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Jean Paul Sartre

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Jean-Paul Sartre



 
 
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980), commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialist
Existentialism

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
 philosopher, playwright
Playwright

A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works may be written specifically to be performed by actors or they may be closet dramas or literary works written using dramatic forms but not meant for performance....
, novelist, screenwriter
Screenwriter

Screenwriters or scenarists are scriptwriters who write the screenplays from which films and television programs are made.Most screenwriters start their careers writing on speculation....
, political activist, biographer, and literary critic
Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals....
. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy
Twentieth-century French philosophy

Twentieth-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements....
.



-Paul Sartre was born and raised in Paris
Paris

Paris is the Capital of France and the country's largest city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the ?le-de-France Regions of France ....
 to Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy
French Navy

The French Navy, officially the Marine nationale and often called La Royale , is the maritime arm of the French military. It consists of a full range of vessels, from patrol boats to guided missile frigates, and includes one nuclear aircraft carrier and ten nuclear submarines ....
, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer.






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Quotations


A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

King Aegistheus, Act 2

Absurd, irreducible; nothing—not even a profound and secret delirium of nature—could explain a tree root.

Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

Jupiter, Act 1

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

Jupiter to Orestes, Act 2

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Act 2, sc. 3

All human actions are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.






Encyclopedia


Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980), commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialist
Existentialism

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
 philosopher, playwright
Playwright

A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works may be written specifically to be performed by actors or they may be closet dramas or literary works written using dramatic forms but not meant for performance....
, novelist, screenwriter
Screenwriter

Screenwriters or scenarists are scriptwriters who write the screenplays from which films and television programs are made.Most screenwriters start their careers writing on speculation....
, political activist, biographer, and literary critic
Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals....
. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy
Twentieth-century French philosophy

Twentieth-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements....
.



Biography


Early life and thought

Jean-Paul Sartre was born and raised in Paris
Paris

Paris is the Capital of France and the country's largest city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the ?le-de-France Regions of France ....
 to Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy
French Navy

The French Navy, officially the Marine nationale and often called La Royale , is the maritime arm of the French military. It consists of a full range of vessels, from patrol boats to guided missile frigates, and includes one nuclear aircraft carrier and ten nuclear submarines ....
, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin, and was a cousin of German Nobel prize laureate Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer was a German theology, musician, philosopher, and physician. He was born in Kaysersberg in the province of Elsass-Lothringen of the German Empire....
. When Sartre was 15 months old, his father died of a fever. 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
Classics

Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean World; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity ....
 at a very early age.

As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
 upon reading Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosophy, influential in the first half of the 20th century....
's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He studied and earned a doctorate
Doctorate

A doctorate is an academic degree that in most countries represents the highest level of formal study or research in a given field. In some countries it also refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to practice in a specific profession ....
 in philosophy in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure
École Normale Supérieure

The ?cole normale sup?rieure is a France Grandes ?coles . The ENS was initially conceived during the French Revolution, and intended to provide the First French Republic with a new body of teacher, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the the Enlightenment....
, an institution of higher education which was the alma mater
Alma mater

File:Alma_Mater,_Lorado_Taft.jpgAlma mater is Latin for "nourishing mother". It was used in ancient Rome as a title for the mother goddess, and in Middle Ages Christianity for the Virgin Mary....
 for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy
Western philosophy

Western philosophy is a term that refers to philosophy thinking in the Western world, as distinct from Eastern philosophy and the varieties of indigenous philosophies....
, absorbing ideas from Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century German Philosophy from the Kingdom of Prussia city of K?nigsberg . He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Age of Enlightenment....
, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German people philosopher, and with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators of German idealism....
, Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosophy who is deemed the founder of phenomenology . He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism....
 and Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was an influential Germany Philosophy. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century....
 among others. In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a France author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography in several volumes....
, who studied at the Sorbonne
Sorbonne

The name Sorbonne is commonly used to refer to the historic University of Paris in Paris, France or one of its successor institutions , but this is a recent usage, and "Sorbonne" has actually been used with different meanings over the centuries....
 and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist
Feminism

Feminism is the belief that women should have equal political, social, sexual, intellectual and economic rights to men. It involves various movements, Theory, and philosophies, all concerned with issues of gender difference, that advocate equality for women and that campaign for women's rights and interests....
. The two, it is documented, became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous. Sartre served as a conscript in the French Army
French Army

The French Army, officially the Arm?e de Terre , is the Army component of the Military of France and its largest. As of 2007, the army employs 134,000 regular soldiers, 15,500 reservists, and 25,750 civilians....
 from 1929 to 1931 and he later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence
Algerian War of Independence

The Algerian War , also known as Algerian War of Independence, led to Algeria's independence from France. An important decolonization war, it was a complex conflict characterized by guerrilla warfare, maquis fighting, terrorism against civilians, use of torture on both sides and counter-terrorism operations by the French Army....
.

Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 and social
Society

A society is a group of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions....
 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
Bad faith (existentialism)

Bad faith is a philosophy concept first coined by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the phenomenon wherein one denies one's total freedom, instead choosing to behave as an inert object....
") and an "authentic" way of "being
Being

In ontology being is anything that can be said to be, either Transcendence or Immanence.The nature of being varies by philosophy, given different interpretations in the frameworks of Parmenides, Leucippus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre....
"
became the dominant theme of Sartre's early 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.

