The war drove Sartre from individualist freedom toward Marxist social determinism
Evidence
It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later. He had already moved away from some of what he had said in Being and Nothingness, with its individualist conception of freedom. Now, he sought to develop a more Marxist-influenced view of human life as purposeful and social. This was one reason why he never managed to write the follow-up volume on existentialist ethics: his ideas on the subject had changed too much. He did write many draft pages, published after his death as Notebooks for an Ethics, but he could not give them a coherent shape. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 525
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies the specific pivot of Sartre’s late philosophy away from Being and Nothingness’s freedom toward social purpose.
- XREF: connects to: Sartre’s radical freedom doctrine unintentionally justified the status quo — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 826; Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 511; Sartre’s late thought shifted from individual freedom toward political commitment — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 853 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Sartre ultimately abandoned his early doctrine of absolute freedom
#corroborates(0.95) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 173 - Sartre’s late thought shifted from individual freedom toward political commitment
#corroborates(0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 853 - Sartre’s freedom obsession intensified under Nazi occupation
#contradicts(0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 493