Well, I had not really began to get an understanding of existentialism until reading your post on Sartre. The notion of existence preceding essence seems somehow clear though, whether we are talking about a rock (which presumably does not; cannot CARE about existence) or a human being who DOES care and really has no say-so in the matter of caring...inasmuch as a human essence is measurably more complex and profound than that of a rock. Therefore, Professor Perry, I submit to you that none of us are condemned to decide whether we are existentialists. The matter is, as stated in various subjects of litigation, well-settled. The fact of our humanity itself compels our essential existentialism. We need not worry ourselves over the question. You probably have not lost sleep over this and neither will I. Happy to have been of help. Jean-Paul was an iconic figure. And just so.
HGN.

I think Sartre's role in the Paris Underground was more in spirit than in substance, though it certainly colored his thinking. His is a sort of secular Calvinism. Instead of a solitary soul standing in judgment before a relentlessly ?just? and ?righteous? god, his is a solitary consciousness before the void. The moral void, that is, that sanity was left with after defeat of the Nazis. Unlike so many other thinkers, he did not reach out for some intellectual crutch to elude the terrible specter of complete responsibility. But, pace Perry, it is his philosophical writings that are most of interest, and too much should not be made of his fiction. His two earliest works are ingenious, on the creation of mental images (Imagination and The Psychology of the Imaginary) demonstrate that Husserl's phenomenology is an act of consciousness, not passive perception. Heidegger states in the preface to Being and Time that the essence of Dasein is to exist. He repudiates this later, denying he ever said it, but there it is for any to read. Sartre would have noted this when he received that work during his internment as a POW of the Germans. Hence, ?existence precedes essence?. It amounts to saying that existence is a priori to transcendence. The beginning of the count of time is the act of person naming it. His thinking did not evolve as it might have, so stubborn was he in preserving his ?pessimism?. And yet, he saw in the complete responsibility of being the only act in a universe of passive reaction, an affirmation of moral duty. What he never allows himself to see is the response that completes that act by finding its own worth in it. Each of us is an anomaly to the mindless pulse of time. Each alone is negligible in this. But where time responds in any sense recognized its worth as that act each of us is of it moral duty is what freedom is. Because it is merely the recognition of the worth of that response time is of the act each is. And what neglects that, what views time as unworthy of us (because we belong to some divine plan) or as a mindless obedience to a priori principles, really is despair. It was a kind of honesty that kept Sartre from seeing this, as hard as it surely was for him. Where he really falls flat is in his rather stupid adherence to Stalinism, long after Stalin's inhumanity became known. Just to give an idea of how much of an impact he had in his day, the collection of articles and papers written about him runs to eight finely printed volumes.

Professor Perry, it is interested that I came to this site and saw this post, as I am halfway through your 1978 book: A dialogue on personal identity and immortality. It seems your mind is just as sharp as when you wrote this fabulous book. As far as philosophical works goes, yours is one of my favorites so far. It is very impressive to me that you are able to keep your mind sharp as many philosophers as there years go by, attribute a decline in creativity to a certain "fogginess" that perhaps has engulfed them. Or is it their mind rather and not "them"? Haha.

Here's a useful resource: Sartre, by Neil Levy, from One World Books. It's short and workmanlike, right to the point, and clearer than the other material supplied here.