Sartre and World War II

In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist. He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux
Padoux

Padoux is a village and Communes of the Vosges department in the Vosges departments of France of northeastern France....
, and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war
Prisoner of war

A prisoner of war is a combatant who is held in continuing custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict....
 — in Nancy
Nancy

Nancy is a city in the Meurthe-et-Moselle Departments of France in northeastern France.The city is the capital of the department. The metropolitan area of Nancy had a population of 410,509 inhabitants at the 1999 census, 103,602 of whom lived in the city of Nancy proper ....
 and finally in Stalag
Stalag

In Germany, Stalag was a term used for prisoner-of-war camps. Stalag is an abbreviation for "Stammlager", itself a short form of the full name "Mannschaftsstamm und -straflager"....
 12D, Trier
Trier

Trier is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle River. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC. Trier is not the only city claiming to be Germany's oldest, but it is the only one that bases this assertion on having the longest history as a city, as opposed to a mere settlement or army camp....
, where he wrote his first theatrical
Theatre

Theatre is the branch of the performing arts defined by Bernard Beckerman as what "occurs when one or more actor, isolated in time and/or Theater , present themselves to Audience." By this broad definition, theatre has existed since the dawn of man, as a result of human tendency for story telling....
 piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas
Christmas

Christmas , also referred to as Christmas Day, is an annual holiday celebrated on December 25 that commemorates the birth of Jesus. The day marks the beginning of the larger season of Christmastide, which lasts Twelve Days of Christmas....
. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Heidegger's Sein und Zeit later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology
Ontology

Ontology in philosophy is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic category of being and their relations....
. Due to poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941. Given civilian status, he recovered his position as a teacher of Lycée Pasteur near Paris, settled at the Hotel Mistral near Montparnasse at Paris and was given a new position at Lycée Condorcet
Lycée Condorcet

The Lyc?e Condorcet is a school founded in 1803 in Paris, France located at 8, rue du Havre in the city's IXe arrondissement. Since its inception, various political eras have seen it given a number of different names, but its identity today honors the memory of the Marquis de Condorcet....
, replacing a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law
Statute on Jews

The Statute on Jews was discriminatory legislation against French Jews passed on October 3, 1940 by the Vichy Regime, grouping them as a lower class and depriving them of citizenship before rounding them up at Drancy#History then taking them to be exterminated in concentration camps....
.

After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté with other writers Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a France author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography in several volumes....
, Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a France Phenomenology philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir....
, Jean-Toussaint, Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide
André Gide

Andr? Paul Guillaume Gide was a France author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the Symbolism movement, to the advent of Anti-imperialism between the two World Wars....
 and André Malraux
André Malraux

Andr? Malraux was a France author, adventurer and statesman, and a dominant figure in French politics and culture....
. However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. Socialisme et liberté soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write, instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies
The Flies

The Flies is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1943. It is an adaption of the Electra myth, previously used by the Greek drama Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes....
 and No Exit
No Exit

No Exit is a 1944 in literature existentialism Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, originally published in French language as Huis Clos . English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out, and Dead End. Huis Clos was first performed at the Th??tre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, just be...
, none of which was censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.

After August 1944 and the Liberation of Paris
Liberation of Paris

The Liberation of Paris took place during World War II from 19 August 1944 until the surrender of the occupying German garrison on the 25th and is accounted as the last battle in the Operation Overlord and the transitional conclusion of the Allied invasion breakout in Operation Overlord into a broad-fronted general offensive....
, he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew
Anti-Semite and Jew

"Anti-Semite and Jew" is an essay about antisemitism written by Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after the liberation of Paris from Germany occupation in 1944....
. In the book he tries to explain the etiology
Etiology

Etiology is the study of Causality. The word is derived from the Ancient Greek , aitiologia, "giving a reason for" .The word is most commonly used in medical and philosophical theories, where it is used to refer to the study of why things occur, or even the reasons behind the way that things act, and is used in philosophy, physics, psy...
 of hate by analyzing antisemitic hate. Sartre was a very active contributor to Combat
Combat (newspaper)

Combat was a France newspaper created during the Second World War. Originally a clandestine newspaper of the French Resistance, it was headed by Albert Ollivier, Jean Bloch-Michel, Georges Altschuler and, most of all, Albert Camus....
, a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus
Albert Camus

Albert Camus was an Algerian-born France author, Philosophy, and journalist who won the Nobel Prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus refused this label....
, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until he 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
Vladimir Jankélévitch

Vladimir Jank?l?vitch was a French philosophy and musicologist.Association Vladimir Jank?l?vitch, 48 rue de Fresnes L'Hay-les-Roses France....
 criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resistor who wrote.

When the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes
Les Temps modernes

Les Temps modernes is a political, literary and philosophical France magazine founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty....
 (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review
Review

A review is an evaluation of a publication, such as a film, video game, musical composition, book, or a piece of hardware like a car, appliance, or computer....
, 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
The Roads to Freedom

The Roads to Freedom is a trilogy of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre.The three novels The Age of Reason , The Reprieve , and Troubled Sleep , revolve around Mathieu, a Socialism teacher of philosophy, and a group of his friends....
) (1945–1949).

