Most philosophy is done in moments of relaxation: gazing out the window, reading a book, or conversing with a friend.
It's no coincidence that in Ancient Greece, where the Western philosophical tradition began, philosophy was mainly done by a social class of people so wealthy that they didn't have to work at all.
Sometimes, though, turmoil and disarray – even war – have been conducive to philosophical reflection. Of no-one is this truer than the great French philosopher, playwright, essayist, and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre.
Looking back on his life in 1975, Sartre observed that his thinking underwent a "great change" during World War II. In fact, if Sartre hadn't been called up to fight for France or experienced imprisonment and occupation at the hands of the Nazis, existentialism, as we know it today, might not have existed.
So what did he learn?
The unbearable lightness of being
To understand the effect of the war on Sartre's intellectual development, we have to know something of his philosophy prior to it.
By 1939 Sartre was already a talented writer. However, his philosophical works – though solid – lacked any sense of urgency or robust engagement with the complexities of human life.
Instead, Sartre's greatest pre-war achievement was a novel, Nausea, which is to this day beloved by disaffected teens the world over.
Nausea tells the story of Antoine Roquentin, a troubled and misanthropic soul. Roquentin realizes that nothing exists for any real reason – including himself – and this fills him with a deep revulsion: hence, nausea.
This is clearest in a scene partly inspired by Sartre's ill-fated experiment with mescaline (for years, he experienced flashbacks, often involving hostile crustaceans). Roquentin sits before a chestnut tree, comprehends its utter contingency, and is disgusted by how it piles "up to the sky, spilling over, filling everything with its gelatinous slither."
Roquentin's fascinating but bleak view of existence broadly represented Sartre's own before the war. Clearly, however, it was woefully incomplete: missing from the novel – and Sartre's philosophy – was any positive vision of human action and relations.
Freedom
Perhaps ironically, Sartre only came to develop his humanistic version of existentialism after being exposed to the inhumanity of war.
In September 1939, Sartre was called up to serve on the frontlines as a meteorologist, compiling weather reports in Alsace.
Although the Nazi war machine quickly crushed France, nothing could dent Sartre's voracious appetite for reading and writing. By some estimates, Sartre produced, on average, twenty published pages of writing for every day of his working life. His time on the frontlines was no exception, as he filled several notebooks with thoughts about human existence.
Sartre's basic idea from the war is that human beings are uniquely free to choose themselves.
This is the meaning of Sartre's well-known slogan, "existence precedes essence." We alone are free to create ourselves, to choose our values, and find our own meaning in life. We're totally free to define who we are – because, according to Sartre, there's no God to define us on our behalf.
Curiously, Sartre doesn't actually spend much time trying to disprove the existence of God – and his existentialism is arguably compatible with some forms of pantheism. Sartre, though, just assumes atheism to be correct and then proceeds to think through the consequences.
For this reason, he was often charged with pessimism and nihilism, but Sartre says that this is entirely wrong. Instead, he's adamant that his is an optimistic creed: the idea that we are whatever we decide to do is ultimately a vision of freedom – and one that gives our choices all the weight in the world.
Solidarity
With France's defeat, Sartre was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp, Stalag 12D, near Bonn in Germany. Just like his nine months on the frontline, his nine-month imprisonment was philosophically fruitful.
Sartre is often regarded as a philosophical misanthrope, thanks to declarations such as 'Man is a useless passion' and 'Hell is other people' (which is, in fact, a line of dialogue from a play).
This is only part of the story, however.
Within the camp, he bonded with Frenchmen from all walks of life and seemed to learn something positive about humanity that Nausea had lacked. He learned, in short, about solidarity.
Although we're free to invent ourselves because there's no human nature, there is nevertheless a shared human condition. That condition consists in our being born and surging up in the world, finding ourselves, finding meaning, and doing so with the knowledge of our own mortality.
Sharing this condition with others places us all in the same existential boat. More than that, however, Sartre thinks that as we make choices, we not only define who we are but, by extension, others too.
This is admittedly a strange idea. What he's getting at is that by choosing one course of action rather than another, we're effectively saying: 'this is what one should do with one's life – and not only me with my life but anyone.' So there's a universalism rather than an individualism to Sartre's thought: we should see ourselves as reflecting the whole of humanity and take responsibility accordingly.
