Alfred Betschart

Das Verhältnis zwischen Nietzsche und dem französischen Existenzialismus ist seit Jahrzehnten in der Forschung umstritten. Manche betrachten Nietzsche als Vordenker des französischen Existenzialismus, andere versuchen ihn eher aus dieser Traditionslinie herauszuhalten. Der Band versammelt zentrale Beiträge von Experten aus verschiedenen Disziplinen, die den Gegenstand völlig neu beleuchten. Die Philosophie ist dabei ihrerseits in ihrer gesamten Breite repräsentiert. Der Band bietet so erstmals einen umfassenden Überblick über den Forschungsstand zum Thema. Er beinhaltet sowohl breit angelegte Überblicksdarstellungen zum Verhältnis zwischen Sartre sowie Camus und Nietzsche als auch Detailuntersuchungen zu spezifischen philologischen und systematischen Fragestellungen. Themenfelder sind dabei beispielsweise der Nihilismus und seine Überwindung, Freigeistigkeit und Individualismus sowie Freiheit und Determinismus. Neben den Camus, Sartre und Beauvoir stehen auch andere mit dem französischen Existenzialismus in Verbindung stehende Figuren wie Cioran und Canguilhem im Fokus.

Some thirty years ago, the metanarratives of Sartre's thinking entered their fourth stage, the genetical stage. An important subject of genetical study has become the period prior to the publication of L’être et le néant. This article examines what Sartre read in the 1920s and what formed his philosophical matrix, into which he later incorporated concepts from Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel (3Hs). An important result is that Sartre's main focus in the 1920s was already on the subject's freedom and the contingency of the world. In this respect, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Arthur Schopenhauer, the pragmatists and Karl Jaspers were more influential than the 3Hs, who were prominently present mainly in the writings of the 1940s. We can observe the importance of psychology and sociology for Sartre at that time, which later manifested itself in his psychological works of the 1930s and his biographies and socio-anthropological texts of the 1950s to the 1970s.

In this paper I discuss aspects of Sartre’s philosophy in relation to contemporary approaches in analytic philosophy regarding self-consciousness and self-knowledge. In particular, I am interested in those approaches that take up certain considerations of Wittgenstein on transparency and immunity to error through misidentification in order to demystify our ability to make certain first-person claims without resorting to observation of ourselves. I will acknowledge the fruitfulness of such a dialogue between Sartre and Wittgenstein-inspired approaches but argue that it is restricted to the insight that the concept of self-consciousness is a genuine one which is not to be mistaken for self-reference. It will also be shown that these approaches miss important aspects of Sartre’s philosophy, both exegetically and systematically.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the allegation of nihilism was a weapon frequently used in the fight against those denouncing the reigning morality.The ideas of Nietzsche and Sartre, too, fell prey to this performative use of the term „nihilism“.Were Nietzsche and Sartre indeed nihilists? A comparison of their moral theories based on Kierkegaard’s model of the three stages shows that Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s moral theories share important characteristics that qualify to call Nietzsche and Sartre nihilists, in particular their criticism of the reigning morality and their moral relativism.

Ronald Aronson praises Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism in an essay in the Boston Review. I argue that existential Marxism is a case of a contradictio in adiecto. Sartre was never recognized as a Marxist by his contemporaries. He not only failed to show any interest in the question of economic exploitation, but most of the answers he gave in the Critique even contradicted Marxist theory. His expression of Marxism as the philosophy of our time seems to have rather been more an act of courtesy than the expression of deep conviction. As Sartre himself later said, Marxism and existentialism are quite separate philosophies.