Existentialist philosopher and writer, born in Paris, France. He taught philosophy at Le Havre, Paris, and Berlin, was imprisoned in Germany (1941), and after his release joined the resistance in Paris. In 1945 he emerged as the leading light of the left-bank intellectual life of Paris. His name is synonymous with existentialism, a philosophy which seeks the freedom of the individual human being, and which he shared with his companion, Simone de Beauvoir. His novels include the trilogy, Les Chemins de la liberté (19459, Paths of Freedom), and he also wrote (especially after the war) a large number of plays, such as Huis clos (1944, trans In Camera/No Exit) and Le Diable et le bon Dieu (1951, trans Lucifer and the Lord). His philosophy is presented in L'Etre et le néant (1943, Being and Nothingness). In 1964 he published his autobiography Les Mots (Words), and was awarded (but declined) the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the later 1960s he became heavily involved in opposition to US policies in Vietnam, and supported student rebellion in 1968.
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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
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| Jean-Paul Sartre | |
| Name: | Jean-Paul Sartre |
| Birth: | June 21, 1905 (Paris, France) |
| Death: | April 15, 1980 (Paris, France) |
| School/tradition: | Existentialism, Marxism |
| Main interests: | Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics, Phenomenology, Ontology |
| Notable ideas: | "existence precedes essence" |
| Influences: | Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Marx |
| Influenced: | Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Wes Penre, Ali Shari'ati, Gilles Deleuze |
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced: [ʒɑ̃ pol saʁ.tʁ(ə)]), was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic.
Early life and thought
Sartre was born in Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. When he was 15 months old, his father died of a fever and Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor of German, 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. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger.
Together, Sartre and Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually-destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" state of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943).
Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture. The work has been considered a popular, if over-simplifying, point of entry for those seeking to learn more about Sartre's ideas but lacking the background in philosophy necessary to fully absorb his longer work Being and Nothingness.
Sartre's metaphysics
The basis of Sartre's existentialism is found in The Transcendence of the Ego. Any direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself, Sartre refers to as a "pre-reflective consciousness". the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective consciousness". (self-consciousness is a reflective consciousness of an overflowing infinite) In Sartre's words (or more accurately an interpretation of Sartre's words), "Conciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object". However, there is an implication of Solipsism here that Sartre considers fundamental to any coherent description of the human condition.
Sartre overcomes this Solipsism by a kind of ritual.
La Nausée and existentialism
As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du 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. Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that human freedom and morality are derived from our ability to choose in reality) as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual.
Sartre and World War II
In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux.
Socialisme et liberté disappeared soon and Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance. Sartre and Beauvoir remained friends with him until Camus turned away from communism, a schism that eventually divided them in 1951, after the publication of Camus' The Rebel.
Later, while Sartre was labelled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German Occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself.
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.
Jean-Paul Sartre was the head of the Organization to Defend Iranian Political Prisoners from 1964 till the victory of the Islamic Revolution.
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.
As a fellow-traveller, Sartre 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.
Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with the leading Communist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx.
Sartre and literature
During the 1940s and 1950s Sartre's ideas remained ambiguous, and existentialism became a favoured philosophy of the beatnik generation. In "Desolation Angels," Kerouac implies that his fantasy of Parisian life has been tarnished by Sartre and existentialism.) Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus in the popular imagination.
Besides the obvious impact of Nausea, Sartre's major contribution to literature was the The Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. The first book in the trilogy, L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945), could easily be said to be the Sartre work with the broadest appeal.
Sartre after literature
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 litterature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world.
Though he was now world-famous and a household word (as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with few possessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968, during which he was arrested for civil disobedience. General De Gaulle stepped in, and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrest Voltaire".
In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied: "I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived,...how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself."
Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially due to the merciless pace of work (and using drugs for this reason, e.g., amphetamine) he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and the last project of his life, a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which remain unfinished.
Sartre's atheism was foundational for his style of existentialist philosophy. In March 1980, about a month before Sartre's death, he was interviewed by an assistant of his, Benny Lévy, and within these interviews he expressed interest in Messianic Judaism. In a separate 1974 interview with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre said that he often saw himself "as a being that could, it seems, only come from a creator." Sartre's words were:
Sartre lies buried in Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
Sartre and terrorism
When eleven Israeli Olympians were killed by the Palestinian organization Black September in Munich 1972, Sartre referred to terrorism as a "terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others."
However, Sartre publicly disagreed with the methods of the Red Army Faction in Germany during the same period. aka The Victors), 1946 L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946 La putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute) 1946 Qu'est ce que la littérature? (What is literature?), 1947 Baudelaire, 1947 Situations, 1947 –1965 Les mains sales (Dirty Hands), 1948 "Orphée Noir" (Black Orpheus), introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1948 Le diable et le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord), 1951 Les jeux sont faits (The Game is Up), 1952 Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1952 Existentialism and Human Emotions, 1957 Les séquestrés d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona), 1959 Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), 1960 "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 Search for a Method (English translation of preface to Critique, Vol. I) 1962 Les mots (The Words), 1964 - autobiographical L'idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), 1971–1972 - on Gustave Flaubert Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for an Ethics), 1983, 1947-48 notes on ethics Les carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939 - Mars 1940 (War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War 1939-1940), 1984, notebooks from Sartre's time in the Phony War of 1939-1940
Further reading
Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905-80, 1985 Thomas Flynn, Sartre And Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case Of Collective Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy 1950-1960, New York: Pantheon, 1971. Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian van den Hoven. Heiner Wittmann, L'esthétique de Sartre. 0226287971By Sartre
Americans and Their Myths Sartre's essay in The Nation (October 18, 1947 issue) Sartre Internet Archive on Marxists.org French Audiobook (mp3) : incipit of The Words (1964), read aloud in French by IncipitBlog.On Sartre
Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason essay by Andy Blunden Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): Existentialism Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Sartre.org Articles, archives, and forum "The Second Coming Of Sartre", John Lichfield, The Independent, 17 June 2005 The World According to Sartre essay by Roger Kimball Reclaiming Sartre A review of Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism Biography and quotes of Sartre 1987 audio interview of Annie Cohen-Salal, author of Sartre: A Life. Pierre Michel, Jean-Paul Sartre et Octave Mirbeau. Laureates (2001- )| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sartre, Jean Paul |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | French philosopher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 21, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 15, 1980 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Paris |
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