Book contents
- Frontmatter
- I Introduction
- II Existentialism in Historical Perspective
- III Major Existentialist Philosophers
- 4 Kierkegaard’s single individual and the point of indirect communication
- 5 “What a monster then is man”: Pascal and Kierkegaard on being a contradictory self and what to do about it
- 6 Nietzsche: after the death of God
- 7 Nietzsche: selfhood, creativity, and philosophy
- 8 Heidegger: the existential analytic of Dasein
- 9 The antinomy of being: Heidegger’s critique of humanism
- 10 Sartre’s existentialism and the nature of consciousness
- 11 Political existentialism: the career of Sartre’s political thought
- 12 Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism: freedom and ambiguity in the human world
- 13 Merleau-Ponty on body, flesh, and visibility
- IV The Reach of Existential Philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
- OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES OF CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS
10 - Sartre’s existentialism and the nature of consciousness
from III - Major Existentialist Philosophers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- I Introduction
- II Existentialism in Historical Perspective
- III Major Existentialist Philosophers
- 4 Kierkegaard’s single individual and the point of indirect communication
- 5 “What a monster then is man”: Pascal and Kierkegaard on being a contradictory self and what to do about it
- 6 Nietzsche: after the death of God
- 7 Nietzsche: selfhood, creativity, and philosophy
- 8 Heidegger: the existential analytic of Dasein
- 9 The antinomy of being: Heidegger’s critique of humanism
- 10 Sartre’s existentialism and the nature of consciousness
- 11 Political existentialism: the career of Sartre’s political thought
- 12 Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism: freedom and ambiguity in the human world
- 13 Merleau-Ponty on body, flesh, and visibility
- IV The Reach of Existential Philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
- OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES OF CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS
Summary
SARTRE AND MODERN IDEALISM
When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980 his body lay in state and was viewed by more than fifty thousand people. It is safe to say that few of these were there because the deceased had authored a volume with the forbidding subtitle, “An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology,” or because he had helped to free modern thought from the spell of transcendental idealism. Sartre died a notorious public intellectual – “the hated conscience of his century” – and it was his pugnacious advocacy of unpopular causes, his commitment to resistance in all its forms, his well-known novels and plays, and, of course, his association with the legends of “existentialism,” that fascinated the crowd. Sartre dominated French intellectual life as no one had before and no one has since, but by 1980 the idea that his philosophy was worth critical consideration seemed quaint. Being and Nothingness? Old hat. Naïve. Pre-linguistic-turn. Metaphysical. Phenomenological. Sartre's idiom seemed irrevocably tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had finally laid to rest. No matter that Sartre himself had deconstructed the metaphysical subject; the emphasis on consciousness in Being and Nothingness marked it as passé.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism , pp. 199 - 226Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
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