Jean-Paul Sartre he was one of the figures who most contributed to the formation of contemporary thought and philosophy. An irreverent figure, the philosopher and writer has an extensive work written in prose, which includes essays and philosophical treatises, novels, as well as plays and screenplays for the cinema. Sartre can be considered the existentialist philosopher who went out of his way to theorize this current of thought, having written his masterpiece: being and nothingness, in which he describes the main concepts of the existentialist theory of the 20th century.
Read too: Main philosophers and theories of contemporary philosophy
Sartre's Biography
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. His father, Jean-Baptiste Marie Aymard Sartre, died in 1906. Her mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, moved with her baby to her father, German teacher Charles Scweitzer, in Meudon.
The creation of Jean-Paul Sartre, typically bourgeois, provided him with a Good education focused on literature and on learning languages and cultures. Until the age of 10, he had been educated by his grandfather and tutors at home. From an early age, the grandfather provided his grandson with the
contact with great writers, such as Goethe, Mallarmé, Victor Hugo and Flaubert (the latter decisively influenced Sartre's philosophy).![Jean-Paul Sartre, an important name in existentialist philosophy. [1]](/f/bdfb985c15ed2aea7231ccc56e03bd78.jpg)
Sartre seemed to say that the contact with the great literature from an early age and the absence of his father made him the way he was: a writer with a taste for lyrics and creativity (due to your early readings) and a free man, for not having, in his training, the repressive paternal figure. In 1921, studying at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, he met his great friend Paul Nizan and the philosophy of Henri Bergson.
In 1924, young Sartre entered the Philosophy course at the Escola Normal Superior in Paris. His social circle widens, having met, in addition to Nizan and Professor Bergson, Raymond Aron. There he meets the philosopher who would be his companion for the rest of his life, Simone de Beauvoir. The two maintained an open relationship, outside the accepted standards for the time, and had never been legally married.
According to feminist writer Claudine Monteil (Beauvoir and Sartre's friend because of feminist militancy in the 1970s), in an interview with BBC journalist Louise Hidalgo, the couple signed a “pact according to which they shared the most essential love of their lives, but at the same time, they had lovers"|1|.
In 1928, Sartre completed the course in Philosophy and enters compulsory military service, serving until 1931 as a meteorologist. Then he teaches philosophy at a high school. At that time, he wrote a novel rejected by the editors and, in 1933, he went to Berlin, where he delved into Husserl's phenomenology, the existentialism of Jaspers and Heidegger, as well as the works of Kierkegaard. The ideas of the precursors of phenomenology and existentialism, combined with the reading of Sartre de Nietzsche, led him to found a new existentialist theory. Still in Germany, he wrote the novel that would be published later under the title of the nausea.
In 1939, Sartre was called to serve the French army in Second World War, despite the pacifist ideas defended by him since his graduation days. In 1940 he was captured and trapped in a concentration camp, from which he manages to escape in 1941, returning to Paris and meeting again with Simone de Beauvoir.
During this period, Sartre broke completely with the Parisian bourgeois intellectual circle, with which he had fallen out since 1924, and entered a more politically engaged cycle, defending socialism. Marxist, pacifism and anti-nationalism. Sartre was also against anti-Semitism, the xenophobia it's the racism. In 1941 he founded the Socialism and Freedom — a socialist and anti-fascist resistance group that was known for its engagement and struggle against the fanatical totalitarian and nationalist ideals that plagued Europe.
In 1943 the philosopher completed his work being and nothingness, started in 1939, which would give full light to its existentialism. In 1945, after the war, the Socialism and Freedom group was closed and Sartre founded, with his friends and also French intellectuals, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron, the The Modern Times magazine.
Within the Marxist movement, Sartre receives harsh criticism because of his existentialist ideas, which, in the eyes of the militants, sounded like a defense of a perhaps even liberal individualism. To undo this stigma, Sartre delivers the conference existentialism is a humanism and publishes it in the form of a book, in which he points out the ethical character of thinking in the sense of a philosophical existentialism.
The trajectory that united intellectual production with political engagement continues in Sartre as well as in Beauvoir. Sartre becomes interested in the question of colonialism and the harm it was causing to the countries of the so-called third world. Simone de Beauvoir, in turn, intensifies her militancy in the feminist movement. In 1961, the couple travels to Cuba, where they meet Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and to Brazil, where he meets a couple of famous writers in our literature, Zelia Gattai and Jorge Amado.
