Renowned as a philosopher, literary figure, and social critic, Jean Paul Sartre, b. Paris, June 21, 1905, d. Apr. 15, 1980, was probably most famous as a representative of existentialism, a philosophical approach that emphasizes, among other things, the ultimacy of human freedom. In his later writings, however, Sartre attempted to combine the individualism of his existentialist work with a form of Marxism, which stresses the collective aspects of human existence.
As Sartre explained in his autobiography, The Words (1963; Eng. trans., 1964), his career as an author was a response to his childhood experiences of rejection. He graduated from the Ecole Normal Superieure, Paris, in 1929, by which time he had met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his lifelong companion as well as his intellectual associate. Sartre taught in various lycees, or secondary schools, until 1945, after which time he devoted himself exclusively to writing and editing the journal Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times). He spent a year as a prisoner of war during World War II and was a key figure among the French intellectuals who resisted the Nazi occupation.
PHILOSOPHICAL WORK
Under the influence of Edmund Husserl and, more importantly, Martin Heidegger, Sartre developed his existentialism as an analysis of self-consciousness in relation to Being. In the 1930s he wrote several phenomenological analyses of the imagination and the emotions, which culminated in his most important philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943; Eng. trans., 1956). This book provided a brilliant philosophical structure for the inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction that swept postwar Europe. The book's central idea is the opposition between objective things and human consciousness, the latter being a non-thing insofar as its reality consists in standing back from things and taking a point of view on them. Because consciousness is a non-thing (which is a somewhat better translation of Sartre's neant than the literal translation, "nothingness"), it does not have any of the causal involvements that things have with other things. This means that consciousness and thus humans themselves are essentially free, and that any attempt by an individual person or a philosophical theory to believe otherwise is a form of self-deception, or "bad faith." Ironically, the freedom of human consciousness is experienced by humans as a burden ("Man is condemned to be free"). Human projects, therefore, consist in the impossible attempt to become a free consciousness, such as when a person tries to become an intellectual or a parent or to play any other social role that is deemed determinate. Because the impossibility of this attempt to become a conscious thing--in Sartre's terminology, a for-itself-in-itself--does not prevent humans from being irresistibly drawn to undertake it, Sartre declares that "man is a useless passion." Whether this entails that all human life is futile and without value, however, is another issue, and the vigor of Sartre's own life suggests that he himself did not draw this conclusion. Another debatable issue is whether there is any significant continuity between Sartre's existentialism and his later Marxist work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), in which he attempts to explain how the freedom of the individual is related to history and the class struggle.
LITERARY WORK
Most of Sartre's literary output reflects his existentialism, although he finished three volumes of a projected four-volume study of Gustave Flaubert that combines Marxist and Freudian approaches (The Family Idiot, 1971-72; Eng. trans., 5 vols., 1981-91). In his first novel, Nausea (1938; Eng. trans., 1949), the protagonist, Roquentin, finds himself weighed down and sickened by the opposition between things and consciousness, a theme analyzed philosophically in Being and Nothingness. In the most famous part of the novel Roquentin comes up against the impenetrableness of things in the form of a gnarled old chestnut tree root, whose opaqueness to his understanding eventually demonstrates to him the absurdity of an existence that cannot be analyzed.
In subsequent works, particularly his short stories in Intimacy (1939; Eng. trans., 1949), his other novels, and his plays, Sartre presents the ethical dilemmas generated by commitment to a course of action, usually political action. This is particularly clear in the three novels that are collectively entitled The Roads to Freedom (1945-49; Eng. trans., 1947-50). His dramas Dirty Hands (1948; Eng. trans., 1949) and The Condemned of Altona (1959; Eng. trans., 1961) both take up the problem of responsible political action and end with the suicide of the main character. But Sartre's most popular play is undoubtedly the one-act drama No Exit (1944; Eng. trans., 1947), which is a discussion of such familiar negative existentialist themes as bad faith, self-destruction, and the impossibility of interpersonal relationships. It is in this play that Sartre's famous line, "Hell is other people," occurs.
Sartre also wrote numerous essays about literature. He argued in What Is Literature? (1948; Eng. trans., 1949) that literature must be political, and he devoted his journal Les Temps Modernes to this point of view. He wrote essays about William Faulkner (1938), Charles Baudelaire (1946), and Jean Genet (1952). His essays on Baudelaire and Genet employ the technique of existential psychoanalysis, a term coined by Sartre to describe discerning, from the details in a person's life, the nature of the fundamental project that animates him or her, and how the project came into being.
Thomas E. Wren
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Barnes, H., Sartre and Flaubert (1981); Champigny, R., Sartre and Drama (1982); Davies, H., Sartre and Les Temps Modernes (1987); De Beauvoir, S., ed., The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926-1963, 2 vols., trans. by L. Fahnestock and N. MacAfee (1992-93); Gerassi, J., Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1 (1989); Gordon, H. and R., Sartre and Evil (1995); Howells, C., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (1992); Hayman, R. S., Sartre (1987); Jameson, F., ed., Sartre after Sartre (1985); Murdoch, I., Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, rev. ed. (1987); Scriven, M., Sartre's Existential Biographies (1994); Thody, P., Jean-Paul Sartre (1992); Wood, P. R., Understanding Jean-Paul Sartre (1990).
