From Socrates to Sartre EP28 ⟩ “Sartre IV: No Exit”
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Happy Halloween! Welcome to the scariest episode of the series!
These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
Sartre IV: No Exit
Welcome to the terror of absolute freedom. The collapse of external foundations. The ineluctable demand to choose without appeal. No gods. No guarantees. Just you, your freedom, and the abyss.
Welcome to the hell of actual reality. Can you bear to kill your comforting illusions for 166.6 minutes?
When I called John Carpenter today about our coming FINAL EPISODE with Thelma, he reflected on my situation and said this.
“I see two frightening [redacted] facts about your Sartre IV episode.”
And then he laughed and flattered himself about the alliteration, at which point I hung up. I apologized by email and he wrote back later but didn’t say anything relevant. But a few hours later he called back drunk and these are my notes —
- Children under 17 should not be admitted to this episode.
- Many people will be scarred to know that this is our last episode with Thelma. Our actual Bubbe, who has been actually spiritually communicating with us, is leaving us. After this, there will be no warm super-distinct explainer with that (Thelonius) Monk-like phrasing—the surprise pauses, the percussive strikes of imagic lightning, the jarring but perfect examples, the clean phrases that land like verdicts. All of that goodness will be absent.
- Many people will be traumatized by content of the episode. There is no monster, possessed girl, demon, or zombie scarier than radical freedom without appeal. The freedom monster is a really real scary thing that’s actually in you. Nothing, except the Alien chest-burster scene if you saw it in the theater at age nine, is as scary as He who walks behind the rows within you.
Sartre’s Uplifting Bitter Alchemy
Sartre stands at the apex of mid-century European thought during its cultural nadir, i.e., in the immediate aftermath of Nazi occupation.
People traumatized by the Nazi occupation no longer trusted their inherited metaphysical and moral frameworks. They were in a meaning-and-value vacuum. This vacuum was experienced as both catastrophe and possibility. Sometimes you need a nadir before you can really improve. Sartre gave this Zeitgeist moment its best possible philosophical voice.
In 1945, France emerged from the triple trauma of Nazi occupation, national humiliation, and (especially) mass collaboration. Sartre’s existentialism did not seek to soften or sublimate this despair but use it as a strategic launchpad.
Take despair and disorientation. In Ultima IV, these are names of dungeons. But are they really of the devil? In Sartre’s gospel, they are actually a pair of raw, uncamouflaged, necessary/structural facts about rational-agentive self-determining consciousness. Despair is not an irregularity that needs to be medicated or distracted away but an essence of the authentic, healthy, free human. (Knowing that it’s a good thing already makes me feel better.)
So instead of offering a consoling metaphysics (Christian, humanist, or Marxist), Sartre transmutes fear and trembling into gateways to transformation —
- Yeah, the collapse of external foundations is pretty bad and might make your mind snap … but it could wake you up to the radical responsibility tied to your innate ontological freedom.
- Yeah, the absence of moral guarantees might lead you to religious escapism or nihilism, … but it could confront you with the stark imperative to choose without appeal — to act without recourse to any higher tribunal of justification.
Instead of curing our despair, Sartre turns it into an ally—a necessary condition of freedom, though admittedly a scary absolute freedom unmoored from all guarantees. Existentialism builds its entire moral ontology out of the materials of nihilism.
Why Sartre was So Popular
What made Parisian audiences so enthusiastic in 1945 was not academic analysis of Being and Nothingness. That book was widely owned, cited, and admired—true. But it was an intellectual totem. Most of Sartre’s philosophical vision was absorbed through more entertaining stuff, his —
- Lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (direct and accessible),
- Plays (No Exit)
- Novels (Nausea, The Roads to Freedom),
- And the pervasive intellectual atmosphere around Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Thelma’s Parting Five-Course Sartre Performance
Now look at this curated goodness that Thelma handcrafted for expert presentation in this episode. It’s so good, that I heard people saying that the second half of this episode should be watched daily. These blips are meditations that need to be engrained in us daily. Thelma has actually provided special mantras (Thelmantras) that we can use for just this practice —
I. Ethics without Foundations
Sartre’s existentialism refuses the comfort of external or transcendent moral authorities. Neither Christian doctrine, nor Kantian maxims, nor any general ethic can decide the meaning of a choice. When his student sought moral guidance—torn between fighting the Nazis abroad and caring for his mother—Sartre’s reply was devastating in its simplicity:
“You’re free. Choose.”
