Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism and Human Emotions

 The more I read of Sartre, the clearer he becomes, in several ways.  The first, perhaps most significant, is that it's not that serious or complicated at root.  One tries to parse every word, making sense of and extrapolating each turn of phrase, but as it turns out that, while Sartre's thinking may be sophisticated, his writing is not.  Where he seems to be trying to explain the inexplicable, desperately trying to clarify for the reader something that is beyond words, he is in actuality trying to  work through and adorn a very simple idea in his own mind, and is just as confused as the reader.  I owe a great deal of my own personal beliefs and philosophy to existentialist thought, but I must say that in this case he seems to have overextended himself, gone under his own gas, and gilded the lily.  The truth of existentialism is universal, but here he tries to make it specific and to lay it into a practical purpose: that of psychoanalysis.  There are a couple of flaws with this mercifully brief project;  for one thing, the nature of existential reality is such that it is impossible for it to be prescriptive; if reality and experience have no inherent meaning, then it is awfully silly to use the same tools that have revealed that fact to try and reveal the whys and hows of behavior, to give meaning to what is without meaning.  For another thing, it would be absurd from a purely existentialist point of view to try and make generalizations about human experience, insofar as it is impossible to know the experience of another, let alone of all.  This is most sorely revealed when Sartre addresses the promising question of "The Hole" (84).  This is at first glance a sobriquet for "The Void" which is so crucial to existentialism, but no.  He means literal, physical holes: mouths, sockets, and vaginas.  He observes that people like to fill holes, and assumes it is because they are representations of the larger Void at the heart of the self.  by his reasoning, it is purely for this reason that children put their fingers in their mouths, and men enjoy putting their penises in . . . honestly anything.  If one didn't know better, one would think that he had never actually had sex, for there is a stronger urge at play that that of filling holes: that of having orgasms and feeling physical pleasure.  It is this sort of detachment from the realities of human experience that make it seem as if Sartre were a god trying to communicate to mortals, but in reality he is simply a man who had a great idea, and spent the rest of his life trying to make it work.