Politics

The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948 work Les Mains Sales
Les Mains Sales

Dirty Hands is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre. It was first performed on 2 April 1948 in literature#New drama at the Theatre Antoine in Paris, starring Fran?ois P?rier, Marie Olivier and Andr? Luguet....
 (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being both an intellectual at the same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He embraced communism
Communism

Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarianism, classlessness, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general....
, denied the purgings
Great Purge

Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1936-1938. Also described as a "Soviet holocaust" by several authors, it involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of kulaks, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliat...
 of Stalin, had an affair with a KGB
KGB

KGB is the Russian language abbreviation of Committee for State Security , which was the official name of the umbrella organization serving as the Soviet Union's premier security agency, secret police, and intelligence agency, from 1954 to 1991....
-agent and defended existentialism
Existentialism

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
, though never officially joining the Communist Party
French Communist Party

The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism. Although its electoral support has greatly declined in recent decades, it remains the largest party in France advocating communist views, and retains a large membership and considerable influence in French politics....
, and took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria
French rule in Algeria

French rule of Algeria lasted from 1830 to 1962, under a variety of governmental systems. One of France's longest-held overseas territories, Algeria became a destination for hundreds of thousands of European ethnic groups immigrants, known as colons and later, as pied-noirs....
. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the FLN
National Liberation Front (Algeria)

The National Liberation Front is a socialist, political party in Algeria. It was set up on November 1, 1954 as a merger of other smaller groups, to obtain independence for Algeria from France....
 in the Algerian War and was one of the signatory of the Manifeste des 121. Furthermore, he had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965. He opposed the Vietnam War
Vietnam War

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina Wars, the Vietnam Conflict, or often in Vietnam the American War occurred in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1959 to April 30, 1975....
 and, along with Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, Order of Merit , Fellow of the Royal Society , was a British people philosopher, mathematical logic, mathematician, historian, advocate for social reform, and pacifism....
 and others, organized a tribunal
Tribunal

Tribunal in the general sense is any person or institution with the authority to judge, adjudication on, or determine claims or disputes - whether or not it is called a tribunal in its title....
 intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal
Russell Tribunal

The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal or Russell-Sartre Tribunal, was a public body organized by British philosopher Bertrand Russell and hosted by French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre....
 in 1967. Its effect was limited.

As a fellow-traveller
Fellow traveller

In some political contexts the term fellow traveler refers to a person who sympathizes with the beliefs of a particular organization, but does not belong to that organization....
, Sartre spent much of the rest of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas about free will
Free will

The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and Causality, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic....
 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
Critique of Dialectical Reason

Critique of Dialectical Reason, originally Critique de la raison dialectique , was the last of Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical works: it attempted to reconcile Marxism and Existentialism....
) appeared in 1960 (a second volume appeared posthumously). In Critique, Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received up until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class
Social class

Social class refers to the hierarchy distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. Usually most societies have some notion of social class , but concretely defined social classes are not found in every known type of human societies....
" as an objective entity was fallacious. 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
Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser was a Marxist philosophy. He was born in Algeria and studied at the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx
Young Marx

Young Marx is one half of the concept in Marxology that Karl Marx's intellectual development can be broken into two broad categories, the other being ?Mature Marx?....
 were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx.

Sartre went to Cuba
Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is a country in the Caribbean. It consists of the island of Cuba , the island of Isla de la Juventud, and several adjacent small islands....
 in the '60s to meet Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary leader who was prime minister of Cuba from February 1959 to December 1976 and then president, premier until his resignation from the office in February 2008....
 and spent a great deal of time philosophizing with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age" and the "era's most perfect man." Sartre would also compliment Che Guevara
Che Guevara

Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che, or simply Che, was an Argentina Marxism revolutionary, politician, author, physician, military theorist, and guerrilla leader....
 by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel."

Following the Munich massacre
Munich massacre

The Munich massacre occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and eventually murdered by Black September , a militant group with ties to Yasser Arafat?s Fatah organization....
 in which eleven Israel
Israel

Israel officially the State of Israel , is a country in the Middle East located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area....
i Olympians were killed by the Palestinian organization Black September in Munich
Munich

Munich is the capital city of Bavaria, Germany. Munich is located on the River Isar north of the Northern Limestone Alps. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg....
 1972, Sartre said terrorism
Terrorism

Terrorism, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is the systematic use of terror, "violent or destructive acts committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands." At present, there is no internationally agreed upon definition of terrorism....
 "is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others." Sartre also found it "perfectly scandalous that the Munich attack should be judged by the French press and a section of public opinion as an intolerable scandal." However, Sartre was generally supportive of Israel and Zionism.

Late life and death

In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les mots (Words). The book is an ironic counterballast to Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eug?ne Marcel Proust was a France novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time , a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927....
, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide
André Gide

Andr? Paul Guillaume Gide was a France author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the Symbolism movement, to the advent of Anti-imperialism between the two World Wars....
 (who had provided the model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. He was the first Nobel Laureate to voluntarily decline the Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" ....
, and he had previously refused the Légion d'honneur
Légion d'honneur

The L?gion d'honneur or Ordre national de la L?gion d'honneur is a France order established by Napoleon I of France, First Consul of the French First Republic, on May 19, 1802....
, in 1945. The prize was announced 1964 22 October; on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread; on 23 October, Le Figaro
Le Figaro

Le Figaro is one of the leading France morning daily newspapers. Its editorial line is Conservatism and has generally been supportive of the Rally for the Republic political party and its successor, the Union for a Popular Movement ....
 published a statement by Sartre explaining his refusal.

