The Words

Rating:
Summary: The Words
Review: A very boring, rambling book... I was really disappointed since I admired Jean-Paul Sartre and his works so much. I didn't learn anything more about Existentialism from this book and I could barely finish it.

Rating:
Summary: The author has become an institution
Review: At present one can only experience-Sartre's-absence, but his words are always present if needed, being embedded in the volumes that now populate the world's libraries, or "temples" as Sartre called them. Sartre divided his life into two sections: reading and writing, and in this book, his autobiography, he expounds, but does not explain, his transitions from one of these sections to the other. This lack of explanation was done on purpose by Sartre: conscious purpose of course. To explain his life would be to institutionalize it, and this is an anathema to Sartre. However, the reader is granted many explanations of Sartre's existence, regardless of Sartre's intent. Such is the nature of the written word: Sartre's choice was not to explain, but the reader is free to choose otherwise. Sartre has condemned all readers with such choices some might say, others would say he has blessed them.

The reader learns of Sartre's "bourgeois" origins": explaining his very baffling attempt to reconcile his view of freedom with Marxism; of his belief that a library is a temple: explaining his command of the literature during and before his time, and inducing his characteristically eclectic philosophy; of the origins of Sartre's idealism, and his thirty-year attempt to rid himself of it: explaining his overwhelming emphasis on consciousness; of his Protestant/Catholic "doubly affiliated" religious background, explaining his atheism (even a mind as free as Sartre's could not reconcile the conflicting doctrines given by these two religions).

Sartre's life can be characterized as about a man who definitely had time on his hands, and controlled it with efficiency of an American. The artistic Sartre, the philosophizing Sartre, the political Sartre, all came about because of his command of time. His works, far from exhibiting spontaneity, as one might expect considering his philosophical view of time, reflect rather an organized, rational view of time. Sartre kept schedules and met deadlines. A profilic author such as Sartre cannot do otherwise. In once criticizing the Faulknerian-Sartorian view of time, Sartre it seems wanted to set the record straight for himself: he did not want to speak of himself and his deeds as past history. This would make him de trops, as in the way of himself, as superfluous as Roquentien in the park. But all we now have of Sartre is his past: his musings in this book, and what he set down in the philosophical and theatrical literature. He is now an institution due to these works.

Rating:
Summary: The author has become an institution
Review: At present one can only experience-Sartre's-absence, but his words are always present if needed, being embedded in the volumes that now populate the world's libraries, or "temples" as Sartre called them. Sartre divided his life into two sections: reading and writing, and in this book, his autobiography, he expounds, but does not explain, his transitions from one of these sections to the other. This lack of explanation was done on purpose by Sartre: conscious purpose of course. To explain his life would be to institutionalize it, and this is an anathema to Sartre. However, the reader is granted many explanations of Sartre's existence, regardless of Sartre's intent. Such is the nature of the written word: Sartre's choice was not to explain, but the reader is free to choose otherwise. Sartre has condemned all readers with such choices some might say, others would say he has blessed them.

The reader learns of Sartre's "bourgeois" origins": explaining his very baffling attempt to reconcile his view of freedom with Marxism; of his belief that a library is a temple: explaining his command of the literature during and before his time, and inducing his characteristically eclectic philosophy; of the origins of Sartre's idealism, and his thirty-year attempt to rid himself of it: explaining his overwhelming emphasis on consciousness; of his Protestant/Catholic "doubly affiliated" religious background, explaining his atheism (even a mind as free as Sartre's could not reconcile the conflicting doctrines given by these two religions).

Sartre's life can be characterized as about a man who definitely had time on his hands, and controlled it with efficiency of an American. The artistic Sartre, the philosophizing Sartre, the political Sartre, all came about because of his command of time. His works, far from exhibiting spontaneity, as one might expect considering his philosophical view of time, reflect rather an organized, rational view of time. Sartre kept schedules and met deadlines. A profilic author such as Sartre cannot do otherwise. In once criticizing the Faulknerian-Sartorian view of time, Sartre it seems wanted to set the record straight for himself: he did not want to speak of himself and his deeds as past history. This would make him de trops, as in the way of himself, as superfluous as Roquentien in the park. But all we now have of Sartre is his past: his musings in this book, and what he set down in the philosophical and theatrical literature. He is now an institution due to these works.

Rating:
Summary: One of Sartre's best
Review: Sartre writes about his very early life. He writes about things that as an adult you aren't even conscious of anymore. How reading a book about horses and armies can bring those things to life. Sartre talks about his grandfather, his mother, his absent father. He is pretty dispassionate about them. The main thing about the book is Sartres' keen observation and reckless honesty. In the usual autobiography you get alot of bluster, the secret to my success type stuff. Someone, I think it was Martin Amis, said, all autobiographies are success stories. You see that all the time. How I rose from my humble background to be a rich and famous such and such. Well you don't get that here. This is Jean Paul's life before he ever did anything noteworthy. Astonishing level of honesty. I look at memoirs differently after this.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good, But Less Than Expected
Review: Sartre's works on Jean Genet and Charles Baudelaire display the power within Sartre's existentialism to psychoanalyze; they take the reader into the very "being" of their subjects, explaining their every eccentricity to their last detail. The effect of such a read is that one has entered the life of these poets. The catch is that upon reading these analyses, one is prompted toward self-reflection--thus letting it sink in that what one finds before them is also strung about one's own life. As a consequence, the end is that you find yourself in an existential crisis, so to speak; i.e., doing some serious thinking about the type of person you are sustaining and whether the life you lead is of any real satisfaction or whether it merits any horror and disgust, shame or dread. "Mind-f*%&ed", in other words. With The Words, however, Sartre refused to drag out the details of deepest parts of his "existential project". The result: we find Sartre to have been compassionate in the details which fill this book. Hence no immersion into the Other's project, little resulting self-reflection on the part of the reader. This is not a moral position of course, but a critical one that suggests that readers will be disappointed if they expect the same experience that has been mentioned above with Baudelaire and Saint Genet. Reviewers have said otherwise below, however, by comparison it does not stand.

