Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Summary
Iris Murdoch offers a close, interpretive study of Jean-Paul Sartre that blends philosophical analysis with literary criticism. She reads his major philosophical statements alongside his novels and plays, treating philosophical doctrines and narrative technique as mutually illuminating. The result is a picture of Sartre as a thinker whose rigorous existential system is also animated by a romantic intensity.
Murdoch traces how Sartre's central claims about freedom, subjectivity and responsibility unfold across genres. She pays attention to the lived, psychological texture of his characters as a testing ground for his abstractions, showing where philosophical theses gain force and where they strain against imaginative detail.

Main Themes and Arguments
Murdoch coins the phrase "romantic rationalist" to capture a tension at the heart of Sartre's work: a commitment to rational analysis and phenomenological method combined with a romantic insistence on revolt, passion and individual authenticity. Her reading emphasizes that Sartre's celebrated doctrine that "existence precedes essence" is not merely metaphysical assertion but a charged ethical and literary stance that privileges creative self-formation and negation.
She examines Sartre's notion of freedom as an uncompromising capacity of consciousness to define itself, arguing that his account powerfully exposes the moral stakes of autonomy but often underestimates the formative influence of circumstances, institutions and other people. Murdoch locates recurrent dialectics in his thought: freedom versus facticity, the self as project versus the self as object, and the pull between imaginative empathy and philosophical abstraction.

Literary Criticism and Method
Murdoch reads Sartre's fiction and drama with a critic's eye for characterization, narrative technique and tone. She highlights his skill at producing intense psychological situations, his use of interior monologue and his theatrical staging of existential dilemmas. For Murdoch, these narrative devices both exemplify and test his philosophical claims, providing vivid case studies of bad faith, anguish and ethical choice.
Her method combines close textual attention with philosophical scrutiny. She treats novels like laboratories: scenes and characters are inspected for how well they instantiate concepts such as freedom, responsibility and the look of the Other. Where Sartre's narrative achieves psychological realism, Murdoch credits novelistic insight; where it lapses into polemic or schematic types, she marks the philosophical limitations.

Assessment and Critique
Murdoch admires Sartre's intellectual courage, rhetorical energy and the originality of his existential vocabulary, but she is also critical. She worries that his emphasis on individual transcendence can drift into a form of solipsism that neglects mutual obligations and the ethical weight of ordinary relationships. She finds his moral picture sometimes thin: freedom is vividly asserted, but the positive content of goodness, care and attention receives less robust treatment.
Her criticisms are not merely negative. Murdoch offers corrective suggestions grounded in moral psychology and literary sensibility. She proposes sharpening attention to relationality, to the subtle ways that character, habit and social context shape moral life. In doing so she anticipates themes she later pursues in her own philosophical writings about virtue, attention and the moral imagination.

Legacy and Importance
The study stands as an early example of Murdoch's philosophical engagement and as a nuanced contemporary assessment of Sartre's postwar significance. It helped anglophone readers grasp the interplay between his phenomenology and his literature, and it signaled Murdoch's capacity to move between analytic rigor and literary judgment.
By identifying both the strengths and the lacunae in Sartre's project, Murdoch's portrait proved influential for later debates about existentialism, ethics and the role of fiction in philosophy. The phrase "romantic rationalist" endures as a concise diagnostic of Sartre's complex temperament: a thinker who marries systematic ambition to passionate revolt, and whose genius raises as many questions as it settles.