth (Osiris; Jung on dark waters becoming waters of life; Nietzsche on inorganic matter as "the mother's breast"; Chaucer's old man knocking on the ground: "Oh dear mother, let me in!").
Myth versus reality
| Feature of the myth | Beauvoir's diagnosis |
|---|---|
| Static, Platonic Idea | Contradicting women "are not feminine": experience cannot refute it |
| Absolute Other | Denies the real reciprocity of desire, love, rivalry |
| Incompatible archetypes | Social roles fixed into types: the "bad woman" who dissipates patrimony is a guardian angel at home (Aspasia, Mme de Pompadour) |
| Paired opposites | Saintly mother / cruel stepmother; angel / perverse virgin |
| Chosen by need | Paternalism defines her as immanence; Comte identifies Woman with Altruism |
| Myth vs signification | Michel Leiris's descriptions in Manhood are significations; "Woman is Flesh, Flesh is Night" is myth |
The myth justifies the "master caste": women's suffering is "intended by Nature", a pretext to deny them pleasure or work them "like a beast of burden".
The mystery
The most entrenched myth is feminine mystery. It excuses the man who does not understand, flatters "his laziness and vanity", and preserves the solitary game Kierkegaard preferred to possession. Everyone is "mysterious like everyone" (Maeterlinck); men cannot know women's pleasure, menstruation or childbirth, but women equally cannot know male eroticism. Mystery is reciprocal, yet men make their view absolute.
Literature cannot sustain mysterious women: in Peter Cheyney's thrillers every enigma turns out a spy or a thief. The myth is a luxury of leisured classes; the fellah, the Bedouin, the artisan and the worker relate too concretely to their companions to idealise them. It is "eternity at bargain prices", a trap of the spirit of seriousness.
After the myth
Laforgue: "Mirage! Mirage!... make them real equal companions". Women were most cherished when treated as peers, as in the eighteenth century: read Dangerous Liaisons, The Red and the Black, A Farewell to Arms. Rejecting myths keeps poetry and love but grounds them "in truth". Today the "real woman" is one "who accepts herself as Other", splitting women between equality and inessentiality, while a man's success only adds to his virility. A new aesthetic is emerging (slim, tanned, toned, "like a worker's torso"; short skirts); Peynet draws a fiancé seduced by the mayoress. Turning back is neither possible nor desirable. Laforgue's wish: "When will you be our brothers?"; Breton's Melusina rescued; Rimbaud: when "woman's infinite servitude is broken".
Woman's Situation and Character (Simone de Beauvoir)
Situation and character.
A counter-universe inside the male world
Women never formed an autonomous society. They share a mechanical solidarity of likeness, not the organic solidarity of a community (Durkheim's terms, used without credit), and their counter-universes, from the Eleusinian mysteries to salons, are framed inside the masculine world. Hence the paradox: "Their docility is always accompanied by refusal, their refusal by acceptance."
Woman is called an "eternal child", as workers, black slaves and colonised natives were called "big children" while unthreatening. She does not meet the world as Heidegger's "set of tools" but as indomitable resistance ruled by fate: the spot of blood that becomes a child, the dough that rises, the stain that will not "revive" in the wash. So she believes in magic: telepathy, astrology, Mesmer's baquet, table turning, saints for travellers and lost objects. Time for her is repetition, cycles of pregnancy and flowering, and slow degradation.
Faith instead of judgement
A syllogism does not make mayonnaise. Lacking efficacy, her thinking is "no different from a dream"; taught to defer, she leaves judgement to "the superior caste". "Men make gods, and women worship them," Beauvoir quotes from Frazer. Hence the cult of the chief: generals Boulanger, Pétain and de Gaulle had women's support; L'Humanité's women journalists gushed over Tito's uniform. Faith is "blind, passionate, stubborn and stupid".
| Indicted trait | Situational cause, per Beauvoir |
|---|---|
| Conservatism, fanaticism | Excluded from history, she cannot imagine rebuilding values; Southern women for slavery, women against the Commune |
| Resignation, patience | Powerless against "volcanoes, policemen, employers or men"; also stoic courage |
| Sensuality, frivolity | The harem slave must kill time; little things matter when big ones are barred |
| Servility | The man is "the only means and the only reason for living" |
| Avarice, utility ethic | Absorbed in means (food, clothes, lodging); the golden mean of mediocrity |
| Narcissism, egotism | No concrete communication beyond her family |
| Worry, credulity | Not acting, she imagines every catastrophe as equally real |
| Complaint, Manichaeism | Passive, she wants evil swept out like dust: "everything is the Jews' fault"; de Gaulle as "king sweeper" |
| Tears and scenes | Magical conjuration; Diderot and Constant wept until custom forbade it |
| Lateness, contrariness | Protest against a life of waiting; negating what she cannot replace |
| Lying, calculation | The parasite role; "duplicity wherever there is a coercive regime" (Fourier) |
"Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly."
