Jean-Paul Sartre

Born: 1905

Died: 1980, at the age of 75

Country of origin: France

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• Major Books written by Jean-Paul Sartre:
  
  
  • "Nausea" (1938)
    
  • "The Wall" (1939)
    
  • "The Flies" (1943)
    
  • "Existentialism Is A Humanism", considered the manifesto for modern Existentialism (1946)
    
  • "Being and Nothingness" (1948)
    
  
  
• Cocktail summary of Jean-Paul Sartre's main ideas:
  
  
  Sartre was one of the last of the philosopher celebrities. Not the very last, but definitely one of the most romanticized. His life and his writings had a presence on the world-stage of ideas unlike any other. Sartre and his life-long companion Simone de Beauvoir were the quintessenial French philosophers of their age, perhaps the quintessential philosophers of the 20th century. Their names are interchangeable with Existentialism, and their life-stories are the stuff of romance, drama, betrayal, and a sweeping symbol of the power of ideas.
  
  Sartre didn't create Existentialsim, nor did he use the word much himself, but he is still its most famous celebrity. Existentialism comes in several "flavors": it began as a Christian flavor with the Danish writings of Kierkegaard, then became a secular flavor with the German writings of Martin Heidegger, then became a Swiss flavor with the German writings of Karl Jaspers. Sartre represents the French flavor, and is probably the best-known flavor.
  
  Sartre's ideas can be summed up in one sentence: We are born with no purpose in life, but we can create this purpose ourselves. He expressed this in his most famous sentence: "L'existence précède l'essence.", which in English is "Existence precedes essence".
  
  What's meant by this is that all humans are defined by 2 categories: our existence and our purpose. Religion, Christianity in particular, teaches us that God creates us according to a specific purpose, and this purpose is said to be our "essence": our essence is the template God created us against. This template, or purpose, exists prior to our existence at birth. In this sense, our essence precedes our existence - we are born with a purpose and a specific nature, ready-made.
  
  But if there is no God then we are all born without any template, without a specific purpose, without any pre-defined "essence", and we simply exist as a sort of undefined potential - thus the term "Exist-entialist". Our condition is the reverse of the above: our existence precedes our essence.
  
  If humans - which Sartre called "existents" - are born without any essence, without any pre-defined purpose, then we are all initially defined by our bare existence. We then create our essence ourselves by the choices we make in life. Thus, the Existentialist looks at life as both an empty, Angst-filled void left by the absence of God, but at the same time as an opportunity of great freedom in which humanity can define itself - its essence - in any way we want. The result is that humanity has only itself to blame for its problems, not God. The Existentialist argues that we are fully responsible for our present condition.
  
  Existentialism had its heyday in the 2 decades following World War II, since Western Civilization had just teetered on the edge of collapse and the world was ripe for new ideas. As a result, all of the ideas contributed by Western history were viewed with suspicion. Existentialism was seen as a fresh start from a blank slate, rebuilding all ideology, ethics, and values from the perspective of mankind as the ultimate reference-point, not from the perspective of religion or the ideology of a failed culture.
  
  Also, just for the sake of clarity, Sartre represented one of 2 broad kinds of Existentialism: Secular Existentialism as opposed to Christian Existentialism. Christian Existentialism was born with the ideas of S¯ren Kierkegaard in the early 1800's, and his ideas of the paradox of Creation, the need to pursue all doctrinal and ethical choices in a free manner, independent of any guidelines, even traditionally Biblical guidelines, and the need for believers to choose to believe in God in the face of contradictory reasons. This form of Existentialism was later more fully developed by theologians of the so-called "Neo-Orthodoxy" movement: Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, and Karl Barth.
  
  But Secular Existentialism is basically a logical conclusion to Christian Existentialism. The Neo-Orthodox theologians argued for the same basic ideas as Secular Existentialism, but simply used traditional religious language as a sort of cushion, to make the ideas more easily digestible: sort of a more user-friendly Existentialism. But Sartre discarded any religious language and dealt with Existentialist ideas in their bare, "naked" forms.
  
  Existentialism is sometimes portrayed as a reaction against the Scientific Determinism that preceded it. While determinism argues that all human actions are based on rational, scientific, chemical causes over which humans have little control, thereby denying any true freedom in human actions, Existentialism argues exactly the reverse: human existence is based entirely on freedom, free from any kind of determinism, unless we choose to let it dominate us. Freedom itself is the definition of human action, not science. Sartre occupied the opposite end of the spectrum of how freedom is defined, with the other end of the spectrum being represented by someone like the Marquis de Sade, a fellow-Frenchman who had notoriously argued for a cynical version of pure chemical determinism, in which humans are nothing more than choice-less drones driven by chemistry and instinct.
  