Sartre developed this line of thought while giving lectures to other prisoners – particularly a group of Jesuit priests he'd befriended. Even though they and Sartre were divided on matters of religion, all bonded over a shared fate and love of ideas.
At the priests' invitation, Sartre wrote a play – his very first – to be performed by fellow prisoners on Christmas Eve, 1940. The result, Bariona, is remarkable in that it's an unashamedly Christian play: Jesus is depicted as the Messiah, including in rapturous tones when Sartre movingly portrays Mary's maternal love:
"And no other woman has had God just for herself in that way. A very tiny God whom she can take in her arms and cover with kisses, a warm-bodied God who smiles and breathes, a God she can touch, a God who is alive. And if I were a painter, it is at a moment like this that I would paint Mary. I would try to capture the air of affectionate daring and delicate shyness with which she puts out her finger to touch the soft little skin of this baby God whose warm weight she feels on her lap and who smiles at her".
It's tempting to think that this breathtaking passage is evidence that Sartre temporarily veered from his atheist convictions. Based on everything he and the priests later said about their conversations, though, Sartre's encounter with God was purely in the imagination.
Regardless, this in itself is significant as it exemplifies the solidarity running through Sartre's thought. They were very different from himself, no doubt – but they shared in the human condition and a fundamental respect for humanity.
Resistance
Quite incredibly, Sartre escaped from prison by simply asking to leave. With his eyesight genuinely failing, he requested permission to visit an ophthalmologist outside the camp. He was duly granted a pass to leave for that purpose and, unsurprisingly, never returned.
Sartre instead returned to Paris, where he lived through four long years of German occupation. It was, he says, a disorienting experience: by day, the soldiers could be polite, innocuous even, while at night, they tortured and stole away anybody accused of subversion.
In those conditions, Sartre learned the value of standing up to oppression – and this is the final reason why his philosophy is a humane one. For not only are we free to choose who we are, and not only does this choice imply a choice for humanity as such, but we need, Sartre says, to ensure the conditions for that freedom.
Under Nazi occupation, that meant aiding the French Resistance, and Sartre played a small role in it, mainly by writing subversive literature.
In his eyes, the Resistance represented the best of France, even the true France. He called it a 'new Republic': one where every citizen "knew what he owed to every other and that each could count on that alone. Each of them understood, in the completest loneliness, his historic role and responsibility. Each of them set himself freely, irremediably, against the oppressors. And in his freedom in choosing himself, he chose the freedom of all".
As we've seen, Sartre was often described as a nihilist during his life – a charge that he staunchly denied. Today, he's more often regarded as a prophet of the naked individualism that looms so large in our culture. Yet this misinterpretation should be resisted just as fiercely.
What Sartre learned during WWII was that the individual is never truly isolated. On the contrary, we are bound together by a common condition. Equally, we never live only for ourselves, but in the process of living, forge a life as though we were doing so for humanity as such. And the conditions that allow each of us to do so are worth fighting for.
So if Sartre's existentialism had to be summed up, this might be one way to do it: freedom isn't freedom from others, to do as we please. It's freedom with others – even freedom for others.
That's not a bad thing to learn.
Editor’s Note:
It is easy to respect Sartre’s intellect, bravery, open-mindedness and esprit de corp. What can be difficult, is processing what appear to be internal inconsistencies in what he held. For instance, as we learn above, he believed that “We're totally free to define who we are – because, according to Sartre, there's no God to define us on our behalf.”
To many, the opposite would appear to be true. The logical implication of Godlessness is determinism—that the material world (which is all there is) obeys the laws of physics and is wholly predetermined. In this regard, it is God who provides the possibility of freedom rather than limiting it.
As such, even though he abandoned his initial negative thinking, nausea is indeed the appropriate response to a Godless universe. Even free-will does not rescue it. The freedom to choose between two meaningless options will be meaningless however you slice it.
Finally, leaving aside the theological problems of “a very tiny God” while respecting his camaraderie with the priests, it would seem that if Sartre embraced concepts like love, unity, freedom and individuality, then deep down, he tacitly accepted the existence of a metaphysical reality in that none of those concepts are to be found in material one.