Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

French novelist, playwright, existentialist philosopher, and literary critic. Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964, but he declined the award in protest of the values of bourgeois society. His longtime companion was Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met at the École Normale Superieure in 1929.

"The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith. But above all, the unique point of view from which the author can present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom." (from What Is Literature, 1947)

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris. His father was a naval officer who died when Jean-Paul was young. Through his mother, the former Anne-Marie Schweitzer, he was a great nephew of Albert Schweitzer. Sartre lived after his father's early death with his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer and his mother in Paris. When his mother remarried in 1917, the family moved to La Rochelle. Sartre attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He graduated from the Ècole Normale Supérieure in 1929. From 1931 to 1945 he worked as a teacher and traveled in Egypt, Greece, and Italy. In 1933-34 he studied in Berlin the writings of the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

At the Left Bank cafés Sartre gathered around him a group of intellectuals in the 1930s. During WW II Sartre was drafted in 1939, imprisoned a year later in Germany, but released in 1941 (or he escaped). However, he lost his freedom he valued above all for a short time. In Paris he joined resistance movement, writing for such magazines as Les Lettres Française and Combat. After the war he founded a monthly literary and political review, Les Temps modernes, and devoted full time to writing and political activity. Sartre was never a member of Communist party, although he tried to reconcile existentialism and Marxism and collaborated with the French Communist Party as the only hope of bettering the lot of the working classes. However, when Albert Camus, with whom Sartre was closely linked in the 1940, openly criticized Stalinism, Sartre hesitated at that time about such acts. The publication of Camus's novel The Rebel in 1951 caused a break between the two friends.

"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (from L'Être et le Néant / Being and Nothingness, 1943)

Sartre's first novel , LA NAUSÉE, appeared in 1938, and expressed under the influence of German philosopher Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method, that human life has no purpose. The protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, discovers the obscene overabundance of the world around him, and his own solitude induces several experiences of psychological nausea. He is not only impressed by the solidity of the stones on the sea shore, but feels similar kind of horror when he contemplates the world of bourgeois banality. "Nobody is better qualified than the commercial traveller over there to sell Swan toothpaste. Nobody is better qualified than that interesting young man to fumble about under his neighbour's skirts. And I am among them and if they look at me they must think that nobody is better qualified than I to do what I do. But I know. I don't look very important but I know that I exists and that they exists. And if I knew the art of convincing people, I should go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and I should explain to him what existence is. The thought of the look which would come on to his face if I did makes me burst out laughing." The rationality and solidity of this world, Roquentin thinks, is a veneer.

LE MUR (1938) was a collection of five stories and a novella. In' The Childhood of a Leader' the pitiful hero, Lucien, believes he do not exists. He seeks a feeling of strength through a homosexual affair. Encouraged by his friend Lucien ends up in the ultra-conservative organization of the Action Française, with a desire to purify the French blood and beat the Jews. "Bergère spoke often of Rimbaud and the "systematic disordering of all the senses." "When you will be able, in crossing the Place de la Concorde, to see distinctly and at will a kneeling negress sucking the obelisk, you will be able to tell yourself that you have torn down the scenery and you are saved."

In his non-fiction works L'ÊTRE ET LE NÉANT (1943, Being and Nothingness) Sartre formulated the basics of his philosophical system, in which "existence is prior to essence." Sartre made the distinction between things that exist in themselves (en-soi) and human beings who exist for themselves (pour-soi). Conscious of the limits of knowledge and of mortality, human beings live with existential dread. "Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have." (from Situations, 1947) Sartre developed his ideas further in L'EXISTENTIALISME EST UN HUMANISME (1946), and CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON DIALECTIQUE (1960). According to Sartre, human being is terrifying free, and responsible for the choices he makes. In a godless universe life has no meaning or purpose beyond the goals that each man sets for himself. In Being and Nothingness Sartre argued that an individual must detach oneself from things to give them meaning.

Sartre's first play, LES MOUCHES (1943), examined the themes of commitment and responsibility. In the story, set in the ancient, mythical Greece, Orestes kills the murderers of Agamemnon, thus freeing the people of the city from the burden of guilt. According to Sartre's existentialist view, only one who chooses to assume responsibility of acting in a particular situation, like Orestes, makes effective use of one's freedom. In his second play, HUIS CLOS (1944), a traitor, a lesbian, and a nymphomaniac are forced to live in "hell", in a small room, their inauthenticity after their deaths.

QU'EST CE QUE LA LITTÉRATURE (1947) is Sartre's best-known book of literary criticism. He grouped poetry with painting, sculpture, and music - they are not signs but things. For the poet emotion has become a thing. A writer is always a watchdog or a jester. A novelist cannot escape engagement in political and social issues. The function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world. One of the chief motifs of artistic reation is the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world. The reader brings to life the literary object - it is not true that one writes for oneself. On the other hand Sartre sees that literature is dying and alludes to newspapers, to the radio and movies. "The goal of art is to recover this world by giving it to be seen not as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom."

In 1956 Sartre spoke out on behalf of freedom for Hungarians, and Czechs in 1968. After Stalin's death in 1953 Sartre accepted the right to criticize the Soviet system although he defended the Soviet state. He visited the Soviet Union next year and was hospitalized for ten days because of exhaustion. The O.A.S. (Organisation de l'Armee Secrete), engaged in terrorist activities against Algerian independence, exploded a bomb in 1961 in Sartre's apartment on rue Bonaparte; it happened also next year and Sartre moved on quai Louis-Blériot, opposite the Eiffel tower. In a historical debate between Louis Althusser unexpectedly Sartre lost, perhaps the only time in his public life. In 1965 Sartre adopted Arlette Elkaïm, his mistress, who received the rights to Sartre's literary heritage after his death. In 1967 Sartre headed the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell to judge American military conduct in Indochina. He became closely involved in movement against Vietnam War and supported student rebellion in 1968. In 1970 Sartre was arrested because of selling on the streets the forbidden Maoist paper La cause du peuple.

From 1960 until 1971 Sartre worked with a four-volume study called L'IDIOT DE LA FAMILLE, a wide biography of Gustave Flaubert, which used Freudian and Marxist interpretations, familiar from his philosophical work. Sartre had been preoccupied with Flaubert since



childhood. In this study Sartre showed how Flaubert became the person his family and society determined him to be. While writing this work, Sartre used Corydrane, a drug that also race bicyclists used in the 1960s. In 1974 Sartre visited the terrorist Andreas Baader at the prison of Stammheim in Germany.

L'idiot was Sartre's last large work; it remained unfinished. According to Sartre, the fact that he will never finish it "does not make me so unhappy, because I think I said the most important things in the first three volumes." From 1975 the philosopher suffered from failing eyesight and near the end of his life Sartre was blind. He died in Paris of oedema of the lungs on April 15, 1980.

Jean-Paul Sartre was largely responsible for our image of the postwar French intellectual - and as an activist and writer he was considered the leading interpreter of the postwar generation's world view. In his essays Sartre dealt with wide range of subjects, sometimes in provocative manner. 'The Republic of Silence' starts 'We were never more free than under the German occupation', explaining this later that then each gesture had the weight of a commitment. In 'The Humanism of Existentialism' he condensed the major theme of existentialist philosophy simply 'first of all, man exist, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself'.