Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, US also
; 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 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
despite attempting to refuse it, saying that
he always declined official honours and that
"a writer should not allow himself to be turned
into an institution".
== Biography ==
=== Early life ===
Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905
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, whose father
Louis Théophile was the younger brother of
Anne-Marie's father.
When Sartre was two years old, his father
died of an illness, which he most likely contracted
in Indochina. Anne-Marie moved back to her
parents' house in Meudon, where she raised
Sartre with help from her father Charles Schweitzer,
a teacher of German who taught Sartre mathematics
and introduced him to classical literature
at a very early age. When he was twelve, Sartre's
mother remarried, and the family moved to
La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied.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. He attended
the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris.
He studied and earned certificates in psychology,
history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy,
ethics and sociology, and physics, as well
as his diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly
equivalent to an MA thesis) in Paris at the
École Normale Supérieure, an institution
of higher education that was the alma mater
for several prominent French thinkers and
intellectuals. (His 1928 MA thesis under the
title "L'Image dans la vie psychologique:
rôle et nature" ["Image in Psychological
Life: Role and Nature"] was supervised by
Henri Delacroix.) It was at ENS that Sartre
began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, friendship
with Raymond Aron. 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.From his first years in the École Normale,
Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters.
In 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon
in the revue of the school, coauthored with
Georges Canguilhem, particularly upset the
director Gustave Lanson. In the same year,
with his comrades Nizan, Larroutis, Baillou
and Herland, he organized a media prank following
Charles Lindbergh's successful New York City–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.
The public's resultant outcry forced Lanson
to resign.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, though
they were not monogamous. The first time Sartre
took the agrégation, he failed. He took it
a second time and virtually tied for first
place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually
awarded first place, with Beauvoir second.Sartre
was drafted into the French Army from 1929
to 1931 and served as a meteorologist for
some time. He later argued in 1959 that each
French person was responsible for the collective
crimes during the Algerian War of Independence.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),
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;
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.In
1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at the
Institut français d'Allemagne 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).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.
=== World War II ===
In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French
army, where he served as a meteorologist.
He was captured by German troops in 1940 in
Padoux, and he spent nine months as a prisoner
of war—in Nancy and finally in Stalag XII-D,
Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical
piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama
concerning Christmas. It was during this period
of confinement that Sartre read Martin Heidegger's
Being and Time, later to become a major influence
on his own essay on phenomenological ontology.
Because of poor health (he claimed that his
poor eyesight and exotropia affected his balance)
Sartre was released in April 1941. According
to other sources, he escaped after a medical
visit to the ophthalmologist. Given civilian
status, he recovered his teaching position
at Lycée Pasteur near Paris, settled at the
Hotel Mistral. In October 1941 he was given
a position at Lycée Condorcet in Paris, replacing
a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to
teach by Vichy law.
After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he
participated in the founding of the underground
group Socialisme et Liberté ("Socialism and
Liberty") with other writers Simone de Beauvoir,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti,
Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École
Normale students. In spring of 1941, Sartre
suggested with "cheerful ferocity" at a meeting
that the Socialisme et Liberté assassinate
prominent war collaborators like Marcel Déat,
but de Beauvoir noted his idea was rejected
as "none of us felt qualified to make bombs
or hurl grenades". The British historian Ian
Ousby observed that the French always had
far more hatred for collaborators than they
did for the Germans, noting it was French
people like Déat that Sartre wanted to assassinate
rather than the military governor of France,
General Otto von Stülpnagel, and the popular
slogan always was "Death to Laval!" rather
than "Death to Hitler!". In August Sartre
and de Beauvoir went to the French Riviera
seeking the support of André Gide and André
Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux were
undecided, and this may have been the cause
of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement.
Socialisme et liberté soon dissolved and
Sartre decided to write instead of being involved
in active resistance. He then wrote Being
and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit, none
of which were censored by the Germans, and
also contributed to both legal and illegal
literary magazines.
In his essay "Paris under the Occupation",
Sartre wrote about the "correct" behavior
of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians
into complicity with the occupation, accepting
what was unnatural as natural, writing:
The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand,
through the streets. They did not force civilians
to make way for them on the pavement. They
would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro.
