Jean-Paul Sartre

1) His Biography:

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), a French philosopher, was born in Paris in 1905 and studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1924 to 1929 before becoming Professor of Philosophy at the University of Le Havre in 1931. He studied Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger’s philosophies in Berlin (1932) with the help of a scholarship from the Institut Français. From 1937 to 1939, he taught at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris, after teaching at Le Havre and then Laon.

Sartre has been working as a freelance writer since the conclusion of World War II. Sartre is one of those writers whose artistic existence is centred on a firm philosophical perspective. The existentialism Sartre established and popularised is profoundly original, drawing on various origins such as Husserl’s idea of a free, fully intentional consciousness and Heidegger’s existentialist. Its fame, as well as that of its creator, peaked in the 1940s, and Sartre’s theoretical writings, as well as his novels and plays, remain one of the most important sources of inspiration for modern literature.

Atheism is taken for given in his philosophy, and the “loss of God” is not grieved. Man is born free, free from all forms of power, which he may try to avoid, distort, or deny, but which he must confront if he is to become a moral human. Man’s existence does not determine the significance of his life. Once the awful freedom has been accepted, man must give it meaning, dedicate himself to a position in the world, and commit his freedom. And without the “solidarity” of others, this endeavour to make oneself is meaningless.

“Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” 1948: (What Is Literature? ) lays forth the conclusions a writer must draw from this perspective : Literature is no longer primarily concerned with character and scene description, but rather with human freedom and its (and the author’s) dedication. Literature is a moral activity, as is artistic production.

While his early, largely psychological studies, L’Imagination (1936), Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Outline of a Theory of Emotions), 1939, and L’Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (The Psychology of Imagination), 1940, went largely unnoticed, Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), 1938, and the collection of stories Le Mur (The Wall and Other), they represent Sartre’s early existentialist concepts of alienation and commitment, as well as salvation via art, in a dramatic way.

L’Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), his fundamental philosophical work from 1943, is a vast structuralization of his concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism originates. The existentialist humanism that Sartre promotes in his popular article L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946, can be seen in the Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) series of books, published between 1945 and 1949.

Sartre is best recognised for his work as a playwright. In 1943’s Les Mouches (The Flies), the young killer’s devoted freedom is opposed against Jupiter’s powerlessness, while in 1947’s Huis Clos (No Exit), hell is revealed to be the coming together of humanity. Sartre is well-versed in literary criticism, having written works on Charles Baudelaire (1947) and Jean Genet (1952).

2) Main Works:

Being and Nothingness:

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre released Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology in 1943, with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Sartre builds a philosophical case for existentialism in the book, covering issues such consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of “nothingness,” psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.

Existentialism Is a Humanism:

The main defining principle of existentialist, according to Sartre, is that a person’s existence comes before their essence. The phrase “existence precedes essence” became a rallying cry for the existentialist movement. Simply put, this suggests that nothing can dictate a person’s character, life goals, or other characteristics; only the individual can define their essence. “Man first existing, encounters himself, surges up in the universe – and then defines himself,” according to Sartre.

As a result, Sartre rejects “deterministic excuses” and asserts that humans must accept responsibility for their actions. Anguish, according to Sartre, is the emotion people experience when they understand they are accountable not only for themselves, but for all humanity. Anguish makes people recognise that their acts shape humanity and permits them to pass judgement on others based on their attitude toward liberty.

Nausea:

In 1938, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre released Nausea, a philosophical fiction. It is Sartre’s first work of fiction. The work is set in ‘Bouville,’ a town comparable to Le Havre, and it follows a disheartened historian who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to identify himself, on his intellectual and spiritual independence, causing sickness in the protagonist.

No Exit:

Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit was written in 1944. In May 1944, the play premiered at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. Three individuals find themselves in a mystery room at the start of the play. It’s a representation of the afterlife in which three deceased individuals are sentenced to spend forever trapped in a room together. It is the root of Sartre’s famous phrase “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” which refers to Sartre’s beliefs about the glance and the ongoing ontological battle of being forced to regard oneself as an object from the perspective of another consciousness.

The Respectful Prostitute:

The Respectful Prostitute is a 1946 French drama by Jean-Paul Sartre about a lady who works as a prostitute in a racially charged moment in American history. The audience is aware that there was an incident on a train involving not only mentioned woman, but also a black man who is blamed by biased law enforcement. The viewer will notice that a white man initiated the attack, but it is in the interests of the law to maintain the white person’s perception at the expense of the black “devil.”

