Imaginary interview with Jean-Paul Sartre
by Charactorium · Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 — 1980) · Literature · Philosophy · 6 min read
It is in the apartment on boulevard Raspail, one spring afternoon in 1975, that Simone de Beauvoir sits down opposite Sartre. The light falls on the stacks of school notebooks, a cold pipe rests in the ashtray, and the smell of tobacco still lingers. They have known each other for forty-six years, since the agrégation of 1929, and that day Beauvoir comes not as a biographer: she comes to ask the man what she already thinks she knows about the philosopher.
—Jean-Paul, in 1964 you refused the Nobel. I was there when the news broke. Why such a gesture, really?
You remember my panic, Castor — I even wrote too late to the Swedish Academy to warn them. But the principle never wavered: a writer must not let himself be turned into an institution, even in the most honorable forms. If I had accepted, it would no longer be Sartre signing his positions, but the Nobel Prize laureate, that is, a statue. Yet I want my commitments to commit only me, fallible, living, revocable. Official honor buys the writer softly: it wraps him in respectability until it neutralizes him. Refusing was not contempt for Sweden; it was staying available for the struggles to come. You who saw me hesitate know it was not a pose: it was a matter of concrete freedom.
A writer must not let himself be turned into an institution, even in the most honorable forms.
—Let's talk about us. In 1929, in front of the Panthéon, we sealed that pact — necessary love, contingent loves. Do you regret it, after all this time?
Regret it? That would be to deny what we built that is truest. We decided that our bond would need no lie to hold, and that transparency would replace possession. Others cried scandal; they saw libertinage where there was an almost austere demand: to tell everything, to gloss over nothing. Of course, it cost us — transparency sometimes wounds more than it frees, and we both know that. But I have never had, with anyone, that certainty of being read like an open book without risking judgment. Our love was never a contract of comfort; it was a way to prove, in our very lives, that the freedom of two beings could choose each other.
We decided that our bond would need no lie to hold.
—You used to repeat at the Café de Flore this formula: existence precedes essence. Explain it to me like a first-year student.
It's very simple, and it's dizzying. A paper-knife: the craftsman designs it before making it; its essence — its definition, its use — precedes its existence. Man, on the other hand, first appears, encounters himself, and defines himself only afterward, through what he does. There is no human nature given in advance, no God to have drawn the plan. Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. Hence comes anguish: if nothing determines me, I am condemned to be free, and responsible for everything. Many defend themselves against it through bad faith: they pretend to be prisoners of their character, their class, their role. That is lying to oneself. To refuse this freedom is still to use it. That is why I say that man is entirely in his acts, never in his excuses.
Man is condemned to be free, and responsible for everything he does.
—But this total freedom, do you believe in it even in misery, even under oppression? Isn't it a luxury of a Parisian intellectual?
I am often reproached for this, and I understand it. Yet I maintain: freedom is not the absence of obstacles; it is the way I position myself in relation to them. The chained slave is not free to break his chains, but he remains free to will them or refuse them, to revolt or consent — and that choice, no one can take from him. The situation weighs heavily; I am not naive enough to forget it. But it never decides for me the meaning I give it. It is precisely for this reason that commitment has a price: if we were determined, struggling would make no sense. Radical freedom is not a comfort; it is a burden — and it is this burden that makes action possible.
Freedom is not the absence of obstacles; it is the way I position myself in relation to them.
—I want to take you back to 1935, to that mescaline injection at Lagache's. The crabs followed you, you said. What did you really experience?
Ah, my crustaceans... You remember it better than I do, perhaps, because you were the one I worried when I told you about it. The experience was supposed to last a few hours; the visions, however, stayed with me for months. Crabs, octopuses, at the edge of my sight, present without being fully there. It was not the fear of madness — I knew they did not exist — but something more muffled: the feeling that the real could, at any moment, overflow, swarm, weigh too much. That excess, that soft paste of existence without justification, I put into Roquentin. Nausea is not a stomach illness; it is the revelation of contingency: things are there, gratuitously, and this gratuitousness sickens before it liberates.