However, Lars Gyllensten
Lars Gyllensten

Lars Johan Wictor Gyllensten was a Sweden author and physician, and a member of the Swedish Academy, which has the aim of furthering the "purity, vigour and majesty" of the Swedish language and selects the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature each year....
, long time member of the Nobel prize committee has claimed in his autobiography that Sartre later tried to access the prize money, but was subsequently turned down. Allegedly, the French philosopher in 1975 wrote a letter to the Nobel Prize committee saying that he had changed his mind about the prize, at least when it came to the money. At which point the prize committee is said to have declined the request, stating that the funds had been reinvested in the Nobel institute.

Though his name was then 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
Civil disobedience

Civil disobedience is the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government, or of an occupying power , without resorting to physical violence....
. President De Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrest Voltaire
Voltaire

Fran?ois-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Age of Enlightenment writer, essayist, and philosophy known for his wit, philosophical sport, and defense of civil liberty, including freedom of religion and free trade....
."


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
Critique of Dialectical Reason

Critique of Dialectical Reason, originally Critique de la raison dialectique , was the last of Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical works: it attempted to reconcile Marxism and Existentialism....
. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet...If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more. 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
Amphetamine

Amphetamine and related drugs such as methamphetamine are a group of drugs that act by increasing levels of norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine in the brain....
) he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and the last project of his life, a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was a France writer who is counted among the greatest Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style....
 (The Family Idiot), both of which remained unfinished. He died 15 April 1980 in Paris from an oedema of the lung
Lung

The lung is the essential respiration organ in air-breathing animals, including most tetrapods, a few fish and a few snails. In mammals and the more complex life forms, the two lungs are located in the chest on either side of the heart....
.

Sartre's atheism
Atheism

Atheism is the absence or rejection of belief in deity, or the explicit view that Existence of God.Many list of atheists are Skepticism of all supernatural beings and cite a lack of empiricism evidence for the existence of deities....
 was foundational for his style of existentialist philosophy. In March 1980, about a month before his death, he was interviewed by his assistant, Benny Lévy
Benny Lévy

Benny L?vy was a philosopher, political activist and author. A political figure of May 1968 in France, he has been the disciple and last personal secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980....
, and within these interviews he expressed his interest in Judaism
Judaism

Judaism is a set of beliefs and practices originating in the Hebrew Bible , as later further explored and explained in the Talmud and other texts....
 which was inspired by Levy's renewed interest in the faith. Through Sartre's study of Jewish history he became particularly interested in the messianic
Messiah

Messiah literally means "anointed ".In Jewish messiah tradition and Jewish eschatology, messiah refers to a future monarch of United Monarchy from the Davidic line, who will rule the people of Israelite#The Twelve Tribes, and herald the Messianic Age of global peace....
 idea of the faith. Some people apparently took this to indicate a deathbed conversion
Deathbed conversion

A deathbed conversion is the adoption of a particular religious faith shortly before dying. Making a Religious conversion on one's deathbed may reflect an immediate change of belief, a desire to formalize longer-term beliefs, or to complete a process of conversion already underway....
; however, the text of the interviews makes it clear that he did not consider himself a Jew
Jew

A Jew is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnoreligious group that traces its ancestry to the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East....
, and was interested in the ethical and "metaphysical character" of the Jewish religion, while continuing to reject the idea of an existing God
God

God is a deity in theism and deism religions and other belief systems, representing either the sole deity in monotheism, or a principal deity in polytheism....
. In a separate 1974 interview with Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a France author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography in several volumes....
, Sartre said that "I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God." But immediately adds that "this is not a clear, exact idea..."

During his life, Sartre tried to draw all possible conclusions from the idea that there is no God. "Man," he wrote in 1943, "is a useless passion." He also wrote "everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident."

Sartre lies buried in Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was attended by 20,000 mourners.

Thought


The basis of Sartre's existentialism can be found in The Transcendence of the Ego
The Transcendence of the Ego

The Transcendence of the Ego is a philosophical and psychological essay written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1937. The essay demonstrates Sartre?s transition from traditional phenomenological thinking and most notably his break from Edmund Husserl?s school of thought....
. To begin with, the thing-in-itself
Noumenon

The noumenon is a posited object or event as it is in itself, independent of the senses. It classically refers to an object of human inquiry, understanding or cognition....
 is infinite and overflowing. Sartre refers to any direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself as a "pre-reflective consciousness." Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize etc. the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective consciousness." There is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-reflective, and so reflection is fated to a form of anxiety, i.e. the human condition. The reflective consciousness in all its forms, (scientific, artistic or otherwise) can only limit the thing-in-itself by virtue of its attempt to understand or describe it. It follows, therefore, that any attempt at self-knowledge (self-consciousness - a reflective consciousness of an overflowing infinite) is a construct that fails no matter how often it is attempted. Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object.

