Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905–April 15, 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic.

Contents

1 Early life and thought 2 La Nausée and Existentialism 3 Sartre and World War II 4 Sartre and communism 5 Sartre and literature 6 Works 7 Further reading 8 External links

Early life and thought

Sartre was born in Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, cousin of Albert Schweitzer. He was 15 months old when his father died of a fever and Anne-Marie raised him with help of her father, Charles Schweitzer, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at an early age.

As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He studied in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure where, in 1929, he met fellow student Simone de Beauvoir. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, though far from monogamous. Together they challenged the assumptions and expectations of their bourgeois upbringings. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (bad faith/mauvaise foi) and an "authentic" state of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1944).

Possibly the best introduction of Sartre's philosophy can be found in his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946). In this work, Sartre defends existentialism against its detractors, which ultimately lends itself to a 'dumbing down' of his ideas. This fact makes it a wonderful point of entry for anyone wanting to know more about Sartre's ideas, but lacking a background in philosophy to crawl through his magnamous tome Being and Nothingness.

He graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1929 with a doctorate in philosophy and served as a conscript in the French Army from 1929 to 1931.

La Nausée and Existentialism

As a junior lecturer at the University of Le Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. He believed that ideas always remained contingent upon real-life situations, and that novels and plays had as much value as did discursive essays for the expression of philosophical theories. The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected researcher in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom. This emphasis on the power of unconscious things over conscious, living beings resonates with Karl Marx's criticism of the power of commodities over people ("Censored page"), giving an indication of Sartre's coming turn to revolutionary liberation and dialectics.

The stories in Le Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of the situations people find themselves in and the absurdity of their attempts to deal rationally with them. A whole school of "absurd" literature subsequently developed.

Sartre and World War II

1939 saw Sartre drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist. German troops captured him in 1940 in Padoux , and he spent nine months in prison — later in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D , Treves, until released in April 1941 due to poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight affected his balance). Given civilian status, he then escaped to Paris where he became involved in the French Resistance, and participated in the founding of the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté . It was while engaged in the resistance that he met Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs, and remained friends with him until Camus became disillusioned with communism, a schism between them that eventually divided them in 1951. When the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review, and started writing full-time as well as continuing his political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).

Sartre and communism

The first period of Sartre's career, defined by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. He embraced communism, though he never officially joined the Communist party, and took a prominent role in the struggle against French colonialism in Algeria. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the Algerian war of liberation. He had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm , who became his adopted daughter in 1965. No orthodox Stalinist fellow-traveller, he spent much of the rest of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas about self-determination with communist principles, which taught that socio-economic forces beyond our immediate, individual control play a critical role in shaping our lives. His major defining work of this period, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960.

Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in Marx and the emphasis this gave rise to on the early Marx, led to a famous dispute with the leading Communist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, in which Althusser attempted to redefine Marx's work into an early pre-Marxist period, with essentialist generalizations about Mankind, and a mature, scientific, authentically Marxist period (starting between the Grundrisse and Das Kapital). Some say this was the only public debate Sartre ever lost.

Sartre and literature

During the 1940s and 1950s Sartre's ideas remained much in vogue, and existentialism became a favoured philosophy of the beatnik generation. Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948, the Vatican placed his complete works on the Index of prohibited books. Most of his plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line: "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people".

Besides the obvious impact of Nausea, Sartre's major contribution to literature was the Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism. The first book in the trilogy, L'age de raison (The Age of Reason ) (1945), could easily be said to be the Sartre work with the broadest appeal.

In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first six years of his life, Les mots (Words). The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of literature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but, true to his views, he resoundingly declined it. This rejection hurt the prestige of the Nobel institution more than it did Sartre.

Sartre lies buried in Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was attended by some 50,000 people.

Works

• L'imagination (Imagination), 1936
• La transcendance de l'égo (The Transcendence of the Ego ) 1937
• La nausée (Nausea), 1938
• Le mur (The Wall), 1939
• L'imaginaire, 1940
• Les mouches (The Flies ), 1943 - a modern version of the Oresteia
• L'être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943
• Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew ), 1943
• Huis-clos (No Exit), 1945
• Les Chemins de la liberté (Roads to Freedom ) trilogy, comprising:
  • L'age de raison (The Age of Reason ), 1945
  • Le sursis (The Reprieve ), 1947
  • La mort dans l'Âme (Iron in the Soul ), 1949
• Morts sans sépulture (The Victors), 1946
• Existentialism and Humanism, 1946
• La putain respectueuse (Censored page) 1946
• Qu'est ce que la littérature? (What is literature? ), 1947
• Baudelaire, 1947
• Situations, 1947–1965
• Les mains sales (Dirty Hands ), 1948
• Le diable et le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord ), 1951
• Existentialism and Human Emotions, 1957
• Les séquestrés d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona ), 1959
• Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), 1960
• Les mots (The Words ), 1964 - autobiographical
• "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
• L'idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), 1971–1972 - on Gustave Flaubert
• Cahiers pour une morale, 1983, posthumous

Further reading

• Heiner Wittmann, L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, translated from the German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar, Éditions L'Harmattan (Collection L'ouverture philosophique), Paris 2001.
• H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1996.
• Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905-80, 1985

External links

• Americans and Their Myths http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=19471018&s=sartre Sartre's 1947 essay in The Nation
• http://www.romanistik.info/sartre.html
• http://www.sartre.org
• The World According to Sartre http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/extras/sartre.htm essay by Roger Kimball

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Jean-Paul Sartre