Jean-Paul Sartre: Exalting Black Thought and Living Existentialism

For progressive readers, existential philosophy reaches its apogee when it serves as the theoretical foundation for progressive political commitments and engaged activism. Existential thought may be vivified in this manner, for it broadens subjective ruminations on being and freedom, agency and responsibility from the level of the individual to that of the collectivity.  

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Angela Y. Davis showed, Frederick Douglass and Jean-Paul Sartre rooted their activism in transformative existential thought, and thereby introduced new potentialities for equitable social and political relations in their respective societies. Douglass’s and Sartre’s works illuminate how phenomenological apprehensions of Freedom can lead to discursive and political agitation against hegemonic domination.

Douglass explored the existential themes of Being and Freedom an entire century before Sartre and many other European existentialists because his lived experience as enslaved compelled him to articulate Freedom as the crux of human existence—even as he struggled against the racist dehumanization of chattel slavery’s material and institutional structures. His articles, autobiographies, speeches, and letters (available in International Publishers collections volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3) further delineate his mission to actualize what he viewed as the United States’ ethical charge:  the eradication of chattel slavery and its ideological underpinnings, and the invalidation of institutionalized anti-Black racism.

In addition to Douglass, Africana thinkers such as David Walker, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B Du Bois, and others have cited the frequency of slave fugitivity, insurrection, and other forms of resistance as evidence of Freedom’s immediacy irrespective of chattel slavery’s physical and legislative constraints and continued historical failures to address those wrongs. Contemporary Africana existential liberationist work in this tradition includes Lewis Gordon’s Existentia Africana, A. Shahid Stover’s Being and Insurrection, and this author’s Being Apart.

After Douglass’s nineteenth-century efforts, Sartre’s twentieth-century lived experience of authoritarian hegemony under Nazi occupation, and his apprehension of post-war anomie in Europe, moved him to conceptualize the irreducibility of Freedom as the defining characteristic of the human condition. It was, however, the history of chattel slavery and European colonialism that informed Sartre’s later writings, as his exposure to the critical thought of Douglass’s theoretical heirs—the Black thinkers Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon—altered the trajectory of his philosophical writings on anti-racism and anti-colonialism as praxis and equality as an actionable concept. These revolutionary aspects of Sartrean thought are outlined in Lewis R. Gordon’s intellectual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought.

Gordon’s expansive piece on Sartre outlines the contours of the Sartrean theoretical method in three ways: (1) Gordon explains that Sartre’s philosophical and political thought emerged during World War II and the post-war period, as his intellectual productions simultaneously diverged from and critiqued Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology; (2) he highlights that Sartre’s exchanges with Richard Wright propelled his discursive challenges to anti-Black racism (and anti-Semitism), and intensified Sartre’s preoccupation with the principle of equality; and (3) he demonstrates that Sartre’s formulation of existential Marxism is neither theoretically impossible nor ideologically inconsistent. Instead, he explicates Sartre’s existential Marxism to remind readers that both existentialism and Marxism share the same practical preoccupation: how to use philosophical discourse to promote humanist values and propose solutions to alienation in order to create a just, livable world.

The latter two points converge in Gordon’s analysis of the boxing match in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre contends that the spectators, trainers, and assistants are in the fight with the boxers because each of these different groups is socially invested in the fight’s outcome. Gordon expands on this metaphor to stress that geo-political conflicts, like the Cold War, become representative of  “collective responsibility for global political affairs.”

Let us extend Gordon’s analysis of Sartre’s phenomenological boxing metaphor to Muhammad Ali’s legendary athletic career. Ali’s anti-colonial, Black Nationalist political commitments made him an icon of Black resistance and self-determination during the era of Third World (now known as the Global South) decolonization in the late 1960s. “Say my name!” he demanded of his opponents who refused to acknowledge his Muslim identity. In the same defiant manner, Ali refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War to aid in the slaughter of guerilla warriors fighting to dismantle European colonial rule. Yes, I was in the ring with Ali for every fight. With every knockout, I joined arms with Ali, our Black radical warrior who fearlessly aligned himself with the newly emergent, independent nations of the Third World. Each of Ali’s triumphs was my victory, just as his victories exulted every person of color in our mutual ascendance over the injustices of white supremacy, colonialism, and oppression the world over. Gordon captures this aspect of human solidarity in the Sartre quote that closes his piece: “equality…means that our joy, our pain, our need to be relevant, are equal.”

Though Sartre was not a Black radical thinker, like Douglass his discursive productions emphasize that the principles of Freedom and anti-racism could and should become forms of socially ameliorative praxis. While Douglass’s existentialist writings and political work affirmed his fidelity to radical egalitarianism an entire century before Sartre, both thinkers’ writings and life choices reveal that philosophical work can be vivified when people choose to live their deepest political commitments. Sartre’s political commitments to anti-racism and anti-colonialism honored the struggles of Black people against the hegemonic infringement of European imperialism, the institutionalization of anti-Black racism, and the perpetuation of neocolonial domination. Like Douglass, he lived his philosophical and political mission by embracing a life of integrity and egalitarianism over one of mendacity and opportunism. Today, their liberationist existentialism resounds in perpetuity when we, their theoretical heirs, use existential thought to remind others that individual agency, collective responsibility, and actionable dissent are foundational to emancipatory political practices. 

Rowman & Littlefield’s new book series, Living Existentialism honors the theoretical contributions of Douglass, Sartre, Fanon, Wright, Davis, Gordon and others who have devoted their philosophical work to exploring existential thought’s most transformative ideas. Through Living Existentialism, philosophical thought continues to introduce the possibilities for a more just and humane world.

LaRose T. Parris

LaRose T. Parris is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. Her accolades include the 2016 Nicolás Guillén Prize for Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature by the Caribbean Philosophical Association for her book Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature.  “To Be Young, Gifted and Woman,” Parris’s recent piece on Lorraine Hansberry and Rosa Luxemburg, appears in Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. She is co-editor of the Living Existentialism book series, published by Rowman & Littlefield Press in London, UK.