Sarah Richmond is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College London. She has published several papers on Sartre’s philosophy and in 2018 published a new English translation, with Routledge, of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The translation appeared in the US in 2021, published by Simon & Schuster. Additional philosophical interests include some areas of ethics, the intersection of morality and literature, and psychoanalytic psychology.

Could you give an overview of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas?

In Sartre’s early philosophy, the period that leads up to and includes Being and Nothingness, the key idea is freedom. He argues that the central feature of human existence is that human beings are radically free, in a sense that is entirely incompatible with any form of determinism. Sartre believes that this freedom is a source of anguish, and that many people, for much of their lives, try to deny their freedom.

Human freedom for Sartre is very radical. He denies that there’s such a thing as human nature. Famously, he says that ‘existence precedes essence’. We have no essence, and what we do – through living, and through the choices that we make in living – is make ourselves. It’s a doctrine of self-creativity. An obvious thing to ask, once one has grasped that idea, is whether there is any particular way that we ought to be living? On that topic, Sartre is similarly radical: he thinks that we have to create moral value. He takes himself to be disagreeing, both with traditional religious conceptions of morality, and with non-religious realist conceptions of morality. He doesn’t think morality exists antecedently to human existence, and he thinks that human beings, in addition to choosing how to live and who to be, also choose moral value. So, we carry an enormous burden, an enormous responsibility as Sartre sees it. It’s that responsibility, which causes us anguish. Sartre thinks it leaves us without excuses. We can’t say, “Oh, but it’s in my nature to be dishonest, or cowardly, or whatever.” We must take responsibility for everything about ourselves.

What are the connections you see between Sartre’s idea of freedom and Becker’s ideas?

As far as I know, Sartre knew nothing of Becker, although they were alive at the same time. Independently, they were both interested in the concept of death, and what death means for human beings and for human existence.
Now, I don’t know if Sartre would have been interested in death, independently of his study of Heidegger, but he became acquainted with Heidegger’s philosophy very early on. In Heidegger, in Being and Time (published in 1927), death is given a very important role. Heidegger seems to have a lot of overlap with Becker. Heidegger thought that we tend to avoid confronting our own mortality. For Heidegger, it’s sort of a harmful evasion, insofar as if we refuse to confront the fact that one day we will die, Heidegger thinks we can’t really get hold of the idea of ourselves as an individual. Only by thinking of our lives as terminating in death, can we fully grasp that it’s this particular finite life that we have. For Heidegger, coming to terms with our mortality is a way of not only individuating ourselves and understanding that we are different from every other human person on this planet, but also of being able to reach the attitude that he refers to as authenticity.

Sartre was aware of these views of Heidegger, and in Being and Nothingness, he stages a sort of dialogue with this position, and rejects it roundly. He thinks the importance that Heidegger attaches to the concept of death is spurious. There’s nothing special about the fact that we have to die; it’s not any more special than many other facts about us. One of the reasons that Heidegger is wrong, according to Sartre, is that he fails to see a certain absurdity about the fact that we have to die. What Sartre means by absurdity is that, at least in the majority of cases, our deaths are entirely outside our control. We don’t typically choose or control the way our death occurs or the time at which it occurs. In effect, Sartre is saying against Heidegger, “How can I even hold an attitude towards this event when I have no idea what it will be like?”

Freedom and nothingness go together as elements of human consciousness.

Is Sartre’s conception of nothingness related to death?

Sartre thinks nothingness is the absence of being, and so one might draw some connections between nothingness for Sartre and the idea of death. For Sartre nothingness is our primary existential concern, even if it’s not fully transparent to us. This concern relates to a certain nothingness in our being, so it’s not a nothingness after we have ceased to exist, it’s an ongoing nothingness, which forms the structure of human consciousness. This nothingness is really central to understanding the freedom that he ascribes to us. Because freedom and nothingness go together as elements of human consciousness.

There are some very interesting parallels between non-being, being dead, and absence – we often associate the idea of absence with death. Sartre is taking these negative ideas, ideas of negativity, very seriously in his philosophy, but he doesn’t appear to think that they have anything in particular to do with death.

Does Sartre suggest how we might choose our moral values?

At the end of Being and Nothingness, he begins thinking about the possibility that there’s only one value that human persons can coherently adopt, and that is freedom itself. So, freedom becomes not only a way of characterizing our existence, but also a value, a goal, that we can and should affirm There’s a path from that ethical claim to Sartre’s political standpoint, which is a socialist standpoint, because Sartre thinks that a full recognition of my freedom requires me to affirm the freedom of others at the same time. Sartre ultimately never worked out this connection fully. But for Sartre, capitalist society is going to have to come to an end, if we want the reign of freedom to be genuinely inscribed within our social world. Freedom is inscribed in us all individually, but it’s not inscribed in us all as social beings, to the same extent. The set of political goals that seem to flow out of this concept, for Sartre, are egalitarian and socialist.