The same holds true about knowledge of the "Other
Other

The Other or constitutive other is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the identity . It refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is 'other' than the concept being considered....
." The "Other" (meaning simply beings or objects that are not the self) is a construct of reflective consciousness. One must be careful to understand this more as a form of warning than as an ontological statement. However, there is an implication of solipsism
Solipsism

Solipsism is the philosophy idea that "My mind is the only thing that I know exists." Solipsism is an epistemology or ontology position that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified....
 here that Sartre considers fundamental to any coherent description of the human condition. Sartre overcomes this solipsism by a kind of ritual. Self consciousness needs "the Other
Other

The Other or constitutive other is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the identity . It refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is 'other' than the concept being considered....
" to prove (display) its own existence. It has a "masochistic desire" to be limited, i.e. limited by the reflective consciousness of another subject. This is expressed metaphorically in the famous line of dialogue from No Exit
No Exit

No Exit is a 1944 in literature existentialism Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, originally published in French language as Huis Clos . English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out, and Dead End. Huis Clos was first performed at the Th??tre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, just be...
, "Hell is other people."

The main idea of Jean-Paul Sartre is that we are, as men, "condemned to be free." This theory relies upon his atheism
Atheism

Atheism is the absence or rejection of belief in deity, or the explicit view that Existence of God.Many list of atheists are Skepticism of all supernatural beings and cite a lack of empiricism evidence for the existence of deities....
, and is formed using the example of the paper-knife. Sartre says that if one considered a paper-knife, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because, there is no Creator. Thus: "existence precedes essence". So, and just for that, the sartrian man with his freedom will became a god, but he remain always only a bankrupt god.

La Nausée and existentialism

As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre
Le Havre

Le Havre is a city in the northwest region of France situated on the right bank of the mouth of the Seine River as it outlets into the Bay of the Seine section of the English Channel....
 in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto
Manifesto

A manifestom is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often Politics in nature, but may also be life stance related. However, manifestos relating to religious belief are rather referred to as credo....
 of existentialism
Existentialism

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
 and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays can well describe such fundamental experiences, have as much value as do discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories. With such purpose, this novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them.

This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste — specifically, his freedom. The book takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th century philosophy Germans philosophy and classical philology. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor and aphorism....
's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra , subtitled A Book for All and None , is a written work by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885....
, where it is used in the context of the often nauseating quality of existence. No matter how much Roquentin longs for something else or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world. The novel also acts as a terrifying realization of some of Kant's fundamental ideas; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality
Morality

Morality has three principal meanings.In its first, descriptive usage, morality means a code of conduct which is held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong....
 is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability to choose being derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying "Condemned to be free") as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas prove to be bitterly rejected.

The stories in Le Mur (The Wall
The Wall (Book)

The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre, a collection of short stories containing the eponymous story "The Wall," is considered one of the author's greatest existentialist works of fiction....
) 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
Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular Play written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work....
 literature subsequently developed.

Sartre and literature

During the 1940s and 1950s, Sartre's existentialism
Existentialism

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
 became a favoured philosophy of the beatnik
Beatnik

Beatniks were part of a sociocultural movement in the 1950s and early 1960s that subscribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle in the wake of WWII....
 generation. Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus
Albert Camus

Albert Camus was an Algerian-born France author, Philosophy, and journalist who won the Nobel Prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus refused this label....
 in the popular imagination. In 1948, the Roman Catholic Church
Roman Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic Church, officially known as the Catholic Church is the world's largest Christianity Ecclesia , representing over half of all Christians and one-sixth of the world population....
 placed his complete works on the Index of prohibited books
Index Librorum Prohibitorum

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of publications censorship by the Roman Catholic Church.It was abolished on June 14, 1966 by Pope Paul VI....
. Most of his plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit
No Exit

No Exit is a 1944 in literature existentialism Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, originally published in French language as Huis Clos . English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out, and Dead End. Huis Clos was first performed at the Th??tre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, just be...
), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people".

Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major contribution to literature was the The Roads to Freedom
The Roads to Freedom

The Roads to Freedom is a trilogy of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre.The three novels The Age of Reason , The Reprieve , and Troubled Sleep , revolve around Mathieu, a Socialism teacher of philosophy, and a group of his friends....
 trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II
World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
 affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism
Existentialism

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
.

Sartre as a public intellectual


While the broad focus of Sartre's life revolved around the notion of human freedom, he began a sustained intellectual participation in more public matters in 1945. Prior to this -- before the Second World War -- he was content with the role of an apolitical liberal intellectual: "Now teaching at a lycée in Laon [...] Sartre made his headquarters the Dome café at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards. He attended plays, read novels, and dined [with] women. He wrote. And he was published" (Gerassi 1989: 134). Sartre and his lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a France author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography in several volumes....
, existed, in her words, where "the world about us was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out" (de Beauvoir 1958: 339).

Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist in the The Age of Reason
The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, a deistic treatise written by eighteenth-century British radical and American revolutionary Thomas Paine, critiques institutionalized religion and challenges the Biblical inerrancy....
, which was completed during Sartre's first year as a soldier in the Second World War. By forging Mathieu as an absolute rationalist, analyzing every situation, and functioning entirely on reason, he removed any strands of authentic content from his character and as a result, Mathieu could "recognize no allegiance except to [him]self" (Sartre 1942: 13), though he realized that without "responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing" (Sartre 1942: 14). Mathieu's commitment was only to himself, never to the outside world. Mathieu was restrained from action each time because he had no reasons for acting. Sartre then, for these reasons, was not compelled to participate in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War was a major conflict in Spain that started after an attempted coup d'?tat by a group of Spanish Army generals, supported by the conservative Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right , Carlist groups and the fascistic Falange, against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, then under the leadership of pr...
, and it took the invasion of his own country to motivate him into action and to provide a crystallization of these ideas. It was the war that gave him a purpose beyond himself, and the atrocities of the war can be seen as the turning point in his public stance.

The war opened Sartre's eyes to a political reality he had not yet understood until forced into continual engagement with it: "the world itself destroyed Sartre's illusions about isolated self-determining individuals and made clear his own personal stake in the events of the time" (Aronson 1980: 108). Returning to Paris in 1941 he formed the "Socialisme et Liberté" resistance group. In 1943, after a lack of Communist support forced the disbandment of the group, Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group, in which he remained an active participant until the end of the war. He continued to write ferociously, and it was due to this "crucial experience of war and captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it through literature" (Thody 1964: 21).

The symbolic initiation of this new phase in Sartre’s work is packaged in the introduction he wrote for a new journal, Les Temps Modernes
Les Temps modernes

Les Temps modernes is a political, literary and philosophical France magazine founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty....
, in October 1945. Here he aligned the journal, and thus himself, with the Left and called for writers to express their political commitment (Aronson 1980: 107). Yet, this alignment was indefinite, directed more to the concept of the Left than a specific party of the Left.

Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being a public intellectual
Public intellectual

A public intellectual is a contemporary phrase for the archaic term publicist ? that is, a writer, academic, orator or mass media personality who regularly and visibly deals with matters of broad interest relating to government policy or social questions....
. He envisaged culture as a very fluid concept; neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished; instead, in true existential
Existentialism

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
 fashion, "culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention". This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as a pragmatist, willing to move and shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause other than the belief in human freedom
Liberty

Liberty, the freedom to act or believe without being stopped by unnecessary force, is generally considered in modern time to be a concept of political philosophy and identifies the condition in which an individual has the right to act according to his or her own free will....
, preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity. It is this over-arching theme of freedom that means his work "subverts the bases for distinctions among the disciplines" (Kirsner 2003: 13). Therefore, he was able to hold knowledge across a vast array of subjects: "the international world order, the political and economic organisation of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks that regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that control and disseminate information. Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about what he saw as inequalities and injustices in the world" (Scriven 1999: xii).

Moreover, his views were divergent from the prevailing political situation. The most clear example of this is in his post-war attitude to the French Communist Party
French Communist Party

The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism. Although its electoral support has greatly declined in recent decades, it remains the largest party in France advocating communist views, and retains a large membership and considerable influence in French politics....
 (PCF), who, following Liberation
Libération

Lib?ration is a France daily newspaper founded in Paris in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Victor alias Benny L?vy and Serge July in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968....
 were infuriated by Sartre's philosophy and opposition, which appeared to lure young French men and women away from the ideology of Marxism annd into Sartre’s own existentialism (Scriven 1999: 13). Here we see Sartre telling his own truths to the establishment, a fundamental role of the public intellectual. His troubled and varied relationship with Communism -- and Marxism
Marxism

Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism holds at its core a Marxist analysis of Critique of capitalism and a theory of social change....
 in particular -- was a consequence of their doctrines that would have prevented his notion of radical freedom. And to align himself too rigidly with any political movement would have circumscribed the very freedom he was searching for. This search is most evident in his earlier writings and, especially after the Second World War, in his public activities, which he had begun to regard as more significant upon recognition of the futility of words in contrast to action. (Kirsner 2003: 60).

In the aftermath of a war that had for the first time properly engaged Sartre in political matters, he set forth a body of work which "reflected on virtually every important theme of his early thought and began to explore alternative solutions to the problems posed there" (Aronson 1980: 121). The greatest difficulties that he and all public intellectuals of the time faced were the increasing technological aspects of the world that were outdating the printed word as a form of expression. In Sartre's opinion, the "traditional bourgeois literary forms remain innately superior", but there is "a recognition that the new technological 'mass media
Mass media

Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a mainstream such as the population of a nation state....
' forms must be embraced if Sartre's ethical and political achievements as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: the demystification of bourgeois political practices and the Sartre's raising of the consciousness, both political and cultural, of the working class" (Scriven 1993: 8). The struggle for Sartre was against the monopolising moguls who were beginning to take over the media and destroy the role of the intellectual. His attempts to reach a public were mediated by these powers, and it was often these powers he had to campaign against. He was skilled enough, however, to circumvent some of these issues by his interactive approach to the various forms of media, advertising his radio interviews in a newspaper column for example, and vice versa. (Scriven 1993: 22).

The role of a public intellectual can lead to the individual placing himself in danger as he engages with disputed topics. In Sartre's case, this was witnessed in June 1961, when a plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building. His public support of Algerian self-determination
Self-determination

Self-determination is defined as free choice of one?s own acts without external compulsion, and especially as the freedom of the people of a given territory to determine their own political status or independence from their current state....
 at the time had led Sartre to become a target of the right-wing campaign of terror that mounted as the colonists' position deteriorated. A similar occurrence took place the next year and he had begun to receive threatening letters from Oran
Oran

Oran is a city on the Mediterranean Sea coast in northwestern Algeria. Oran marked the largest westernmost metropolitan area of the then Ottoman Empire....
. (Aronson 1980: 157).

