Sartre
Jean-Paul-Charles-Aymard Sartre (/ˈsɑːrtrə/;[5] French: [saʁtʁ]; 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 has also been noted for his open relationship with the prominent feminist theorist 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).[6] 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".[7]
Contents
- 2 Thought
- 3 Career as public intellectual
- 4 Literature
- 5 Criticism
- 6 Works
- 7 See also
- 8 References
- 9 Sources
- 10 Further reading
Biography
Early life
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.[8] 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.)[9] When Sartre was two years old, his father died of a fever overseas. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon, where she raised Sartre with help from her father, a teacher of German who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age.[10] When he was twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied.[11]
As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's essay Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.[12] He attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris.[13] He studied and earned a degree 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.[14] It was at ENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, friendship with Raymond Aron.[15] Perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartre's philosophical development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojève's seminars, which continued for a number of years.[16]
From his first years in the École Normale, Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters.[17][18] In 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem, particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson.[19] In the same year, with his comrades Nizan, Larroutis, Baillou and Herland,[20] he organized a media prank following Charles Lindbergh's successful New York–Paris flight; Sartre & Co. called newspapers and informed them that Lindbergh was going to be awarded an honorary École degree. Many newspapers, including Le 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 Lindbergh look-alike.[19][21][22] The public's resultant outcry[need ^quotation ^to verify] forced Lanson to resign.[19][23]
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,[24] though they were not monogamous.[25] The first time Sartre took the exam to become a college instructor, he failed. But he took it a second time and was first in his class, with Beauvoir second.[26]
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Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in Beijing,1955.
Sartre was drafted into the French Army from 1929 to 1931 and served as a meteorologist for some time.[27] He later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence.[28]
From 1931 until 1945 Sartre taught at various lycées of Le Havre (at the Lycée de Le Havre, the present-day Lycée François-Ier (Le Havre) (fr), 1931–36), Laon (at the Lycée de Laon, 1936–37), and, finally, Paris (at the Lycée Pasteur, 1937–39, and at the Lycée Condorcet, 1941–44;[29] see below).
In 1932, Sartre discovered Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a book that had a remarkable influence on him.[30]
In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at the Institut français d'Allemagne (fr) in Berlin where he studied Edmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. Aron had already advised him in 1930 to read Emmanuel Levinas's Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology).[31]
The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.[32]
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