The story looks at the loss of freedom in a cruel world, a theme that runs through Sartre’s whole creative career. The piece premiered at the Théâtre Antoine-Simone Berriau in Paris in November 1946. Sartre was accused of anti-Americanism when the play was staged in the United States.

3) Being and Nothingness:

Sartre studied Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which uses Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for investigating ontology, while a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941. Sartre credited his exposure to this work with influencing the direction of his own philosophical inquiries. Despite being influenced by Heidegger, Sartre remained sceptical of any method by which mankind could acquire a level of personal fulfilment similar to Heidegger’s hypothetical “re-encounter with Being.”

Man, according to Sartre, is a being tormented by a vision of “complete” (what he refers to as the ens causa sui, which literally translates as “a being that causes itself”), which many religions and thinkers identify as God. One finds oneself inserted into being when one is born into the material reality of one’s body, in a material cosmos. Sartre develops the idea that there can be no kind of self that is “hidden” inside consciousness, in line with Husserl’s theory that consciousness can only exist as consciousness of something.

Sartre goes on to give a philosophical critique of Sigmund Freud’s beliefs based on the notion that consciousness is basically self-conscious, on these grounds. Despite its debt to Heidegger, Being and Nothingness is recognised as both the most important non-fiction articulation of Sartre’s existentialist and his most influential intellectual work.

The book’s basic idea that “being precedes essence,” its introduction of the concept of poor faith, and its examination of “nothingness,” as well as its original contributions to the philosophy of sex, have all been lauded. However, the work has been panned for its obscurity and depiction of Sigmund Freud.

Sartre’s most important philosophical work, as well as the most important non-fiction statement of his existentialism, is Being and Nothingness. It was of “incontestable” importance, according to Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, and ranks among the most important contributions to universal philosophy.

While Marcel acknowledged Heidegger’s impact on “at least the form” of Being and Nothingness, he also remarked that Sartre differed from Heidegger’s beliefs in Being and Time (1927) in significant respects, and that Sartre’s contributions were unique. Sartre’s examination of poor faith, according to Marcel, was “one of the most remarkable and substantial” aspects of Being and Nothingness, as it kept Sartre’s ideas from being merely abstract.

One of the work’s most important merits, according to Marcel, is that it demonstrates “that a form of metaphysics that denies or refuses grace inevitably ends up in front of us the image of an atrophied and contradictory world in which the better part of ourselves is finally unable to recognise itself.”

4) Existentialism:

He argued, “My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is.” “In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes,” writes Simone de Beauvoir in her diary, Force of Circumstance. Neither she nor Sartre liked the term (which was probably coined by Gabriel Marcel in 1943 when he used it in reference to Sartre), but they decided to go along with it: “In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes.” But, exactly, what is existentialism? In his lecture, Sartre specifically addressed this issue, describing existentialism as “the least controversial and the most austere” (p.26) of all doctrines, and one that is only really intended for technicians and philosophers. He claimed that the so-called existentialists’ common denominator was their notion that “existence comes before essence” for humans (p.26).

In contrast to a created object like a penknife, whose blueprint and purpose are pre-existing the real physical thing, human beings have no pre-determined purpose or nature, nor anything that we have to or ought to be. Sartre was a devout atheist who believed that our basic qualities could not have been conceived in the mind of a Divine Artisan. Sartre didn’t believe in any other external source of values, either: unlike Aristotle, he didn’t believe in a common human nature that might be the source of morality.

The human problem is defined by the fact that we are obliged to select what we will become, to define ourselves by our actions: all that is provided is that we are, not what we are. While the essence of a penknife is pre-defined (it isn’t a penknife if it doesn’t have a blade and won’t cut), human beings have no such pre-defined essence to begin with: …man first exists, then encounters himself, rises in the world, and finally defines himself. If man is not definable in the existentialist’s eyes, it is because he is nothing to begin with. He won’t be anything until much later, and then he’ll be whatever he wants to be (p.28).

So, for the penknife, essence comes before existence, whereas for humans, the reverse is true – Sartre says nothing about non-human animals’ place in this framework. All existentialist thinkers place a strong emphasis on our ability to choose who we are.

