Documentary on the life of Jean Paul Sartre : The Road to Freedom

Summary

Highlights

• Sartre's philosophy highlights the eerie freedom discovered under German occupation during WWII. 🇩🇪
• Existentialism brought a revolutionary idea that existence precedes essence, challenging traditional values. 🔄
• Sartre's relationship with Simone de Beauvoir showcased his unconventional views on love and freedom. ❤️

Key Takeaways

• Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of freedom was shaped under the dire constraints of WWII German occupation. 🇩🇪
• Key to Sartre's existential philosophy is the idea that life is meaningless, but we are free to choose our meaning. 🤔
• Existentialism was groundbreaking for suggesting that we are responsible for our own actions, with no divine blueprint. 🌌

Overview

Documentary on the life of Jean Paul Sartre : The Road to Freedom Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]
• 00:30 - 01:00 [Music] [Music] we had lost all our rights and first of
• 01:00 - 01:30 all the right to speak we were insulted every day and had to keep silent but that is precisely why we were free as the German poisons seeped into our minds as we were constantly watched every gesture we made was a commitment the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre spent a lifetime defying conventional logic the man who never felt so free as under German occupation would go on to Challenge almost every assumption about
• 01:30 - 02:00 the way we live in his search for the meaning of freedom what struck means I would say the physical nearly physiological sense of freedom a sort of Freedom embodied made body he was he was freedom it was lying in a German prisoner of war camp that sarch working in secret first began to realize the potential of his ideas about personal freedom
• 02:00 - 02:30 he didn't know it at the time but they would become the basis for the philosophy known as existentialism which would transform the mental landscape of post-war Europe ideas so potent they would turn satra himself into a cult figure an entirely new kind of thinker who seemed to speak to the Ordinary People he spoke about Freedom he spoke about action he spoke about despair and he tried to tell everyone that you
• 02:30 - 03:00 know you are in charge of your own life only you is in charge of that you are allowed to build it the way you want and it's it will be your own work of art it is not his fault if people like us who were not philosophers who were not thinkers took him as prophet but there was another Bleaker less optimistic side to satra and his ideas the moment when you realize that your
• 03:00 - 03:30 existence is not founded upon any past objective facts that your existence consists of what you're going to make of it there is something slightly horrifying maybe about about that recognition I mean it removes your excuses it removes your alibis this is a world in which we are not only condemned to be free but in which freedom
• 03:30 - 04:00 is the freedom to do anything at all freedom is as complete as he says then one is faced with a valueless universe and that I think is what his people if one can put it like this are always afraid of because nothing is a failure and this is a very frightening thought such an uncompromising philosophy of
• 04:00 - 04:30 Freedom might seem impossible to live by but that is exactly what satra tried to do throughout his long and controversial life he refuses order he refuses uh family he refuses children he refuses being faithful everything is a contrary and he's happy well he's a real I don't know you should kill men like
• 04:30 - 05:00 that you should burn them [Music] it was no accident that John Paul sartre's philosophy reached a really wide public for the first time during the immediate aftermath of World War II France was an exhausted country ashamed of its past and fearful of the future and such's ideas brought a message of
• 05:00 - 05:30 hope everybody realized that the old Frameworks of values on which they'd depended you know perhaps for Generations were collapsing and Santa's idea was that this was actually a fantastic moral opportunity other people were wringing their hands and saying nobody believes in Christianity anymore nobody believes in the in the family and in the moral standards of our mothers and fathers and our grandparents and Santa's idea was that actually from a moral point of view that was brilliant because it meant that people were taking responsibility for
• 05:30 - 06:00 their actions in new kind of ways to be told you are responsible for the period of history that you are living in you have not only the right to choose but the duty to choose and if you are now surrounded by poverty by War by oppression by cruelty that's what you have chosen and as an idea this is like champagne it's tremendously exciting bubbly