They showed great fondness for children and
would pat them on the cheek. They had been
told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined,
they tried shyly and conscientiously to do
so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness
which could find no practical expression.
Sartre noted when Wehrmacht soldiers asked
Parisians politely in their German-accented
French for directions, people usually felt
embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their
best to help out the Wehrmacht which led Sartre
to remark "We could not be natural". French
was a language widely taught in German schools
and most Germans could speak at least some
French. Sartre himself always found it difficult
when a Wehrmacht soldier asked him for directions,
usually saying he did not know where it was
that the soldier wanted to go, but still felt
uncomfortable as the very act of speaking
to the Wehrmacht meant he had been complicit
in the Occupation. Ousby wrote: "But, in however
humble a fashion, everyone still had to decide
how they were going to cope with life in a
fragmenting society ... So Sartre's worries
... about how to react when a German soldier
stopped him in the street and asked politely
for directions were not as fussily inconsequential
as they might sound at first. They were emblematic
of how the dilemmas of the Occupation presented
themselves in daily life". Sartre wrote the
very "correctness" of the Germans caused moral
corruption in many people who used the "correct"
behavior of the Germans as an excuse for passivity,
and the very act of simply trying to live
one's day-to-day existence without challenging
the occupation aided the "New Order in Europe",
which depended upon the passivity of ordinary
people to accomplish its goals.Throughout
the occupation, it was German policy to plunder
France and food shortages were always a major
problem as the majority of food from the French
countryside went to Germany. Sartre wrote
about the "languid existence" of the Parisians
as people waited obsessively for the one weekly
arrival of trucks bringing food from the countryside
that the Germans allowed, writing about how:
"Paris would grow peaked and yawn with hunger
under the empty sky. Cut off from the rest
of the world, fed only through the pity or
some ulterior motive, the town led a purely
abstract and symbolic life". Sartre himself
lived on a diet of rabbits sent to him by
a friend of de Beauvior living in Anjou. The
rabbits were usually in an advanced state
of decay full of maggots, and despite being
hungry, Sartre once threw out one rabbit as
uneatable, saying it had more maggots in it
than meat. Sartre also remarked on conversations
at the Café de Flore between intellectuals
had changed, as the fear that one of them
might be a mouche (informer) or a writer of
the corbeau (anonymous denunciatory letters)
meant that no-one really said what they meant
anymore, imposing self-censorship. Sartre
and his friends at the Café de Flore had
reasons for their fear; by September 1940,
the Abwehr alone had already recruited 32,000
French people to work as mouches while by
1942 the Paris Kommandantur was receiving
an average of 1,500 letters/per day sent by
the corbeaux.Sartre wrote under the occupation
Paris had become a "sham", resembling the
empty wine bottles displayed in shop windows
as all of the wine had been exported to Germany,
looking like the old Paris, but hollowed out,
as what had made Paris special was gone. Paris
had almost no cars on the streets during the
occupation as the oil went to Germany while
the Germans imposed a nightly curfew, which
led Sartre to remark that Paris "was peopled
by the absent". Sartre also noted that people
began to disappear under the occupation writing
about how:
One day you might phone a friend and the phone
would ring for a long time in an empty flat.
You would go round and ring the doorbell,
but no-one would answer it. If the concierge
forced the door, you would find two chairs
standing close together in the hall with the
fag-ends of German cigarettes on the floor
between their legs. If the wife or mother
of the man who had vanished had been present
at his arrest, she would tell you that he
had been taken away by very polite Germans,
like those who asked the way in the street.
And when she went to ask what had happened
to them at the offices in the Avenue Foch
or the Rue des Saussaies she would be politely
received and sent away with comforting words"
[No. 11 Rue des Saussaies was the headquarters
of the Gestapo in Paris].
