Sartre, Jean-Paul

Sartre, Jean-Paul (zhäN-pôl sär`trə), 1905–80, French philosopher, playwright, and novelist. Influenced by German philosophy, particularly that of Heidegger, Sartre was a leading exponent of 20th-century existentialism. His writings examine man as a responsible but lonely being, burdened with a terrifying freedom to choose, and set adrift in a meaningless universe. His first novel, Nausea (1938, tr. 1949), was followed by Intimacy (1939, tr. 1949), a collection of short stories. Sartre served in the army during World War II, was taken prisoner, escaped, and was involved in the resistance. During the occupation he wrote his first plays, The Flies (1943, tr. 1946) and No Exit (1944, tr. 1946), and the monumental treatise Being and Nothingness (1943, tr. 1953). Theatrically expert, his plays also express his philosophy. After the war Sartre's writings became increasingly influential, and his ideas began to reflect his interest in Marxism. In 1945 he founded the periodical Les Temps modernes. His other major works include the trilogy of novels The Age of Reason, The Reprieve (both: 1945, tr. 1947), and Troubled Sleep (1949, tr. 1951); and the plays The Respectful Prostitute (1947, tr. 1949), Dirty Hands (1948, tr. 1949), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951, tr. 1953), The Condemned of Altona (1956, tr. 1961), and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960, tr. 1963). He wrote several major studies of literary figures, including Baudelaire and Flaubert. His essay collections in translation include Essays in Aesthetics (1963), The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (ed. by R. D. Cumming, 1965), and Of Human Freedom (1967). Among his later individual essays are What Is Literature? (1948, tr. 1965), The Ghost of Stalin (tr. 1968), and On Genocide (1968). Sartre declined the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature on the grounds that such awards lend too much weight to a writer's influence. Simone de Beauvoir, his close associate of many years, wrote about him in her autobiography, The Prime of Life (tr. 1962).

Bibliography

See his autobiographical The Words (1964); F. Jameson, Sartre after Sartre (1985); A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre (tr. 1987); S. de Beauvoir, ed., Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1940–1963 (1994); K. and E. Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (1994); B.-H. Levy, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (2000); H. Rowley, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005).

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Sartre, Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul Sartre, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1968.

(credit: Gisèle Freund)

(born June 21, 1905, Paris, France—died April 15, 1980, Paris) French philosopher, novelist, and playwright, the foremost exponent of existentialism. He studied at the Sorbonne, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his lifelong companion and intellectual collaborator. His first novel, Nausea (1938), narrates the feeling of revulsion that a young man experiences when confronted with the contingency of existence. Sartre used the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl (see phenomenology) with great skill in three successive publications: Imagination: A Psychological Critique (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), and The Psychology of Imagination (1940). In Being and Nothingness (1943), he places human consciousness, or nothingness (néant), in opposition to being, or thingness (être); consciousness is nonmatter and thus escapes all determinism. In his postwar treatise Existentialism and Humanism (1946) he depicts this radical freedom as carrying with it a responsibility for the welfare of others. In the 1940s and '50s he wrote many critically acclaimed plays—including The Flies (1943), No Exit (1946), and The Condemned of Altona (1959)—the study Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952), and numerous articles for Les Temps Modernes, the monthly review that he and de Beauvoir founded and edited. A central figure of the French left after the war, he was an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union—though not a member of the French Communist Party—until the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956, which he condemned. His Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) faults Marxism for failing to adapt itself to the concrete circumstances of particular societies and for not respecting individual freedom. His final works include an autobiography, The Words (1963), and Flaubert (4 vol., 1971–72), a lengthy study of the author. He declined the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature.