Sartre vs Baldwin | Joanna Kavenna, Jonathan Webber, and Marie-Elsa Bragg

Apr 1, 2025

Guest

Marie-Elsa Bragg

Guest

Jonathan Webber

Guest

Joanna Kavenna

In this discourse, Joanna Kavenna, an award-winning writer and seasoned traveler, Jonathan Webber, a moral philosophy professor and UK Sartre Society president, and author Marie-Elsa Bragg unravel the philosophical showdown between Sartre and Baldwin. They debate how much we can truly understand about others' experiences. Love, language, and identity are explored, juxtaposing Baldwin's view of connection against Sartre's insistence on individual subjectivity. They tackle whether language can bridge human experiences and the complexities of understanding in a polarized world.

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INSIGHT

Shared Perspectives

Sartre and Baldwin share common ground: social meanings shape us.
We're not determined by these meanings but driven by self-set goals.

ANECDOTE

City Dreams vs. Social Reality

In Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain," John Grimes desires to claim the city.
Yet, he's met with smirks, highlighting the disparity between inner self and societal perception.

INSIGHT

Freedom and Love

Both Sartre and Baldwin champion freedom from societal constraints.
Baldwin emphasizes love, a concept often debated in relation to Sartre.

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We take it for granted that through language and communication we can learn about the experience of others. But it remains unknown whether we can fully know what it is like to be another human being. James Baldwin and Jean-Paul Sartre take radically different approaches. For Sartre, the experience of others is unknown to us. Fundamentally, we are alone with our own subjectivity. While for Baldwin, "to encounter oneself is to encounter the other; and this is love". Summing up his disagreement with Sartre he remarked: "it has always seemed to me that ideas were somewhat more real to him than people.”

Was Baldwin right that to be alive is to be socially connected to others? Or is Sartre's insight that the only thing we can know is our own experience more telling? Should we conclude that we cannot understand the experience of another unless we have had the same experience? Or is language capable of bridging the seemingly impossible gap between us?

Jonathan Webber is a professor at Cardiff University specializing in moral philosophy and the philosophy of psychology. Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg is an author, teacher, and priest. Her first novel, Towards Mellbreak is about four generations of a quiet hill farming family on the North Western fells of Cumbria. Joanna Kavenna is an award-winning writer. She was born in the UK but as a seasoned traveller, she was led to her first book, The Ice Museum, which details her experience travelling in the remote North. Hosted by presenter, writer and professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford, Rana Mitter

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