← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · robinder
Thread ID: 18760 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-06-22
2005-06-22 10:18 | User Profile
PARIS - Jean-Paul Sartre, the 20th century philosopher whose influence has been on the wane, may be getting the last laugh from the grave as France battles a new existential crisis.
The 100th anniversary of the bespectacled thinker's birth on Tuesday comes amid a bout of soul searching about France's role in the world following voters' resounding rejection of the European Union constitution and turmoil in the country's fabled social welfare system.
With the word "crise" on just about everyone's lips, Sartre's legacy is being re-examined in a flurry of academic gatherings, media reports and commemorative exhibits marking the centennial, as well as the 25th anniversary of his death in April.
"Sartre can be used to decode the sickness that France is living today," said Annie Cohen-Solal, author of a best-selling biography on Sartre. "He plays the role of revealing the identity crisis."
But while Sartre's philosophy is attracting renewed interest in some circles, his status as an intellectual icon has largely faded among the general public.
The philosopher's fans mutter that his works are disappearing from the high school curriculum, and worry that his unapologetic support of controversial left-leaning causes has overshadowed his philosophy.
One of the centennial tributes, a National Library exhibit featuring letters, photos, interviews and manuscripts has drawn disappointing numbers of visitors since March, library officials said.
"France hated him when he was alive and shuns him in death," said philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, author of "Sartre ââ¬â The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century." "He is treated like a pornographer."
Yet Sartre's impact is undeniable.
Admirers praise his criticism of the state, his rejection of the bourgeois society from which he emerged, and his willingness to take sharp, often unpopular, positions on political issues.
He was a co-founder of the left-leaning newspaper Liberation, established in 1973. Today it is a major newspaper in France.
One of Sartre's most enduring legacies may have been his image: that of the archetypal Parisian intellectual.
France has gone through considerable change since the days when Sartre and his illustrious companion Simone de Beauvoir contemplated life and politics at smoky Left Bank redoubts like the Cafe de Flore.
But that era is still romanticized today ââ¬â even if many people know little about the philosophy it produced.
Other echoes of Sartre's France remain: He would likely have approved of the frequent labor strikes, student demonstrations and popular revolts against authority like the EU constitution vote.
Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the late French president, once explained why Sartre was never arrested for his participation in often-raucous demonstrations during the 1960s: "You don't arrest Voltaire," he said.
Sartre is credited with bringing philosophy to the street level, injecting pop-star magnetism into France's rarefied intellectual circles and raising criticism of the state to an art form.
But his missteps were equally as prominent. He defended the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and praised what he claimed was "absolute freedom" of speech in the 1950s Soviet Union before breaking with Moscow following its 1956 invasion of Hungary.
Sartre's image as rebel was reinforced when he refused to accept the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature, seeking to show his contempt for an honor he considered bourgeois.
During the Nazi occupation of France, Sartre wrote "Being and Nothingness," his treatise on existentialism, which holds that people are born without meaning to their lives and have freedom of choice to determine their "essence."
"Hell is other people," said one of his characters in "No Exit," perhaps his best-known play, one of the few that are still regularly performed in French theaters and school auditoriums.
"In his lifetime, France had two faces: that of Sartre and that of de Gaulle," Levy said. "I miss that period; we've fallen a few notches since then."
About 80,000 mourners attended Sartre's funeral in 1980.
But today on the streets, especially among the young, Sartre's significance is often overlooked. Near the Pantheon, students struggled to remember his influence, using terms that echoed his philosophy of nihilism.
"I have no recollection," said Jean-Francois Vergnoux, 22. "It's terrible ââ¬â it's total emptiness when I think about him."
[url="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050621/ap_on_re_eu/sartre_s_shadow/nc:732;_ylt=AnXmwbjxGgwmXaazQ4V5o3t0bBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl"]http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050621/ap_on_re_eu/sartre_s_shadow/nc:732;_ylt=AnXmwbjxGgwmXaazQ4V5o3t0bBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl[/url]