Jean-Paul Sartre

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Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher. Also known as a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He is both known as a philosopher of the phenomenology school as well as one of the founders of existentialism. Existentialism is most commonly explained using Sartre’s theory: ‘Existing comes before essence’.

Sartre and Existentialism

The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre is an account of the way that we humans exist, in contrast to the ways in which such things as chairs and tables exist. It aims to elaborate the central structures of our lives, around which all the things that we do are built (Webber 2009). This view emphasises the 'subjectivity' of human beings, the only beings in the world to possess 'will and consciousness' and insists that human beings are 'free' te choose the 'nature' of their existence and to give it meaning to fill the 'existential void' (Cloke, Philo & Sadler, 1999). Sartre said: ‘man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself’ (Cloke, Philo & Sadler, 1999). A well known statement of Jean-Paul Sartre was that every person at its birth is an evil being that can be accounted for the many conflicts in the world.

Sartre intented his philosophy not as something only to be studied in libraries. That is why he wrote about it in the press, because he believed that it could answer questions of what we are and what we all face (Webber, 2009).

Life

Born in Paris as an only child, his father died when he was two years old. After which his mother Anne-Marie Schweitzer moved to her hometown Meudon. Where her father helped in the upbringing, introducing him to classical literature at a early age. He studied at École Normale Supérieure from 1924 to 1929. In Berlin, 1932 he studied the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Drafted in the French army during World War II, he was captured by the Germans in 1940. After being released because of poor health he returned to Paris. During this period he wrote Being and Nothingness, his central philosophical work. From which much of modern existentialism derives. After WW II his Marxist political views made him a strong voice against French rule in Algeria. He met Castro en Guevara in Cuba and opposed the Vietnam war. Sarte was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, which he declined. 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. His physical conditions started to deteriorate due to his merciless pace of work and smoking habits. He became almost completely blind in 1973 and dies in 1980.

Political changes of view

As mentioned above Jean-Paul Sartre criticised the western politics and parts of its culture. He was considered as someone who had views related to Marxism and was considered neutral in the conflict between the United States of America and the Sovjet-Union. But when France politically moved more to the United States, Sartre chose the side of the Sovjet-Union in 1952. During 1952-1956 he chose to examine communism by traveling the Sovjet-Union with fellow-traveler Claude Lanzmann. During the following years he more and more abandoned his own existentialism. But in 1956 he rejected the communism when the Sovjet-Union attacked Hungary. The following years were years where he rejected the france colonialisation of Algeria, and the ideas of colonialism.

Bibliography

Plays, screenplays, novels, and short stories

• Nausea / La nausée (1938)
• The Wall / Le mur (1939)
• Bariona / Bariona, ou le fils du tonnerre (1940)
• The Flies / Les mouches (1943)
• No Exit / Huis clos (1944)
• Typhus, wr. '44, pub. '07; adapted as The Proud and the Beautiful
• The Age of Reason / L'âge de raison (1945)
• The Respectful Prostitute / La putain respectueuse (1946)
• The Victors / Morts sans sépulture (1946)
• The Chips Are Down / Les jeux sont faits (1947)
• The Reprieve / Le sursis (1947)
• In the Mesh / L'engrénage (1948)
• Dirty Hands / Les mains sales (1948)
• Troubled Sleep (London ed. (Hamilton) has title: Iron in the soul) / La mort dans l'âme (1949)
• Intimacy (1949)
• The Devil and the Good Lord / Le diable et le bon dieu (1951)
• Kean (1953)
• Nekrassov (1955)
• The Condemned of Altona / Les séquestrés d'Altona (1959)
• Hurricane over Cuba / written and printed in 1961 in Brazil, along with Rubem Braga and Fernando Sabino (1961)
• The Trojan Women / Les Troyennes (1965)
• The Freud Scenario / Le scénario Freud (1984)

Philosophic essays

• Imagination: A Psychological Critique / L'imagination (1936)
• The Transcendence of the Ego / La transcendance de l'égo (1937)
• Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions / Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (1939)
• The Imaginary / L'imaginaire (1940)
• Being and Nothingness / L'étre et le néant (1943)
• Existentialism is a Humanism / L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946)
• Search for a Method / Question de méthode (1957)
• Critique of Dialectical Reason / Critique de la raison dialectique (1960, 1985)
• Notebooks for an Ethics / Cahiers pour une morale (1983)
• Truth and Existence / Vérité et existence (1989)

Critical essays

• Anti-Semite and Jew / Réflexions sur la question juive (1943)
• Baudelaire (1946)
• Situations I: Literary Critiques / Critiques littéraires (1947)[50]
• Situations II: What Is Literature? / Qu'est-ce que la littérature ? (1947)
• "Black Orpheus" / "Orphée noir" (1948)
• Situations III (1949)
• Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr / S.G., comédien et martyr (1952)[51]
• The Henri Martin Affair / L'affaire Henri Martin (1953)
• Situations IV: Portraits (1964)
• Situations V: Colonialism and Neocolonialism (1964)
• Situations VI: Problems of Marxism, Part 1 (1966)
• Situations VII: Problems of Marxism, Part 2 (1967)
• The Family Idiot / L'idiot de la famille (1971–2)
• Situations VIII: Autour de 1968 (1972)
• Situations IX: Mélanges (1972)
• Situations X: Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken / Politique et Autobiographie (1976)

Autobiographic

• Sartre By Himself / Sartre par lui-mème (1959)
• The Words / Les mots (1964)[51]
• Witness to My Life & Quiet Moments in a War / Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres (1983)
• War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War / Les carnets de la drole de guerre (1984)

References

• Cloke, P., Philo, Ch. & Sadler, D. (1991) Approaching Human Geography. Chapman, London, p. 76

• Webber, J. (2009) The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Routledge, London

• Naess, A. (1968) Four modern philosophers, The university of Chicago Press, Chicago

• Unknown. Retrieved 2012 September 16 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre

• Unknown. Retrieved 2012 September 16 from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1964/sartre-bio.html

• Francis Jeanson, "Jean-Paul Sartre", Bezige Bij, A'dam, 1968 (Dutch translation)

Contributors

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