Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most well-known philosophers of the last
century, was born in Paris, France in 1905. However, his beginnings were indeed
humble. When Sartre was two years old,
his father died, so he spent his childhood living with his German protestant
grandfather and single mother. Eventually his mother remarried, and in 1924,
Sartre was accepted into the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure to study
philosophy. This is where he met Simone de Beauvoir, and “the two became life
partners, sharing the same preoccupations and interests” (Naess, 1965, p. 267).
In the 1940’s, he was captured by Nazis, but continued to write in the
concentration camp, creating dramas for his fellow prisoners as well as
continuing to develop his own philosophy. He eventually escaped and joined the
French resistance. His most influential works were published between 1943 and
1948. He was even offered a Nobel Prize for literature, “which he refused on
the ground that ‘a writer should not be an institution’” (Sherman &
Solomon, 2003, p. 165). Upon his death in 1980, over 50 000 Parisians are said
to have taken to the streets to honor him.
Evidently, as a novelist, playwright,
literary critic, and political activist, Sartre enjoyed fame during his
lifetime. In fact, his figure became so enmeshed in French culture, “thus
prompting Charles de Gaulle to declare, in response to those who sought
Sartre’s arrest for his political activities during the postwar period, that
Sartre was France, and one does not jail France” (Sherman & Solomon, 2003,
p. 165). Arguably, one of Sartre’s greatest contributions to the philosophical
field is his work Being and Nothingness,
which is considered by many to be an existential masterpiece. He believed, like
most existential philosophers that “existence precedes essence” in man,
(Sartre, 1953, p.52). This is the idea that there is no meaning to human life-
we are only what we decide to make of ourselves. Man is condemned to freedom,
according to Sartre, and is “no more than what he does; what we do with our own
lives is our own fault” (Sartre, 1953, p. 52). To live existentially is “to act
without hope of external reward” and thus as “all ways of avoiding
responsibility are taken away, every act becomes significant” (French, 1970, p.
47), Therefore, Sartre proposes the ideas of responsibility and freedom. Every
individual is responsible for accepting human freedom. He uses the term “bad
faith” to refer to the response that avoids human freedom, and includes
religion as an act of bad faith (Greene, 1966).
