Prezado colega, Dear colleague, 

Let me start this thread by thanking you for your question. In terms of historical scholarship, it is a fascinating one but not, I'm afraid, one of great import today.

Your question intrigues me as a psychiatrist and as a philosopher and I will restrict my comments to the interaction of those two spheres of thought and practice. I have read Sartre rather closely in both the French originals and widely disseminated English translations; my own interests led me to track through his ideas about emotions, psychology and psychoanalysis, starting with his "Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions"/"Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions" published in French in 1939 and elaborated in the English edition of his "L'Être et le néant" (1943 in French), translated as "Being and Nothingness" (1956). In this later work, he elaborated on a theory of consciousness and offered a reading and critique of Freud's notion of the unconscious. Sartre wanted to found an existential psychoanalysis.

The results are very mixed. On one hand, he was enormously influential and for many people in the second half of the 20th century, he was a major public "engaged intellectual" and universally identified with the hugely influential school of existentialism based on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and his own reading and idiosyncratic understanding of Martin Heidegger. Sartre influenced many psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, notably R.D. Laing and Frantz Fanon. Laing is associated with "anti-psychiatry" in Britain (although he disavowed the term coined by his friend David Cooper) and founded an approach he called "social phenomenology," inspired in great part by his reading of Sartre, as documented in the work with David Cooper, "Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy" (1964). Sartre wrote a brief Foreword to that work in which he acknowledges that Laing and Cooper had made a close and faithful reading of his work and that he looked forward to the day when we would have a truly human psychiatry. Fanon was a brilliant Martinican psychiatrist who wrote about the experience of colonials as both psychiatric patients and doctors. His call for a revolutionary psychiatry was compelling but incomplete as he turned his energy to militant activities in Algeria and died rather young. Both Laing and Fanon remain inspirational figures (although criticized in some quarters for different reasons) for young militants and in Laing's case for many people looking for a more existential and some may feel, more human, approach to human experiences and our vicissitudes. 

In my view, Sartre had a great influence on philosophy, literature (he was a novelist and a playwright, as well as a biographer and screenwriter), and  the humanities in general. Through the likes of Laing and Fanon, he has had an influence on psychiatry. However, we cannot say he founded a school or gave us a coherent or workable theory that inspired a new paradigm for psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis. Many Sartreans still write and contribute to intellectual life in many spheres but they have been supplanted in the humanities by the much more influential and prolific Michel Foucault who was both a psychologist and philosopher who became famous for his work, "Madness and Civilization" (1964, in its first English version, later retranslated in its entirety as the "History of Madness" in 2006). Foucault's followers are more critics and observers of psychiatry than actual clinicians or theoreticians of my fields of interest. 

A recent popular and compelling volume on existentialism, centred around Sartre is Sarah Bakewell's "At the Existentialist Café" (2016). It is erudite and well-referenced but not primarily a work of scholarship. It is very well-written, offers accurate and telling summaries of the people, their work and their relationships among the thinkers who are associated with existentialism and is as fine a summary as anyone has produced. I've been reading these authors for 50 years and I don't think she gets any of the details wrong and many of the ideas and conclusions spot on!

That said, I think the moment has passed for Sartre to be the change-agent for a paradigm shift in the social or human sciences. He was as successful in his time or more than any philosopher of modernity since Kant yet he is not considered one of the most influential thinkers in philosophy of the 20th century. The top two would be (against my own judgement, but by frequent mention): Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. Wittgenstein, to my knowledge never mentioned Sartre, and Heidegger and Sartre misunderstood and dismissed each other, with Heidegger referring to "Being and Nothingness" as unreadable "dreck," although from his comments, we know that he read it through and mentioned ideas that appear at the end of Sartre's work. There was a notable exchange between the two on existentialism and humanism. The sad side of his legacy is that he produced little of outstanding critical thought after his magnus opus and although he was very productive and eventually earned a Nobel Prize in Literature which disdainfully refused, he printed many intemporate and unconsidered opinions and attacks. His apologetics for Stalin led him to betray a better man and a better writer, Albert Camus, in print that ended their relationship. History has shown that Camus was correct, more courageous, and far more decent a human being. I broke with Sartre as a young man for his preface to Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961/1963) with its justification for violence, invoking the sword of Achilles that both wounds and heals. As a philosopher that is ill-founded; as a physician and trauma specialist that is morally offensive and tragically wrong-headed. Violence begets violence and nothing else.

