What did Sartre want to convey in his trilogy "Roads of Freedom"? Which part of the three is the most significant?
How does this book relate to his philosophy and philosophy in general?
Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
All parts are important (there are 4 of them, but the fourth is formally unfinished). In my opinion, the climax is reached in the third part, where the characters make a choice.
The book is closely connected with Sartre's philosophy – it is a continuation of the development of the philosophy of existentialism. In the book, the characters find themselves in a series of borderline situations, in which, according to Sartre, in the process of choosing, they find freedom. It is enough to recall the episode when Mathieu (in which some features of the author are guessed) decides to fight in a deliberately hopeless situation, but it is there that he is truly free.
But at the same time, this book, in my opinion, represents a step from existentialism to Marxism. Sartre in this book actually comes to the Hegelian and then Marxist conclusion that freedom is a known necessity. That the point is not only in the act of choosing, but in what kind of choice a person makes, whether it corresponds to objective reality. Sartre did not come to these thoughts immediately, but his path to them is well known in his philosophical plays from the simplest and most purely existentialist (“Flies”, “Behind closed doors”) to much more complex ones (“The Devil and the Lord God” and “The Recluses of Altona”).
In his manifesto “Existentialism is Humanism,” Sartre wrote about his novel:
“One of the main reproaches to my book “Roads of Freedom” is formulated as follows: how can you make heroes of such flabby people? This objection is not serious, it assumes that people are born heroes. In fact, this is exactly what people would like to think: if you were born a coward, you can be completely calm — you can't change anything and you will remain a coward for the rest of your life, no matter what you do. If you were born a hero, you can also be completely calm — you will remain a hero all your life, you will drink like a hero, eat like a hero. The existentialist says: the coward makes himself a coward, and the hero makes himself a hero. It is always possible for a coward to stop being a coward, and for a hero to stop being a hero. But it's only total determination that counts, not individual cases or individual actions — they don't capture us completely.”
It seems to me that this fragment speaks well of what Sartre wanted to convey in “Roads of Freedom”.