Sartre wrote the feldgrau ("field grey") uniforms
of the Wehrmacht and the green uniforms of
the Order Police which had seemed so alien
in 1940 had become accepted, as people were
numbed into accepting what Sartre called "a
pale, dull green, unobtrusive strain, which
the eye almost expected to find among the
dark clothes of the civilians". Under the
occupation, the French often called the Germans
les autres ("the others"), which inspired
Sartre's aphorism in his play Huis clos ("No
Exit") of "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" ("Hell
is other people"). Sartre intended the line
"l'enfer, c'est les Autres" at least in part
to be a dig at the German occupiers.After
August 1944 and the Liberation of Paris, he
wrote Anti-Semite and Jew. In the book he
tries to explain the etiology of "hate" by
analyzing antisemitic hate. Sartre was a very
active contributor to Combat, a newspaper
created during the clandestine period by Albert
Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar
beliefs. Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends
with Camus until 1951, with the publication
of Camus's The Rebel. Later, while Sartre
was labeled by some authors as a resistant,
the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir
Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political
commitment during the German occupation, and
interpreted his further struggles for liberty
as an attempt to redeem himself. According
to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted;
not a resister who wrote.
In 1945, after the war ended, Sartre moved
to an apartment on the rue Bonaparte which
was where he was to produce most of his subsequent
work, and where he lived until 1962. It was
from there that he helped establish a quarterly
literary and political review, Les Temps modernes
(Modern Times), in part to popularize his
thought. He ceased teaching and devoted his
time to writing and political activism. He
would draw on his war experiences for his
great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la
Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).
=== Cold War politics and anticolonialism
===
The first period of Sartre's career, defined
in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943),
gave way to a second period—when the world
was perceived as split into communist and
capitalist blocs—of highly publicized political
involvement. Sartre tended to glorify the
Resistance after the war as the uncompromising
expression of morality in action, and recalled
that the résistants were a "band of brothers"
who had enjoyed "real freedom" in a way that
did not exist before nor after the war. Sartre
was "merciless" in attacking anyone who had
collaborated or remained passive during the
German occupation; for instance, criticizing
Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist
writer Robert Brasillach from being executed.
His 1948 play Les mains sales (Dirty Hands)
in particular explored the problem of being
a politically "engaged" intellectual. He embraced
Marxism but did not join the Communist Party.
For a time in the late 1940s, Sartre described
French nationalism as "provincial" and in
a 1949 essay called for a "United States of
Europe". In an essay published in the June
1949 edition of the journal Politique étrangère,
Sartre wrote:
If we want French civilization to survive,
it must be fitted into the framework of a
great European civilization. Why? I have said
that civilization is the reflection on a shared
situation. In Italy, in France, in Benelux,
in Sweden, in Norway, in Germany, in Greece,
in Austria, everywhere we find the same problems
and the same dangers ... But this cultural
polity has prospects only as elements of a
policy which defends Europe's cultural autonomy
vis-à-vis America and the Soviet Union, but
also its political and economic autonomy,
with the aim of making Europe a single force
between the blocs, not a third bloc, but an
autonomous force which will refuse to allow
itself to be torn into shreds between American
optimism and Russian scientificism.
About the Korean War, Sartre wrote: "I have
no doubt that the South Korean feudalists
and the American imperialists have promoted
this war. But I do not doubt either that it
was begun by the North Koreans". In July 1950,
Sartre wrote in Les Temps Modernes about his
and de Beauvoir's attitude to the Soviet Union:
As we were neither members of the [Communist]
party nor its avowed sympathizers, it was
not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps;
we were free to remain aloof from the quarrel
over the nature of this system, provided that
no events of sociological significance had
occurred.
Sartre held that the Soviet Union was a "revolutionary"
state working for the betterment of humanity
and could be criticized only for failing to
live up to its own ideals, but that critics
had to take in mind that the Soviet state
needed to defend itself against a hostile
world; by contrast Sartre held that the failures
of "bourgeois" states were due to their innate
shortcomings. The Swiss journalist François
Bondy wrote that, based on a reading of Sartre's
numerous essays, speeches and interviews "a
simple basic pattern never fails to emerge:
social change must be comprehensive and revolutionary"
and the parties that promote the revolutionary
charges "may be criticized, but only by those
who completely identify themselves with its
purpose, its struggle and its road to power",
deeming Sartre's position to be "existentialist".While
a Marxist, Sartre attacked what he saw as
abuses of freedom and human rights by the
Soviet Union. In 1954, Sartre visited the
Soviet Union, which he stated he found a "complete
freedom of criticism" while condemning the
United States for sinking into "prefascism".