• 06:00 - 06:30 um it gives you an exhilaration because it gives you tremendous power what matters is what we choose the future to be we can choose anything we want you and I together are going to make the future [Music] in the heady atmosphere year of newly liberated parrots such as existentialist ideas found fertile ground providing the Jazz generation with a personal philosophy of Freedom which expressed
• 06:30 - 07:00 their instinctive rejection of the past we were against everything that had uh that seemed a little for order so we hated that and as much as we could we did all that was forbidden and prohibited it was prohibited to dance with ants it was prohibited to Hear jazz music we heard Jason [Music]
• 07:00 - 07:30 but satra himself had more personal reasons for wanting to leave the past behind born in 1905 into an upper middle class family the death of his father and hatred of his stepfather drove the precocious child to reinvent himself as a character unconnected to the adults around him he looked on the death of his father as a great Liberation now that's probably not the way he looked at it in the five
• 07:30 - 08:00 or six years after losing his father but he felt that he had never had this pressure of a man he ought to model himself on and that he had to find his own models of what he wanted to be he needed to believe he was free to make himself into something different um the ability to reinvent oneself the ability to choose
• 08:00 - 08:30 um became the most important thing that was his possession and therefore in his philosophy it became the most important thing that anyone else could possess another factor in the young sartre's need to remake himself was his appearance an infection had left him with an extreme squint and when he lost his baby curls he was horrified to discover himself ugly the major turning point came when the
• 08:30 - 09:00 golden curls were cut off and he came home and saw something rather different in the mirror and much worse found that other people were no longer reacting to him as they had before he had lost that charm and from then on it was his brain that was golden would go on to study at the prestigious in Paris where he quickly developed a reputation as an unconventional Bohemian figure the student who came second to
• 09:00 - 09:30 him in their final philosophy exams was the writer simonda Beauvoir foreign always wanted to be a writer he
• 09:30 - 10:00 initially took a post as a school teacher during his spare time he developed a strong interest in phenomenology a new branch of philosophy that offered a radical account of the workings of human consciousness in 1933 he took a year off and went to Berlin to study under Edmond husso the world's leader in that field when search returned to Paris he felt he had found an entirely new way of seeing man's existence in the world the big idea he got was
• 10:00 - 10:30 that to be conscious of something is to relate to an item in the world rather than to relate to some you know representation of it within your head what we think of as self-consciousness is actually our consciousness of the world the idea that we have such a thing as a self an inner character an essential being that we truly are that is a myth according to Saturn is the whole kind of moral impulse of his work is to try and get people to abandon the
• 10:30 - 11:00 idea to give up so actually in some ways rather comforting security blanket of an idea that there is some answer some inner answer to the question who we are Santa's whole argument is that there is no predetermined character which makes you be who you are who you are is a function of what you do such a loved Cinema especially Thrillers and went most evenings he was struck by the difference between the characters on the screen and the
• 11:00 - 11:30 people on the streets outside the cinema the people outside could do anything they liked because they were making it up as they went along unlike in the films he saw there was no pre-ordained script in real life inspired by Hussein and his Cinema experience Sarge began writing an essay on what he called the contingency of existence the fact that we seem to be here by chance with no purpose in life simonda Beauvoir who was now his lover suggested he rewrite it as a thriller
• 11:30 - 12:00 the result was a novel published in 1939 which gave a name to existential angst nausea here we all are all of us eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and there's nothing nothing absolutely no reason for existing I Remember My Philosophy teachers in French DC they were
• 12:00 - 12:30 flabbergasted by suck because generally you know philosophers talk about the lamp on their table you know when I perceive the lamp on my table what do I see now here was sat saying I am in a cafe and I want to know what the essence of the waiter is that was very new cast in the form of a fictional diary in which the central character discovers that existence is meaningless nausea was an entirely original piece of writing which immediately became widely read it translated complicated philosophical
