Features > Being and Nothingness

New preface by Richard Eyre

In this country Sartre is as unfashionable as loon pants, so it’s hard for us to imagine a world in which, as the novelist Iris Murdoch said when she briefly met Sartre in 1945 in Brussels, “His presence in the city was like that of a pop star. Chico Marx, who was there at about the same time, was less rapturously received.”

When I was a student in the 1960s, Sartre didn’t quite have poster status - his pipe, glasses and air of bad-temper kept him off walls that celebrated Che, Brigitte Bardot and James Dean - but few student bookshelves lacked a (largely) unread copy of Being and Nothingness, his 632 page exegesis of existentialism. From the little I read, I understood only what suited me but, as I was growing up in a world still scarred by the Holocaust, Hitler, Stalin and nuclear warfare, it wasn’t hard to grasp a philosophy which was predicated on the absolute absence of God. And if I understood Sartre superficially, I understood him sufficiently to corroborate my feelings of confusion about my sexual and political identity: “First of all, man exists,” he said, “turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.” That seemed to describe my condition pretty accurately, and his argument for the reality of “nothingness” hit the mark as far as student life was concerned.

If Sartre’s philosophy remained more talked about than read, his novels were popular (Roads to Freedom was serialised by the BBC) and his plays were much performed. In fact, it was practically a legal obligation in the ‘60s for student drama groups to perform Huis Clos. Sartre was attracted to the theatre because theatre thrives on metaphor - a room becomes a world, a group of characters becomes a whole society - so plays tend to be about how we live and why we live. In the theatre Sartre was obliged to characterise and animate his philosophical and political propositions, test theory against flesh and blood. And he was obliged to condense and distil his ideas. “The metaphysician who could not say anything unless he said everything was compelled in the theatre to give his message briefly,” said Iris Murdoch, “and as Sartre unfortunately could not do everything, as opposed to thinking everything, he found the theatre, where he had undoubted talent, a sympathetic place to drop into.”

His play, Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands), was first performed in 1948. It’s a noir-ish political thriller, set in a fictional East European country (“Illyria”) in the dying days of the Second World War. A young man is commissioned by a revolutionary Socialist Party to assassinate the leader of a rival faction, who is held to be diluting the Party’s principles by joining a coalition with Liberal and Right Wing parties in order to form a government. Not long after the Labour landslide of 1997, I decided to adapt the play for the Almeida Theatre in North London. What attracted me to it was partly the topicality of the debate between means and ends and purity and opportunism, but as much its exploration of class, of sex, and of growing up. Like Hamlet, Hugo, the play’s protagonist, grows up to grow dead.

My version of Les Mains Sales (which I christened The Novice) coincided with the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland and with rancorous bickering between Old and New Labour. “Principle”, “pragmatism” and “power-sharing” were words that rained down from all directions, while the metaphor of “dirty hands” was invoked on a daily basis. Sartre’s play seemed once again a play for today just as, it seems to me, Being and Nothingness is a philosophy for today.

The universe which Sartre’s philosophy describes is a familiar one to any contemporary reader in the West: a meaningless, godless and de-personalized world in which the words “ennui”, “angst” and “alienation” are much more current than hope and compassion. But nevertheless, says Sartre, it’s a world in which we have free will: we are responsible for our actions and are the sole judges of how they affect others. But that free will is curbed by the fact that our awareness of ourselves prevents us from ever truly being “ourselves”, so we play at being ourselves and become “inauthentic”.

To behave “authentically” is to understand that we can make and remake ourselves by our actions and thus become what our acts define us as being. To talk rather than act is moral self-deception - “mauvaise foi” (bad faith) - which involves our behaving as insensate things rather than “authentic” human beings. In bad faith, we evade responsibility by not exploiting the possibilities of choice; in short, by not being fully human.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre doesn’t present a total system of belief or a user’s manual to life but for me, in spite of being literate in philosophy and in spite of his sometimes barely penetrable technical vocabulary, he provides a topographical account – a moral template - that helps me navigate some of the more shadowy paths of my existence. And for all his pessimism, in asserting the absolute nature of the individual Sartre defies the inhuman determinism of the contemporary world, where every day we are told that we are “wired” to do this or that by our genetic makeup, or by the pressures of society, or the structures of economic systems. Sartre presupposes that our lives require a basis in reason but declares that the attempt to uncover that basis is a "futile passion." Oddly I find some comfort in being told this: that we can never hope to understand why we are here and that we have to choose a goal and follow it with passionate conviction, aware of the meaninglessness of our lives and the certainty of our deaths.

For me Sartre’s concern with our disposition to evade responsibility and to lie to ourselves – our "bad faith" – is as active a notion as when I first came across it. And in an age where we appear to believe nothing except celebrity, I can’t think that a writer who says that we define man only in relation to his commitments is entirely redundant.

I hope the publication of Being and Nothingness does something to revive interest in a writer whose philosophy in Britain has become as unfashionable as his fiction. What’s more he’s frequently reviled as a misogynist: the writer Angela Carter once asked “There is one question that every thinking woman in the Western world must have asked herself at one time or another. Why is a nice girl like Simone de Beauvoir sucking up to a boring old fart like Jean-Paul Sartre?” But just before Christmas a few years ago, I arrived in Paris on the Eurostar. To my astonishment, the magazine kiosks were plastered with photographs of the boring old fart: Sartre had been resurrected as man and philosopher by the popular savant, Bernard Henri-Levy. Later I heard that there was to be a Place Sartre-De Beauvoir near his favourite café, Les Deux Magots, and that Richard Attenborough was said to be making a film about Simone De Beauvoir’s affair with Nelson Algren with Sartre as the third corner of the amorous triangle. Fame indeed. People might even start to read his books.