Abstract

This thesis aims to illuminate the philosophical importance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s final major work, L’Idiot de la famille, by arguing that it is not only a biographical study of the literary author Gustave Flaubert, but also the culmination of Sartre’s defence of philosophical realism. It proceeds by first establishing the defence of a realist position as one of Sartre’s most important philosophical agendas. Then, it explains how Sartre’s realism may be characterized as the view that all reality is human reality and, therefore, knowable. Next, it highlights how, after having already demonstrated that material things and Others exist independently of consciousness in L’Être et le néant, and that it is possible for consciousness to grasp the essence of material things in the Critique de la raison dialectique, what remains for Sartre – by the time he comes to write L’Idiot de la famille – is to show that it is possible to comprehend the essence of an Other by means of a concrete example. The final parts of this investigation explore why Sartre employs literary techniques to grasp and communicate the ‘essence' of Flaubert, throughout L’Idiot de la famille. Although the fact that Sartre was unable to complete L’Idiot de la famille makes it difficult to assess its success in any definitive way, this thesis exposes it as Sartre’s rigorous attempt to show that the essence of an Other is not necessarily beyond the limits of human knowledge. And this, in my view, means that it possesses a philosophical significance that is so far under-appreciated by scholars.