Now, two people below have given this book undue criticism. As for Crawford, Sartre was not a nationalist prize--the French mainstream hated his books and he was only popular among intellectual youth--with the exception of later academia. Secondly, the trend of existentialism mostly died off except for the few who find it hip cling to the clothing fashion that accompanied it in the 40's and 50's (these people are negating themselves in bad faith, so I doubt they have read Being and Nothingness). Third, a philosophical account of existence is different than the people who take it up as a fashion.

As for Robinow, how Sartre's philosophy is self-refuting is unclear, seeing as how the consciousness that says "I" is what constitutes my existence and not the "I" that appears as a non-absolute phenomenon, but as a temporally constrained object of the world in relation to consciousness. In other words, it is not the ego that constitutes my being, it is consciousness itself--which is to say that consciousness is ontologically prior to the ego, it is its antecedent. Moreover, that consciousness is afraid of its own spontaneity does not mean that it is afraid to choose nonetheless. For if fear of oneself were such an issue, it would result in suicide, which would be a spontaneous and free choice affirmed despite fear. What Sartre means by this fear is that consciousness is quick to resort to the ego on a reflective level of consciousness so as to not have to choose regarding the situation it is in and the decisions it is faced with. However, this recourse to the ego is only a temporary flight in bad faith, after which it returns to the pre-reflective, non-thetic level of consciousness. This is to say that the fear can always be overcome and it usually is as it is for the most part ambient in our experience on account of it being the case that it is upon the unreflective level of consciousness that fear is recognized non-thetically as "having to be fled from", which involves a choice of reflection to bring about the ego into the world as a transphenomenal object. Thus, it is when a situation is chosen in which decisions are worthy of much anxiety that we should expect the flight in bad faith to the ego (which is an object, out there in the world, opaque yet with spontaneity conferred upon it).

That Sartre's phenomenological ontology is limited and one-sided is of no concern. Sartre admits this himself. Consciousness is only able to perceive one aspect of the world at once, while there are simultaneously an infinite number of perspectives that the world offers--we negate them all for the one we experience at a given time. This is also to say that as the fraction of the world we perceive at a given instant is (1/infinity), ignorance characterizes our relation to the world quite well and our choices are infused with this character all of the time. Hence, Sartre does not emphasize moral mastery so much as say, Ayn Rand (who does it foolishly and Sartre does a nice job of sweeping from it any plausible premise with which it could be justified as having as a starting point).

Now, I do not know what a peak experience is, but whatever it may be, Sartre establishes the conditions for the possibility of such an experience (so long as desire is infused with it as it is in all of experience). The same is to be said of mystical experiences, as I cannot think of why Sartre's thinking would contradict it as a possibility of experience. The only thing that should be considered here is that ontology cannot find values outside of human experience, in which they are confined to subjectivity where they constitute the desire of a subject at every moment. Now, he certainly neglects them to some extent, however it should be noted that he experimented with mescaline and LSD (experimented may be too light of a word, how's consumed heavily). For Sartre, though, consciousness itself is an enigma, having no logical history. Thereby, existing without reason in a world of alienation, constantly failing to achieve its desires, finding its life always at each instant without justification, life, human reality, may very well inspire itself with the awe of its absurdity (e.g., Sartre) or negate itself completely in suicide.

Rating:
Summary: Sinister
Review: Surpassing the likes of Huxley and Orwell in its vision of dystopic horror, told in the guise of a childhood memoir, the story is simple yet brilliantly complex. Jean-Paul is a little boy with no personality ("no super-ego") who longs for fame and eventually takes over the world by creating a new religion, sold as an antidote to fascism. The final irony in this self-reflexive work of fiction is in the title: the boy discovers his own power in that of words, the power to change perceptions and to obscure individual differences (the author knows his Wittgenstein). Infinitely more subtle than any outspoken critique of the Soviet Union, it perhaps has more in common thematically with Nabokov's 'Bend Sinister': the boy's description of himself as 'toady' suggests a kinship with that book's villain, The Toad, founder of the 'Average Man Party'. I would suggest this book was both the peak and death-knell of the existential / nouveau roman era that combined narrative objectivity with moral-ambiguity-by-numbers, a belief attested by the extraordinary poetic and imaginative range of the great French authors since 1964, such as Jean Barth, Donald DeLille and Thomas Pynchonne.

Rating:
Summary: so what?
Review: This autobiography is rather dull, confirming my suspicion that Sartre is over-rated, as much a product of a nationalist culture-aggrandizement machine as of his talent.

Coming from a bizarre family, he was maladjusted and socially inept, and so he lived in the world of books. No wonder he thought and wrote such strange things: he didn't have a clue about how to live as a normal person. Then, in the part not covered in the book, he built a brilliant career as an independent yet professional intellectual from his obsessions. If this kind of thing is your cup of tea - and if you buy into the myth of Sartre's genius - then you will like this book. I approached on its own terms as a literary work, without a fascination for this little toad, and I was left unimpressed. Not even the writing, which a French pal praised to me and which I read in the original, is very good.

As I put it down, I felt, "so what." Sartre was just a self-obsessed, bright twerp of a kid.