To conclude, I believe that while Sartre provided some strong images and scenes in his writing, especially in his novels and plays, they are the best part of his existential philosophy of "situations" which does not hold up as either profound or coherent and is not a starting for thinking about philosophical matters or psychiatric ones. Even worse, the larger school of thought in which Sartre inserted himself - phenomenology - has become so vague and all-encompassing that it can mean anything, as Tom Sparrow recently opined in his work, "The End of Phenomenology" (2014), and ends up meaning nothing. Alain Badiou, France's and one of Europe's greatest living philosophers who knew Sartre has called for an end to what he describes as the subjective phenomenology of Husserl and his followers, including Heidegger and Sartre. Badiou ("L'Être et l'événément," 1988 in French; "Being and Event," 2005 in English) calls for another philosophy and paradigm for the humanities based on a new Platonist ontology founded on mathematics and set theory where his core concept is the Event. He calls for an "objective phenomenology" with no reference to consciousness and names the Event as the key notion that introduces novelty to the world and the birth of the human subject. 

In sum, I'm afraid that that is precisely what I perceive in the humanities - the end of subjective phenomenology (including the Sartrean version) and a call for a new ontology, an objective phenomenology, and a new theory of change (the Event) and the subject. 

Amitiés, Amizade, Cordially,  

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Psychiatrist and Philosopher                                                                                 Professor of Psychiatry                                                                                           University of Montreal

Dear Vincenzo Di Nicola,

Thank you very much for your contribution and your class on. I am a beginner in the discussions about Sartre. Your explanation was really very important to me. Thank you very much.

Best Regards

However, I would like to clarify that a paradigm shift that I refer to in the human sciences is not about Sartre's work, but about a crisis in which the humanities live (their usefulness in globalized society, the closing of science courses Humanities, the commodification of thought, among other questions) and how Sartrean thought can help to rethink the role of the humanities today.

Your explanation was really very important to me. Thank you very much.

Prezado, Dear Marcelo Neto

Let me start by saying that, like Vincenzo Di Nicola, I want to thank you for your interesting posting. Your question has mainly to do to what extent Sartre's existentialism can contribute to change the paradigm in the human sciences.

Note that the term paradigm is an ambivalent term in social, and also natural sciences. As amply recognized, T. Kuhn, who is often associated with the idea of paradigm, used that terms in many senses. So, an answer to your question would imply to clarify what you do mean by paradigm. To me, a paradigm is a theoretical framework on the basis of which we can think (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein' s theses on the philosophy of language and language-games or Karl Popper's theses on the falsification of scientific theories and hypotheses) or perform empirical research (e.g., Piaget's constructivist approach and its idea that, in the last analysis, the individual is the main responsible for his/her development and education or Vygotsky's social-cultural theory or social constructionist, not constructivist, approach, according to each we became ourselves through others. Of course, to perform empirical research implies thinking and even complex thinking.

As Vincenzo greatly and cogently elaborated on your questions, my answer may be considered a short answer.

As I see it, it is difficult in human and social sciences, namely in psychology, which is my area of expertise, to say that somebody contributed or not to a paradigmatic change, this being also true regarding Sartre’s existentialism. This is so, because, as critic John Horgan (1999) once argued “theories of human nature never really die; they just go in and out of fashion” (pp. 6-7). As paradigms of human natures go in and out of fashion, it is almost impossible to say who contributes to the introduction of a novel paradigm or theoretical framework. More to the point, some years ago Zeaman (1959) pointed to a common, albeit unnoticed, procedure in scientific research and theorizing in different fields. Whereas in “… the natural sciences, each succeeding generation stands on the shoulders of those that have gone before …, in the social sciences each generation steps in the face of its predecessors.” (p.167).This procedure partly explains what the neo-Popperian Paul Meehl (1978; Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) called “the slow progress of soft psychology” and, I would add, social and human sciences.

Note also if the number of theories and paradigms were a criterion of scientific progress, then psychology -- or social and human sciences in general --  would be the queen of sciences, which is not the case.