Resignation, revolt and their limits
Women in the ruins of Pompeii were, Beauvoir says, bent towards the earth while men defied the sky. For every Flora Tristan or Louise Michel, many timid housewives begged husbands not to strike. Yet "when women are concretely called to action... they are as strong and brave as men". The husband becomes "the perfect victim": guilty of being a man, kept close in order to be made to pay; "her supreme consolation is to set herself up as martyr".
- Sophia Tolstoy. Her hysterical scenes, fake suicides and false escapes were unpleasant, but she had no positive way to express revolt; whether she was right "does not change the horror of her situation".
- Suicide. Men succeed more often; women attempt more, avoid knives and guns, drown "like Ophelia". She "plays at rupture" but stays.
- Waiting. Her whole existence waits: for tribute, love, money, the male's desire. Keeping him waiting a few minutes is "meagre revenge".
The self-confirming loop Beauvoir describes: situation produces the traits that are then used to justify the situation.
Magic, logic and the double morality
The engineer at home is a demigod: one word and dinner is served. A miracle is an uncaused break in a rational world; magic is a continuous secret becoming a docile consciousness embraces. The newborn is miraculous to the father, magic to the mother. "Man's experience is intelligible but full of holes; that of the wife is... obscure but complete." Housewives say: "Men, they don't think!" Woman rejects male logic because "in men's hands reason becomes an insidious form of violence": "she refuses to play the game because she knows the dice are loaded". She holds not that truth is otherwise, but that there is no truth.
He wants her as object, yet she makes herself object freely: "this is her original treason". He demands feigned pleasure; afterwards she mocks him with friends, as servants mock bosses. "None of these traits manifests a perverted essence... they reflect a situation." Men encourage them: Helmer in A Doll's House enjoys pardoning; Bernstein's husbands bow to thieving wives; American racists and French colonialists want the black man "thieving, indolent and lying".
Ambivalence and hidden advantages
She trusts a neighbour's anecdote over science and never adds up failures ("That can't happen to me"). Her attitude to man is split: child, drone, tyrant, and also liberating hero; "This is a man!" fuses sexual and social power (Lawrence's phallus). She would return to Bachofen's reign of the Mother, giving more truth to "a garden than a city... a birth than a revolution". "Her life is spent scrubbing pots and pans and it is a marvellous romance." Her body is burden and marvellous double in the mirror.
Conclusion of the chapter
It is as absurd to speak of "the woman" as of "the eternal man". Compared situations, the man's is "infinitely preferable"; but comparing the use each makes of freedom is meaningless, since "freedom is entire in each". In woman freedom remains abstract and can assume itself authentically only in revolt. Liberation must be collective and economic; individual salvation attempts, "transcendence through immanence", produce the narcissist, the woman in love and the mystic.
Conclusion (Simone de Beauvoir)
Second Sex conclusion.
No physiological destiny
The chapter opens with Jules Laforgue: "No, woman is not our brother... the eternal little slave's defiances." Many men still believe in eternal Sturm und Drang. Beauvoir replies that even the praying mantis devours her male only for lack of food; and "humanity is something other than a species: it is an historical becoming". The psychoanalytic penis envy and castration wish matter only if the woman experiences femininity as mutilation; what she wants, ambiguously, is male transcendence itself. Sexuality expresses "the totality of a situation"; it does not define destiny.
Two forms of the combat
| Historical form | Woman's strategy | Man's response |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional (immanence) | Mother, wife, lover as gaolers: drag man into her prison, contradict his values; "All oppression creates a state of war" | Codifies her inferiority |
| Modern (transcendence) | Escape the prison; the "modern" woman accepts male values and claims equality; the "emancipated" woman is active and prehensile | "Petulantly dumps" her; refuses concrete equality; a privileged caste holds a besieging caste in check |
Élise (a figure from earlier in The Second Sex) prizes flesh over spirit; the modern woman prizes thinking, working, creating. Women confuse the issue too: Mabel Dodge used feminine wiles to enslave Lawrence, then sought spiritual domination; many demand "both old-fashioned respect and modern esteem". Woman is "an object paradoxically endowed with subjectivity", so the fight cannot be clear-cut: "whatever he does, he feels duped and she feels wronged".