  Sartre had one main goal in life: to work out all of the philosophical implications of a universe without God. He sought to replace this vacuum with an ideology of personal responsibility and a new Ethic based on Reason and social equality. What was humanity's responsibilities and potentials in the absence of any God in the universe, and what was humanity to do with the experiences we all encounter, with only ourselves as the ultimate reference-point? His answers to these questions have resulted in Sartre's name becoming almost synonymous with modern Existentialism.
  
  Sartre was a one-man study of Atheism. He was so purely atheistic in all of his views that he spent almost no time arguing against religion. He simply took the total absence of God as his starting point and assumed his readers agreed with this basic point, and then started his thinking from there.
  
  Unlike most Philosophers, but like many modern French Philosophers, Sartre expressed most of his ideas in the forms of plays and novels, instead of in dense philosophical books. He did write some of the latter, most famously the book "Being and Nothingness" in 1948, but most of his ideas are found in the expressions of fictional characters in his creative writing.
  
  The most famous of these was his early book "Nausea", written in 1938, in which he describes a character who experiences sensations of nausea and sickness whenever the meaninglessness of life become apparent to him. It is during times of these types of sensations, similar to Heidegger's Angst when contemplating Being, that humanity is at it's most "authentic", the book argues.
  
  This realization that existence has no meaning whatsoever, which the main character Roquentin comes to terms with while looking at a tree-root - deciding that humans have no more predetermined purpose for existing than the tree root - is worked out in great detail in his book "Being and Nothingness", but the argument is perhaps most striking in the form of fiction.
  
  His basic ideology can be summarized by a single sentence from his book "Nausea": "Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident". Sartre meant this as a phrase of both despair and optimism at the same time.
  
  The despair comes from no longer being able to hope for any idealistic signifigance for the human race from a religious or idealistic perspective, but the optimism comes from seeing this as an opportunity to build up a new system of beliefs, ethics, and sense of purpose with only ourselves as the starting point, and with only ourselves to blame for the violence in the world.
  
  Sartre borrowed 2 phrases from Hegel in his effort to explain the 2 broad states existence, comparing inanimate existence with human existence. Being-In-Itself ("L'etre-en-soi" in French) is the existence of a rock, being an existing object which "rests in itself". Being-For-Itself ("l'etre-pour-soi" in French) is self-aware existence, which is the nature of human existence. In his book "Being and Nothingness", Sartre argued that all humans desire to combine the 2 states of existence into one.
  
  Sartre draws a further distinction between 2 broad states of human existence: authenticity and "bad faith" ("mauvaise foi" in French). Authenticity is the goal of Existentialism - making choices and legitimizing one's self by a non-passive "act of the will" - and this is only possible in a state of total freedom, thus Sartre's many years of social activism.
  
  This striving for authenticity formed the basis of Sartre's ethic. It struck many people as odd that someone who argued for the total lack of any absolutes and universal standards would at the same time choose to purse a life of political activism. If there were no absolutes, why was freedom any better or worse than tyranny? But since Sartre argued that personal authenticity could only be achieved in a state of total freedom from oppression, he naturally pursued agendas that he argued could create the conditions for that freedom.
  
  Sartre also stressed that every condition we find ourselves in is due to conscious decisions we make, and therefore our social conditions are our own responsibility. He didn't buy Freud's idea of the subcionscious, since this would imply that we make decisions that we aren't aware of. He argued that there was no such thing as the subconscious, and that all of our choices are conscious. He famousely said, "Man is condemned to be free". Our existential freedom is argued to be both a release from philosophical blindness, but it also makes us responsible for our own actions. The Existentialist can no longer blame God for the problem of evil, only himself or herself.
  
  Sartre's Existentialism is a grand synthesis of optimistic social self-determination and brooding cynicism. He spent many years publically speaking out against the bourgeois French Middle Class (of which he, himself, was a member), for the civil rights of the underpriveleged, those oppressed by Colonialism, and Third World countries seeking independence, with a longstanding alliance with Marxism, which promised solutions to all of the above. Yet, at the same time, he realized the difficulty in justifying any of these concerns for ethical justice, since Existentialism ultimately offered no basic reason why authenticity via freedom was any more defensible than oppression.
  