In 1964, Sartre published his penultimate book, The words. In the same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature, honor that he rejected. In a letter addressed to the award's producers, the existentialist explains that his philosophy and his literature are free from ties and authorities, and that “receiving the honor means recognizing the authority of the judges, which he considers inadmissible grant”|2|.
In May 1968, when student protests broke out in Paris and spread around the world, Sartre took to the streets and demonstrated with the students, carrying posters and confronting the police. At that time, the thinker also kept in touch with French philosophers who emerged as promising young people, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
In 1971 a last work was published, it is a critical study on the work of GustaveFlaubert. In 1973, at the age of 67, Sartre's health began to waver. Due to the intense work routine (he spent more than 14 hours writing in a single day), accompanied by the excessive use of alcohol, tobacco and stimulant drugs, the philosopher was affected for one complicated clinical picture.
His situation involved diabetes, hypertension and circulatory problems that would cause it, adding up all, a glaucoma that left him almost totally blind. From then on, his health was weakened and the philosopher began to be taken by terrible pain and agony until his death, with small pictures of restoration, as described by Simone de Beauvoir in her passionate and sad text on the death of the companion: the farewell ceremony. Sartre died on April 15, 1980.
See too: Frankfurt School – School of Thought Contemporary to Sartre's Production
Sartre's main ideas
Sartre was a unconditional defender of freedom. In his writings, the philosopher makes it clear that the human being was, paradoxically, condemned to be free. This was the presupposition for his existentialist theory and, more deeply, it made clear his refusal of any kind of social ties.
Politically the philosopher walked in the same direction, claiming that freedom is the human essence applied in politics. Any tendency against freedom would be inhumane. The philosopher engaged in communist struggle, and many detractors saw his political position as a contradiction to his philosophy. However, Sartre also made it clear that what he understood by communism and Marxism went far beyond what was left by Marx and applied in the Soviet Union. Marxism, for him, had a dimension of its own that had surpassed the ideas of Karl Marx, as if he had a life and intelligence of his own.
In literature and literary criticism, the philosopher sought to establish links with writers who conveyed the idea of freedom and misery of human existence, surrounded by the anguish of exacerbated freedom and lack of support by God or by any metaphysical institution. sartre was materialist and atheist.
![Martin Heidegger, considered one of the most original philosophers of the 20th century, greatly influenced Sartre's work. [2]](/f/c7862a1b3376a503c146fa0bfee96089.jpg)
At philosophy, the French thinker will find in Nietzsche the affirmation of material and corporeal life; in Kierkegaard, a defense of a philosophy focused on the human being and on life; in Heidegger, the beginning of existentialism; is on Husserl, the phenomenological method, which defends a kind of deepening of the senses as a way to immerse yourself in the world and in thought. This entire set of ideas will serve as the basis for the formulation of Sartrean existentialism.
Also access: Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality
Sartre's Existentialism
Before Sartre, existentialism had already found its echoes in the arts, society and Heideggerian philosophy since the end of the First World War. Desolated by the horror of war, Europeans began to think about their situation and their condition as finite beings. It is in this aspect that Heidegger identifies the human being as a being-to-death, which would lead us to anguish, as we are aware of our finitude.
Sartrean existentialism part of Heidegger's ideas, but goes further, as the French philosopher identifies freedom, abandonment, the primacy of existence and the non-recognition of oneself as factors for anguish.
First, we are doomed to be free. This implies our attitude, whatever it may be, as a result of our choice, and it also means that we are living a condemnation, because as much as we want to get rid of our freedom, it is not possible to do so.
There is also the issue of abandonment. The human being, for Sartre, is abandoned, abandoned in the world, because, contrary to what religion and medieval metaphysical conceptions say, there is no God to guide us. Another factor of anguish is the lack of essence that determines us. For Sartre, existence precedes essence, and “if existence really precedes essence, man is responsible for what he is”|3|.The human being has total responsibility for himself and, at the same time, he does not have a predefined essence.
Sartre criticizes the entire philosophy since Plato until Kant, who tried to frame the human being in a concept of humanity, in an essence that preceded existence and gave human life a form. Sartre is against any form of determinism, and the fact that existence precedes essence, for the philosopher, is a factor of anxiety.
