Sartre had anopen relationship with prominentfeminist and fellow existentialist philosopherSimone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged thecultural andsocial assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they consideredbourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructiveconformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical workBeing and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943).[6] Sartre provided an introduction to his philosophy in his workExistentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.
Born inParis, Sartre lost his father at age two and was raised primarily by his mother and grandfather, who introduced him to literature. He studied at the prestigiousÉcole Normale Supérieure, where he developed a deep interest in philosophy, influenced by thinkers likeHenri Bergson,Edmund Husserl, andMartin Heidegger. Sartre’s early academic career included teaching in several Frenchlycées and engaging in provocativepranks and debates.
Sartre’s life was marked by strong political engagement. DuringWorld War II, he was drafted, captured, and later released, after which he co-founded the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté. Though the group dissolved, Sartre became an influential voice inoccupied France, contributing to underground literature and writing plays likeNo Exit. After the war, he co-founded the journalLes Temps modernes and increasingly used his platform to advocate for political and social causes. He supportedanti-colonial movements, condemned French policies inAlgeria, opposedU.S. intervention in Vietnam, and aligned himself at various times withMarxism,Maoism, andanarchism. Despite declining health in his later years, Sartre remained committed to activism and intellectual debate until his death in 1980. His funeral drew 50,000 mourners.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 inParis as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of theFrench Navy, and Anne-Marie (Schweitzer).[7] When Sartre was two years old, his father died of an illness, which he most likely contracted inIndochina. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house inMeudon, where she raised Sartre with help from her father Charles Schweitzer, ateacher ofGerman who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him toclassical literature at a very early age.[8] The theologian/organist/physician Albert Schweitzer was Sartre's cousin. When he was twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and the family moved toLa Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied, in part due to the wandering of his blind right eye (sensoryexotropia).[9]
As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon readingHenri Bergson's essayTime and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.[10] He attended theCours Hattemer, aprivate school in Paris.[11] He studied and earned certificates in psychology, history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy, ethics and sociology, and physics, as well as hisdiplôme d'études supérieures [fr] (roughly equivalent to anMA) in Paris at theÉcole Normale Supérieure (ENS), an institution of higher education that was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals.[12] (His 1928 MA thesis under the title "L'Image dans la vie psychologique: rôle et nature" ["Image in Psychological Life: Role and Nature"] was supervised byHenri Delacroix.)[12] It was at ENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, friendship withRaymond Aron.[13] Perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartre's philosophical development was his weekly attendance atAlexandre Kojève's seminars, which continued for a number of years.[14]
From his first years in theÉcole normale, Sartre was one of its fiercestpranksters.[15][16] In 1927, hisantimilitaristsatirical cartoon in the revue of the school, which he co-wrote withGeorges Canguilhem, particularly upset the directorGustave Lanson.[17] In the same year, with his comrades Nizan, Larroutis, Baillou and Herland,[18] he organized amedia prank followingCharles Lindbergh's successful New York City–Paris flight; Sartre & Co. called newspapers and informed them that Lindbergh was going to be awarded an honorary École degree. Many newspapers, includingLe Petit Parisien, announced the event on 25 May. Thousands, including journalists and curious spectators, showed up, unaware that what they were witnessing was a stunt involving a Lindberghlook-alike.[17][19][20] The scandal led Lanson to resign.[17]
In 1929 at the École normale, he metSimone de Beauvoir, who studied at theSorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship,[21] though they were notmonogamous.[22] The first time Sartre took theagrégation, he failed. He took it a second time and virtually tied for first place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded first place, with Beauvoir second.[23][24]
In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at theInstitut français d'Allemagne in Berlin where he studiedEdmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. Aron had already advised him in 1930 to readEmmanuel Levinas'sThéorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology).[27]
In 1939, Sartre was drafted into theFrench Army, where he served as ameteorologist.[29][30] He was captured by German troops in 1940 inPadoux,[31] and he spent nine months as aprisoner of war—inNancy and finally inStalag XII-D [fr],Trier, where he wrote his firsttheatrical piece,Bariona, ou le fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre readMartin Heidegger'sSein und Zeit, later to become a major influence on his own essay onphenomenologicalontology. Because of poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight andexotropia affected his balance), Sartre was released in April 1941. According to other sources, he escaped after a medical visit to the ophthalmologist.[32] Given civilian status, he recovered his teaching position at Lycée Pasteur near Paris and settled at the Hotel Mistral. In October 1941, he was given a position, previously held by a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach byVichy law, atLycée Condorcet in Paris.
