Background

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France. He was the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. Sartre lost his father in infancy. After her husband's death, Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon to raise her son.

Education

After attending the Lycée Henri IV for a while in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre transferred to the Lycée in La Rochelle after his mother remarried.

In 1924, Sartre entered the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris and graduated first in his class - an extraordinary feat because of the demanding requirements of the school. While at the École, he formed a friendship with the young Simone de Beauvoir, who continually placed second behind him on all the exams. At the École, Sartre formed many important friendships with thinkers and writers who later became well known in their respective fields - people such as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the philosopher Simone Weil.

Career

In 1931, Jean-Paul Sartre became a Professor of Philosophy at Le Havre.

From 1933 to 1935, Sartre was a research student at the Institut Français in Berlin and Freiburg, Germany. He discovered the works of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and began to philosophize on phenomenology, or the study of human awareness. A series of works on the models of consciousness poured from Sartre's pen: two works on imagination, one on self-consciousness, and one on emotions. He also produced a first-rate volume of short stories, The Wall (1939).

After further teaching at Le Havre, and then in Laon, he taught at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris from 1937 to 1939 and continued his writing, but this was interrupted by World War II. Called up by the army, he served briefly on the Eastern front and was taken prisoner. After nine months he secured his release and returned to teaching in Paris, where he became active in the Resistance, a secret French group dedicated to removing the occupying German army. During this period he wrote his first major work in philosophy, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (1943).

After the war Sartre abandoned teaching, determined to support himself by writing. He was also determined that his writing and thinking should be engaging, or intellectually activating. Intellectuals, he thought, must take a public stand on every great question of their day. He thus became fundamentally a moralist, both in his philosophical and literary works.

Sartre had turned to playwriting and eventually produced a series of theatrical successes which are essentially dramatizations of ideas, although they contain some finely drawn characters and lively plots. The first two, The Flies and No Exit, were produced in occupied Paris. They were followed by Dirty Hands (1948), usually called his best play; The Devil and the Good Lord (1957), an insulting, anti-Christian rant; and The Prisoners of Altona (1960), which combined convincing character portrayal with telling social criticism. Sartre also wrote a number of comedies: The Respectful Prostitute (1946), Kean (1954), and Nekrassov (1956), which the critic Henry Peyre claimed "reveals him as the best comic talent of our times."

During this same period Sartre also wrote a three-volume novel, The Roads to Freedom (1945-1949); formal writings on literature; lengthy studies of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Jean Genet (1910-1986); and a large number of reviews and criticisms. He also edited Les Temps modernes.

In 1960 Sartre returned to philosophy, publishing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason. It represented essentially a modification of his existentialist ideas, or a philosophy that stresses the importance of the individual experience. The drift of Sartre's earlier work was toward a sense of the uselessness of life. In Being and Nothingness he declared man to be "a useless passion," forced to exercise a meaningless freedom. But after World War II, his new interest in social and political questions gave way to more optimistic and activist views.

Sartre was always controversial yet respected. In 1964 he was awarded but refused to accept the Nobel Prize in literature. Sartre suffered from declining health throughout the 1970s and died from lung problems on April 15, 1980. He is remembered as one of the most influential French writers of the twentieth century.

Achievements

• A leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre was an exponent of a philosophy of existence known as existentialism. His most notable works included Nausea (1938), Being and Nothingness (1943), and Existentialism and Humanism (1946).
  
  Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was awarded in October 1964. He said he always refused official distinctions and did not want to be "institutionalized." He also told the press he rejected the Nobel Prize for fear that it would limit the impact of his writing.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Truth and Existence

    (Truth and Existence, written in response to Martin Heideg...)

    1989
  • Essays in Aesthetics

    (Renowned French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre references a...)

    1963
  • The Age of Reason: A Novel

    (The first novel of Sartre's monumental Roads to Freedom s...)

    1945
  • Being and Nothingness

    ("Being and Nothingness" contains all the basic tenets of ...)

    1943
  • Nausea

    (Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer...)

    1938
  • Existentialism Is a Humanism 1946

Religion

Despite his philosophy, Sartre always claimed that religious belief remained with him - perhaps not as an intellectual idea but rather as an emotional commitment. He used religious language and imagery throughout his writings and tended to regard religion in a positive light, even though he didn't believe in the existence of any gods and rejected the need for gods as a basis for human existence.

Politics

After World War II, Sartre took an active interest in French political movements, and his leanings to the left became more pronounced. He became an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union, although he did not become a member of the Communist Party. In 1954 he visited the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Africa, the United States, and Cuba.