"What the man and the woman hate in each other is the striking failure of their own bad faith or their own cowardice."
Each camp is its enemy's accomplice: "the woman pursues a dream of resignation, the man a dream of alienation". Montaigne: "It is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other." Man is "a slave to his double", consumed by the need to appear male and superior; "he would be liberated with their liberation. But that is exactly what he fears."
Beauvoir's contrast between the present situation and reciprocal recognition.
Sexuality and the shared condition
If reality were different, sexual postures would mean something different: a woman who pays and dominates may feel proud of her "superb inertia"; already "many sexually balanced couples" think in terms of exchange. "Man is, like woman, a flesh, thus a passivity"; she, like him, is "consent, voluntary gift and activity". "The fact of being a human being is infinitely more important than all the singularities"; "virtue", as the Ancients said, belongs to "what depends on us" (the Stoic phrase).
Answering the objections
2. Life will lose its spice. Reply: abolishing slave markets ended "that delicate Southern civilization" with its azaleas; the voices of the Sistine castrati are gone. Only a barbarian would not appreciate feminine charm, but "if these treasures are paid for with blood or misery, one must be willing to sacrifice them".
3. Uniformity and boredom. Reply: "it is institutions that create monotony": harem slaves are all the same in the sultan's arms. Differences will remain; "those who talk so much about 'equality in difference' would be hard put not to grant me that there are differences in equality".
The charming woman comes "from Thebes, Minos, Chichén Itzá"; she is "a helicopter and she is a bird"; but once grasped "the wife and the mistress speak like everyone else, with their mouths". Few men truly wish women to accomplish themselves: scorners see no gain, admirers see too well what they will lose. "Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future"; new "friendships, rivalries, complicities, chaste or sexual companionships" are already appearing. Recognising each other as subjects, "each will remain an other for the other", and "to give", "to conquer" and "to unite" keep their meaning.
The book ends with Marx: "The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman." "This could not be better said." Men and women must "unequivocally affirm their brotherhood."
Part 5 Introduction: Colonialism and Racialization
Part 5 map.
A timeline of engagement
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1945 | Les Temps modernes issues 1-2 serialise Richard Wright's "Fire and Cloud"; issue 3 carries Sartre on antisemitism |
| 1946 | Sartre's play The Respectful Prostitute; book version of Anti-Semite and Jew |
| 1947 | Wright's Black Boy serialised; Beauvoir tours the USA, mostly with Wright in New York (America Day by Day, 1948); Alioune Diop founds Présence Africaine, with Sartre on French bad faith about colonialism |
| 1948 | Senghor's anthology of new Black and Malagasy poetry, with Sartre's preface "Black Orpheus" |
| 1952 | Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks |
| 1954 | Cartier-Bresson's China book with Sartre's preface; France concedes Vietnamese independence; Algerian war begins |
| 1961 | The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Sartre; Fanon dies aged thirty-six |
Fanon's path
Born in Martinique, taught by Aimé Césaire, Fanon served in the French Army, studied medicine at Lyon on a veterans' scholarship and specialised in psychiatry. Warned that a dissertation on racism would not be accepted, he submitted one on a spinal disorder; the rejected draft became the book. It switches between theory and confession, engages philosophy, psychoanalysis, Négritude poetry and novels, and is "angry, hopeful, urgent, and witty".
Webber's reconstruction of the arc of Fanon's chapter 5 and the negrophobia diagnosis of chapter 6.
- Chapter 5. The shock of being pointed out; the "I" shifts between Fanon and black francophone people generally. Négritude is the turning point: rhythm against colonial analytic rationality. But whites can subsume it as an earlier stage of human culture and enjoy it as adults enjoy children's play. Whichever way black people turn, "they cannot be in control of their own image".
- Chapter 6. Negrophobia: a phobia attributing evil, mysterious power to its object, immune to reasoning. European symbolism of black and white crystallises into an archetype of pure negativity personified as a black person; comics and films, as society's outlets for aggression, cast white heroes and black villains; colonised people absorb the same images.
