Sartre, Jean-Paul

I

Introduction

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-1980), French philosopher, dramatist, novelist, and political journalist, who was a leading exponent of existentialism. Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905, and educated in the city at the École Normale Supérieure, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and the French Institute in Berlin. He taught philosophy at various secondary schools from 1929 until the outbreak of World War II, when he was called into military service. In 1938 he published his first novel, Nausea (trans. 1949), which describes a provincial intellectual like himself who is progressively appalled at the mere “is-ness” of things, and the absence of any meaning in nature or human life.

From 1940 to 1941 Sartre was imprisoned by the Germans; after his release, he taught in Neuilly, France, and later in Paris, and was active in the French Resistance. The German authorities, unaware of his underground activities, allowed the production of his anti-authoritarian play The Flies (1943; trans. 1946) and the publication of his major philosophical work L’Etre et le Néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1953).

Sartre gave up teaching in 1945. With the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong companion, he founded the political and literary magazine Les Temps Modernes, of which he became editor-in-chief. He was active after 1947 as an independent socialist, critical of both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States in the so-called Cold War years. Most of his writing of the 1950s deals with literary and political problems. Rejecting the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, Sartre explained that to accept it would compromise his integrity as a writer.

Sartre’s philosophical works combine influences from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the Germans Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. He later developed this in a social direction, attempting to integrate it into a broadly Marxist outlook. His views, made popular by works such as the short Existentialism and Humanism (1946; trans. 1948), related philosophical theory to literature, psychology, and political action. They stimulated enormous popular interest, and at one time existentialism was a worldwide movement. He was the dominant intellectual figure in France in the first two decades after World War II.

II

Being and Nothingness

In his early philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguished between human beings and the non-human world, maintaining that human existence is intrinsically characterized by nothingness—that is, a capacity to negate what is and contrast it with what might be—and by individual freedom and responsibility. Human beings, however, constantly tend to fall into “bad faith”. That is, they deny this freedom and deceive themselves into thinking that their actions are determined by their circumstances or their own natures, so that they are not really responsible for them. To achieve an authentic human existence, an individual must overcome the tendency to bad faith, recognize his or her own absolute freedom, and assume responsibility for any decisions made, unaided by society, traditional morality, or a belief in God. Sartre’s plays and novels express his belief that freedom and acceptance of personal responsibility are the main values in life and that individuals must rely on their creative powers rather than on social or religious authority.

III

Critique of Dialectical Reason

Sartre’s later philosophical work Critique de la Raison Dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1976) shifted his emphasis from individual freedom to a Marx-influenced theory of the subject as an actor who is always historically and socially conditioned. Sartre argued that the influence of modern society as a whole over the individuals who comprise it is so great as to produce “serialization”, a kind of loss of the self. Genuine freedom can only be gained by collective revolutionary action. Whereas in his early work, Sartre had portrayed human relations as an endless struggle to reduce the other person to the object of one’s “look”, and to escape from a similar objectification by the other, in this and other later writings he held out the possibility of relations of mutual recognition between free individuals.

Despite his support for revolutionary action, especially against colonial regimes, Sartre did not himself join the Communist Party. He condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, as well as French actions in the Algerian War in the late 1950s, and American involvement in the Vietnam War in the following decade. In his last years, Sartre was active in attempts to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians. He died in Paris on April 15, 1980.

IV

Other Writings

Sartre’s other works include the unfinished series Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads of Liberty), comprising L’Age de Raison (1945; trans. 1947), Le Sursis (1945; trans. 1947), and La Mort dans l’Âme (1949; trans. 1951); a biography of the controversial French writer Jean Genet, St Genet, Comédien et Martyr (1952; trans. 1952); the plays Huis Clos (1944; trans. 1946), La Putain Respectueuse (1946; trans. 1947), and Les Séquestrés d’Altona (1959; trans. 1961); his autobiography, Les Mots (1964; trans. 1964); and a biography of the French author Gustave Flaubert (3 vols., 1971-1972).