Abstract

This book consists of selections that cover almost thirty years of writing, from Nausea to the essay, Search for a Method which summarizes the Critique of Dialectical Reason The selections succeed in giving us a substantial account of Sartre’s explanation of the nature and conditions of human freedom, and in reflecting also his thinking on contemporary issues which affect human rights. They are arranged chronologically and suggest an actual development of thought. In Nausea Sartre uses Roquentin’s struggle to dramatize his discovery of ‘the key to existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life’; through the void of his own conceptual existence he glimpses the fact and possibilities of his own freedom. In The Psychology of Imagination ’Sartre examines the function of consciousness in creating a world of unrealities, probes the nature of the psychic life and the mind’s complex ties with the outer world, defines the intentional structure of the image and the uniqueness of man’s freedom to create, and concludes that “the imagination is the necessary condition for the freedom of empirical man in the midst of the world”’. The full exposition of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom is given in Being and Nothingness. But for Sartre, a writer must use his own freedom to promote the freedom of all men. There are selections from his writings on freedom from persecution, freedom to write, freedom to do evil, freedom from exploitation. Finally, in Search for a Method there is an excerpt on his positive social theory and his hope that Marxism will take on ‘the human dimension’.