Sartre (third from left) and other French journalists visit GeneralGeorge C. Marshall in the Pentagon, 1945.
After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground groupSocialisme et Liberté ("Socialism and Liberty") with other writersSimone de Beauvoir,Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Jean-Toussaint Desanti,Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In spring of 1941, Sartre suggested with "cheerful ferocity" at a meeting that theSocialisme et Liberté assassinate prominent war collaborators likeMarcel Déat, but de Beauvoir noted his idea was rejected as "none of us felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades".[33] The British historianIan Ousby observed that the French always had far more hatred for collaborators than they did for the Germans, noting it was French people like Déat that Sartre wanted to assassinate rather than the military governor of France, GeneralOtto von Stülpnagel, and the popular slogan always was "Death toLaval!" rather than "Death toHitler!".[34] In August Sartre and de Beauvoir went to theFrench Riviera seeking the support ofAndré Gide andAndré Malraux. 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 wroteBeing and Nothingness,The Flies, andNo Exit, none of which were censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.
In his essay "Paris under theOccupation", Sartre wrote that the "correct" behaviour of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the occupation, accepting what was unnatural as natural:
The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on the pavement. They would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined, they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness which could find no practical expression.[35]
Sartre noted whenWehrmacht soldiers asked Parisians politely in their German-accented French for directions, people usually felt embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their best to help out the Wehrmacht which led Sartre to remark "We could not benatural".[36] French was a language widely taught in German schools and most Germans could speak at least some French. Sartre himself always found it difficult when a Wehrmacht soldier asked him for directions, usually saying he did not know where it was that the soldier wanted to go, but still felt uncomfortable as the very act of speaking to the Wehrmacht meant he had been complicit in the Occupation.[37] Ousby wrote: "But, in however humble a fashion, everyone still had to decide how they were going to cope with life in a fragmenting society ... So Sartre's worries ... about how to react when a German soldier stopped him in the street and asked politely for directions were not as fussily inconsequential as they might sound at first. They were emblematic of how the dilemmas of the Occupation presented themselves in daily life".[37] Sartre wrote the very "correctness" of the Germans caused moral corruption in many people who used the "correct" behavior of the Germans as an excuse for passivity, and the very act of simply trying to live one's day-to-day existence without challenging the occupation aided the "New Order in Europe", which depended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals.[35]
Throughout the occupation, it was German policy to plunder France, and food shortages were always a major problem as the majority of food from the French countryside went to Germany.[38] Sartre wrote about the "languid existence" of the Parisians as people waited obsessively for the one weekly arrival of trucks bringing food from the countryside that the Germans allowed, writing: "Paris would grow peaked and yawn with hunger under the empty sky. Cut off from the rest of the world, fed only through the pity or some ulterior motive, the town led a purely abstract and symbolic life".[38] Sartre himself lived on a diet of rabbits sent to him by a friend of de Beauvoir living inAnjou.[39] The rabbits were usually in an advanced state of decay, full of maggots, and despite being hungry, Sartre once threw out one rabbit as uneatable, saying it had more maggots in it than meat.[39] Sartre also remarked that conversations at theCafé de Flore between intellectuals had changed, as the fear that one of them might be amouche (informer) or a writer of thecorbeau (anonymous denunciatory letters) meant that no one really said what they meant anymore, imposing self-censorship.[40] Sartre and his friends at the Café de Flore had reasons for their fear; by September 1940, theAbwehr alone had already recruited 32,000 French people to work asmouches while by 1942 the ParisKommandantur was receiving an average of 1,500 letters per day sent by thecorbeaux.[41]
