This chapter starts unearthing the political import of the existential aesthetic judging sensibility by engaging Sartre's and Beauvoir's existentialist visions of the situated condition of human political existence. The analysis of each thinker opens with a brief biographical preface, focusing on their practical ethical and political engagements. Tracing their insights into the roots of modern crisis, the chapter next draws on their critiques of the abstract notions of truth and knowledge and examines their attendant turn to the mode of aesthetic judgement. It discloses how their aesthetic sensibility illuminates political judgement as a creative, communicative practice of world-disclosure that confronts us with our responsibility for the world, and appeals to our capacities of engaging it in action. Building on this initial exposition, the chapter delves into Sartre's and Beauvoir's increasing recognition of the worldly perplexity of political judgement arising from the weight of oppressive structures and forces that frustrate any easy assumption of freedom. It discerns how their narrative judging sensibility becomes oriented towards grasping the complexity of a given political reality and confronting the uncertainty and tragedy of political action.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. He was schooled at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy and psychology, and earned his agrégation in 1929. Shortly after, he started work on what was to become one of the most prolific philosophic and literary careers of the twentieth century (Thody 1971: 25–6). It was also around that year that he met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his personal and intellectual companion until his death in 1980 (Thody 1971: 26). With the publication of Nausea in 1938 and Being and Nothingness in 1943, Sartre gained international acclaim. His radical ideas of human freedom and responsibility stirred the complacency of the predominant ‘bourgeois’ world-view, and established the vogue of existentialism for decades to come.

Throughout his career, Sartre was at pains to distance himself from the idealism of the philosophical tradition, which led him into an enthusiastic embrace of Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenological approach to reality. But it was only during and especially after the war that ‘Sartre's great theme’ of how to engage his ontological and ethical notion of freedom in the political realities of the day came into its own (Aronson 2004: 95).