The early Sartre and Arendt on action: exploring a neglected relationship

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to engage with Jean-Paul Sartre's and Hannah Arendt's analyses of action. Although Arendt's analysis of action is well known and interest in Sartre's early analysis of action has recently grown, there has been little attempt to bring the two thinkers together on this topic. This is presumably because their respective positions appear to be antithetical and, indeed, Arendt's assessment of Sartre's philosophy was so critical. My guiding contention, however, is that the early Sartre and Arendt actually share a number of common positions regarding the question of action. By first outlining Sartre's analysis of action in Being and Nothingness, before turning to Arendt's discussions in The Human Condition and the essay “What is Freedom?” (from 1958 and 1960), I show that, although differences exist, their respective positions overlap on a number of important points, including a common critique of the free will tradition, both for its supposed dependence on arbitrariness and for reducing action to a mental activity, and their joint insistence that action entails a projection of the entire being of the individual that is grounded in a prior orientation (defined in terms of values for Sartre and a principle for Arendt).