Nonetheless, Sarte's relationship with Simone de Beauvoir earns him a bit of a place in 20th century history.
Speaking for herself and Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote (in The Prime of Life) that she and Sartre were "temperamentally opposed to the idea of reform," because peaceful change was less sanguine to their temperaments than violent revolution.
I disagree with your suggestion that the Soviet Union was only revealed as evil when Khruschev gave his "secret speech." First of all, the speech was extremely slanted. It only dealt with Stalin's abuses which were directed at party members. He had nothing to say, for instance, for the 7 million Ukranians wiped out by a deliberately planned regional famine. Kruschev's motives were more political: he wanted to protect his power by discrediting those who aligned themselves with Stalin's positions on various arguments (such as the organization of the Comintern). Secondly, there were numerous accounts of the horrors that had gone on in the Soviet Union. People like Sartre simply chose to ignore them, unless perhaps they came from someone who happened to be a Soviet communist himself. It is a fact that Sartre only admitted that torture existed in the USSR when Kruschev said it had. But before this event, he helped to discredit and humiliate the first-hand witnesses of such abuses. Interestingly, Sartre didn't display such fervent skepticism regarding accusations of terror involving his own government.
Furthermore, the reader is left to wonder why Sartre's alleged discrediting in France should have any bearing on how the rest of the world should evaluate Sartre's ideas. ( And note, no empirical evidence of any kind is given to support that Sartre is discredited in France, rather, it is merely suggested that other thinkers have come along challenging his ideas. C'est tout on that regard). The French, as far as I know, have no strangle-hold on evaluating the merits of any ideas. Why, it is rumored that the French have elevated Mickey Rourke and Jerry Lewis to the level of "artistes". Je ne comprend pas.
His literature, not meant to be a completion of his philosophical work, but a parallel creation, nevertheless contained a lot of his philosophical symbols and the characters were situated inside the existential anguish that Sartre described as the consequence of freedom.
Here are some of Sartre's more memorable and delectable citations or extracts:
"I have replaced my earlier notion of consciousness (although I still use the word a lot), with what I call le vecu - `lived experience'. I will try to describe in a moment what I mean with this term, which is neither the preconscious, nor the unconscious, nor consciousness, but the terrain in which the individual is perpetually overflowed by himself and his riches and consciousness plays the trick of determining itself by forgetfulness." (1969) "A simple formula would be to say that life taught me la force des choses - the power of circumstances." (1969) "But the most striking feature of the man, it seems to me, was the metaphysical anguish which he endured so openly and modestly. Not a single day passed without him being tempted to kill himself. But this suspended death gave him a kind of charming and destructing irony - his native intelligence, which was above all the art of finding and establishing in his daily life, and even in his perception, a lethal duet to which he submitted all the objects of this world." (Mallarme: the poetry of suicide) garcin: Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? ...Ah, I see; it's life without a break. valet: What are you talking about? garcin: Your eyelids. We move ours up and down. Blinking, we call it. It's like a small black shutter that clicks down and makes a break. Everything goes black; one's eyes are moistened. You can't imagine how restful, refreshing, it is. Four thousand little rests per hour. Four thousand little respites--just think!...So that's the idea. I'm to live without eyelids. huis clos: Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why,now,should it be disagreeable? ...Ah,I see; it's life without a break.(Huis Clos)
"A simple formula would be to say that life taught me la force des choses - the power of circumstances." (1969)
"But the most striking feature of the man, it seems to me, was the metaphysical anguish which he endured so openly and modestly. Not a single day passed without him being tempted to kill himself. But this suspended death gave him a kind of charming and destructing irony - his native intelligence, which was above all the art of finding and establishing in his daily life, and even in his perception, a lethal duet to which he submitted all the objects of this world." (Mallarme: the poetry of suicide)
garcin: Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? ...Ah, I see; it's life without a break. valet: What are you talking about? garcin: Your eyelids. We move ours up and down. Blinking, we call it. It's like a small black shutter that clicks down and makes a break. Everything goes black; one's eyes are moistened. You can't imagine how restful, refreshing, it is. Four thousand little rests per hour. Four thousand little respites--just think!...So that's the idea. I'm to live without eyelids. huis clos: Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why,now,should it be disagreeable? ...Ah,I see; it's life without a break.(Huis Clos)
Biography of the man: 1905 - born 21 June 1906 - 21 September his father dies, due to a lung disease. Sartre goes to Paris with his mother, to live with his grandparents 1914 - First World War 1917 - His mother marries Joseph Mancy 1917 - Enters the Lyceum of La Rochelle 1918 - First World War ends - Starts teaching in Lyceum 1938 - Publishes La Nausee 1939 - Second World War starts. He enters the army as a meteorologist, June 21 1940 - Taken prisoner by the German force. 1941 - March: regains freedom. April 2nd, returns to Paris after a year spent out of the city 1943 - June 3rd Les Mouches 1943 - June: Nothingness and being 1944 - Huis Clos 1944 - Paris is liberated 1945 - Travels to USA 1954 - Travels to USSR 1958 - The Freud Scenario 1960 - Critique de la raison dialectique 1960 - Travel to Cuba 1960 - Camus dies 1967 - Travel to Israel 1964 - Wins Nobel prize and rejects it 1970 - Becomes director of la cause du people 1972 - Sartre par lui meme by contat and astruc 1978 - Publishes Pouvoir et Liberte in Temps Modernes 1980 - April 15, dies in Broussais hospital
The pivotal scene in his (1938) La Nausee, in which Roquentin, the hero, experiences a loss of the boundaries that his conceptual structures impose on the world, 'merging' with his immediate surroundings, (starting with a tree, as I recall) is very reminiscent of a description of a psychedelic experience.
Given that this passage is often taken as his presentation in literary form of the idea of the en-soi - 'being in itself' - it may not be going too far to attribute a significant role to his mescaline experience in the development of this idea, presented more explicitly in the weighty Being and Nothingness (L'Etre et le Neant) - though of course it wasn't the only factor: Sartre had already spent a year in Berlin (around 1933) in order to hear Edmund Husserl's lectures, and so on.
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