Sartre's preface praises Cartier-Bresson for refusing the picturesque that dehumanises, showing people in action and our common condition, while presenting desperate poverty; the essay marks economic conditions of freedom becoming central. Fanon, a psychiatrist in Algeria, joined the liberation movement and edited its newspaper.
The Lived Experience of the Black Man (Frantz Fanon)
Fanon lived experience.
Fixed by the gaze
| Layer | Built from | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Body schema | Implicit knowledge (reaching for cigarettes and matches); Lhermitte's sensations | "A genuine dialectic between my body and the world" |
| Historical-racial schema | The white man's "thousand details, anecdotes, and stories" | The black body read through legends |
| Epidermal racial schema | Skin alone: "cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism... Y a bon Banania" | Existing "in triple"; seats left empty on the train; "Nausea" |
The scene escalates: "Look! A Negro!" (a sting), then "Maman, look, a Negro; I'm scared!" "My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day." The litany ("the Negro is an animal... the Negro's going to eat me") ends: "All this whiteness burns me to a cinder." Responses: accepting slave ancestry "the same way President Lebrun was the grandson of peasants"; the liberal clichés ("I had a Senegalese colleague in the regiment, very smart guy"); a defiant obscenity to a woman who calls him handsome.
Exit one: reason
Fanon's successive strategies and their defeats.
Exit two: the irrational
He "secreted a race" around one element: Rhythm! Senghor: rhythm is the life-giving element above all others; "Emotion is Negro as reason is Greek." Césaire's Notebook of a Return: "Those who have invented neither gunpowder nor compass... my negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral." Fanon swims in black magic, circumcision rites and initiation songs described by De Pédrals and Vergiat, and embraces it: "Yes, we [black people] are backward, naive, and free." He quotes Langston Hughes' rivers and Senghor's "Night of Africa, my black night". For a moment he is "poet of the world"; whites turn to black people as "insurance for humanity" when too mechanised. Then: "genetically I represented a phase"; "we will turn to you as the childhood of the world".
Exit three: history, and Sartre's verdict
He excavates black antiquity: Schoelcher, Frobenius, Westermann, Delafosse; Segu and Djenne with "over 100,000 inhabitants"; learned men who debated in Mecca; silver and gold worked 2,000 years ago; Césaire's portrait of peoples "who knew how to erect houses, administer empires... forge steel".
"When I read this page, I felt they had robbed me of last chance": "We had appealed to a friend of the coloured peoples, and this friend had found nothing better to do than demonstrate the relativity of their action."
Fanon's reply: consciousness "needs to get lost in the night of the absolute"; "Black Orpheus marks a date in the intellectualization of black existence", and Sartre's mistake was "in a certain way to drain the spring dry". "I did not create a meaning for myself; the meaning was already there." "I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am." Against "You'll change, my boy", he cites poems: Jacques Roumain's call to "white worker in Detroit black peon in Alabama", David Diop's "The white man killed my father... 'Hey boy, a pastis'", and Diop's "Renegade". "Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man": the white man is not just "the Other" but the master.
"I refuse to accept this amputation. I feel my soul as vast as the world." The chapter ends: "Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep."
The Black Man and Psychopathology (Frantz Fanon)
Fanon psychopathology.
Family and nation
Psychoanalysis treats the family as "psychic object and circumstance" (Lacan). In Europe family and nation are continuous: militarisation revives paternal authority; Joachim Marcus: "The family structure is internalized in the superego... and projected into political behaviour." Fanon contrasts Father Trilles' study of Pygmy religion with the "artificiality" of Tempels' Bantu Philosophy. For the Antillean the chain breaks:
| European child | Antillean child | |
|---|---|---|
| Family to society | Same laws, principles, values | Family has "virtually no ties" with the French structure |
| Marcus's schema | Family to Individual to Society | Family ← Individual → Society; family relegated to the id |
| Source of neurosis | Repressed family Erlebnis (Freud and Breuer's traumas) | Contact with the white world; often no trauma at all |
| Unconscious | Affective amnesia, guilt | The racial drama is "played out in the open", lived consciously |
René Ménil explains the Sorbonne student already on guard: the repressed "African" spirit replaced by a Master symbol "as a garrison controls a conquered city". But often the abnormal black man has never met whites, never seen his father lynched. So Fanon calls on collective catharsis.