Although Sartre was an atheist, some existentialists, such as Gabriel Marcel, were Christians: they emphasise the need for doctrine to be derived from human experience and reject any appeal to eternal essence; they, like the atheist existentialists, believe that human beings are forced to create themselves.

5) His relationship with Simone de Beauvoir:

The thinkers recognised as the mother of contemporary feminism and the father of existentialism collaborated for over half a century, defying the conventions of their period and ours. From 1929, when they met in the same prestigious graduate programme in philosophy, until their burial side-by-side in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre shared each other’s work and lives without ever sharing a house. In 1929, De Beauvoir and Sartre were classmates and rivals at the Sorbonne, where they were both pursuing the aggregate in philosophy, a coveted graduate degree.

Despite the fact that Sartre’s grades were higher than de Beauvoir’s, she was the youngest person to ever pass the exam, at the age of 21. The two began their love relationship in October of that year, an experiment in personal responsibility and open-heartedness. De Beauvoir, who had resisted social constraints earlier in life by rejecting the Catholic faith, bucked expectations once more by declining Sartre’s marriage proposal. Instead, the couple agreed to reject what they saw as bourgeois hypocrisy, namely, the patriarchal assumption that married men engage in extramarital affairs and lie to their wives, who then stoically pretend ignorance. Rather than pretending to be monogamous, the partners were free to pursue other sexual and romantic relationships. The only requirement was complete disclosure.

They never married or lived together. Instead, they met every day in Parisian cafés to speak, write, and edit each other’s work, as well as to discuss their secondary relationships. Through Sartre’s harrowing service and capture in World War II, and long after the sexual component of the intellectuals’ “soul marriage” had gone away, their intellectual and emotional intimacy lasted for 51 years. Simone de Beauvoir, dubbed “The Beaver” by Sartre, never published a piece of writing without her partner’s permission until after his death. He also referred to her as a “filter” for his writings, and some academics argue that she even wrote some of them for him.

6) His influence on philosophy:

The best-known European public intellectual of the twentieth century, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), produced a highly distinctive political philosophy, influenced in part by Hegel and Marx’s work. Although he didn’t write much about ethics or politics before WWII, political topics became more prominent in his writings after 1945. Sartre was a co-founder of the publication Les Temps Modernes, which published numerous significant pieces on political theory and international affairs.

Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, a scathing critique of French culpability in the Holocaust that also advanced the wider notion that oppression is a distortion of interpersonal awareness, is the most famous example. Sartre shifted his allegiance to Marxism in the 1950s, and in 1960, he published Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1 (1960), a large, methodical analysis of history and group struggle. Critique tempered Sartre’s earlier, more extreme notion of existential freedom in addition to offering a new critical theory of society based on a synthesis of psychology and sociology.

The Family Idiot (1971), his final comprehensive work, would present his most sophisticated ideas on the relationship between individuals and social wholes. Sartre’s ground breaking synthesis of Existentialism and Marxism produced a political theory that was particularly attentive to the conflict between individual freedom and historical forces. He was a Marxist who believed that civilizations should be viewed as battlegrounds between powerful and downtrodden factions. He held individuals directly responsible for large and seemingly authorless social ills as an Existentialist, though.

Authenticity, the most important existential virtue, would necessitate a person’s lucid examination of his or her social environment and acceptance of personal responsibility for the choices made in that situation. Unlike other forms of Marxism, Sartre’s Existentialist-Marxism was founded on a compelling conception of individual agency and moral responsibility.

Sartre criticised anti-Semitism, racism, brutality, and colonialism in addition to class analysis. He reworked Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, stating that oppression is a tangible, historical form of mastery. To oppress someone is to try to affirm one’s own sense of self by denying them their freedom. The self-contradictory aspect of oppression led him to the positive conclusion that oppression is a historical fact that should be resisted by both self-assertion and communal action, rather than an inherent, ontological condition.

Sartre defended a vast number of unique methodological and substantive theses as a social-political theorist. Between reductive individualism and ontological holism, he pursued a medium route. He cleverly reworked Hegelian recognition to answer the recurring question “What identifies a social group?” His account of social group fusion and disillusionment is still unique today. Sartre’s socialpolitical theory is one of the great contributions to twentieth-century philosophy since it is both comprehensive and innovative.