Sartre wrote under the occupation Paris had become a "sham", resembling the empty wine bottles displayed in shop windows as all of the wine had been exported to Germany, looking like the old Paris, but hollowed out, as what had made Paris special was gone.[42] Paris had almost no cars on the streets during the occupation as the oil went to Germany while the Germans imposed a nightly curfew, which led Sartre to remark that Paris "was peopled by the absent".[43] Sartre also noted that people began to disappear under the occupation, writing:
One day you might phone a friend and the phone would ring for a long time in an empty flat. You would go round and ring the doorbell, but no-one would answer it. If theconcierge forced the door, you would find two chairs standing close together in the hall with the fag-ends of German cigarettes on the floor between their legs. If the wife or mother of the man who had vanished had been present at his arrest, she would tell you that he had been taken away by very polite Germans, like those who asked the way in the street. And when she went to ask what had happened to them at theoffices in the Avenue Foch or theRue des Saussaies she would be politely received and sent away with comforting words" [No. 11 Rue des Saussaies was the headquarters of the Gestapo in Paris].[44]
Sartre wrote thefeldgrau ("field grey") uniforms of the Wehrmacht and the green uniforms of the Order Police which had seemed so alien in 1940 had become accepted, as people were numbed into accepting what Sartre called "a pale, dull green, unobtrusive strain, which the eye almost expected to find among the dark clothes of the civilians".[45] Under the occupation, the French often called the Germansles autres ("the others"), which inspired Sartre's aphorism in his playHuis clos ("No Exit") of "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" ("Hell is other people").[46] Sartre intended the line "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" at least in part to be a dig at the German occupiers.[46]
Sartre was a very active contributor toCombat, a newspaper created during the clandestine period byAlbert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, with the publication of Camus'sThe Rebel. Sartre wrote extensively post-war about neglected minority groups, namelyFrench Jews andblack people. In 1946, he publishedAnti-Semite and Jew, after having published the first part of the essay, "Portrait de l'antisémite", the year before inLes Temps modernes, No. 3. In the essay, in the course of explaining theetiology of "hate" as the hater's projective fantasies when reflecting on theJewish question, he attacksantisemitism in France[47] during a time when the Jews who came back from concentration camps were quickly abandoned.[48] In 1947, Sartre published several articles concerning the condition of African Americans in the United States—specifically the racism and discrimination against them in the country—in his secondSituations collection. Then, in 1948, for the introduction ofLéopold Sédar Senghor'sl'Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry), he wrote "Black Orpheus" (re-published inSituations III), a critique of colonialism and racism in light of the philosophy Sartre developed inBeing and Nothingness. Later, while Sartre was labeled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistantVladimir 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. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted; not a resister who wrote.
In 1945, after the war ended, Sartre moved to an apartment on therue Bonaparte, where he was to produce most of his subsequent work and where he lived until 1962. It was from there that he helped establish a quarterly literary and politicalreview,Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), in part to popularize his thought.[49] He ceased teaching and devoted his time to writing and political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels,Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).
