appealed to Sartre because he thought of the object world as a
cause of philosophical wonder and disorientation. But Husserl
was too calmly reflective for Sartre’s taste. So Sartre gave
Husserl’s ideas his own twist, emphasizing psychology and po-
litical action over the detailed, abstruse studies of perception
that Husserl preferred to pursue.
In October 1945 Sartre delivered a momentous lecture,
“Existentialism Is a Humanism,” to a packed house in a Right
Bank theatre in Paris. In his talk, Sartre declared that “man is
condemned to be free.” Faced with the heroic, epochal choice
between authenticity and inauthenticity, how could we not
commit ourselves to authentic existence, and thereby to self-
realization?
The straightforward bravado of “Existentialism Is a Hu-
manism” catapulted Sartre to immense fame. In 1945 , after the
German occupation during which so many of the French felt
they had acted in bad faith, or in quiet alliance with the evil of
the times, the Sartrean endorsement of authentic choice came
like an unexpected blessing. And, even better, it came from a
man who presented himself as a hero of the resistance. (Soon
afterwards Sartre’s lecture drew a scowl from one of his main
inspirations, Heidegger, in his “Letter on Humanism”: Sartre,
Heidegger wrote, “stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the
truth of being” [Passion 47 ]. Derrida, in the midst of the tu-
mult of the sixties, would look back to the debate between
Sartre and Heidegger in his essay “The Ends of Man.”)
As important as Sartre’s ideas and his books was his ca-
reer as the archetypal politically engaged intellectual. In this
respect he inadvertently delivered a warning to Derrida con-
cerning the perils of taking sides in the Cold War. Sartre’s rela-
tion to Communism was vexed and uncertain at times, but for
the most part he loyally defended the Soviet Union. Sartre’s
From Algeria to the École Normale 27