Upon the entry of Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956, however, Sartre's hopes for communism were sadly crushed. He wrote in Les Temps Modernes a long article, “Le Fantôme de Staline,” that condemned both the Soviet intervention and the submission of the French Communist Party to the dictates of Moscow. Over the years this critical attitude opened the way to a form of "Sartrian Socialism" that would find its expression in a new major work, Critique de la raison dialectique. Sartre set out to examine critically the Marxist dialectic and discovered that it was not livable in the Soviet form. Although he still believed that Marxism was the only philosophy for the current times, he conceded that it had become ossified and that, instead of adapting itself to particular situations, it compelled the particular to fit a predetermined universal. Whatever its fundamental, general principles, Marxism must learn to recognize the existential concrete circumstances that differ from one collectivity to another and to respect the individual freedom of man.

Views

The central theme of Sartre's philosophy was always "being" and human beings: What does it mean to be and what does it mean to be a human being? In this, his primary influences were always those alluded to thus far: Husserl, Heidegger, and Marx. From Husserl he took the idea that all philosophy must start first with the human being; from Heidegger, the idea people can best understand the nature of human existence through an analysis of human experience; and from Marx, the idea that philosophy must not aim to simply analyze existence but rather to change it and improve for the sake of human beings.

Sartre argued that there were essentially two kinds of being. The first is being-in-itself, which is characterized as fixed, complete, and have absolutely no reason for its being - it just is. This is basically the same as the world of external objects. The second is being-for-itself, which is dependent upon the former for its existence. It has no absolute, fixed, eternal nature and corresponds to human consciousness.

Thus, human existence is characterized by "nothingness" - anything which people claim is part of human life is of people's own creation, often through the process of rebelling against external constraints. This is the condition of humanity: absolute freedom in the world. Sartre used the phrase "existence precedes essence" to explain this idea, a reversal of traditional metaphysics and conceptions about the nature of reality.

According to Sartre, freedom produces anxiety and fear because, without providing absolute values and meanings, humanity is left alone without an external source of direction or purpose. Some try to conceal this freedom from themselves by some form of psychological determinism - the belief that they must be or think or act in one form or another. This always ends in failure, however, and Sartre argues that it is better to accept this freedom and make the most of it.

In his later years, he moved towards a more and more Marxist view of society. Instead of simply the completely free individual, he acknowledged that human society imposes certain boundaries on human existence which are difficult to overcome. However, even though he advocated revolutionary activity, he disagreed with communists on a number of issues. He did not, for example, believe that human history is deterministic.

Quotations: "When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die."

"Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance."

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

"We have lost religion, but we have gained humanism."

Membership

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Personality

Perhaps because of his physical limitations and irregular family life, Sartre learned early to assess people and events from a detached, systematic viewpoint. He would talk with his mother in the park each day in search of new friends, and on discovering that children his age weren't much interested in him, he would return sadly to his apartment and launch into dreams. Such is the background for what would become a career based on serious and profound thinking tempered by a creative, artistic talent.

Physical Characteristics: As a child, Sartre was small and cross-eyed - features which followed him through life - and thus he was generally unsuited for the activities of more ordinary children.

Quotes from others about the person

• Louis Althusser: "He was our Jean-Jacques Rousseau."
  
  Lisa Appignanesi: "When I was growing up in the 60s, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were a model couple, already legendary creatures, rebels with a great many causes, and leaders of what could be called the first postwar youth movement: existentialism - a philosophy that rejected all absolutes and talked of freedom, authenticity, and difficult choices. It had its own music and garb of sophisticated black which looked wonderful against a cafe backdrop. Sartre and De Beauvoir were its Bogart and Bacall, partners in a gloriously modern love affair lived out between jazz club, cafe and writing desk, with forays on to the platforms and streets of protest. Despite being indissolubly united and bound by ideas, they remained unmarried and free to engage openly in any number of relationships. This radical departure from convention seemed breathtaking at the time."

Interests

• Theatre, reading

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Kierkegaard, Marx

• Politicians

  Fidel Castro, Ernesto "Che" Guevara

• Writers

  Gustave Flaubert

• Artists

  Tintoretto

• Sport & Clubs

  football

• Music & Bands

  jazz

Connections

In 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir. At the time, they were both studying for a national exam in philosophy in Paris. Although Sartre resisted what he called "bourgeois marriage," he formed an open relationship with de Beauvoir. They frequently read each other's work, and in 1945 they founded Les Temps modernes, a monthly review.

Sartre also had an Algerian mistress known as Arlette Elkaim, whom he adopted as a daughter in 1965.

Father:

Jean-Baptiste Sartre

Mother:

Anne-Marie Schweitzer

Daughter:

Arlette Elkaim

Partner:

Simone de Beauvoir

Jean-Paul Sartre shared a great friendship with philosopher and feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir. Though it turned into a romantic relationship later on, neither of them were monogamous.

References

• Sartre: A Philosophical Biography by Thomas R. Flynn
  2014