The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part byBeing and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period—when the world was perceived as split into communist and capitalist blocs—of highly publicized political involvement. Sartre tended to glorify theResistance after the war as the uncompromising expression of morality in action, and recalled that therésistants were a "band of brothers" who had enjoyed "real freedom" in a way that did not exist before nor after the war.[50] Sartre was "merciless" in attacking anyone who had collaborated or remained passive during the German occupation; for instance, criticizing Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist writerRobert Brasillach from being executed.[50] His 1948 playLes mains sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being a politically "engaged" intellectual. He embracedMarxism but did not join theCommunist Party. For a time in the late 1940s, Sartre described French nationalism as "provincial" and in a 1949 essay called for a "United States of Europe".[51] In an essay published in the June 1949 edition of the journalPolitique étrangère, Sartre wrote:
If we want French civilization to survive, it must be fitted into the framework of a great European civilization. Why? I have said that civilization is the reflection on a shared situation. In Italy, in France, in Benelux, in Sweden, in Norway, in Germany, in Greece, in Austria, everywhere we find the same problems and the same dangers ... But this cultural polity has prospects only as elements of a policy which defends Europe's cultural autonomy vis-à-vis America and the Soviet Union, but also its political and economic autonomy, with the aim of making Europe a single force between the blocs, not a third bloc, but an autonomous force which will refuse to allow itself to be torn into shreds between American optimism and Russian scientificism.[52]
About the Korean War, Sartre wrote: "I have no doubt that the South Korean feudalists and the American imperialists have promoted this war. But I do not doubt either that it was begun by the North Koreans".[53] In July 1950, Sartre wrote inLes Temps Modernes about his and de Beauvoir's attitude to the Soviet Union:
As we were neither members of the [Communist] party nor its avowed sympathizers, it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrel over the nature of this system, provided that no events of sociological significance had occurred.[54]
Sartre held that the Soviet Union was a "revolutionary" state working for the betterment of humanity and could be criticized only for failing to live up to its own ideals, but that critics had to take in mind that the Soviet state needed to defend itself against a hostile world; by contrast Sartre held that the failures of "bourgeois" states were due to their innate shortcomings.[50] The Swiss journalistFrançois Bondy wrote that, based on a reading of Sartre's numerous essays, speeches and interviews "a simple basic pattern never fails to emerge: social change must be comprehensive and revolutionary" and the parties that promote the revolutionary charges "may be criticized, but only by those who completely identify themselves with its purpose, its struggle and its road to power", deeming Sartre's position to be "existentialist".[50]
Sartre believed at this time in the moral superiority of theEastern Bloc, arguing that this belief was necessary "to keep hope alive"[55] and opposed any criticism of Soviet Union[56] to the extent thatMaurice Merleau-Ponty called him an "ultra-Bolshevik".[57] Sartre's expression "workers of Billancourt must not be deprived of their hopes"[57] (Fr. "il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt"), became acatchphrase meaning communist activists should not tell the whole truth to the workers in order to avoid decline in their revolutionary enthusiasm.[58]
In 1954, just after Stalin's death, Sartrevisited the Soviet Union, which he stated he found a "complete freedom of criticism" while condemning the United States for sinking into "prefascism".[59] Sartre wrote about those Soviet writers expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union "still had the opportunity of rehabilitating themselves by writing better books".[60] Sartre's comments onHungarian revolution of 1956 are quite representative to his frequently contradictory and changing views. On one hand, Sartre saw in Hungary a true reunification between intellectuals and workers[61] only to criticize it for "losing socialist base".[62]
In 1969 Sartre, along with other fifteen prominent French writers, includingLouis Aragon andMichel Butor, signed the letter of protest against the expulsion of "the writer most representative of the great Russian tradition,Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – already a victim of Stalinist repression", from theUnion of Soviet Writers.[64][65]
In 1973 he argued that "revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, and their death is the only way".[66] A number of people, starting fromFrank Gibney in 1961, classified Sartre as a "useful idiot" due to his uncritical position.[67]
Sartre came to admire the Polish leaderWładysław Gomułka, a man who favored a "Polish road to socialism" and wanted more independence for Poland, but was loyal to the Soviet Union because of the Oder-Neisse line issue.[68] Sartre's newspaperLes Temps Modernes devoted a number of special issues in 1957 and 1958 to Poland under Gomułka, praising him for his reforms.[68] Bondy wrote of the notable contradiction between Sartre's "ultra Bolshevism" as he expressed admiration for the Chinese leaderMao Zedong as the man who led the oppressed masses of the Third World into revolution while also praising more moderate Communist leaders like Gomułka.[68]
As an anti-colonialist, Sartre took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria, and the use of torture and concentration camps by the French in Algeria. He became an eminent supporter of theFLN in theAlgerian War and was one of the signatories of theManifeste des 121. Consequently, Sartre became a domestic target of the paramilitaryOrganisation armée secrète (OAS), escaping two bomb attacks in the early '60s.[69] He later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during theAlgerian War of Independence.[70] (He had an Algerian mistress,Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965.) He opposed U.S. involvement in theVietnam War and, along withBertrand Russell and others, organized atribunal intended to expose U.S.war crimes, which became known as theRussell Tribunal in 1967.
