Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June
21, 1905, the only child of Anne-Marie and Jean-Baptiste Sartre.
Both of his parents came from prominent families. Sartre’s paternal
grandfather was a celebrated physician, and his maternal grandfather, Karl
“Charles” Schweitzer, was a respected writer on topics of religion,
philosophy, and languages. In 1906, Sartre’s father died of entercolitis,
a disease he’d contracted on a voyage to China while in the navy.
After the death, Sartre and his mother moved into the highly disciplined
home of Sartre’s grandfather, Karl Schweitzer. Sartre maintained
a complicated relationship with his grandfather throughout his childhood.
Like his mother, the young Sartre resented Schweitzer’s domineering
presence and fallacious religiosity. However, Sartre was at least
mildly receptive to the tutoring of his grandfather, who had recognized
early on Sartre’s lively, unique mind.
In 1924, Sartre enrolled at the Ecole Normale Supérieure
(ENS), an elite French university. In 1928, he made the acquaintance
of a classmate named Simone de Beauvoir, who would become his lifelong
companion and go on to become a tremendously important thinker herself.
Her most famous work, The Second Sex, is regarded as
one of the seminal texts of feminist thought. Although Sartre and de
Beauvoir never married and never maintained an exclusive romantic
relationship, they remained close both intellectually and emotionally
until Sartre’s death in 1980.
After finishing his studies at ENS, Sartre served briefly
in the army, then accepted a teaching position at a high school
in northwest France. In 1933, Sartre left for Berlin to study under
the eminent German philosopher Edmund Husserl, a thinker who contributed
greatly to the synthesis of Sartre’s own philosophy. While in Berlin,
Sartre also became acquainted with the work and, briefly, the person
of Martin Heidegger, another leader of twentieth-century philosophy
who also greatly influenced Sartre. In 1938, Sartre published Nausea,
a philosophical novel heavily imbued with the ideas and themes of
Husserl’s philosophy.
At the start of World War II, Sartre was once again conscripted into
the military. He was captured by the Nazis in June 1940 and held
as a prisoner of war until March 1941, when he escaped and returned
to Paris. There, he joined the French Resistance to Nazi occupation.
During the months he spent in captivity, Sartre began work on what
would become his magnum opus, the sprawling classic of existentialism
entitled Being and Nothingness. Published in 1943,
the work made Sartre famous and brought his existentialist philosophy
to the forefront of the intellectual conversation that followed
the war.
As an editor of the journal Les Temps Moderne,
which was first published in 1945, Sartre had a constant and immediate
outlet for his ideas, which evolved considerably over time as they
adapted to the social and political context of the world in the
decades that followed the war. While many of his peers, notably
Albert Camus, supported America and its Western European allies
in the Cold War, Sartre was a devoted Socialist and stood with the
Soviet Union. Although Sartre condemned the more totalitarian elements
of Sovietism, in particular its imperialist authoritarian side,
he believed that the proletariat, or working class, was better off
there than anywhere in the capitalist West.
In seeking to unite his philosophical and political beliefs,
Sartre maintained a firm belief in the idea that both literature
and philosophy are inherently political, in function if not in content.
He believed that the author or the artist must always create with
the hope of changing the social order. Sartre himself enthusiastically lent
his name and his writing to many causes, including, most famously,
the struggle to end French colonialism in Africa.
In the last decades of his life, Sartre was perhaps better
known for his leftist political beliefs than for the existentialist
philosophy that had elevated him to iconic status in France and
throughout Europe. In the 1960s, student radicals in both Europe
and America embraced Sartre as a hero and appropriated him as a
symbol in their resistance to war, imperialism, and other reactionary
cultural–political forces. However, Sartre was never much more than
an icon of the counterculture. Until his death in 1980, he remained
a tremendously prolific and outspoken writer and embodied the conviction that
philosophy, if it is to be serious, must be lived.
Sartre’s basic philosophy, existentialism, is neither
a narrowly definable school of thought nor limited to Sartre and
his French contemporaries such as Camus. Although in a certain sense
Sartre and Camus were the first to name and define existentialism,
it is best understood as a long-running current in Europe’s philosophical
history, a current that emerged in the late nineteenth century.
Existentialist philosophers believe that philosophy should emphasize
the individual human experience of the world, and they consider
ideas of individual freedom; individual responsibility; and how
it is possible, if it is possible at all, for individual human beings
to act meaningfully in the world.
These ideas themselves belong to a larger philosophic
trend that sought to expose the ostensible bankruptcy of traditional
philosophy, in particular the philosophy of the Enlightenment. During
the Enlightenment, philosophy had put its faith in the idea that
reason and rationality hold the answer to all of humanity’s problems.
To nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and
twentieth-century existentialists, such as Sartre, a radically different
approach was needed if philosophy was to rediscover its urgency.
Instead of attempting to contain reality within an absolute theoretical
framework, iconoclastic philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard
felt that philosophy should emphasize the individual’s subjective
experience rather than the individual as the bearer of abstract,
universal rights. As adopted by Sartre, this emphasis on individual
experience emanated from the belief that, ultimately, people cannot
appeal to universal notions of morality or ethics to guide their
behavior. Any attempt to generalize human nature, and hence any
attempt to construct a system based on these universals, is doomed
to fail.
Sartre was unique within this current of thought largely
because of the way he wedded phenomenology to his rejection of traditional philosophy.
Phenomenology can be described as the study of consciousness, or
how the external world appears to our minds. Phenomenology poses
the question of whether it is possible to find the objective reality
behind how something appears to us—a question that weighed heavily
on Sartre’s own meditations on the individual’s experience of and
interaction with the world.
Sartre’s thought also comprises elements of Marxism. Sartre strongly
self-identified as a Marxist and was a firm believer in certain
key tenets of Marxist thought, including the inherently exploitative
nature of the capitalist system, the fact of class conflict as the animating
engine of history, and the dialectical nature of all being. That
said, Sartre’s Marxism did not act so much as an influence on his
existentialist philosophy as something that existed alongside it. In
seeking to fuse the two, Sartre composed such works as the Critique
of Dialectical Reason, which expanded on the themes of Being and
Nothingness while incorporating Marxian sociological inquiry into
the discussion.