Sartre wrote about those Soviet writers expelled
from the Soviet Writers' Union "still had
the opportunity of rehabilitating themselves
by writing better books". He was one of the
first French journalists to expose the existence
of the labor camps, and vehemently opposed
the invasion of Hungary, Russian anti-Semitism,
and the execution of dissidents. About the
Hungarian revolt of 1956, Sartre wrote: "In
spite of everything, the Rakosi regime stood
for socialization. Only it did it badly and
that is worse than not to do so at all". Sartre
came to admire the Polish leader Władysław
Gomułka, a man who favored a "Polish road
to socialism" and wanted more independence
for Poland, but was loyal to the Soviet Union
because of the Oder-Neisse line issue. Sartre's
newspaper Les Temps Modernes devoted a number
of special issues in 1957 and 1958 to Poland
under Gomułka, praising him for his reforms.
Bondy wrote of the notable contradiction between
Sarte's "ultra Bolshevism" as he expressed
admiration for the Chinese leader Mao Zedong
as the man who lead the oppressed masses of
the Third World into revolution while also
praising more moderate Communist leaders like
Gomułka.As an anti-colonialist, Sartre took
a prominent role in the struggle against French
rule in Algeria, and the use of torture and
concentration camps by the French in Algeria.
He became an eminent supporter of the FLN
in the Algerian War and was one of the signatories
of the Manifeste des 121. Consequently, Sartre
became a domestic target of the paramilitary
Organisation armée secrète (OAS), escaping
two bomb attacks in the early '60s. (He had
an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who
became his adopted daughter in 1965.) He opposed
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and, along
with Bertrand Russell and others, organized
a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes,
which became known as the Russell Tribunal
in 1967.
His work after Stalin's death, the Critique
de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical
Reason), appeared in 1960 (a second volume
appearing posthumously). In the Critique Sartre
set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual
defense than it had received until then; he
ended by concluding that Marx's notion of
"class" as an objective entity was fallacious.
Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in
the early works of Marx led to a dispute with
a leading leftist intellectual in France in
the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that
the ideas of the young Marx were decisively
superseded by the "scientific" system of the
later Marx. In the late 1950s, Sartre began
to argue that the European working classes
were too apolitical to carry out the revolution
predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz
Fanon stated to argue it was the impoverished
masses of the Third World, the "real damned
of the earth", who would carry out the revolution.
A major theme of Sarte's political essays
in the 1960s was of his disgust with the "Americanization"
of the French working class who would much
rather watch American TV shows dubbed into
French than agitate for a revolution.Sartre
went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro
and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After
Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him
to be "not only an intellectual but also the
most complete human being of our age" and
the "era's most perfect man". Sartre would
also compliment Guevara by professing that
"he lived his words, spoke his own actions
and his story and the story of the world ran
parallel". However he stood against the persecution
of gays by Castro's régime, which he compared
to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and said:
"In Cuba there are no Jews, but there are
homosexuals".During a collective hunger strike
in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction leader
Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized
the harsh conditions of imprisonment. Towards
the end of his life, Sartre became an anarchist.
=== Late life and death ===
In 1964 Sartre renounced literature in a witty
and sardonic account of the first ten years
of his life, Les Mots (The Words). The book
is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust,
whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed
that of André Gide (who had provided the
model of littérature engagée for Sartre's
generation). Literature, Sartre concluded,
functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute
for real commitment in the world. In October
1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature but he declined it. He was the
first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline
the prize, and remains one of only two laureates
to do so. According to Lars Gyllensten, in
the book Minnen, bara minnen ("Memories, Only
Memories") published in 2000, Sartre himself
or someone close to him got in touch with
the Swedish Academy in 1975 with a request
for the prize money, but was refused. In 1945,
he had refused the Légion d'honneur. The
Nobel prize was announced on 22 October 1964;
on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter
to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed
from the list of nominees, and warning that
he would not accept the prize if awarded,
but the letter went unread; on 23 October,
Le Figaro published a statement by Sartre
explaining his refusal. 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.