Existence precedes essence means that there is no all-encompassing thing that defines all human specimens. There is no concept of a finished human that embraces everyone, indiscriminately. For Sartre, people make themselves, build themselves, insofar as they live and exercise their freedom, for which they are condemned. In this way, there is not a human essence, but a human condition. This is distressing because it takes from the human being one of his optimistic certainties: that he is, necessarily, a being endowed with characteristics that distinguish him from others.
The being-in-itself: is what Heidegger called the Dasein (be-there). They are the things of the world, the phenomena. It's the way things look, appear to us. The phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger is important to Sartre because it enters into this first aspect: of material and phenomenal things.
The being-for-itself: it is consciousness and the way it relates to being-in-itself. It is our mind, it is the immaterial that recognizes our body (material and being-in-itself) - it is in conflict by contrasting itself with the other being and recognizing that there is no definite form like it. This brings us to anguish.
Sartre, in defending himself against Marxist accusations that he was not class conscious (since at first glance, it seems that existentialism is individualist), and of Christians, for seeming too pessimistic and hopeless, writes the rehearsal existentialism is a humanism. In this text, the philosopher defends that the human being makes himself by his choices, but he puts an ethical dimension when he says that “by choosing himself, he [man] chooses all men”.
In fact, there is not a single one of our actions that, creating the human being we want to be, is not simultaneously creating an image of man as we think he should be”|3|. This means to say that the human being, when making his choices, projects on them the image he wants to convey to humanity and that defines for himself what humanity is. Thus, every single choice is not selfish and individual, even if it harms humanity. To get deeper into this philosophical theory, go to: Existentialism in Sartre.
Main works by Sartre
Sartre's works, both literary and philosophical and dramaturgical, have always had existentialism as a conceptual starting point. We highlight, below, his main writings:
the nausea: Sartre's first published novel, the text was written as if it were a diary of the main character. The protagonist roams the streets of a city and, in his experiences, notices commonplace and absurd things, which, at times, puts him in front of the question of the human condition. In this book Sartre's existentialist ideas already exist.
being and nothingness: in this philosophical treatise, the French writer exposes his existentialist philosophy, rooted in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Jaspers, defining concepts and explaining the meanings of common vocabulary terms existentialist. Sartre tries to explain the world and its (dis)order via an existentialist conception.
existentialism is a humanism: here there is the intention of rebutting criticism from Marxists and Christians by showing that there is an optimistic dimension from existentialism (freedom) and a collective and ethical dimension (individual choice extended to humanity).
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
The couple Sartre and Beauvoir were perhaps the ones that raised the most controversy in the history of philosophy. They met when they were studying Philosophy at the Escola Normal Superior in Paris and never parted again, until Sartre's death in 1980. At polemics around the couple focus on the fact that their relationship was unconventional. There was a pact of loyalty and an open relationship, with a partial division of life into two and the acceptance of extramarital affairs. Sartre and Simone were never married and never shared the same house. They lived in the same building, he in her apartment and she in hers. Both had lovers.
Despite not being very attractive physically, Sartre had a charming, outgoing and good-natured intellectual charm. Simone was cultured, intelligent, shrewd, engaging and beautiful. Both had several cases, maybe he more than she. Simone was bisexual and became involved with a number of women and well-known men, such as writer Nelson Algren. Sartre became involved with several women, most of them younger than he.
The couple's relationship, despite appearing to be difficult to accept by our western monogamous standard, lasted 51 years, ending only with Sartre's death. There seemed to be an immense complicity between the two. The intellectual production of both also intersects. While Sartre studied existentialism and proposed a way of understanding the human being as a result of the “human condition”, Beauvoir she also took existentialism as a starting point to theorize what she called the “female condition” in the scope of studies. feminists.
Image credits
[1] Moshe Milner/commons
[2] Willy Pragher/ commons
Grades
|1| Check out the interview with Claudine Monteil by clicking on here.
|2| CHAUI, M. Life and work. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1984. P. IX. (The Thinkers).
|3| SARTRE, J. P. existentialism is a humanism. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1984, p. 6. (The Thinkers).
by Francisco Porfirio
Philosophy teacher
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/biografia/jean-paul-sartre.htm