  Sartre's life can be split into 2 broad phases: his thinking and his acting. He spent the years from the 1920's through the mid-1940's thinking and reading and building up his core set of ideas, but he felt troubled by his lack of relevent, direct action in the world. He was an intellectual giant, but he felt that the ultimate purpose of intellectual insight was direct action in the world. His life from the end of World War II up until his death in 1980 defined his years of action, primarilly through his Leftist social activism.
  
  The turning-point between these 2 phases was his friendship with the writer Albert Camus, who he first encounted in 1942. Sartre saw in Camus a model for intellectual authenticity and relevant social activism. Camus embodied the man of authentic relevance that Sartre sought to become. Their involvement in the French Resistance during the war dramatically increased their credentials with the French public, making them sort of the Batman and Robin of Existentialism in the years following the war's end. But their bitter, public falling-out 10 years later mirrored the strained relationship between the intellectual Left and Communism throughout Europe during the 1950's.
  
  Sartre had chosen as his social cause the the freedom of the working-class, and since the French workers were predominantly members of the Communist Party he chose to align himself with the Communists in France, but without actually becoming a card-carrying member. Camus, however, who had been a Communist for several years before the War (but had been expelled from the Party for not following the official Party-line), was vehemently anti-Communist, due to the crimes of Stalin in Russia. Camus argued that Stalinist Russia was a sham and non-Marixst, arguing instead for a Socialist, non-Communist Left, as opposed to Sartre's argument for following the Communist Party's directions from Moscow, whatever they may be.
  
  Sartre, and a large number of European intellectuals at the time, were drawn to the Marxist views of history and its interpretation of all of life in terms of Class-based struggles. They were strongly attracted to Marxism's promises of social equality and justice, as an alternative to the Capitalism that had historically defined the West for the past 500 years. And since the USSR was the main standard-bearer of Communism they trusted the Soviets to pursue that ultimate goal. And if this goal involved violence, so be it. The ends, they argued, justified the means.
  
  Sartre saw in Marxism a model for building a new, free society in which equality and authenticity could be achieved for the greatest number of people. He viewed anyone who opposed Marxism as clinging to the past of oppressive Capitalism and feudal Class-distinctions, and was therefore to be opposed at all costs. His response to arguments of Soviet violence was, "You have to break eggs to make an omellette", a reply which somehow swept aside the millions of deaths under Stalin.
  
  Camus, representing a significant minority view, differed precisely on the issue of violence in the name of a Communist Utopia. He argued that Marxism was actually a slave to determinism, and was essentially opposed to the basic ideas of personal freedom that Existentialism claimed to teach. He also argued that violence was never justified and was always wrong. Marx had argued that the dissolving of Class-distinctions was inevitable and unstoppable, and that people had to simply choose to either go with the flow or suffer the violent consequences of history. Camus saw in this a form of intellectual slavery, a lack of freedom, and hypocrisy, the exact opposites of what Existentialists supposedly valued. He argued that Sartre and his minions were abandoning their Existentialist credentials by kissing up to a Party that was anything but egalitarian, and was instead a form of tyranny every bit as evil as the Nazis had been.
  
  Sartre successfully painted Camus, and other like-minded non-Communist Left-wing intellectuals, as stooges of Right-wing politicians and Capitalists who wanted to continue oppressing the masses globally. Sartre acknowledged the problem of Marxism's claims of historical determinisim and the lack of personal freedom, but this concern was outweighed by his discovery of a socially relevant cause he could throw himself into and finally feel relevant. And he increasingly viewed violence as a valid tool if the cause was important enough. In the end, Camus was right about Communism, but since he died an early death in 1960 Sartre got many final words, even though they turned out to be wrong.
  
  Sartre did eventually drift away from the Communist Party, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. But he continued to believe that Marxism remained the only valid model for building a society that would create the greatest amount of freedom for all. He remained a true believer at heart, saying "Communism appears to us, in spite of everything that has happened, to be the sole movement which still carries within it the likelihood that it may lead to Socialism". As evil as Soviet Communism was, according to Sartre, any form of Capitalism was worse.
  
  The last 2 decades of Sartre's life, the 1960's and 1970's, were defined less by philosophical writing and more by anti-Colonial Third-World activism. He increasingly supported the use of violence in the revolution that he felt must come in the West, in order to establish the free society that will allow humans - "existents" - to realize their full potential. However this never happened, despite his brief optimism during the 1968 Paris student riots. Throughout the later 1970's he went blind and his philosophical output virtually stopped, until his death in 1980.
  