In his posting, Mário calls our attention to Sartre’s idea that humans are necessarily free. If free will or one’s freedom means one’s possibility or freedom to choose between two alternatives (e.g., to steal or not to steal to save a human life), one is free in his/her very nature. If free will means that one’s choice of one alternative instead of another is not determined by several causes, conditions, or antecedents, then no action, thinking or feeling is a result of chance and hence, a result of  one’s free will.

It is likely that my answer has followed a track you did not expect. Even so, I hope that this may be of some help to you.

Best regards e um forte abraço.

Queridos colegas Mario e Orlando, 

Let me return to this thread.

I read and have been thinking about your question Mario and Orlando's answers. 

I appreciate your concern about the crisis in the human and social sciences - a perpetual one that was already declared and addressed by Edmund Husserl which stimulated him to create the phenomenological approach to philosophy and had been adumbrated before and certainly many times since. According to Foucault, we are all answering Kant's final question - What is man? And we know well Foucault's answer - that Man is dead. 

We have had answers from Husserl, Foucault, Habermas and many others, including more recently Boaventura de Sousa Santos from Portugal.

Although you focus on the so-called paradigm shift in the social sciences you still come back to ask "how Sartrean thought can help to rethink the role of the humanities today". 

I believe I outlined why I think that Sartre is an absolute dead end - huis clos to use his own metaphor - for any kind of thought today. That said, of course I still read Sartre because of his influence on the thought of his time and frankly, to know what mistakes not to repeat. 

The issue of paradigm is an intriguing one. When Foucault was writing in French he claimed not to have read Thomas Kuhn and came up with startlingly similar notions such as épistème in his own research. This notion of "standard science" or established canons and change - how novelty comes into the world is far from being settled in my view. 

Here are my starting points: first, I do not hold by analogies between such endeavours as chemistry and physics and the biological sciences - there is already a huge leap from physics to chemistry to biochemistry never mind the leap from brain to mind and from mind to culture. The rules of translation between and among these different levels are just not established except through intellectually violent reductions and simplifications. 

Second, if the notion of progress has any value in discussing models of human activity, I do not believe it applies to large or small frames of reference, that is, neither individual psychology nor culture. As a child psychiatrist, I specifically eschew the model of "development" and never use the word in my work except with many caveats. I refer you to the brilliant study by Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man," and Neil Postman's "Technopoly." 

Third, when I was studying in London, one of my professors, Isaac Marks, a psychiatrist of great repute as a behaviour therapist, had spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies where he met Kuhn. When he asked Kuhn about psychiatry and his model of paradigms, Kuhn dismissed his question, flatly asserting that psychiatry is not a science. Rather than feeling offended by this as a psychiatrist, I feel greatly relieved. Kuhn's work applies to such scientific endeavours as physics. This is not the proper model for our work in the biological let alone the social and human sciences. 

Finally, I believe that instead of fighting or dismissing each other's frameworks, many of the differences in models may be best understood as temperamental choices. The sorts of questions, the sorts of methods, and the sorts of answers that are edifying to us are not arrived at only logically or based on reasoned argument but by existential necessities that are created by the circumstances of our lives interacting no doubt with our innate talents and predilections. 

In my view, part of the crisis today, or our way of experiencing it, is that the current models favour a certain temperament towards convergence, clarity, objectivity (all strongly criticized by Postman in his "Technopoly") and devalues divergent thought, complex models, and above all, subjectivity, including narrative and qualitative studies. 

Humanities are not very valued today but that is only true at the university. People are as interested in art, literature, philosophy, cinema, theoretical aspects of psychoanalysis and political philosophy (Americans call it political science), among many other studies, as ever. Just as we saw some of the best minds in philosophy migrating to other departments in the humanities in the past - I am thinking of people like Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell and Avital Ronell - the humanities themselves will migrate to other activities under other labels.

Since the three of us share the Portuguese language and culture (I have often presented in Brazil and a number of times in Portugal), it would be really exciting to find a way to meet at some forum to do a symposium together on this topic, either in English or in Portuguese!

Com respeito e muito carinho,

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Université de Montréal

Dear Vincenzo,

I thank you for your reflections so coherent and important; I agree with everything you said, and although Sarte does not offer an outlet - it is an end in itself - I still think that his concepts allow us to think more broadly.