Comics and "our ancestors the Gauls"
Every society needs outlets for aggression: games, psychodrama, comics. Tarzan, young explorers, Mickey Mouse are "written by white men for white children" and devoured in the Antilles, where the Wolf, Devil, Savage "are always represented by Blacks or Indians". The black child identifies with the white explorer "in danger of being eaten". G. Legman counts eighteen thousand scenes of violence seen by an American child by 1945 and links the "Bad Injun" myth to national guilt. Reciting "our ancestors the Gauls", the schoolboy adopts a white man's attitude. Fanon even proposes special magazines, songs and history books for black children.
How cultural imposition produces the Antillean's crisis, in Fanon's account.
The phobogenic object
Neither Freud, Adler nor "the cosmic Jung" considered the black man. "The Oedipus complex is far from being a black complex"; Fanon claims ninety-seven percent of Antillean families cannot produce an oedipal neurosis. As late as 1940 "no Antillean was capable of thinking of himself as black"; Négritude was born with Césaire. Few children know Compè Lapin. Using Hesnard and Charles Odier, phobia is anxious fear and revulsion towards an object endowed "with evil intentions and with all the attributes of a malefic power"; affect overrides reason. The black man is phobogenic, from cases by Sérieux and Capgras to the girl "terrified to sleep with a black man".
"In Europe, the black man has a function: to represent shameful feelings, base instincts, and the dark side of the soul."
The language of darkness: Satan is black, "blackening someone's reputation", "a beautiful blond child" versus the incongruous "beautiful black child". In Desoille's waking-dream therapy, descending leads to caves where savages dance; if a black man appears in the first session "he must be removed at once". In Martinique a very dark visitor prompts "What misfortune brings him?" Since the Antillean shares the European unconscious, "it is normal for the Antillean to be a negrophobe": his anima is a white woman, his animus a white man; his mother says "stop acting like a [black]". "After having been a slave of the white man, he enslaves himself." "An Antillean is white through the collective unconscious... The colour of his skin, which Jung does not mention, is black."
Scapegoat and the descent
Moral consciousness splits light from dark; the black man "is constantly struggling against his own image". Following Hesnard, the normal person unloads guilt onto a scapegoat; for a society of "progress, civilization, liberalism", that is the black man. Fanon's memory at fourteen: cheering Allied gains at Benghazi in front of a friend with an Italian father; "Both of us had been victims of cultural imposition." Two neurotic exits, asking not to be seen or valuing the "bad", give way to a third: "through the particular, reach out for the universal". Césaire's Rebel goes down into the "black flood", kills the master ("the only baptism that today I remember"), and rises, Bachelard's "upward psyche": "Gods... you are not gods. I am free."
From One China to Another (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Sartre on China photos.
The game of anomalies
Knowledge of Asia came from "irritated missionaries and from soldiers", then travellers, "soldiers that have cooled off": "Pillaging is called shopping." Natives are now "scorned collectively, which is the civilized form of massacre". The game of anomalies lists differences ("I use a fork, he uses chopsticks") and wins "a prize for sensitivity". As a child Sartre was taught rotten eggs, men sawn between planks, the "inscrutable" soul; he confesses the racial hierarchy he was taught, in which Asians appeared as "superior arthropods". Henri Michaux first showed "China without lotus or Loti"; Cartier-Bresson "completes the demystification".
Words versus images
In words, an old eunuch who carried Empress Tseu-hi (Cixi), "the yellow Agrippina", to the imperial bed in a purple shawl is pure exoticism. In the photograph: universal old age, a wrinkled face, a hand reaching for a banknote; "the poverty and greed of an old parasite of the fallen regime". A peasant eating rice soup has brothers from Athens to Marrakech; bicycle taxis recall the Occupation. "Poverty is the best-distributed thing in the world"; we "now harness them to machines". Laugh at robes and you must laugh at priests; what is laughable is that "there are elites".