His work after Stalin's death, theCritique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), appeared in 1960 (a second volume appearing posthumously). In theCritique Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the 1960s,Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of theyoung Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx. In the late 1950s, Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced byFrantz Fanon started to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution.[71] A major theme of Sartre's political essays in the 1960s was of his disgust with the "Americanization" of the French working class who would much rather watch American TV shows dubbed into French than agitate for a revolution.[50]
Sartre was a sponsor of theFair Play for Cuba Committee.[72] He went toCuba in the 1960s to meetFidel Castro and spoke withErnesto "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"[73] and the "era's most perfect man".[74] Sartre would also compliment Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel".[75] However he stood against the persecution of gays by Castro's government, which he compared to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and said: "In Cuba there are no Jews, but there are homosexuals".[76]
Hélène de Beauvoir's house inGoxwiller, where Sartre tried to hide from the media after being awarded the Nobel Prize
In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life,Les Mots (The Words). The book is an ironic counterblast toMarcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that ofAndré Gide (who had provided the model oflittérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In October 1964, Sartre was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature, but he declined it. He was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize,[79] and remains one of only two laureates to do so.[80] According toLars Gyllensten, in the bookMinnen, bara minnen ("Memories, Only Memories") published in 2000, Sartre himself or someone close to him got in touch with the Swedish Academy in 1975 with a request for the prize money, but was refused.[81] In 1945, he had refused theLégion d'honneur.[82] The Nobel prize was announced on 22 October 1964; on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and warning that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread;[83] on 23 October,Le Figaro published a statement by Sartre explaining his refusal. He said he did not wish to be "transformed" by such an award, and did not want to take sides in an East vs. West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution.[83] Nevertheless, he was that year's prizewinner.[84]
Sartre in Venice in 1967
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 theMay 1968 strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested forcivil disobedience. PresidentCharles de Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrestVoltaire".[85]
Sartre's and de Beauvoir's grave in thecimetière du MontparnasseSartre's and de Beauvoir's grave in 2016, with a new gravestone. Note the Metro tickets left by visitors.
In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied:
I would like [people] to rememberNausea, [my plays]No Exit andThe Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one,Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay onGenet,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.[86]
Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work (and the use ofamphetamine)[87] he put himself through during the writing of theCritique and a massive analytical biography ofGustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which remained unfinished. He had hypertension,[88] and became almost completely blind in 1973. Sartre was a notoriouschain smoker, which could also have contributed to the deterioration of his health.[89]
Sartre died on 15 April 1980 in Paris frompulmonary edema. He had not wanted to be buried atPère-Lachaise Cemetery between his mother and stepfather, so it was arranged that he be buried atMontparnasse Cemetery. At his funeral on Saturday, 19 April, 50,000 Parisians descended ontoboulevard du Montparnasse to accompany Sartre's cortege.[90][91] The funeral started at "the hospital at 2:00 p.m., then filed through the fourteenth arrondissement, past all Sartre's haunts, and entered the cemetery through the gate on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet". Sartre was initially buried in a temporary grave to the left of the cemetery gate.[92] Four days later the body was disinterred for cremation at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, and his ashes were reburied at the permanent site in Montparnasse Cemetery, to the right of the cemetery gate.[93]
Sartre's primary idea is that people, as humans, are "condemned to be free".[94] He explained, "This may seem paradoxical because condemnation is normally an external judgment which constitutes the conclusion of a judgment. Here, it is not the human who has chosen to be like this. There is a contingency of human existence. It is a condemnation of their being. Their being is not determined, so it is up to everyone to create their own existence, for which they are then responsible. They cannot not be free, there is a form of necessity for freedom, which can never be given up."[95]This theory relies upon his position that there is no creator, and is illustrated using the example of thepaper cutter. Sartre says that if one considered a paper cutter, 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".[94] This forms the basis for his assertion that because one cannot explain one's own actions and behavior by referring to any specific human nature, they are necessarily fully responsible for those actions. "We are left alone, without excuse." "We can act without being determined by our past which is always separated from us."[96]
Sartre maintained that the concepts of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. We need to experience "death consciousness" so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge.[97] Death draws the final point when we as beings cease to live for ourselves and permanently become objects that exist only for the outside world.[98] In this way death emphasizes the burden of our free, individual existence. "We can oppose authenticity to an inauthentic way of being. Authenticity consists in experiencing the indeterminate character of existence in anguish. It is also to know how to face it by giving meaning to our actions and by recognizing ourselves as the author of this meaning. On the other hand, an inauthentic way of being consists in running away, in lying to oneself in order to escape this anguish and the responsibility for one's own existence."[95]
