Sartre
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, existentialism, and Marxism, and his work continues to influence fields such as Marxist philosophy, sociology, and literary studies. Sartre was also noted for his long relationship with the author and social theorist, Simone de Beauvoir. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused the honour.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. (Her father, Charles Schweitzer, was the older brother of Albert Schweitzer’s father, Louis Théophile.)[2] When Sartre was 15 months old, his father died of a fever. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents’ house in Meudon, where Sartre was raised with help from her father, a high school professor of German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age.[3] At twelve his mother remarried and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied.[4]
As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson‘s Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.[5] He studied and earned a doctorate in philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education that was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals.[6] It was at ENS that Sartre began his life-long, sometimes fractious, friendship with Raymond Aron.[7] Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, among others. In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship,[8] though they were not monogamous.[9] Sartre served as a conscript in the French Army 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.[10]
Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, “bad faith“) and an “authentic” way of “being“ 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).[11] Sartre’s introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture.
Selected bibliography
|
|
|
|
Follow UCLB 
