Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic.
When he was twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied, in part due to the wandering of his blind right eye (sensory exotropia). As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's essay An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
In 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem, particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson.
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.
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.
On the other hand, an inauthentic way of being consists in running away, in lying to oneself in order to escape this anguish and the responsibility for one’s own 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.
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 , Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas.
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".
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".
Because of poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight and exotropia affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941.
In October 1941 he was given a position, previously held by a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law, at Lycée Condorcet in Paris. 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".
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 1942: 13 though he realized that without "responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing".
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).
"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 1944–1945.
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, where he was to produce most of his subsequent work and where he lived until 1962.
In 1945, he had refused the Légion d'honneur.
In 1946, he published Anti-Semite and Jew, after having published the first part of the essay, “Portrait de l’antisémite,” the year before in Les Temps modernes, No.
In 1947, Sartre published several articles concerning the condition of African Americans in the United States—specifically the racism and discrimination against them in the country—in his second Situations collection.
Then, in 1948, for the introduction of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s l’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry), he wrote “Black Orpheus” (re-published in Situations III), a critique of colonialism and racism in light of the philosophy Sartre developed in Being and Nothingness.
His 1948 play Les mains sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being a politically "engaged" intellectual.
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.
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.
Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, with the publication of Camus's The Rebel.
"il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt"), became a catchphrase meaning communist activists should not tell the whole truth to the workers in order to avoid decline in their revolutionary enthusiasm. In 1954, just after Stalin's death, 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's comments on Hungarian revolution of 1956 are quite representative to his frequently contradictory and changing views.
He condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. In 1964 Sartre attacked Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" which condemned the Stalinist repressions and purges.
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.
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.
He later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence.
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).
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.
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 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.
A number of people, starting from Frank Gibney in 1961, classified Sartre as a "useful idiot" due to his uncritical position. 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.
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, where he was to produce most of his subsequent work and where he lived until 1962.
He condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. In 1964 Sartre attacked Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" which condemned the Stalinist repressions and purges.
In October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it.
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 had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965.) He opposed 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).
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.
Sartre argued that "the masses were not ready to receive the truth". In 1973 he argued that "revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, and their death is the only way".
He suffered from hypertension, and became almost completely blind in 1973.
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.
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.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic.
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.
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.
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