candidacy for being
Or - we now approach one of the most subtle and urgent suggestions of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - what is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example, and especially when we fall deeply, hopelessly, brutally, stupidly in love.
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Sartre lived the way he spoke. He put the money where his mouth was. He was the most socially, politically engaged celebrity intellectual of his time, more so than Neruda, Bertrand Russell, and anyone else I can think of. He inherited the traditions of the worldly philosophers and went beyond, and for that he was second to none and inspiring to many. all his life he talked about the authenticity of being, and he practiced his own verbal provocations. For liberals, socialists, Maoists, anarchists, he was their high priest. He made it unequivocally clear that all philosophical questions are ethical questions and would be meaningless without real-life applications. He understood that all human societies commit oppression and exploitation of others, and here exists the most fascinating Sartrean paradox: he was always skeptical, and even pessimistic, but he was also unfailingly idealistic. He showed us how it is possible to be both at the same time, because only the genuinely idealistic can afford to be genuinely pessimistic and they are the two sides of the same coin, the power of each side kept in check and also aided by the other. He believed in the role of revolution in changing the status quo. He wanted to see a future where people live equally, freely and authentically. That's the mega reason why he was drawn to Karl Marx (he also admired the way Marx analyzed class struggle and the dynamics of history in the dialectic methodology of Hegel) and why he held undying hope for the communist movement all around the world even when the reality discouraged it. Supporters of the French occupation of Algeria exploded a bomb outside his home. When he refused to accept the Nobel Prize because he didn't want to be identified with an institution and make any compromise, he became something larger than life. His contempt for all things bourgeois was legendary, but the bourgeois denizens remained part of his core audience, because they recognized in him an attractive alternative for how life ought to be lived, at least in theory - not many people could refuse a lucrative job in a company or institution that helps to perpetuate the status quo, openly profess their solidarity with the oppressed and exploited, oppose on record and in action their government's invasion and occupation of another country, and support revolutions that involve force and possible violence.
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