• 12:30 - 13:00 ideas into familiar everyday images at its heart was an encounter with a tree during the course of which comes face to face with what he calls the key to existence foreign there it was clear as day existence had lost the inoffensive aspect of an abstract category it was the actual glue of things this root was molded in existence
• 13:00 - 13:30 I realized that I'd found the key to existence the key to my nausea to my whole life I'd experienced the absolute the absolute or the Absurd in front of this great rugged poor neither ignorance nor knowledge mattered [Music]
• 13:30 - 14:00 um Davos Davos University um songs
• 14:00 - 14:30 when war broke out zarcha was conscripted into the army and assigned to a meteorological unit charting wind conditions to direct artillery fire operating well away from the front line he found that he had a surprising amount of free time on his hands salt didn't have a lot of guard Duty and he would send balloons up in the air it
• 14:30 - 15:00 might be in a very philosophical gesture and wait to see which way they they drifted and he had uh what she did not possess in unlimited quantities when he was a teacher that his time and there he could reflect on himself and also reflect on the world in this somewhat unreal situation sarcha thought and wrote intensively he worked on a fictional Trilogy the roads to freedom and began the major philosophical work of his life being and
• 15:00 - 15:30 nothingness it was heavily influenced by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who by strange coincidence had worked as a meteorologist in the first World War Peter and Keller went off to get hydrogen it was their turn I reread Heidegger's lecture what is metaphysics I spent the day staking out a position vis-a-vis his the philosophy I'm writing is personal it plays a role in my life protecting me
• 15:30 - 16:00 against The Melancholy gloom and sadness of War philosophy and life have really become one when France fell satra was captured and imprisoned his year as a prisoner of war made him question for the first time the extreme individualism of his thinking life Phil experience
• 16:00 - 16:30 [Music] foreign [Music] the social when satra escaped from the prison camp
• 16:30 - 17:00 and returned to occupied Paris he was determined to take part in some kind of resistance he would have liked to become a man of action instead he threw himself into the most powerful subversive activity he could engage in his writing a Volvo foreign
• 17:00 - 17:30 [Music] ly on a political play the novels and his philosophical writings he wrote fast his ideas had been well prepared during his imprisonment his play the Flies a reworking of Greek myth and staged in 1942 was a thinly disguised attack on the collaborationist Vichy government for preaching guilt and
• 17:30 - 18:00 submissiveness to the downcast French foreign once Freedom explodes in the human soul God can do nothing against man God can do nothing against this pillar of granite against this irresistible column man's freedom in an explosion of work Sartre completed being a nothingness in the next year it was a brilliantly original synthesis of ideas from Heidegger which became the core of existentialism
• 18:00 - 18:30 at its heart was the concept of authenticity the idea that individuals can always choose their own actions even in situations that appear to enslave them a situation um [Music]
• 18:30 - 19:00 was still filing when the roof fell on top of him he dropped his rifle and fell 15 minutes we thought in a fury I'll give anything just to hold on for 15 minutes Christ we said aloud no one shall say we didn't hold out 15 minutes be fired and he was cleansed he was all powerful he was free
• 19:00 - 19:30 here is the news read by Richard Wessel Paris has been liberated I communicate just received from General Koenig announces that it has been liberated by French forces of the Interior we didn't want to see the French see is the French they came by the south we wanted to see the English and the Americans and they came along the scene so we went plus de la Concord and it was wonderful really wonderful
• 19:30 - 20:00 to see them to see the thanks and we hated thanks and we hated Gans but to see them coming along the scene and saying hello only hello you see hearing that the language that was in French anymore it was beautiful [Applause] everything was gonna change We Were Young we're hopeful we were hungry and ambitious
• 20:00 - 20:30 geography wasn't the same history wasn't the same French wasn't the same philosophy wasn't the same the school had to be completely changed it could be changed because we had learned our lesson so CH became our chief he didn't want to he just wrote because he thought it was true when The Liberation came freedom of the press and satra set about using it to
• 20:30 - 21:00 build a new Society foreign which he hoped would help to drive social change it was formidably
• 21:00 - 21:30 important not only because a number of people who contributed to it and because was the director the woman who really got things together and read the articles was Simone de Beauvoir but here was a review that was going to take everything into account Politics the life of Ordinary People literature music but the accent was on