Nevertheless he was that year's prizewinner.
After being awarded the prize he tried to
escape the media by hiding in the house of
Simone's sister Hélène de Beauvoir in Goxwiller,
Alsace.
Though his name was then a household word
(as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous
1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with
few possessions, actively committed to causes
until the end of his life, such as the May
1968 strikes in Paris during the summer of
1968 during which he was arrested for civil
disobedience. President Charles de Gaulle
intervened and pardoned him, commenting that
"you don't arrest Voltaire".
In 1975, when asked how he would like to be
remembered, Sartre replied:
I would like [people] to remember Nausea,
[my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the Good
Lord, and then my two philosophical works,
more particularly the second one, Critique
of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet,
Saint Genet. ... If these are remembered,
that would be quite an achievement, and I
don't ask for more. As a man, if a certain
Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like
people to remember the milieu or historical
situation in which I lived, ... how I lived
in it, in terms of all the aspirations which
I tried to gather up within myself.
Sartre's physical condition deteriorated,
partially because of the merciless pace of
work (and the use of amphetamine) he put himself
through during the writing of the Critique
and a massive analytical biography of Gustave
Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which
remained unfinished. He suffered from hypertension,
and became almost completely blind in 1973.
Sartre was a notorious chain smoker, which
could also have contributed to the deterioration
of his health.Sartre died on 15 April 1980
in Paris from edema of the lung. He had not
wanted to be buried at Père-Lachaise Cemetery
between his mother and stepfather, so it was
arranged that he be buried at Montparnasse
Cemetery. At his funeral on Saturday, 19 April,
50,000 Parisians descended onto Boulevard
Montparnasse to accompany Sartre's cortege.
The funeral started at "the hospital at 2:00
p.m., then filed through the fourteenth arrondissement,
past all Sartre's haunts, and entered the
cemetery through the gate on the Boulevard
Edgar Quinet". Sartre was initially buried
in a temporary grave to the left of the cemetery
gate. Four days later the body was disinterred
for cremation at Père-Lachaise Cemetery,
and his ashes were reburied at the permanent
site in Montparnasse Cemetery, to the right
of the cemetery gate.
== 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 referring to 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. 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."
== 
Career as public intellectual ==
While the broad focus of Sartre's life revolved
around the notion of human freedom, he began
a sustained intellectual participation in
more public matters towards the end of the
Second World War, around 1944-45. Before World
War II, he was content with the role of an
apolitical liberal intellectual: "Now teaching
at a lycée in Laon ... Sartre made his headquarters
the Dome café at the crossing of Montparnasse
and Raspail boulevards. He attended plays,
read novels, and dined [with] women. He wrote.
And he was published." Sartre and his lifelong
companion, de Beauvoir, existed, in her words,
where "the world about us was a mere backdrop
against which our private lives were played
out".Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation
in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist
in The Age of Reason, which was completed
during Sartre's first year as a soldier in
the Second World War. By forging Mathieu as
an absolute rationalist, analyzing every situation,
and functioning entirely on reason, he removed
any strands of authentic content from his
character and as a result, Mathieu could "recognize
no allegiance except to [him]self", though
he realized that without "responsibility for
my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd
to go on existing". Mathieu's commitment was
only to himself, never to the outside world.
Mathieu was restrained from action each time
because he had no reasons for acting. Sartre
then, for these reasons, was not compelled
to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and
it took the invasion of his own country to
motivate him into action and to provide a
crystallization of these ideas. It was the
war that gave him a purpose beyond himself,
and the atrocities of the war can be seen
as the turning point in his public stance.