  
• Jean-Paul Sartre praised & criticized:
  
  
  • Sartre was the most visible and well-known of the 20th century Existentialists. He carried the flag of the movement with a consistency and awareness of its implications that few of his peers could ever hope to do. He not only understood where Existentialism would lead intellectually, but he also lived the movement in all aspects of his personal life. This took the positive form of his long support for non-European wars of independence, as well as the negative form of not feeling any need for extending his egalitarian ethic to his romantic involvement with Simone de Beauvoir, whom he ignored in his last will and testament. However, in this he was probably actually quite consistent to his ideals.
    
    Sarte was often criticized for expressing so much of his thought in the form of literature and the theater, instead of through the "real philosophy" of dense, academic, and impenetrable books. He actually did try his hand at the latter kind of writing, but his use of popular media allowed him to spread his ideas much more effectively than if he had simply tried to out-obscure Heidegger's books. This method of writing is also very typically French, so it was not unique to Jean-Paul.
    
    Sartre was often critized for inconsistency, in arguing for a total lack of any universals but at the same time pursuing a life of public activism for Third World liberation. Many viewed his actions as totally incompatable with his ideals, but Sartre simply pursued freedom, largely for its own sake.
    
    Sartre was also often criticized for his back-and-forth relationship with the French Communist Party. Sartre's movement towards the Communist Party in the 1950's coincided with many other intellectuals moving away from it, with the relevlations of Soviet attrocities. Sartre was very attracted to the ideals of Marxism, but he could never bring himself to formally join the Party. His association with Communism was sometimes compared to Heidegger's membership in the Nazi party during the 1930's, but this was a bit overblown, since Heidegger joined up in order to advance his career, whereas Sartre didn't gain any professional advantage from his political associations.
    
    He was also criticized for his selective attention-span regarding idealistic violence. He became very hot under the collar regarding French troops using torture in Algeria during the Civil War there in the 1950's, and also towards American treatment of suspected Communists in their country. But he turned a blind eye to Soviet actions in Eastern Europe and the system of Gulags created by Stalin. He argued that violence in the goal of Communism was excusable, but not by anyone else. In this, he considered himself a true-believer in the need for the lower Classes to free themselves, and saw himself therefore as no different than any other revolutionary in history, for whom violence was always an option.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Jean-Paul Sartre:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    Sartre was an Atheist's Atheist. He was as devoid of religion as a Frenchman is devoid of English. He claimed that he chose to abandon all religious concerns when he was 12 years old. His entire system of Existentialist thought is based on the absence of God and any related ideas of divine purpose, absolute morality or ethics, and any guiding hand over history. God was as far from his mind as a baguette is from a hamburger.
    
    
  • Sartre was related to the missionary-doctor Albert Schweitzer, who was his mother's cousin.
    
    
  • Like most Existentialists, Sartre claimed to not be an Existentialist, at least not in the modern way the word has come to be defined. The word "Existentialism" has applied to such a wide range of ideas and personalities that it has never really been tied to any one true discipline. So the first task of any Existentialist is to denounce the label.
    
    
  • Sartre spent a year in Berlin reading Husserl and Heidegger, from 1933-1934. His timing was ironic, since he went to Nazi Germany to learn "the truth" at the same time that the profound evil of Nazism was growing stronger and causing many intellectuals to flee the country. Sartre's later desire to be relevant in real-world events clearly hadn't yet asserted itself within him at this time.
    
    
  • Sartre had a wandering eye, literally, with his left eye staring off in a completely different direction than his right eye. This was due to a childhood disease of the cornea called Leukoma, in which the cornea clouded over in a white mass and obscured all light in that eye. This caused strabismus - being cross-eyed - with that eye loosing all sight by the time he was 3 years old. Throughout his life he appeared to be looking at 2 things at the same time.
    
    
  • Sartre's intellectual stature was not matched by his physical stature: he stood only about 5 feet tall.
    
    
  • In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the army but was quickly captured by the invading Germans. He was soon released, however, due to him being considered a civilian, not a soldier. He returned to Paris and joined up with members of the French Resistance. It was a somewhat sedate service, with him spending most of the war-years meeting with an intellectual think-tank called "Socialism and Liberty", which staged theatrical plays, published anti-Nazi pamphlets, and sat in cafes in Paris sipping espresso and philosophising. But this period of his life - as a philosopher for the Underground - would become his spring-board to later fame, serving as his strongest anti-Establishment credentials.
    
