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Jean-Paul Sartre Biography
Born: June 21, 1905 (Paris, France)
Died: April 15, 1980 (Paris, France)
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, normally known simply as
Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher,
dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic.
Sartre was born in Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre,
an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer.
His mother was of German-Alsacian origin, and was a cousin
of German Nobel prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. When he
was 15 months old, his father died of a fever and Anne-Marie
raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer,
a high school professor for German, who taught Sartre mathematics
and introduced him to classical literature at an early age.
As
a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy
upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness. He studied in Paris at the elite École
Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education
which has served as the alma mater for multiple prominent
French thinkers and intellectuals. Sartre was influenced by
many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Immanuel
Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger.
In
1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir,
who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a
noted thinker, writer, and feminist. The two, it is documented,
became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic
relationship, though one that was not monogamous.
Together,
Sartre and 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"
state of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's
work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness)
(1943).
Sartre's
best-known introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented
as a lecture. In this work, he defends existentialism against
its detractors, which ultimately results in a somewhat incomplete
description of his ideas. The work has been considered a popular,
if over-simplifying, point of entry for those seeking to learn
more about Sartre's ideas but lacking the background in philosophy
necessary to fully absorb his longer work Being and Nothingness.
One should not take the expression of his ideas contained
here as authoritative; in 1965, Sartre told Francis Jeanson
that its publication had been "une 'erreur.'"
He
graduated from the École Normale Supérieure
in 1929 with a doctorate in philosophy and served as a conscript
in the French Army from 1929 to 1931.
La Nausée and Existentialism
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 describing
such fundamental experiences have as much value as do discursive
essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories. With
this mandate, the 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. 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, who used in the
context of the often sickening quality of existence. No matter
how much he longs for something other 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 Kant's fundamental ideas; Sartre uses the idea
of the autonomy of the will (that human freedom and morality
are derived from our ability to choose in reality) 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 prove to be bitterly rejected.
The
stories in Le
Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of
the situations people find themselves in and the absurdity
of their attempts to deal rationally with them. A whole school
of absurd literature subsequently developed.
Sartre and World War II
In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he
served as a meteorologist. German troops captured him in 1940
in Padoux, and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war —
later in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D, Treves, where he
wrote his first theater piece: Barionà, fils du
tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. Due to poor health
(he claimed that his poor eyesight affected his balance) Sartre
was released in April 1941. Given civilian status, he recovered
his position as a teacher of Lycée Pasteur near Paris,
settled at the Hotel Mistral near Montparnasse at Paris and
was given a new position at Lycée Condorcet, replacing
a Jewish teacher, 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 with
other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint
and Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale
students. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French
Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André
Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and
this might be the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement.
Socialisme
et liberté disappeared soon 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 was censored by the Germans. He also
contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.
After August 1944 and the Paris Liberation, he was a very
active contributor of Combat, a newspaper created during the
period of clandestinity by Albert Camus, a philosopher and
author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and Beauvoir remained
friends with him until Camus turned away from communism, a
schism that eventually divided them in 1951, after the publication
of Camus' The Rebel.
Later,
while Sartre was labelled 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.
When
the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review, and
started writing full-time as well as continuing his 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).
Jean-Paul
Sartre was the head of the Organization to Defend Iranian
Political Prisoners from 1964 till the victory of the Islamic
Revolution.[1]
Sartre and Communism
The first period of Sartre's career, defined by Being
and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as
a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948
work Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in particular
explored the problem of being both an intellectual at the
same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He
embraced communism, though he never officially joined the
Communist party, and took a prominent role in the struggle
against French colonialism in Algeria. He became perhaps the
most eminent supporter of the Algerian war of liberation.
He had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became
his adopted daughter in 1965. He opposed the Vietnam War and,
along with Bertrand Russell and other luminaries, he organized
a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became
known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967.
As
a fellow-traveller, Sartre spent much of the rest of his life
attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas about self-determination
with communist principles, which taught that socio-economic
forces beyond our immediate, individual control play a critical
role in shaping our lives. His major defining work of this
period, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique
of Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960.
Sartre's
emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx
led to a dispute with the leading Communist 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.
Sartre and literature
During the 1940s and 1950s Sartre's ideas remained ambiguous,
and existentialism became a favoured philosophy of the beatnik
generation. Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert
Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948, the Catholic Church
placed his complete works on the Index of prohibited books.
Most of 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".
Besides
the obvious impact of Nausea,
Sartre's major contribution to literature 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. The first book in the trilogy, L'âge
de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945), could easily be
said to be the Sartre work with the broadest appeal.
Sartre
also adapted Arthur Miller's play The Crucible for
the 1957 film Les Sorcières de Salem.
Sartre after literature
In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic
account of the first six years of his life, Les mots (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 litterature engagée
for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned
as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world.
In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,
but he resoundingly declined it, stating that he had always
refused official honors and didn't wish to align himself with
institutions.
Though
he was now world-famous and 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 student revolution strikes in
Paris during the summer of 1968.
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 due to the merciless
pace of work (and using drugs for this reason, e.g amphetamine)
he put himself through during the writing of the Critique
and the last project of his life, a massive analytical biography
of Gustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which remain
unfinished. He died April 15, 1980 in Paris from an edema
of the lung.
Sartre
lies buried in Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
His funeral was attended by some 50,000 people.
Sartre's
atheism was foundational for his style of existentialist philosophy.
In March 1980, about a month before Sartre's death, he was
interviewed by an assistant of his, Benny Lévy, and
within these interviews he expressed interest in Messianic
Judaism. Some people apparently took this to indicate a religious
conversion, however the text of the interviews makes it clear
that he did not consider himself a Jew, and was interested
in the ethical and "metaphysical character" of the
Jewish religion, while continuing to reject the idea of an
existing God. In a separate 1974 interview with Simone de
Beauvoir, Sartre said that he often saw himself "as a
being that could, it seems, only come from a creator."
However he immediately adds that "this is not a clear,
exact idea..." and in preceding and following passages
he makes it clear that he remains an atheist and finds in
atheism a source of personal and ethical power.
Nevertheless,
perhaps due in part to the fact that Sartre's interest in
Jewish messianism was precisely a rejection of Marxist ideas
which has previous played such a huge role in his thought,
the validity of the Levy interviews was disputed. Sartre's
supporters were understandably reluctant to believe that he
had so abruptly renounced a crucial part of his philosophy.
However, shortly before his death, Sartre confirmed that the
interviews were authentic.[citation needed]
Sartre and terrorism
When eleven Israeli Olympians were killed by the Palestinian
organization Black September in Munich 1972, Sartre referred
to terrorism as a "terrible weapon but the oppressed
poor have no others." He also found it "perfectly
scandalous that the Munich attack should be judged by the
French press and a section of public opinion as an intolerable
scandal." (Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century,
Bernard-Henri Lévy, p.343).
However,
Sartre publicly disagreed with the methods of the Red Army
Faction in Germany during the same period.
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