The war opened Sartre's eyes to a political
reality he had not yet understood until forced
into continual engagement with it: "the world
itself destroyed Sartre's illusions about
isolated self-determining individuals and
made clear his own personal stake in the events
of the time." Returning to Paris in 1941 he
formed the "Socialisme et Liberté" resistance
group. In 1943, after the group disbanded,
Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group,
in which he remained an active participant
until the end of the war. He continued to
write ferociously, and it was due to this
"crucial experience of war and captivity that
Sartre began to try to build up a positive
moral system and to express it through literature".The
symbolic initiation of this new phase in Sartre's
work is packaged in the introduction he wrote
for a new journal, Les Temps modernes, in
October 1945. Here he aligned the journal,
and thus himself, with the Left and called
for writers to express their political commitment.
Yet, this alignment was indefinite, directed
more to the concept of the Left than a specific
party of the Left.
Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being
a public intellectual. He envisaged culture
as a very fluid concept; neither pre-determined,
nor definitely finished; instead, in true
existential fashion, "culture was always conceived
as a process of continual invention and re-invention."
This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as a
pragmatist, willing to move and shift stance
along with events. He did not dogmatically
follow a cause other than the belief in human
freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist's
objectivity. It is this overarching theme
of freedom that means his work "subverts the
bases for distinctions among the disciplines".
Therefore, he was able to hold knowledge across
a vast array of subjects: "the international
world order, the political and economic organisation
of contemporary society, especially France,
the institutional and legal frameworks that
regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the
educational system, the media networks that
control and disseminate information. Sartre
systematically refused to keep quiet about
what he saw as inequalities and injustices
in the world."Sartre always sympathized with
the Left, and supported the French Communist
Party (PCF) until the 1956 Soviet invasion
of Hungary. Following the Liberation the PCF
were infuriated by Sartre's philosophy, which
appeared to lure young French men and women
away from the ideology of communism and into
Sartre's own existentialism. From 1956 onwards
Sartre rejected the claims of the PCF to represent
the French working classes, objecting to its
"authoritarian tendencies". In the late 1960s
Sartre supported the Maoists, a movement that
rejected the authority of established communist
parties. However, despite aligning with the
Maoists, Sartre said after the May events:
"If one rereads all my books, one will realize
that I have not changed profoundly, and that
I have always remained an anarchist." He would
later explicitly allow himself to be called
an anarchist.In the aftermath of a war that
had for the first time properly engaged Sartre
in political matters, he set forth a body
of work which "reflected on virtually every
important theme of his early thought and began
to explore alternative solutions to the problems
posed there". The greatest difficulties that
he and all public intellectuals of the time
faced were the increasing technological aspects
of the world that were outdating the printed
word as a form of expression. In Sartre's
opinion, the "traditional bourgeois literary
forms remain innately superior", but there
is "a recognition that the new technological
'mass media' forms must be embraced" if Sartre's
ethical and political goals as an authentic,
committed intellectual are to be achieved:
the demystification of bourgeois political
practices and the raising of the consciousness,
both political and cultural, of the working
class.The struggle for Sartre was against
the monopolising moguls who were beginning
to take over the media and destroy the role
of the intellectual. His attempts to reach
a public were mediated by these powers, and
it was often these powers he had to campaign
against. He was skilled enough, however, to
circumvent some of these issues by his interactive
approach to the various forms of media, advertising
his radio interviews in a newspaper column
for example, and vice versa.The role of a
public intellectual can lead to the individual
placing himself in danger as he engages with
disputed topics. In Sartre's case, this was
witnessed in June 1961, when a plastic bomb
exploded in the entrance of his apartment
building. His public support of Algerian self-determination
at the time had led Sartre to become a target
of the campaign of terror that mounted as
the colonists' position deteriorated. A similar
occurrence took place the next year and he
had begun to receive threatening letters from
Oran, Algeria.
== Literature ==
Sartre wrote successfully in a number of literary
modes and made major contributions to literary
criticism and literary biography. His plays
are richly symbolic and serve as a means of
conveying his philosophy. The best-known,
Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line
"L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated
as "Hell is other people." Aside from the
impact of Nausea, Sartre's major work of fiction
was The Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts
the progression of how World War II affected
Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom
presents a less theoretical and more practical
approach to existentialism.
