Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
Iris Murdoch's 1953 first published book — her short philosophical-critical study of Sartre, the founding statement of her philosophical engagement with French existentialism
Tradition: Twentieth-century British philosophy / engagement with French existentialism
Iris Murdoch's 1953 short study of Sartre — her first published book and the founding statement of her philosophical-literary engagement with French existentialism
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) is Iris Murdoch's first published book — a short philosophical-critical study of Jean-Paul Sartre, the founding statement of her philosophical-literary engagement with French existentialism. Murdoch had spent the late 1940s in Paris reading Sartre and the broader French philosophical scene; the book is her assessment from a British analytical-philosophical perspective. Its thesis: Sartre is a "romantic rationalist" — combining the romantic-existentialist emphasis on individual freedom with a paradoxical rationalist confidence that the resulting moral life can be systematically articulated; the combination is unstable, and the moral philosophy that follows is finally unsatisfactory. The book is the seedbed of Murdoch's subsequent philosophical-literary engagement with the French tradition and the foundation of her own constructive moral philosophy.
Author
Editions cited
- Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge, 1953); reissued with new introduction (Vintage Classics, 1999)
School Embodiments
Murdoch writes from within the mid-twentieth-century British analytic-philosophical tradition while engaging the French continental tradition with full philosophical seriousness.
"Sartre's philosophy is at once a rationalist analysis of the human condition and a romantic celebration of individual freedom; the tension between these is what makes the work unstable." (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist)
Sustained critical-philosophical engagement with French existentialism — Sartre principally, but also Beauvoir and Camus in the background.
"What is most powerful in Sartre is what is most personal — the felt texture of moral choice under contingency." (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist)
Murdoch's emerging Platonist position (the Good as objective metaphysical reality) is implicit in the critique of Sartre as a "romantic rationalist."
"What Sartre lacks — and what no moral philosophy can do without — is a serious metaphysical commitment to the Good as something more than what the agent chooses." (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist)
Murdoch is realist about moral reality — Sartre's failure, on her reading, is precisely his refusal of moral realism.
"Sartre dissolves moral reality into the freedom of the choosing agent; this is, in the end, both philosophically and morally unsatisfactory." (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist)
Despite the critical engagement, Murdoch acknowledges the phenomenological achievement of Sartre's work.
"What Sartre describes — the felt experience of contingency, the texture of moral choice — is often better than what he theorises about it." (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist)
Murdoch identifies the underlying philosophical tensions in Sartre's position — between rationalist-systematic ambition and romantic-individualist commitment.
"The tension between Sartre's rationalist method and his romantic conclusions runs through the entire corpus." (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist)
Murdoch's eventual position — moral seriousness independent of theistic commitment — is here being formed in dialogue with Sartre.
"Sartre's atheism is more thorough than his moral philosophy can sustain — the moral life requires more than the atheistic framework provides." (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist)
Internal Tensions
The book is sometimes treated as a juvenile work eclipsed by Murdoch's mature philosophy; recent rehabilitation (Conradi, Antonaccio, Broackes) has restored its standing as a serious philosophical engagement.
I. Time
The early-1950s moment of British engagement with French existentialism; Murdoch's own intellectual formation.
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II. Space
Paris (where Murdoch had been) and Cambridge (where she now wrote); the British-French philosophical exchange.
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III. Matter
The textual matter of Sartre's philosophical works; Sartre's own embodied presence in 1940s-50s Paris.
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IV. Observer
Murdoch as British-analytical-philosophical observer; Sartre as the French-continental subject.
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V. Energy
The intellectual energies of mid-twentieth-century European philosophical exchange.
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VI. Information
The philosophical-critical analysis; the developmental seed of Murdoch's own constructive position.
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Sartre: Romantic Rationalist resolves each dilemma
48 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 9 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.