Sartre (original) (raw)
Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980)
Life and Works
. . Freedom
. . Responsibility
. . Self-Deception
. . Despair
Bibliography
Internet Sources
Educated in his native Paris and at German universities, Jean-Paul Sartre taught philosophy during the 1930s at La Havre and Paris. Captured by the Nazis while serving as an Army meteorologist, Sartre was a prisoner of war for one year before returning to his teaching position, where he participated actively in the French resistance to German occupation until the liberation. Recognizing a connection between the principles of existentialism and the more practical concerns of social and political struggle, Sartre wrote not only philosophical treatises but also novels, stories, plays, and political pamphlets. Sartre's personal and professional life was greatly enriched by his long-term collaboration with Simone de Beauvoir.
Although he declinedthe Nobel Prize for literature in 1964, Sartre was one of the most respected leaders of post-war French culture, and his funeral in Paris drew an enormous crowd.
Sartre's philosophical influences clearly includeDescartes,Kant,Marx,Husserl, andHeidegger. Employing the methods of descriptive phenomenology to new effect, hisl'Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943) offers an account ofexistence in general, including both the being-in-itself of objects that simply are and the being-for-itself by which humans engage in independent action. Sartre devotes particular concern to emotion as a spontaneous activity of consciousness projected onto reality. Empasizing the radical freedom of all human action, Sartre warns of the dangers ofmauvaise foi(bad faith), acting on theself-deceptive motives by which people often try toelude responsibility for what they do.
In the lecture l'Existentialisme est un humanisme("Existentialism is a Humanism") (1946), Sartre described the human condition in summary form:freedom entails total responsibility, in the face of which we experienceanguish, forlornness, and despair; genuine human dignity can be achieved only in our active acceptance of these emotions.
Sartre's complex and ambivalent intellectual relationship with traditional Marxism is more evident in Critique de la raison dialectique (Dialectical Reason) (1960), an extended sociological and philosophical essay.
Recommended Reading:
Primary sources:
- The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. by Robert D. Cummings (Random House, 1972)
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, tr. by Hazel E. Barnes (Washington Square, 1993)
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (Lyle Stuart, 1984)
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (Routledge, 2001)
Secondary sources:
- The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. by Christina Howells (Cambridge, 1992)
- Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. by Julien S. Murphy (Penn. State, 1999)
- Gregory McCulloch, Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes (Routledge, 1994)
Additional on-line information about Sartre includes:
- Thomas Flynn's article in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Heiner Wittman's site on Sartre's aesthetics.
- The full article available at Encyclopædia Brittanica Online.
- The thorough collection of resources at EpistemeLinks.com.
- Andy Blunden's biography of Sartre.
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Last modified 25 November 2011.
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