John Huston got Sartre to script his film
Freud: The Secret Passion. However it was
too long and Sartre withdrew his name from
the film's credits. Nevertheless, many key
elements from Sartre's script survive in the
finished film.
Despite their similarities as polemicists,
novelists, adapters, and playwrights, Sartre's
literary work has been counterposed, often
pejoratively, to that of Camus in the popular
imagination. In 1948 the Roman Catholic Church
placed Sartre's oeuvre on the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books).
== Criticism ==
Some philosophers argue that Sartre's thought
is contradictory. Specifically, they believe
that Sartre makes metaphysical arguments despite
his claim that his philosophical views ignore
metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse criticized Being
and Nothingness for projecting anxiety and
meaninglessness onto the nature of existence
itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical
doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine:
it hypostatizes specific historical conditions
of human existence into ontological and metaphysical
characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes
part of the very ideology which it attacks,
and its radicalism is illusory." In Letter
on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre's
existentialism:
Existentialism says existence precedes essence.
In this statement he is taking existentia
and essentia according to their metaphysical
meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has
said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre
reverses this statement. But the reversal
of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical
statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics,
in oblivion of the truth of Being.
The philosophers Richard Wollheim and Thomas
Baldwin have argued that Sartre's attempt
to show that Sigmund Freud's theory of the
unconscious is mistaken was based on a misinterpretation
of Freud. Richard Webster considers Sartre
one of many modern thinkers who have reconstructed
Judaeo-Christian orthodoxies in secular form.Intellectuals
associated with the political right allege
that Sartre's politics are indicative of authoritarianism.
Brian C. Anderson denounced Sartre as an apologist
for tyranny and terror and a supporter of
Stalinism, Maoism, and Castro's regime in
Cuba. The historian Paul Johnson asserted
that Sartre's ideas had inspired the Khmer
Rouge leadership: "The events in Cambodia
in the 1970s, in which between one-fifth and
one-third of the nation was starved to death
or murdered, were entirely the work of a group
of intellectuals, who were for the most part
pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre – 'Sartre's
Children' as I call them."Sartre, who stated
in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched
of the Earth that, "To shoot down a European
is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy
an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the
same time: there remains a dead man and a
free man," has been criticized by Anderson
and Michael Walzer for supporting the killing
of European civilians by the FLN during the
Algerian War. Walzer suggests that Sartre,
a European, was a hypocrite for not volunteering
to be killed.The critic, poet, essayist and
philosopher Clive James excoriated Sartre
in his book of mini biographies Cultural Amnesia
(2007). James attacks Sartre's philosophy
as being "all a pose".
== Works ==
== See also ==
Sartre's Roads to Freedom Trilogy
Situation (Sartre)
Freud: The Secret Passion
== References ==
== Sources ==
Aronson, Ronald (1980) Jean-Paul Sartre – Philosophy
in the World. London: NLB
Baert, Patrick (2015) The Existentialist Moment;
The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bondy, Francois (1967) "Jean-Paul Sartre and
Politics" pages 25–48 from The Journal of
Contemporary History, Volume 2, No. 2, April
1967.
Gerassi, John (1989) Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated
Conscience of His Century. Volume 1: Protestant
or Protester? Chicago: University of Chicago
Press
Judaken, Jonathan (2006) Jean-Paul Sartre
and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism
and the Politics of the French Intellectual.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Kirsner, Douglas (2003) The Schizoid World
of Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Laing. New York:
Karnac
Ousby, Ian (2000) Occupation The Ordeal of
France, 1940-1944, New York: Cooper Square
Press.
Scriven, Michael (1993) Sartre and The Media.
London: MacMillan Press Ltd
Scriven, Michael (1999) Jean-Paul Sartre:
Politics and Culture in Postwar France. London:
MacMillan Press Ltd
Thody, Philip (1964) Jean-Paul Sartre. London:
Hamish Hamilton
== Further reading ==
Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life. Translated
by Anna Cancogni. New York: Pantheon Books,
1987.
Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Biography. New York:
Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1987. (Detailed
chronology of Sartre's life on pages 485–510.)
Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to
Sartre, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Allen, James Sloan, "Condemned to Be Free,"
Worldly Wisdom: Great Books and the Meanings
of Life, Savannah: Frederic C. Beil, 2008.
ISBN 978-1929490-35-6.
Steven Churchill and Jack Reynolds (eds.)
Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts, London/NewYork:
Routledge, 2014.
Gianluca Vagnarelli, La democrazia tumultuaria.
Sulla filosofia politica di Jean-Paul Sartre,
Macerata, EUM, 2010.
Robert Doran, "Sartre's Critique of Dialectical
Reason and the Debate with Lévi-Strauss,"
Yale French Studies 123 (2013): 41–62.
Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism:
The Test Case of Collective Responsibility,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience
of His Century, Volume 1: Protestant or Protester?,
University of Chicago Press, 1989. ISBN 0-226-28797-1.
R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence:
A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950–1960,
New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Suzanne Lilar, A propos de Sartre et de l'amour,
Paris: Grasset, 1967.
Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common
Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
Heiner Wittmann, L'esthétique de Sartre.
Artistes et intellectuels, translated from
the German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar,
Éditions L'Harmattan (Collection L'ouverture
philosophique), Paris 2001.
Élisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent
Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser,
Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press,
New York, 2008.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now:
The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian
van den Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996.
P.V. Spade, Class Lecture Notes on Jean-Paul
Sartre's Being and Nothingness. 1996.
Jonathan Webber The existentialism of Jean-Paul
Sartre, London: Routledge, 2009
H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien
von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Tübingen: Gunter
Narr Verlag, 1996.
H. Wittmann, Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics.
The Challenge of Freedom.Ed. by Dirk Hoeges.
Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens
und Frankreichs, vol. 13, Frankfurt/M: Peter
Lang 2009 ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8
Wilfrid Desan, The Tragic Finale: An Essay
on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1954)
Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul
Satre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, 9780226097015,
0226097013 University of Chicago Press 1987
== External links ==
Jean-Paul Sartre at Curlie
=== By Sartre ===
Works by or about Jean-Paul Sartre at Internet
Archive
Americans and Their Myths Sartre's essay in
The Nation (18 October 1947 issue)
Sartre Texts on Philosophy Archive
Sartre Internet Archive on Marxists.org
Works by Jean-Paul Sartre at Open Library
=== On Sartre ===
UK Sartre Society
Alfredo Gomez-Muller: Sartre, de la nausée
à l'engagement. Paris, éditions du Félin,
2014.
Groupe d'études sartriennes, Paris
Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason
essay by Andy Blunden
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): Existentialism
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): Political
Philosophy Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy)
Sartre.org Articles, archives, and forum
"The Second Coming Of Sartre", John Lichfield,
The Independent, 17 June 2005
The World According to Sartre essay by Roger
Kimball
Reclaiming Sartre A review of Ian Birchall,
Sartre Against Stalinism
Sartre’s Existential Marxism and the Quest
for Humanistic Authenticity essay by Daniel
Jakopovich in the journal Synthesis Philosophica
Biography and quotes of Sartre
Living with Mother. Sartre and the problem
of maternity, Benedict O'Donohoe, International
WebjournalSens Public.
L’image de la femme dans le théâtre de
Jean-Paul Sartre – Jean-Paul Sartre:sexiste?
by Stephanie Rupert
Pierre Michel, Jean-Paul Sartre et Octave
Mirbeau.
Listen to Radio 4's In Our Time programme
on Sartre – RealAudio
Sartre: philosophy, literature, politics (articles),
International Webjournal Sens Public
Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists:
Waking up in Waking Life
Louis Menand (26 September 2005). "Stand By
Your Man: The strange liaison of Sartre and
Beauvoir (Book review of the republished The
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir)". The New
Yorker. Retrieved 9 June 2012.
Newspaper clippings about Jean-Paul Sartre
in the 20th Century Press Archives of the
German National Library of Economics (ZBW)