Sartre clearly held himself and his kind in high regard, pronouncing the intellectual
Intellectual

An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intelligence and Critical thinking, either in their profession or for the benefit of personal pursuits....
s to be the moral conscience of their age, their task being to observe the political and social situation of the moment, and to speak out freely in accordance with their consciences. (Scriven 1993: 119).

Selected bibliography

  • L'Imagination (Imagination: A Psychological Critique), 1936
  • La Transcendence de l'égo (The Transcendence of the Ego
    The Transcendence of the Ego

    The Transcendence of the Ego is a philosophical and psychological essay written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1937. The essay demonstrates Sartre?s transition from traditional phenomenological thinking and most notably his break from Edmund Husserl?s school of thought....
    ), 1937
  • La Nausée (Nausea), 1938
  • Le Mur (The Wall
    The Wall (Book)

    The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre, a collection of short stories containing the eponymous story "The Wall," is considered one of the author's greatest existentialist works of fiction....
    ), 1939
  • Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
    Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions

    Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions is a book by Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1939. In it, Sartre analyses prior ideas, including psychoanalytic theories before presenting his own Phenomenology analysis....
    ), 1939
  • L'Imaginaire (The Imaginary
    The Imaginary (Sartre)

    The Imaginary, first published in French in 1940, is one of Jean-Paul Sartre important but often-overlooked works. It lays out Sartre's concepts of the imagination and what it says about the nature of human consciousness that we can imagine at all....
    ), 1940, lit. "The Unconscious"
  • Les Mouches (The Flies
    The Flies

    The Flies is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1943. It is an adaption of the Electra myth, previously used by the Greek drama Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes....
    ), 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
    Anti-Semite and Jew

    "Anti-Semite and Jew" is an essay about antisemitism written by Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after the liberation of Paris from Germany occupation in 1944....
    ; literally, Reflections on the Jewish Question), 1943
  • Huis-clos (No Exit
    No Exit

    No Exit is a 1944 in literature existentialism Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, originally published in French language as Huis Clos . English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out, and Dead End. Huis Clos was first performed at the Th??tre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, just be...
    ), 1944
  • Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom
    The Roads to Freedom

    The Roads to Freedom is a trilogy of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre.The three novels The Age of Reason , The Reprieve , and Troubled Sleep , revolve around Mathieu, a Socialism teacher of philosophy, and a group of his friends....
    ) trilogy, comprising:
    • L'Âge de raison (The Age of Reason
      The Age of Reason (Sartre)

      L'?ge de raison is a 1945 novel by Jean Paul Sartre. It is the first part of the trilogy The Roads to Freedom . The novel, set against the background of the bohemian Paris of the late 1930s, focuses around three days in the life of a philosophy teacher named Mathieu who is seeking to find the money to pay for an abortion for his mist...
      ), 1945
    • Le Sursis (The Reprieve), 1947
    • La Mort dans l'Âme (Troubled Sleep, title formerly translated as Iron in the Soul, literally "Death in Spirit"), 1949
  • Morts sans sépulture (Deaths without burial; aka The Victors; Men Without Shadows in English), 1946
  • L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946
  • La Putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute
    The Respectful Prostitute

    The Respectful Prostitute is a French Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1946, which observes a woman prostitute caught up in a racially tense period of History of the United States....
    ) 1946
  • Qu'est ce que la littérature? (What is literature?
    What is literature?

    What is literature? is a 1947 book by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is divided into three topics of discussion:# Sartre condemns the bourgeoisie as being devoid of culture....
    ), 1947
  • Baudelaire, 1947
  • Situations, 1947 –1965
  • Les Mains sales
    Les Mains Sales

    Dirty Hands is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre. It was first performed on 2 April 1948 in literature#New drama at the Theatre Antoine in Paris, starring Fran?ois P?rier, Marie Olivier and Andr? Luguet....
     (Dirty Hands), 1948
  • "Orphée Noir" (Black Orpheus), introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor
    Léopold Sédar Senghor

    L?opold S?dar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician, and cultural theorist who served as the first List of Presidents of Senegal of Senegal ....
    , 1948
  • Le Diable et le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord
    The Devil and the Good Lord

    The Devil and the Good Lord is a play by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The play concerns the moral choices of its characters, warlord Goetz, clergy Heinrich, Communism leader Nasti and others during the German Peasants' War....
    ), 1951
  • Les Jeux sont faits
    Les jeux sont faits

    Les jeux sont faits is an existential book written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1943 and published in 1947. The title translates literally as "The Plays are Made", an idiomatic French expression used mainly in casino gambling meaning the bets have been placed. An English translation was made from the French language by Louise Var?se in 1...
     (The Game is Up), 1952
  • Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr
    Saint Genet

    Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr is a book by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre about the writer Jean Genet. It was first published in 1952 in literature....
    , 1952
  • Kean
    Edmund Kean