While Sartre had been influenced by Heidegger, the publication ofBeing and Nothingness did mark a split in their perspectives, with Heidegger remarking inLetter on Humanism:
Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is takingexistentia andessentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said thatessentia precedesexistentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.[99]
Herbert Marcuse also had issues with Sartre's metaphysical interpretation of human existence inBeing and Nothingness and suggested the work projected anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself:
Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: ithypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory.[100]
Sartre also took inspiration from phenomenological epistemology, explained by Franz Adler in this way: "Man chooses and makes himself by acting. Any action implies the judgment that he is right under the circumstances not only for the actor, but also for everybody else in similar circumstances."[101] Also important is Sartre's analysis of psychological concepts, including his suggestion that consciousness exists as something other than itself, and that the conscious awareness of things is not limited to their knowledge: for Sartre intentionality applies to the emotions as well as to cognitions, to desires as well as to perceptions.[102] "When an external object is perceived, consciousness is also conscious of itself, even if consciousness is not its own object: it is a non-positional consciousness of itself."[103] However his critique of psychoanalysis, particularly of Freud has faced some counter-critique.Richard Wollheim andThomas Baldwin argued that Sartre's attempt to show thatSigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious is mistaken was based on a misinterpretation of Freud.[104][105]
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 towards the end of the Second World War, around 1944–1945.[106] Before World War II, 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."[107] Sartre and his lifelong companion, de Beauvoir, existed, in her words, where "the world about us was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out".[108]
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."[109] Returning to Paris in 1941, he formed the "Socialisme et Liberté" resistance group. In 1943, after the group disbanded, Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group,[110] 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".[111]
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, in October 1945. Here he aligned the journal, and thus himself, with the Left and called for writers to express their political commitment.[112] Yet, this alignment was indefinite, directed more to the concept of the Left than a specific party of the Left.
During the trial ofRobert Brasillach Sartre was among a small number of prominent intellectuals advocating for his execution for 'intellectual crimes'.[113]
Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being apublic intellectual. He envisaged culture as a very fluid concept; neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished; instead, in trueexistential fashion, "culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention." This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as apragmatist, willing to move and shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause other than the belief inhuman freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity. It is this overarching theme of freedom that means his work "subverts the bases for distinctions among the disciplines".[114] 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."[115]
Sartre always sympathized with the Left, and supported theFrench Communist Party (PCF) until the 1956Soviet invasion of Hungary. Following theLiberation the PCF were infuriated by Sartre's philosophy, which appeared to lure young French men and women away from the ideology of communism and into Sartre's own existentialism.[116] From 1956 onwards Sartre rejected the claims of the PCF to represent the French working classes, objecting to its "authoritarian tendencies". In the late 1960s Sartre supported theMaoists, a movement that rejected the authority of established communist parties.[1] However, despite aligning with the Maoists, Sartre said after the May events: "If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist."[117] He would later explicitly allow himself to be called an anarchist.[118][119]
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".[120] 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' forms must be embraced" if Sartre's ethical and political goals as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: the demystification ofbourgeois political practices and the raising of the consciousness, both political and cultural, of the working class.[121]
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.[122]
Sartre's role as a public intellectual occasionally put him in physical danger, such as in June 1961, when a plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building. His public support of Algerianself-determination at the time had led Sartre to become a target of the 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 fromOran, Algeria.[123]
Sartre's role in this conflict included his comments in his preface toFrantz Fanon'sThe Wretched of the Earth that, "To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man". This comment led to some criticisms from the right, such as by Brian C. Anderson andMichael Walzer. Writing forDissent, Walzer suggested that Sartre, a European, was a hypocrite for not volunteering to be killed.[124][125]
However, Sartre's stances regarding post-colonial conflict have not been entirely without controversy on the left; Sartre's preface is omitted from some editions ofThe Wretched of the Earth printed after 1967. The reason for this is his public support for Israel in theSix-Day War. Fanon's widow, Josie considered Sartre's pro-Israel stance as inconsistent with the anti-colonialist position of the book, from which his preface was eventually omitted.[126] When interviewed atHoward University in 1978, she explained, "when Israel declared war on the Arab countries [during theSix-Day War], there was a great pro-Zionist movement in favor of Israel among western (French) intellectuals. Sartre took part in this movement. He signed petitions favoring Israel. I felt that his pro-Zionist attitudes were incompatible with Fanon's work".[126] Recent reprints of Fanon's book have generally included Sartre's preface.