"What separates has to be learned; what unites can be seen in an instant... And you will decide what you are on deciding what he is."
| Picturesque claim | Sartre's materialist reply |
|---|---|
| Rotten eggs and shark fins are Chinese food | 400 million Chinese have never eaten them either; they are hungry like Italian labourers and French peasants |
| The Chinese are born schemers | Naples versus Peking: "a Chinese versus a Chinese and a half. A draw"; ruse comes from poverty and craft economy |
| The coolie is a "Chinese grasshopper" | "You immediately become a French frog" |
| Eternal China | "Fragile eternity": the record is about to be smashed by History |
The lighthouse and the poor
In Shanghai the top three floors of a tower are reserved for foreign correspondents: "the eye of the West", dancing "much too high to see what is happening down below" while Chiang Kai-shek loses. In "all the capitals of poverty" people scavenge rubbish already sifted by the poor and pull handfuls from cotton bales; in Nanking a man under fire strips an armchair for one hour's fuel. "Cartier-Bresson has photographed eternity", but "these timeless snapshots are precisely dated; they fix forever the last moments of the Eternal."
Sartre's three temporalities of the album.
Waiting and arrival
Between circular and irreversible time is "a gelatinous duration": waiting. "The masses of Peking and Shanghai are not making History; they are subjected to it." History is made in fields and mountains: "For the first time, a capital awaits the pleasure of the country"; the towns are "lodged like grains of urate" in the living muscle of the countryside. People rub idols' noses and buy pellets for "listless husbands". The bourgeois of Shanghai pray for the communists: "any kind of order rather than the fury of the people". When the last policeman leaves, the crowd takes "practically nothing: the floorboards to make a fire".
Afterword: "No, I'm Not an Existentialist" (Webber; Jeanine Delpech with Albert Camus)
Afterword arc.
Webber's afterword
Camus starts from the absurd, moves through revolt, and arrives at a natural solidarity demanding personal honesty and political freedom. Delpech, a historian and translator who became a novelist, also draws out his view of style and biography and paints "this earnest yet playful intellectual".
Delpech's framing
Camus is famous for The Outsider, The Misunderstanding, Caligula, The Myth of Sisyphus and his Combat editorials. Delpech glosses existentialism with Sartre's "man is a useless passion", lists Jaspers, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Chestov, Scheler and Plato as predecessors, and notes that few young self-styled existentialists know the sources, though Huis Clos gives them a "striking, if not attractive" illustration. Camus seems a headteacher yet almost a student, and answers his phone: "M. Camus has already left."
What Camus said
- Not a school. "Sartre and I are always surprised to see our two names associated." They considered an advertisement refusing "to answer for each other's debts". All their books predate their meeting; The Myth of Sisyphus "is directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers".
- Shared unbelief proves nothing. Neither believes in God or absolute rationalism, but nor do Stendhal, Sade, Gide, Montaigne, Molière, Breton: "Should we put all these people in the same school?" Those who do not live in grace "are the most numerous".
- Absurd as a step. Accepting absurdity is "a necessary experience; it must not become a dead end". It stimulates fertile revolt, which may restore "a relative meaning to existence".
- Solidarity. The war showed "the extreme solidarity between men", even between victims and executioners: "When a Czech was shot, the grocer on Rue de Beaune was targeted." Conditions: men must be frank ("lying confuses things") and free ("one does not communicate with slaves"), and feel some justice.
- Jobs. Car accessories, meteorology, shipping brokerage, prefecture clerk, actor, journalist; never a teacher.
- Style. The American technique used in The Outsider reaches an impasse, "a universe of automata"; "I would give a hundred Hemingways for a Stendhal or a Benjamin Constant." The only eternal revolution in art is "the exact fit of form and content".
- Projects. "A novel about plague, an essay about revolt. Perhaps I should also decide to study existentialism."
Camus's sequence as stated in the 1945 interview, later developed in The Plague and The Rebel.
Camus's position is that absurdity is a starting point that demands revolt and solidarity, not a philosophy of freedom built on nothingness.
Delpech closes doubtful: can understanding or fraternal friendship make bearable a universe of beings resigned to absurdity, when "Hell is other people"? "There is room for doubt", yet his optimism is comforting.
What the Anthology Adds Up To
Main Points
- Existentialism, narrowly defined, is the 1945 Paris movement of Sartre and Beauvoir (Webber).
- Projects, not nature, drive behaviour; they are chosen and can be changed.
- Boredom is a root of evil for Kierkegaard's aesthete, and limitation its cure.
- The public is a phantom created by the press that levels individuals (Kierkegaard).
- God is dead, and his shadows (moral and metaphysical) remain to be overcome (Nietzsche).
- Give style to your character: self-making as an artistic task (Nietzsche).
- The unconscious shows that we do not know our own motives (Freud); Sartre keeps the hermeneutics but rejects the unconscious.