    
  • Like all great French philosophers and artists, Sartre did most of his thinking in cafes. The original reason for the setting was supposedly because cafes were heated and most philosophers' apartments weren't, so they hung out here to stay warm. Some of his favorite spots were the Cafe Flore in the St. Germain area of Paris on the Left Bank, the Cafe des Deux Magots (where he spent a lot of time with Albert Camus), and the La Coupole restaurant in the Montparnasse district, also on the Left Bank.
    
    
  • In 1945, along with Simone de Beauvoir and fellow-Existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre founded the journal "Les Temps modernes" ("Modern Times"), named after the film of the same name by Charlie Chaplin.
    
    
  • For about a decade, Sartre was best buddies with fellow-Existentialist writer Albert Camus. They both shared the same basic outlook on life, but Camus's later change regarding social action and Communism became a roadblock that Sartre couldn't support. They parted ways over some very public exchanges of snits and huffs and accusations of selling out which were published in widely-read journals, creating a public spat that would have made Jerry Springer proud.
    
    
  • Sartre claimed in his autobiography that, for many years, he was convinced he was being stalked by a giant lobster. Perhaps he was...
    
    
  • Sartre refused to wear ties. He thought ties were a symbol of "bourgeois" elitism and thought that his lack of tie brought him closer to the working classes. However, ironically, despite such egalitarian intentions, many of his philosophical books were written in such a dense style that only educated, Middle Class bourgeois elitists could read all the way through his books...
    
    
  • In 1964 Sartre famously refused the Nobel Prize for literature, which had been awarded to him that year. He considered the award a symbol of recognition by the very same elitist, bourgeois, class-based, tie-wearing society that he rejected, which he couldn't bring himself to accept. So, tieless, he told them very curtly "Merci, mais Non!"
    
    
  • Sartre considered the Socialism of Karl Marx to be the only model for organizing society such that the greatest amount of freedom was possible. However, he never embraced the Soviet version of Marxism, partly due to its obvious oppressive nature but also because he couldn't reconcile the idea of historical determinism of Marixsim with his own ideas of unfettered freedom in Existentialism.
    
    
  • Sartre's life-long partner, Simone de Beauvoir, was a famous Existentialist intellectual in her own right and an icon of Feminism. One of their shared ideals was their rejection of such "bourgeois institutions" as marriage, and vowed to never marry, which they never did. (Sartre did propose to her in 1931, but she turned him down) They maintained a very public "open relationship" throughout their adult lives, with both of them taking on many other temporary relationships throughout the years. But they maintained a unique romantic committment to each other for 50 years.
    
    
  • Sartre died of lung cancer in Paris in 1980. He left the legal rights to his entire literary heritage not to Simone de Beauvoir, who had been his partner for his entire adult life, but to Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, his former Algerian mistress and later legally-adopted daughter. This was an ironic end to Beauvoir's long relationship with Sartre, given her prominence as a Feminist and intellectual icon. For all of her progressive views about Feminism she had devoted most of her life to a chauvinist, and her views seem to have never rubbed off on Jean-Paul. In the end he went for a younger woman and left his life-long partner out in the cold financially. Yet, despite this, Beauvoir asked to be buried next to Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris when she died 6 years later, which is where her remains lie to this day. Loyalty knows no reason.
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • "Life begins on the other side of despair".
    
    
  • "Man first of all exists... and defines himself afterwards".
    
    
  • "Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position".
    
    
  • If Man as the Existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is".
    
    
  • "For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism - man is free, man is freedom".
    
    
  • "Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of bein g eternal."
    
    
  • "The first effect of Existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders".
    
    
  • "The Existentialist... finds it extremely embarassing that God doesn't exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven".
    
    
  • "Man makes himself. He is not found ready-made: he makes himself by the choice of his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality".
    
    
  • "No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world".
    
    
  • "It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous."
    
    
  • "There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity".
    
    
  • "An anti-Communist is a dog".
    
    
  • "If we are able to refuse the misleading aid of religion or existential philosophies, we then possess certain basic, obvious facts: the world is chaos, a divine equivalence born of anarchy; tomorrow does not exist, since we all die. In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger". (This last word is a reference to the book of the same name by Albert Camus).
    
    
  • "We should act without hope".
    
    
  • "Man... is nothing else but the sum of his actions".
    
    
  • "There is no sense in life ý priori".
    
    
  • "Man is a useless passion".
    
    
  • "Everything has been figured out, except how to live."