Sartre wrote successfully in a number of literary modes and made major contributions to literary criticism and literary biography. His plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known,Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people."[127] Aside from the impact ofNausea, Sartre's major work of fiction wasThe Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way,Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach toexistentialism.
John Huston got Sartre to script his filmFreud: The Secret Passion.[128] However it was too long and Sartre withdrew his name from the film's credits.[129] Nevertheless, many key elements from Sartre's script survive in the finished film.[128]
Despite their similarities as polemicists, novelists, adapters, and playwrights, Sartre's literary work has been counterposed, often pejoratively, to that of Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948 theRoman Catholic Church placed Sartre'sœuvre on theIndex Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books).
In 1993, French author Bianca Lamblin (originally Bianca Bienenfeld) wrote in her book Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (Memoirs of a deranged young girl, published in English under the title A Disgraceful Affair) of her sexual exploitation by Sartre and Beauvoir.[130] Lamblin claims that while a student at Lycée Molière, she was sexually exploited by her teacher Beauvoir, who introduced her to Sartre a year later. Bianca wrote her Mémoires in response to the posthumous 1990 publication of Jean-Paul Sartre's Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres: 1926–1963 (Letters to Castor and other friends), in which she noted that she was referred to by the pseudonym Louise Védrine.[131]
Sartre and Beauvoir frequently followed this pattern, in which Beauvoir would seduce female students and then pass them on to Sartre.[132][133][134][135]
^"Minnen, bara minnen" (ISBN978-91-0-057140-5) from year 2000 by Lars Gyllensten. Address by Anders Österling, Member of the Swedish Academy. Retrieved 4 February 2012.
^Brabazon, James (1975).Albert Schweitzer: A Biography. Putnam. p. 28.
^Leak, Andrew N. (2006),Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Reaktion Books, pp. 16–18.
^Jean-Paul, Sartre;Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, Jonathan Webber (2004) [1940].The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Routledge. pp. viii.ISBN978-0-415-28755-5.
^Cohen-Solal 1987, pp. 61–62 "During his first years at the Ecole, Sartre was the fearsome instigator of all the revues, all the jokes, all the scandals."
^Bondy 1967, p. 28: "To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp."
^Bondy 1967, p. 38: "In Stalin's day this seemed a private refinement and what was of particular importance then was Sartre's strong resistance to any form of opposition to the communist bloc."
^Bondy 1967, p. 37: "In 1956 Sartre saw in Hungary the kind of revolution of which he had dreamed: a contact between intellectual circles and broadly based mass movements, an activism shared by intellectuals and workers, revolution as an explosion of spontaneity. Reading Sartre's reply to Camus after fourteen years, we are struck by the mixture of dishonesty and bubbling verve with which Sartre indulges in misquotation in order to ridicule his opponents with the quick wit of the experience playwright."
