Sartre
Contemporary philosophySartre was a twentieth-century French philosopher (1905-1980). Born in Paris, he spent a happy childhood (recounted in his autobiography The Words), before attending the Lycée Henri-IV, then the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and finally the École Normale Supérieure. He met Simone de Beauvoir. He passed the agrégation in philosophy and taught at a lycée in Le Havre, then in Neuilly. His fame came with the publication of Nausea. After the war, his reputation was immense and existentialism became a fashionable philosophy.
Sartre's Works Summarised on This Site
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre sets out the principles of existentialism in a clear and pedagogical manner. He shows how this doctrine differs from pessimism, quietism, etc.
Being and Nothingness
What is being? What is nothingness? Sartre here delivers a phenomenological investigation that leads him to deduce human freedom.
The Imaginary
Sartre here delivers a phenomenological analysis of the "unrealising function of consciousness", the imagination.
Bibliography
Here are the essential books if you wish to gain a better understanding of this author's thought:
Webber, Jonathan, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Routledge, 2009
Churchill, Steven and Reynolds, Jack (eds.), Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts, London/New York: Routledge, 2014
Catalano, Joseph S., A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1987
Baert, Patrick (2015). The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Scriven, Michael (1999). Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France. London: MacMillan Press Ltd
Recommended Videos
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Biography: Life of Sartre
Youth
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 into a bourgeois family.
He was the only child of a military father who died fifteen months after his birth, and of a mother from a family of Alsatian intellectuals, the Schweitzers.
Raised by his mother and grandfather, he was doted on, which fostered in him a certain narcissism. He devoured the books in the family library and preferred reading to playing with other children.
This happy period came to an end when his mother remarried: Sartre loathed his stepfather. He was also uprooted to La Rochelle, where he encountered, at school, the casual violence of children his age.
At the École Normale Supérieure
At sixteen, Sartre returned to Paris and entered the Lycée Henri-IV, where he became friends with Paul Nizan, and the two caused no end of trouble together.
Both were admitted to the École Normale Supérieure. Sartre remained a provocateur, and his wit made him a well-known figure among his fellow students. He also met Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the ENS.
For all that, he was a tireless worker who read widely and wrote poems, short stories and novels.
After failing the agrégation in philosophy, he repeated the year and met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his companion. Together, they took the top two places in the agrégation.
From Teacher to Philosopher
He was appointed teacher at the lycée in Le Havre in 1931 — an exile, as Sartre felt it, that would last six long years.
He was nonetheless a gifted teacher, winning over successive generations of pupils with his oratorical talent and passing on to them his passion for philosophy.
During this period, he spent a full year in Berlin, studying the thought of Husserl and Heidegger. Phenomenology would exert a profound influence on him.
On his return, he resumed his teaching post.
But life in the provinces wore on him, and a series of rejections from publishers began to erode his confidence.
In 1938, success finally came: Gallimard accepted the manuscript of Nausea. The novel brought him real recognition and narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt.
He was transferred by the Éducation Nationale to a new lycée in Picardy, then to Neuilly.
He wrote a collection of short stories, The Wall.
During the War
When the Second World War broke out, Sartre enlisted — setting aside his anarchist and pacifist tendencies to serve as a meteorologist in the army. He wrote prolifically, and recounted this episode in his Notebooks from a Phony War.
He published The Imaginary just before being taken prisoner in June 1940 and sent to a camp, where he once again became the life of the party, as he had been at the ENS, and threw himself fully into camp life.
In March 1941 he was released, either on the strength of a false medical certificate or through the intervention of Drieu de la Rochelle.
Back in occupied Paris, Sartre resumed his teaching career. At the same time, he founded a Resistance cell, printing and distributing leaflets with Simone de Beauvoir and around fifty others; they came close to arrest on several occasions. The group eventually disbanded after two of its members were captured.
He had The Flies performed — a play that offered a veiled critique of the Nazi occupation.
However, Sartre's wartime conduct was ambiguous and has been the subject of sharp criticism.
He agreed to replace the khâgne teacher Ferdinand Alquié, who had been deported because he was Jewish — meaning that, like any collaborator, Sartre's career benefited from the Occupation.
Having The Flies performed before an audience that included German officers was also criticised, despite its hidden meaning. He also produced broadcasts for Radio Vichy.
In 1943, he published Being and Nothingness, and in 1944 staged his new play, No Exit.
Sartre covered the liberation of Paris for the newspaper Combat, where he had been recruited by Albert Camus. He was sent by Le Figaro to the United States for a series of articles and was received there as a hero of the Resistance. His fame became international.
After the War
At the Liberation, Sartre founded the journal Les Temps modernes and gave up teaching.
In 1945, he delivered a lecture attended by all of fashionable Paris, the content of which was later published as Existentialism Is a Humanism.
It launched a new craze: Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the district where Sartre lived, became the capital of existentialism. People flocked there to listen to jazz in the smoky cellars of its cafés.
In 1946 he published the celebrated Anti-Semite and Jew.
He continued to engage with the political debates of his time.
He championed the cause of decolonisation, in opposition to General de Gaulle.
He embraced Marxism while rejecting Stalinist communism as an enemy of freedom, and drew closer to the Communist Party between 1952 and 1956.
As chairman of the France-USSR association, he declared: The Soviet citizen possesses, in my opinion, complete freedom of criticism
— a statement for which he was later taken to task when the realities of life in the Eastern bloc came to light.
This commitment also drove a wedge between him and Camus, who was far more critical of the USSR.
Sartre eventually broke with the party following the crushing of the Budapest uprising in 1956.
He produced a sequel to Being and Nothingness: the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Later Years
In the 1960s, existentialism fell out of fashion, supplanted by structuralism — a movement founded on opposing principles, denying the primacy of human freedom.
Seemingly indifferent to this new current, Sartre turned his attention to Flaubert, one of his favourite writers, producing an ambitious new work: The Family Idiot.
He declined the Nobel Prize for Literature, a chair at the Collège de France and the Légion d'honneur, unwilling to be co-opted by any institution. He published The Words, an autobiography.
A man of the left until the end, he was engaged in the Algerian War, the Cuban Revolution, May '68 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He co-founded the newspaper Libération with Serge July and others, but resigned after falling out with them.
Largely blind following a stroke, and worn down by decades of heavy drinking and smoking, Sartre was greatly diminished from 1971 onwards.
He died in 1980 in Paris, aged nearly seventy-five, of pulmonary oedema.
His death prompted an outpouring of grief: tens of thousands of people — friends, readers and political sympathisers — accompanied his coffin.
Main Works
Imagination: A Psychological Critique
The Transcendence of the Ego
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
The Imaginary
Being and Nothingness
Situations