• 21:30 - 22:00 commitment that really was born out of three weeks he's famous I mean really was made during three weeks of the month of September 1945 where he really appeared like the writer on the scene he gave a conference called existentialism is a humanism he uh published his novel The libertar Rose to Freedom
• 22:00 - 22:30 he gave out the first issue of his monthly magazine later model and and then his play wiklow new exit was had been you know performed many many for many months then sartra's new found status as France's most prominent writer was held by his very accessible lifestyle in and around the cafes and bars of here was a new kind a very public intellectual who even seemed to write his books in between sipping cups of
• 22:30 - 23:00 coffee and chatting to friends [Music] um class
• 23:00 - 23:30 the people around them they all lived in the same Hotel it was like living in family I mean near one to the other and not having um not being in possession of things he owned nothing no flat no car even threw away all his
• 23:30 - 24:00 books one day he was interviewed by people in cafes and so on people would ask him but what is existentialism and he would say existentialism I do not know what that is My Philosophy is a philosophy of existence and he comes from a very complicated uh German I mean philosophy which is phenomenology but I'm not going to explain to you right now he said so one of the things is that you know the kind of people press
• 24:00 - 24:30 started to to pull some elements from his very thick and dense Works into the popular press by giving you know beats here and bits there so basically they started to build a whole thing out of existentialism Sartre himself didn't exactly discourage the kind of fashionable image that was growing up around him he wrote lyrics for the singer Juliet
• 24:30 - 25:00 Greco and was often seen in the company of other glamorous women in a way that attracted media attention I asked him when David if you weren't a teacher in the philosopher what would you like what would you have been said but as well as being fascinated by sartre's Lifestyle the media was also scandalized by his atheist ideas the mainstream press attacked him continuously accusing him of moral
• 25:00 - 25:30 corruption and of spreading hopelessness among the Young subtle tries to rebuild the idea of freedom taken out of the Christian culture and um to get rid of the power of God on um human life and so he comes to the conclusion that
• 25:30 - 26:00 if God exists man is not free and if man is free God does not exist [Music] I am My Liberty you had scarcely created me when I stopped belonging to you nature jumped backwards I was ageless and felt quite alone in the middle of your well-meaning world like a man who's lost his shadow there was nothing left in Heaven by the good nor evil
• 26:00 - 26:30 nor anyone to give me orders for I am a man and each man must find his own way you can either punish me nor reprimand me and that's why I make you afraid [Music] he says there is no Garden well more than half the world is against him that's how he's bad that how he's nasty that's why he shouldn't be red
• 26:30 - 27:00 that's why he should be burnt then he says Liberty is for everybody everybody's got right to Liberty got right to go everywhere I say everything think everything do everything and they condemned him as they condemn Socrates he didn't like being famous it stopped him in what he wanted to do when he was in his bureau with his
• 27:00 - 27:30 pepper then it was all right he gave Rendezvous sometimes to people but when he was stopped in the street for autographs or somebody who said hello he hated that forced to retreat from the cafes of the Left Bank by the attentions of the press Sartre moved to live with his mother in
• 27:30 - 28:00 the reborn apart they lived quietly often playing piano Duets together and Sartre was free to write away from the prying eyes of the world from childhood onward was someone who had suffered when he couldn't be in control of the image that other people formed of him
• 28:00 - 28:30 this for him was hell this was hellish this was acutely worrying the discomfort he felt whenever he thought about what other people were thinking when they were looking at him is fundamental to his existence and to all his writing such tells the story about someone I
• 28:30 - 29:00 think it's in a hotel Corridor with their eye to a keyhole completely absorbed in what's going on in the bedroom behind and then they hear a step on the stairs behind them and they suddenly become aware that they are a person looking at a bedroom scene behind it like a closed door whereas before they were just looking at the scene and he's interested to transformed from being something that's just concentrated on trying to hear to being
