WEB LINK: You will find a brief page about Sartre HERE.

His Life:

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. His father died when he was just 15 months old and so little Jean-Paul was brought up under the cosseting influence of his mother, who called him 'Poulon' (her 'little chicken').

His life is simpler to describe than his philosophy! He taught philosophy in Paris and La Havre during the 1930s and was captured by the Germans during the second world war. On his release (or escape) he participated actively in the French Resistance movement until the end of the war. He is correctly associated with Communism, although he was never a member of the Communist party.

Sartre wrote prolifically. As well as philosophy, he wrote many novels and plays and also literary commentaries. He was offered (but declined) the Nobel prize for literature in 1964 and became one of the most respected and important figures in post-war French culture.

Sartre was romantically as well as professionally engaged with the feminist/existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir for much of his life. She died after him, in 1986.

His Philosophy:

Sartre's philosophy was based on existing ideas - particularly those of the phenomenologists and of Kierkegaard - but he contributed many new concepts too. Instead of writing about them in detail, I shall put some of these key ideas here for your consideration:

Objective being, like the being of a stone, is être-en-soi - being-in-itself. This is defined from the outside - from the relations between its parts. It is determined, not free. It is something.

Subjective being - human consciousness - is être-pour-soi - being-for-itself. This is not defined outwardly but is like a negation at the heart of being-in-itself. It is free. It is nothing. And yet the whole of being-in-itself depends on it - comes into being through it. Hence the title of Sartre's most famous philosophical work, L'être et le Néant.

Being-for-itself is not fixed - it has no essence. It is existence - becoming. Humans constantly seek ontological security - that is, they seek to be something. Yet because this is a denial of their true, existential nature, this is to pretend. It is called mauvaise foi - bad faith.

Being - the world - is absurd. It is de trôp - superfluous - there, real, terrifying and meaningless.

Human being is terrifying - it is responsibility and freedom. We like to wear uniforms which define us from the outside, then we can escape this freedom by being something. We constantly walk the knife-edge between being and non-being.

There is no God. Our being, as nothingness, is lonely. Many characters in Sartre's plays and novels explore this feeling of loneliness or worse, nausea (as in Sartre's book, La Nausée).

Life with others is a constant battle. The existence of the other as subject makes us into objects - we objectify others when they appear in our manifold. The woman undressing peacefully suddenly feels herself as object when she catches sight of a man watching through the window.

Questions:

Do you feel a fundamental nothingness beneath your identity - do you feel an existential insecurity or angst?

Do you seek to be something - to fix your identity?

Do you ever feel a sense of worthlessness?

Do you ever feel the world is meaningless?

Do you feel your freedom as a terrible responsibility?

If you answer 'no' to all these questions, maybe it is because Sartre is wrong. Or, maybe it is because you have already given in and are happy to see yourself drifting along fatalistically in a deterministic universe, as if you were, rather than as if you were becoming. Maybe you already live your life in bad faith…

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