    Edmund Kean was an England actor, regarded in his time as the greatest ever. For many years he lived at Keydell House, Horndean....
     (adaptation of Alexandre Dumas, père
    Alexandre Dumas, père

    Alexandre Dumas, p?re , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his numerous historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world....
    's play) 1953, produced Paris 1954, revived London 2007
  • Nekrassov, 1955
  • Existentialism and Human Emotions, 1957
  • The Problem of Method, 1957
  • Les Séquestrés d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona), 1959
  • Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason
    Critique of Dialectical Reason

    Critique of Dialectical Reason, originally Critique de la raison dialectique , was the last of Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical works: it attempted to reconcile Marxism and Existentialism....
    ), 1960
  • "Preface" to Frantz Fanon
    Frantz Fanon

    Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosophy, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization....
    's The Wretched of the Earth
    The Wretched of the Earth

    The Wretched of the Earth is Frantz Fanon's most famous work, written during and regarding the Algerian struggle for independence from Colonialism rule....
    , 1961
  • Search for a Method (English translation of preface to Critique, Vol. I), 1962
  • Colonialism and Neocolonialism
    Colonialism and Neocolonialism

    Colonialism and Neocolonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre is controversial and influential critique of French rule in Algeria in Algeria. It argues that for French disengagement from its former French colonial empires and controversially defending the rights of violent resistance by groups such as the Algerian FLN in order to achieve this....
    , 1964
  • Les Mots (The Words
    The Words

    The Words is Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963 autobiography....
    ), 1964, autobiographical
  • L'Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), 1971–1972 - on Gustave Flaubert
    Gustave Flaubert

    Gustave Flaubert was a France writer who is counted among the greatest Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style....
  • Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for Ethics), 1983, 1947-48 notes on ethics
  • Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939 - Mars 1940 (War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War 1939-1940), 1984, notebooks from Sartre's time in the Phony War
    Phony War

    The Phoney War, also called the Twilight War by Winston Churchill, der Sitzkrieg in German language , the Bore War and la dr?le de guerre was a phase in early World War II ? in the months following the Invasion of Poland in September 1939 and preceding the Battle of France in May 1940 ? that was marked by a la...
     of 1939-1940


Further reading

  • Annie Cohen-Solal
    Annie Cohen-Solal

    Annie Cohen-Solal is a France academic, writer, historian, and biographer. Born in French rule in Algeria Algeria, she is part of the Jewish diaspora that left that country for France during the Algerian War of Independence....
    , Sartre 1905-80, 1985.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
  • Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
  • John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Volume 1: Protestant or Protester?, University of Chicago Press, 1989. ISBN 0226287971.
  • R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950-1960, New York: Pantheon, 1971.
  • Suzanne Lilar
    Suzanne Lilar

    Suzanne, Baroness Lilar was a Flemish people Belgian essayist, novelist, and playwright writing in French language. She was the wife of the Belgian Minister of Justice Albert Lilar and mother of the writer Fran?oise Mallet-Joris and the art historian Marie Fredericq-Lilar....
    , A propos de Sartre et de l'amour, Paris: Grasset, 1967.
  • Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
  • 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.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian van den Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
  • P.V. Spade, . 1996.
  • H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996.
  • Wilfrid Desan
    Wilfrid Desan

    Wilfrid Desan was a professor in philosophy best known for introducing French existentialism and especially the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre to the United States....
    , The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1954)


Sources


  • Aronson, Ronald (1980) Jean-Paul Sartre - Philosophy in the World. London: NLB
  • Gerassi, John (1989) Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. Volume 1: Protestant or Protester? Chicago: University of Chicago Press
  • Kirsner, Douglas (2003) The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Lang. New York: Karnac
  • Scriven, Michael (1993) Sartre and The Media. London: MacMillan Press Ltd
  • Scriven, Michael (1999) Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France. London: MacMillan Press Ltd
  • Thody, Philip (1964) Jean-Paul Sartre. London: Hamish Hamilton


See also

  • Existentialism
    Existentialism

    Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...


External links


By Sartre

  • on the website 'La philosophie'
  • Sartre's essay in The Nation (18 October 1947 issue)
  • on
  • French , incipit of The Words (1964), read aloud in French by IncipitBlog.


On Sartre

  • , Paris
  • essay by Andy Blunden
    Andy Blunden

    Andy Blunden is an Australian writer and Marxist philosopher based in Melbourne.Blunden is a member and secretary of the Marxists Internet Archive , a website which contains many Marxist and Marxist related text on history, philosophy and politics along with many other topics....
  • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Articles, archives, and forum
  • Sartre Rubric on the website of the Sorbonne Marx Seminar
  • , John Lichfield, The Independent
    The Independent

    The Independent is a United Kingdom Compact newspaper published by Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media. It is nicknamed the Indy, with the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, being the Sindy....
    , 17 June 2005
  • essay by Roger Kimball
  • A review of Ian Birchall
    Ian Birchall

    Ian Birchall is a British Marxist historian and translator, a member of the Socialist Workers Party and author of numerous articles and books, particularly relating to the French Left....
    , Sartre Against Stalinism
  • , Benedict O'Donohoe, International WebjournalSens Public.
  • .
  • Wilfrid Desan
    Wilfrid Desan

    Wilfrid Desan was a professor in philosophy best known for introducing French existentialism and especially the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre to the United States....