• 29:00 - 29:30 a human um performing a shameful act and he feels shame and the Very existence of Shame proves that we are always under the eyes of other people if we can even feel shame this means we know that other people are looking at us thinking about us we start thinking of ourselves as though we were an object and so we construct an idea of ourselves as an item in someone else's world and that's the point at which something like
• 29:30 - 30:00 a self comes into being the implication of this is that there is no way that people can in the end be comfortable with each other it is always going to be impossible to think of yourself simultaneously as someone who is going around the world acting in it and being an agent and also to think of yourself as being an object that other people are
• 30:00 - 30:30 observing so there is always a conflict and there's no such thing as human relations that don't involve this kind of conflict and this is why the um at the end of weekly held his other people because we can't get away from this terrible gaze of other people on us all the time it's much much more likely that you will hurt me
• 30:30 - 31:00 with its Unforgettable catchphrase hell is other people with such most popular play look into my eyes what do you see [Music] I'm there oh but so tiny I can't see myself properly I can [Music] the problem of personal freedom being threatened by other people was not
• 31:00 - 31:30 simply theoretical to such he carried his ideas into his personal life the set was partly dependent on simulator and partly independent he had said to her and truly cantian fashion we shall have necessary there is a necessary love between us but we sure also have contingent relationships translated into ordinary English or French this means uh you know we have a
• 31:30 - 32:00 deep Eternal affection but I can go around scoring as much as I want and so if you knew I'm not sure that it's suited her quite as well I said suited him satra was never sexually faithful to simonda bovoir or Castor as she was known while maintaining a lifelong working partnership each was free to have other lovers he had any more relationships than she did but sartre's many Mistresses found that They too had to accept his definition of freedom I remember
• 32:00 - 32:30 asking how do you manage with all these women in your life and he would say well I lie to them with his gesture is on and I then said to all of them yes to all of them and even the Shima and the Beauvoir and he would say especially Simone's most long-term rival was Michelle she met satra in 1946 and they were
• 32:30 - 33:00 lovers until his death her time with him convinced her that there were flaws in his idea of freedom contra foreign it isn't true
• 33:00 - 33:30 synonyms experience of this kind of relationship undoubtedly fed into her book The Second Sex it was published in 1949 and explored the effect on women of the post-war freeing up of sexual attitudes foreign
• 33:30 - 34:00 foreign people were moving about they were anybody anything can occur anything can happen I kept saying to myself in anguish where shall I go where shall I go Anything Could Happen behind me and when I suddenly turn around it would be too late what I think he totally overlooks is
• 34:00 - 34:30 that human beings actually are very like one another and that therefore nearly all human beings I would say all human beings would prefer to each scrambled egg rather than eat coal and therefore this is a kind of value that things in the world actually have he will not admit that because he wants to insist that it's entirely a matter of my choice which of the two substances I prefer to eat now that is the exaggeration of freedom but it's also
• 34:30 - 35:00 the destruction of the values by which actually most of us live most of the time convinced himself that he didn't convince many other people that this idea of a world of existential is still making decisions for themselves would be a world of socialists who treat each other as equals and it's hard to see really why it shouldn't be a world of egomaniacs who treat each other like dirt how to accommodate individual Freedom
• 35:00 - 35:30 within a free Society increasingly preoccupied such having flirted with but never joined the Communist Party he spent much of the 50s trying to reconcile the individualist philosophy of existentialism with the collective vision of Marxism you find that between 1958 and 1968 this word Liberty which had been terrifically important had been Central to everything he thought and
• 35:30 - 36:00 said and wrote vanished completely from his writing the reason it vanished is that he had become much less interested in the individual person in me in the self and one person's fight the only Freedom he believed in during those 10 years was the collective Freedom which hadn't yet been achieved the individual he thought would be free again once the whole of humanity we free
• 36:00 - 36:30 the Republic it is foreign
• 36:30 - 37:00 in 1964 Sartor was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature horrified by the idea of being incorporated into the establishment he immediately refused it is
