Sartre: Philosopher, Writer, and Public Intellectual

Symposium on the 100th anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre.
August 22, 2005
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Juha Sihvola

Orwell: 'predominatly an windback'
Sartre published 20 pages per day on an average.

Kari Palonen

1956-1970 homo politicus
Déjouer
Later, political dilettante
Sartre treats everybody as a political animal
Sartre never told not to vote
Max Weber - comparaisons
Rationality of voting - Virginia vote interpretation

Robert Solomon

Bad faith, insincerity, inauthenticity...
Jammes: emotion (passive), physiological mechanism
Sartre: bound to intentionality
Trad. causal account (coffee)
Sartre: strategy, purpose, for a reason
prereflective: Strategy not spelled out to myself in order to work. Spontaneity
Sour grapes. Resentment. Magical transformation of the world. Change your vision of the world in order to save face. Escape.
Duality of the world - Husserl rejected
Friendliness of stewardesses. Genuinity
Bad faith: using your emotions as an excuse. Using your love as an excuse. Refuse to take responsibility for what you do, for what you are.
Bad translation: self-deception. Both know and not know the truth in order to lie to oneself.
Taking responsibility is not bound to knowing the truth. Wrong start.
I am what I take responsibilty for. Facticity (from Heidegger). Transcendance (potentialities - unfortunate word: beyond the facts).
Bad faith: confusing one's transcendance and one's facticity.
Phenomenology and ontology.
Bad faith requires reflection -- animals cannot be in bad faith.
Enjoy your anger.

Esa Saarinen

Reductive approach doesn't do justice to Sartre.
Encompassing to a whole approach

1. Uniqueness: what makes somebody unique (St Genet, Flaubert). Theme of choice
2. Abundance: new translation of the Bible into Finnish -- bread multiplication as a great jig. Source of irritation for academics. Scarcity.
3. What's beyond the rational. Sartre's masterplan? St Genet out of a peffis.
4. Contigent and generic in the same time. Could be in any way, but happens to be in a certain way. Editor of La Cause du Peuple.
5. Hope. Sense of warmth. Levy's interview.

1. Communicate
2. Be personal and courageous: opposed to Russell
3. Influence: use philosophy
4. Have artistic credibility: philosophy as a performance
5. Sense of life: Christoffer Alexander: A Pattern Language -- new book (2002)

Sara Heinämaa

Hints, water, fire. Ontology. Objective meaning of snow. Melting. Slime (mysogenious! -- visqueux)
Kristeva: abject
Husserl's stimulations.
Merleau-Ponty. Attractions and repulsions.
The structure of perception is not final.
Association between slime and feminism. Obsenity of feminine sex. Literary tradition: Les Fleurs du Mal

Beauvoir reninforces. Humid, heat, shell, carnivorious plants. Glue.
Doean't repeat, but fights to disclose the limits. Internal critique.
Attitudes: artistic, infantile, etc. Feminine and masculine.
Objective meaning non universal, but limited to men (feminine sex).

Kai Mikkonen

"Sick words"

• Responsibility. War had sickened the words, but cured the literature.
• Desire for the real. Against Bataille. He fights poetic denial of the real. Baudelaire: someone "other".
• Absorption. Les Mots: naive reader. Active reading: freedom. Ceremony of the gift.
• Impostor. Words replace the world. Tomstone to literary art. Farewell to literature. St Augustine converted to Christianism, and wrote his memories in this perspective.