- Anxiety discloses freedom, unlike fear, which has an object (Heidegger, Sartre).
- Bad faith is lying to oneself about freedom or facticity; even sincerity can be bad faith.
- The look makes me an object; shame reveals a self I cannot control.
- Original choice: every life expresses a fundamental project, readable by existential psychoanalysis.
- Responsibility without guarantees: after the bomb, humanity holds its own survival (Sartre, 1945).
- Popular wisdom is darker than existentialism; fixed nature is an excuse (Beauvoir).
- Antisemitism is a passion and a choice, not an opinion (Sartre).
- The metaphysical novel discloses lived ambiguity that treatises cannot (Beauvoir).
- Woman is made the Other, the intermediary between nature and peer (Beauvoir).
- Myths are static and immune to experience; feminine mystery has an economic base.
- Character reflects situation: the "feminine" faults are effects of enclosure in immanence.
- Oppression makes accomplices: each sex suffers from its own bad faith; liberation would free men too.
- Freedom breaks vicious circles: "give woman responsibilities and she knows how to assume them".
- Being-for-others is racialised: the white gaze produces an "epidermal racial schema" (Fanon).
- Négritude can be co-opted as the "childhood of the world"; Sartre's dialectic took Fanon's last refuge.
- The collective unconscious is cultural, acquired through comics, schoolbooks and language (Fanon).
- Against the picturesque: what unites is need and work, seen in an instant (Sartre).
- The absurd is a starting point, demanding revolt and solidarity, not existentialism (Camus).
Frameworks at a glance
| Framework | Author | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Crop rotation | Kierkegaard | Diagnose the aesthetic life |
| Levelling and the public | Kierkegaard | Critique mass opinion |
| Anguish / bad faith / the look | Sartre | Analyse self-deception and shame |
| Existential psychoanalysis | Sartre | Read a life by its original project |
| Self / Other, immanence / transcendence | Beauvoir | Analyse gender as situation |
| Body schema to epidermal schema | Fanon | Describe racialised embodiment |
| Collective catharsis, negrophobia | Fanon | Trace racism into the victim's psyche |
| Picturesque versus snapshot | Sartre | Critique exoticism |
| Absurd, revolt, solidarity | Camus | Ground ethics without God |
Webber's key contrast within the movement (Part 5 introduction).
Who's who
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Jonathan Webber | Editor; introductions and afterword |
| Søren Kierkegaard | Danish precursor; Either/Or, Two Ages review |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Precursor; The Gay Science |
| Sigmund Freud | Precursor; psychoanalysis |
| Martin Heidegger | Precursor; Being and Time |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | Co-founder; seven selections |
| Simone de Beauvoir | Co-founder; six selections |
| Frantz Fanon | Martinican psychiatrist; Black Skin, White Masks |
| Henri Cartier-Bresson | Photographer of the China album |
| Jeanine Delpech | Journalist who interviewed Camus |
| Albert Camus | Novelist who refused the label |
| Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor | Négritude poets quoted by Fanon |
| Richard Wright | Novelist serialised in Les Temps modernes |
Whole-book mechanism.
Portable practice.
Synthesis fork.
Synthesis contrasts.
Author endpoints.
Synthesis by author
- Webber: precise definition; anthology as argument that gender and race belong inside existentialism.
- Kierkegaard: aesthetic rotation and present-age levelling as warnings.
- Nietzsche: value-creation after the death of God.
- Freud: unconscious material existentialists rework rather than obey.
- Heidegger: anxiety disclosing ownmost possibility (used, not worshipped).
- Sartre: anguish, bad faith, look, anti-Semite, postwar engagement.
- Beauvoir: popular defence, metaphysical novel, Second Sex path to reciprocity.
- Fanon: lived Blackness and psychopathology under colonialism.
- Camus (via Delpech): refuses the label; keeps absurd/revolt/measure apart.
Cross-part map
| Part | Authors | Payoff |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Inspirations | Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger | Tools before 1945 |
| 2 BN | Sartre | Ontology of freedom |
| 3 Offensive | Sartre, Beauvoir | Public postwar fight |
| 4 Second Sex | Beauvoir | Gender as situation |
| 5 Colonialism | Fanon, Sartre | Race and look |
| Afterword | Delpech, Camus, Webber | Refusal and close |
About this book
The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy: Selections from Kierkegaard to Fanon by Jonathan Webber (ed.), 2025. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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