Book Review: Sartre for Beginners

Coming across this book in the philosophy section of a University Bookshop (as I did) you might well wonder how it got there. For it presents itself as a "comic book", printed in letters of varying size and copiously illustrated by funny and, at times, horrific cartoons in which a wide range of characters - including philosophers - communicate with each other and the reader through speech bubbles. It also happens to be the best introduction to Sartre's thinking I have read.

It is a volume in a series called "...for Beginners" - or rather in one of two series with this name, one published in the States and the other in the U.K., and confusingly it is not clear whether there is a connection between them. The only difference in appearance is that the American version (which includes "Sartre") is somewhat larger in format.

The potential critique of a "comic book" presentation of systems of thought is not difficult to imagine: do not complex ideas suffer from being oversimplified? is not their seriousness undermined by cartoon-like illustrations? Before seeing the more successful of these attempts to present important thinkers and movements of the past and present cultural scene I might well have expressed such doubts.

But these are books for "beginners", they are introductions meant to open up an understanding of unfamiliar and often complicated issues. As a teacher I have often felt the need for a lucid formulation, a striking image that brings out the heart of the matter briefly and graphically.

It depends, of course, on how it is done. Donald Palmer does it extremely well. He has a thorough knowledge of Sartre's ideas and is able to convey them. The book covers the important aspects of Sartre's life, the development of his philosophical position, his ambivalent relationship with communism. It includes a useful introduction to phenomenology as created by Husserl, and illuminates the importance of Kierkegaard's influence on Sartre's concepts. However, it underplays, in my view, the relevance of Heidegger's thinking for Sartre's approach to Being.

For existential therapists lucid discussion of the concepts of "bad faith" and "unreflected consciousness" are helpful, and we are shown how Sartre conceived of the possibility of an "existential psychoanalysis".

Unlike some more academic publications this book has a useful glossary and a list of the quotations used and where exactly these can be found in Sartre's work. And it costs only £ 6.99.

Donald Palmer has also written a book on Kierkegaard for this series which should be worth looking at.

Hans W. Cohn