I would be extremely happy if we had the chance to meet at some academic event to discuss issues relevant to the humanities.

I am ready for any future project and new intellectual exchanges.

Regards,

Mario Marcello Neto

Querido Mario Marcello Neto, 

I would love to have a dialogue with you! I visit Brazil regularly as my wife is a Gaúcha. I plan to be there later this year for a family visit and to give some talks, so perhaps it would be possible to organize a visit with your department to share perspectives on the history of psychiatry and its relation to philosophy. I have also written on the history of the eating disorders, notably anorexia nervosa. The history of psychiatry will figure prominently in my forthcoming volume with Drossi Stoyanov, "Psychiatry in Crisis" (see my research project here, as well as my other project, "Psychiatry and the Humanities"). 

As for Sartre, I just finished Sarah Bakewell's excellent intellectual biography, an overview of his work, along with other fellow travellers in Paris at the time - "At the Existential Café." Her book is quite well documented and offers up to date scholarship on a number of people I read closely, including Albert Camus, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt (and reluctantly, painfully, Martin Heidegger). Nothing in this volume, not a single sentence, endeared him any more to me! He was a venal man, of some talent as a writer but with dubious scholarship in the areas of philosophy in which he was supposed to be a leader, including ontology, metaphysics, phenomenology and political philosophy. His "situations" which were supposed to be moving and to render his notions more accessible always struck me as highly contrived and self-serving, including the famous example of the young man torn between avenging the death of his brother by joining the battle and staying home to care for his sick mother. His reading of psychology and psychoanalysis was, to be charitable, without comprehension or value. His Marxism was a poorly-integrated add-on to his badly digested reading of Heidegger. 

Heidegger himself disavowed Sartre's understanding of his own work. (Not that anyone can claim to truly understand Heidegger! When I asked the leader of the Heidegger seminar in graduate school a question on German grammar, he playfully replied that he did not speak German but Heidegger! This is a common joke and I've read that German scholars read Heidegger in English translation for an interpretation of his texts then return to the German originals.)

I can think of people who attempted hybrids of philosophy and Marxism, notably Antonio Gramsci, George Lukacs and Louis Althusser, with far greater success. RD Laing and David Cooper wrote a summary of Sartre's work on political philosophy which is practically unreadable - "Reason and Violence." His treatment of Albert Camus, a greater writer and without the shadow of a doubt a better human being, was abominable and will remain for me the heart of my view of Sartre as cruel and unfeeling.  

There are people from that era whose philosophy and scholarship are powerful, whose personal histories demonstrate courage and innovation and whose political positions are admirable. Three that come to mind are Albert Camus, Karl Jaspers and Jürgen Habermas. Many others could be added, including Sartre's one-time friend Raymond Aron. 

That said, it would be intriguing to know how this group of scholars, including Sartre, has been received in Brazil. I do keep an eye on Brazilian trends in the humanities, notably political theory and philosophy but only as an interested observer.

Abraços, 

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Université de Montréal

Dear Vicenzo,

Thank you for your reflections. I understand his analysis of Sartre, having to agree, but I still think about political aspects and their public performance allied to their philosophical and theoretical practice, something that in moments of crisis and / or threats to human rights and democracy (in the Brazilian case) Can be thought and readapted, overcoming the problems and failures of the past.

About your coming to Brazil, I'll talk to my department. I believe that we can organize something here, we can talk about it with more caution. When you have some estimate of when you will come to Brazil, please contact me by email: [email protected].

Thank you for all this fruitful discussion for further insight into Sartre.

Regards,

Mario Neto

Querido Mario Marcello Neto,

To follow up on our discussion here, I am planning a visit to Brazil soon. We will be in Rio Grande do Sul for three weeks, from July 22nd to August 14th. Perhaps we can get together. If you can organize an informal meeting in your department, even better! Let's talk. 

Abraços, 

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Contact by email

Dear Vicenzo,

I would like to discuss your visit to Rio Grande do Sul and the possibility of attending a meeting at my university by email, as this would facilitate our contact. If possible send me an email: [email protected] or inform me your e-mail so that you can contact us.

It will be a great honor for us to count on your participation in our university.

Regards,

Mario Marcello Neto