The real could, at any moment, overflow, swarm, weigh too much.
—And this contingency you speak of, is that what made you a novelist as much as a philosopher?
Let's say that the concept alone would have left me cold. Contingency can be demonstrated in a hundred pages of analysis — Being and Nothingness does that. But to make it felt, you need a man sitting before a glass of beer who looks at his hand and no longer understands why it is there. The novel gives philosophy a flesh that the treatise never will. I have always had these two languages: that of notions and that of situations. The chestnut tree in the public garden, its black and bare root, says contingency better than any definition. That is why I never wanted to choose between the writer and the thinker: they are two ways of attacking the same mystery, brute existence, from the front and from behind.
The novel gives philosophy a flesh that the treatise never will.
—We founded Les Temps modernes together in 1945. What did you expect, exactly, from that journal — and from the writer in general?
I expected it to force us to be in situation in our era. That is my most tenacious conviction: the writer is not above the fray; he is plunged into it up to his neck. Every word he publishes has repercussions — and every silence too. I hold Flaubert responsible for the repression that followed the Commune, because he did not write a single line to prevent it. That seems unfair; it is not. To remain silent, when one has a voice, is still to choose a side: that of the established order. With the journal, we wanted a platform that belonged to no party and that intervened on everything — war, torture, colonization. The committed writer is not a writer who gets his hands dirty; he is a writer who refuses to lie by feigning neutrality.
To remain silent, when one has a voice, is still to choose a side.
—In May '68, I saw you go up to the Sorbonne to speak to the students, then sell La Cause du Peuple in the street. At your age, why go down like that?
Because the opposite would have been a betrayal of everything I have written for thirty years. When thousands of young people occupy the amphitheater and ask you to speak, you have no right to answer that you are too old or too famous. Fame, in those moments, is useful for only one thing: spending it. I sold the banned newspaper in the street precisely because the authorities did not dare arrest me — so my notoriety had to serve as a shield for those they arrested without hesitation. An intellectual who keeps his credit in reserve, like capital, is only a cautious bourgeois. Mine, I want to risk it as long as it is worth something. Otherwise, what is the point of having written so much about commitment?
Fame, in those moments, is useful for only one thing: spending it.
—I know you behind the public image. That pipe, those notebooks, the Corydrane you swallowed to write at night — why did you exhaust yourself like that?
You have reproached me enough for those pills that I cannot lie to you about it. I wrote like one digs, thousands of pages a year, and my body struggled to keep up. Amphetamines, coffee, whisky: they were the price of a rhythm I imposed on myself. Critique of Dialectical Reason, I wrote in a kind of fever, full pages without a single correction, carried by the drug more than by health. I do not recommend it to anyone, and I know what it cost my eyes. But you see, I never believed that the work was worth taking it easy. One realizes oneself through one's acts, not through longevity. I preferred to burn out writing than to last by preserving myself — it may be bad faith in reverse, but it is mine.
I never believed that the work was worth taking it easy.
—One last thing. You who refused honors and institutions, what would you like to remain of you when we are no longer here?
Nothing fixed, above all. The idea of an embalmed Sartre, quoted in textbooks as a defined essence, would horrify me — that would be doing to me what I refused all my life. If something must remain, let it be a method rather than a doctrine: the habit of never taking shelter behind one's nature, class, or role to flee one's choices. Let people keep from me not answers, but the demand to know oneself free and responsible, even when it is uncomfortable. Statues, I leave to others. You know well that I never took myself for a monument, and that my books are worth above all for the questions they leave open. The rest — glory, posterity — belongs to those who survive, and that no longer concerns me.
Let people keep from me not answers, but the demand to know oneself free and responsible.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Jean-Paul Sartre's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.