^Sartre, Jean-Paul (19 November 1964). "Nouvel Observateur".La faute la plus énorme a probablement été le rapport de Khrouchtchev, car la dénonciation publique et solennelle, l'exposition détaillée de tous les crimes d'un personnage sacré qui a représenté si longtemps le régime est une folie quand une telle franchise n'est pas rendue possible par une élévation préalable et considérable du niveau de vie de la population... Le résultat a été de découvrir la vérité à des masses qui n'étaient pas prêtes à la recevoir.
^Mészáros, István (2012).The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History (Rev. ed.). New York: Monthly Review. p. 16.ISBN978-1-58367-293-8.
^Le Sueur, James D.; Pierre Bourdieu (2005) [2005].Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria. University of Nebraska Press. p. 178.ISBN978-0-8032-8028-1.
^Green, James N. (2010).We Cannot Remain Silent Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States. Duke University Press. p. 60.
^Khwaja Masud (9 October 2006)."Remembering Che Guevara".The News International. Archived fromthe original on 12 January 2012. Retrieved27 October 2011.
^Martin, Andy (19 May 2013)."The Persistence of the 'Lolita Syndrome'".New York Times. Retrieved28 February 2024.It is well established that she and Jean-Paul Sartre developed a pattern, which they called the "trio," in which Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre.
^LaBreck, Abby (16 May 2020)."Moi Aussi: French Literature and Culture in the Age of #MeToo".Harvard International Review. Retrieved28 February 2024.During his time as a teacher, Sartre developed an obsessive passion for one 17-year-old pupil, before engaging romantically with her younger sister. De Beauvoir even aided Sartre in his relations with minors—grooming and teaching young girls before introducing them to him.
^Menand, Louis (18 September 2005)."Stand By Your Man".New Yorker. Retrieved28 February 2024.Sartre and Beauvoir liked to refer to their entourage as "the Family," and the recurring feature of their affairs is a kind of play incest. Their customary method was to adopt a very young woman as a protégée—to take her to movies and cafés, travel with her, help her with her education and career, support her financially.... The ideal form for a Sartre and Beauvoirménage was the triangle.
Hayman, Ronald (1992).Sartre: A Biography. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers.ISBN978-0-881-84875-5. (Detailed chronology of Sartre's life on pages 485–510.)
Kirsner, Douglas (2003).The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Laing. New York: Karnac.
Allen, James Sloan, "Condemned to Be Free",Worldly Wisdom: Great Books and the Meanings of Life, Savannah: Frederic C. Beil, 2008.ISBN978-1-929490-35-6.
Catalano, Joseph S.,A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1987.ISBN978-0-226-09701-5.
Churchill, Steven and Reynolds, Jack (eds.),Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts, London/New York: Routledge, 2014.
Desan, Wilfrid,The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1954).
Doran, Robert, "Sartre'sCritique of Dialectical Reason and the Debate with Lévi-Strauss",Yale French Studies 123 (2013): 41–62.
Flynn, Thomas,Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Hayim, Gila J. (1980).The Existential Sociology of Jean-Paul Sartre. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.ISBN9780870232985.
Judaken, Jonathan, (2006)Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Laing, R. D. and Cooper, D. G.,Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950–1960, New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Lilar, Suzanne,A propos de Sartre et de l'amour, Paris: Grasset, 1967.
Madsen, Axel,Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Levy, Benny,Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian van den Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Siegler, Marcel,Needful Structures. The Dialectics of Action, Technology, and Society in Sartre's Later Philosophy, Bielefeld: transcript, 2023.ISBN978-3-8376-6282-5.
Vagnarelli, Gianluca,La democrazia tumultuaria. Sulla filosofia politica di Jean-Paul Sartre, Macerata, EUM, 2010.
Webber, Jonathan,The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Routledge, 2009.
Wittmann, H.,Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996.
Wittmann, H.,L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, translated from German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar, Éditions L'Harmattan (Collection L'ouverture philosophique), Paris, 2001.
Wittmann, H.,Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics. The Challenge of Freedom, edited by Dirk Hoeges. Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens und Frankreichs, vol. 13, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 2009.ISBN978-3-631-58693-8.