Here, the ground falls away. With the “death of God,” no moral stars remain by which to navigate. And yet, we remain radically responsible for charting a course. Sartre’s ethics gives us procedural clarity (avoid bad faith, choose authentically) but no substantive moral direction. All acts, freely chosen, are equivalent. To lead a resistance cell or to get drunk alone—ethically indistinguishable.
Thelmantra: I act without anchors and I engage moral thought under conditions of zero gravity. I walk upright in a moral void — and still must choose. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
II. Bad Faith, Inauthenticity, and the Spirit of Seriousness
Sartre’s diagnosis of modern moral evasion is surgical.
- Bad faith is the self’s lie to itself: pretending to be determined like an object when in fact one is free.
- Inauthenticity is the denial of one’s own projective freedom.
- The spirit of seriousness is the quiet metaphysics of bourgeois comfort: treating contingent, historically local moral codes as if they were physical laws, like gravity.
You’ll never forget the image of the dirty pigs of Bouville, smug pillars of society, wallowing in conventional morality as if it were the bedrock of the cosmos.
Thelmantra: Never mistake comfort for truth. Smash the idols of necessity. No idols. No excuses. My freedom cannot be outsourced.
III. “Hell is Other People”: Being-for-Others
Sartre’s social ontology turns every glance into a battlefield. Under the Look (le regard), I become an object in another’s world; my freedom is pierced and held in suspension. Sociality is not a safe refuge from radical freedom, but its intensification. Every relationship, from political conflict to erotic love, is structured by the struggle to possess or escape the Other’s freedom. Sartre adapts and radicalizes Hegel’s master–slave dialectic:
“Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.”
Love is a doomed project—an attempt to anchor my being in another’s freedom without annihilating it. But no one can be both free and possessed.
Thelmantra: Love without owning. Face every gaze without fleeing. Love cannot anchor freedom. It can only collide with it.
IV. The Viscous and the Abyss
Sartre gives his existentialist universe its tactile phenomenology: the viscous—mud, tar, honey—symbolizes the horrifying ambiguity of a world that is neither liquid nor solid, neither determinable nor escapable. To touch it is to risk being engulfed. Freedom confronts the world not as blank neutrality but as a sticky, nauseating otherness. Here Sartre’s thought reveals its subterranean metaphors: a horror not unlike Lovecraft’s—only internalized.
Thelmantra: The world clings. Freedom is wrested from its grip.
V. Radical Freedom, Ethical Bankruptcy, and the Shadow of Nihilism
By grounding all value solely in human freedom, Sartre leaves us with freedom without foundation. No moral law survives this radical gesture—not divine, not rational, not communal. Authenticity is procedural, not normative.
“It comes to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.”
This is the edge of nihilism: all choices equivalent, all values contingent, all principles dissolved.
And yet Sartre leaves the door slightly ajar: footnotes hint at a “radical conversion,” an “ethics of deliverance and salvation” not yet articulated. History will lead him toward Marxism—but it is here, at the lip of the abyss, that his existentialism is most philosophically potent.
Thelmantra: No gods. No guarantees. Only the cold imperative: Choose.
¡Happy Thelmoween!
Don’t miss this terrifying FINAL SESSION of Thelma Lavine’s world-nourishing acheivement. In it, she brings us face to face with the most uncompromising formulation of human freedom in all of modern thought.
You are freedom unanchored, dignity without guarantees, and the Look that turns every relation into a theater of exposure and judgment. This nightmare cannot be woken from.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
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