Jean Paul Sartre – Life and thought

Introduction

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.

His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.

Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. 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 Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism and Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.

He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".[10]

The French philosopher and distinguished writer Jean-Paul Sartre ranks as the most versatile writer and as the dominant influence in three decades of French intellectual life.

Childhood and early work

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris, France, on June 21, 1905. His father, a naval officer, died while on a tour of duty in Indochina before Sartre was two years old. His mother belonged to the Alsatian Schweitzer family and was a first cousin to the famous physician Albert Schweitzer (1875–1925). The young widow returned to her parents' house, where she and her son were treated as "the children." In the first volume of his autobiography, The Words (1964), Sartre describes his "unnatural" childhood as a spoiled and an unusually intelligent boy. Lacking any companions his own age, the child found "friends" exclusively in books. He began reading when he was a very young boy. Reading and writing thus became his twin passions. "It was in books that I encountered the universe," he once said.

Sartre received much of his early education from tutors. He entered the école Normale Supérieure at the University of Paris in 1924 and graduated in 1929. While there, he met the novelist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), and the two formed a close relationship that lasted thereafter. After completing required military service, Sartre took a teaching job at a lycée (public secondary school) in Le Havre, France. There he wrote his first novel, Nausea (1938), which some critics have called the century's most influential French novel.

World War II

From 1933 to 1935 Sartre was a research student at the Institut Français in Berlin and Freiburg, Germany. He discovered the works of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and began to philosophize on phenomenology, or the study of human awareness. A series of works on the models of consciousness poured from Sartre's pen: two works on imagination, one on self-consciousness, and one on emotions. He also produced a first-rate volume of short stories, The Wall (1939).

Sartre returned to Paris to teach in a lycée and to continue his writing, but this was interrupted by World War II (1939–45; a war in which France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and other countries fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan). Called up by the army, he served briefly on the Eastern front and was taken prisoner. After nine months he secured his release and returned to teaching in Paris, where he became active in the Resistance, a secret French group dedicated to removing the occupying German army. During this period he wrote his first major work in philosophy, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (1943).

After the war Sartre abandoned teaching, determined to support himself by writing. He was also determined that his writing and thinking should be engaging, or intellectually activating. Intellectuals, he thought, must take a public stand on every great question of their day. He thus became fundamentally a moralist (a teacher of right and wrong), both in his philosophical and literary works.

Other works

Sartre had turned to playwriting and eventually produced a series of theatrical successes which are essentially dramatizations of ideas, although they contain some finely drawn characters and lively plots. The first two, The Flies and No Exit, were produced in occupied Paris. They were followed by Dirty Hands (1948), usually called his best play; The Devil and the Good Lord (1957), an insulting, anti-Christian rant; and The Prisoners of Altona (1960), which combined convincing character portrayal with telling social criticism. Sartre also wrote a number of comedies: The Respectful Prostitute (1946), Kean (1954), and Nekrassov (1956), which the critic Henry Peyre claimed "reveals him as the best comic talent of our times."

During this same period Sartre also wrote a three-volume novel, The Roads to Freedom (1945–1949); formal writings on literature; lengthy studies of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Jean Genet (1910–1986); and a large number of reviews and criticisms. He also edited Les Temps modernes.

Though never a member of the Communist Party (a political party that believes goods and services should be controlled by a strong government), Sartre usually sympathized with the political views of the (liberal) far left. Whatever the political issue, he was quick to publish his opinions, often combining them with public acts of protest.

Later work

In 1960 Sartre returned to philosophy, publishing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason. It represented essentially a modification of his existentialist ideas, or a philosophy that stresses the importance of the individual experience. The drift of Sartre's earlier work was toward a sense of the uselessness of life. In Being and Nothingness he declared man to be "a useless passion," forced to exercise a meaningless freedom. But after World War II, his new interest in social and political questions gave way to more optimistic and activist views.

Sartre was always controversial yet respected. In 1964 he was awarded but refused to accept the Nobel Prize in literature. Sartre suffered from declining health throughout the 1970s and died from lung problems in 1980. He is remembered as one of the most influential French writer of the twentieth century.

Thought

Sartre's primary idea is that people, as humans, are "condemned to be free".  This theory relies upon his position that there is no creator, and is illustrated using the example of the paper 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". This forms the basis for his assertion that because one cannot explain one's own actions and behavior by referencing 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."

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. 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.[90] In this way death emphasizes the burden of our free, individual existence.

As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea), which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. 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, having equal value to discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories such as existentialism. 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.

He also took inspiration from phenomenologist 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."

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's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 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 Immanuel Kant's fundamental ideas about freedom; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality 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 proves to be bitterly rejected.

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. "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."