1. Jean-Paul Sartre
and
Existentialism

2. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) Nausea (novel) – 1938
The Wall (stories) – 1939
The Flies (play) – 1943
Being and Nothingness – 1943
No Exit (play) – 1944
Roads to Liberty (novel trilogy) –
Existentialism is a Humanism – 1946
What is Literature? (essay) – 1947
Notebooks for an Ethics (posthum.) – 1948
Search for a Method – 1957
The Condemned of Altona (play) – 1959
Critique of Dialectical Reason – 1960
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ( )

3. «A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into
NY Times, 1964 (Existentialist thinks his writings would be compromised.)
«A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into
an institution.»

4. Existentialism: An Ontology (Being and Subjectivity)
Ambiguity of Being Human
Being-in-itself
(objecthood, facticity,
non-conscious)
Being-for-itself
(indeterminate subjecthood,
transcendence, consciousness)

5. Existentialism: An Ontology (Intersubjectivity)
Being-for-others
(objectification, alienation,
gaze of the other)
Human reality is an uneasy
combination of the three
kinds of being

6. «What if there is no God?»: Meaning of Life?
Love and Death, Woody Allen (1975)

7. Existentialism: An Ethics of Freedom
Existence precedes essence
Man is what he makes of himself
Man is freedom and responsibility
Man must choose himself
(what he concretely does
in a situation)
abandonment, anguish
The Scream, Edvard Munch (1893 version)

8. Existentialism: An Ethics of Authenticity
Bad faith vs. free choice
Seeing as necessity, fact or
inevitable what is undecided
or a choice
Seeing oneself as an object
(«Me» or Ego)
Mauvaise foi:
Bad faith, self-deception
Flight from freedom and contingency

9. Existentialism contra Bad Faith and Inauthenticity

10. «The Wall»: Spanish Revolution and Civil War (1936-39)
Tom Mann Company
International Brigade fighters from Britain
(Tom Steinbock from Ireland)
Anarchist and Socialist Workers’ Unions
(Spanish anarchist Pablo Ibbieta)

11. «The Wall»: Questions for Section
What does the figure of the «wall» stand for in the story?
What are the reactions or realizations of the three characters as they wait to be executed in the morning?
What happens when the dimension of the future is closed to the characters?
What kind of choices, if any, are made by the characters under the circumstances depicted in the story?
How can we interpret the ending of the story from an existentialist point of view?