• 37:00 - 37:30 foreign students in Paris mounted a series of protests that escalated into the serious public disorder of May 68. Sartre was on hand to play a role in the Rebellion that for a few days rocked the French state and all they all the boys and loves they came and said you are a big man as you always have so you help us he
• 37:30 - 38:00 said I shall do that how can I help you come with us we you you write for us we are sending La courses and you could um you could you could sign it you could sell it in the street he had several trials for that because it was forbidden
• 38:00 - 38:30 the violence with which the police responded to the street protests shocked France and convinced Sartre of the truth of his idea that conflict in human Affairs was inevitable but the May events also inspired him to renew his Pursuit and freedom he was now more convinced than ever that the main threat to individual Freedom came from the state and he joined those calling for its overthrow
• 38:30 - 39:00 he was always very revolutionary ahead of all the revolutionaries you got to read it its total Liberty its total Revolution All the Time Revolution for for everything um
• 39:00 - 39:30 foreign [Music] ER of War camp now felt profoundly unfree in Charlotte's France of the 1960s he started to lend his name to various militant far-left causes and even became the editor of the extremist newspaper la
• 39:30 - 40:00 caus de perc he was arrested on several occasions but always released without charge as de Gaulle himself put it one does not imprison Voltaire I suppose the point is that freedom as he had conceived it had always been a fantasy it had been a very useful fantasy not only for him but for France
• 40:00 - 40:30 um the public reaction to his ideas um was an immediate demonstration that the individual idea could ignite a further and a useful fervor in a mass of people but the longer he lived the clearer it became the individual Freedom did not exist Ed
• 40:30 - 41:00 um perpetual
• 41:00 - 41:30 as such ideas became more extreme even his supporters found it difficult to follow him in the 70s himself the advocate of social violence which was in actually a counter violence to the violence of the government and he went so far as to support the um
• 41:30 - 42:00 a terrorist attack on the Olympic Games in Munich you know with this argument that terrorism is the atomic bomb of the poor the only weapon available to the Palestinians is Terrorism it's a terrible weapon that the poor and The Underdogs don't have any other weapon violence exists it exists in regimes run by police who are themselves violent
• 42:00 - 42:30 people who are victims of such regimes can do no other than respond with violence I see it as a valuable political gesture is
• 42:30 - 43:00 I mean by that that you cannot say that there is on one side the philosophy and on the other side the politics you cannot separate them you cannot and if you if you consider for instance that satra made only [ __ ] with politic you cannot save the philosophy you you cannot you know there is not too such it is the same one you know a lot of times you will hear
• 43:00 - 43:30 that sorry is incoherent thought has betrayed himself so it has been with the Communists without the Communists against the Communists I mean that he misunderstood this misunderstood that he made mistakes on this and that I mean I don't think that is very important it's an attitude it's do not take anything for granted criticize it attack
• 43:30 - 44:00 find your own way he would say something wonderful he would say I think against myself you have to think against everything which has been given to you by education you have to criticize every single thing which is being given to you Sartre spent his life testing the limits of traditional thinking but at the heart of this philosophy is one deceptively simple question if human beings are truly free to do anything they want how are we to live
• 44:00 - 44:30 our lives Sartre never did find a convincing answer to this question but he was never less than unflinchingly honest in the attempted [Music]
• 44:30 - 45:00 [Music] um in commodities [Music]
• 45:00 - 45:30 when sarch was buried on the 19th of April 1980 over 50 000 people followed the coffin and millions watched on television no philosopher had ever had a bigger following when he died somebody said
• 45:30 - 46:00 now that he died we've a compass because we will not be able to say to ourselves when something important happens what deaths think about it you know which used to be the way we would behave so basically he would be an ethical campus
• 46:00 - 46:30 is attitude gave our generation a sense of Freedom that directed Our Lives we made choices that I think we can still identify with
• 46:30 - 47:00 I'm just aware that at the present time the message of Freedom that the satra is delivering is not accepted as if the this burden of Freedom that is putting on everyone's shoulders is too weighty and maybe we are in a time when people don't want to hear
• 47:00 - 47:30 about freedom thank you