Continental · 1905–1980
Jean-Paul Sartre
Parisian novelist and philosopher, the public face of existentialism
Sartre argued that consciousness is a nothingness that can always negate what is given, so humans are radically free and responsible; later he tried to reconcile this freedom with Marxism.
Life and thought
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong partner. He discovered phenomenology in Berlin in 1933–34, made his name with the novel Nausea (1938) and was a prisoner of war in 1940–41. After the Liberation he became perhaps the most famous intellectual in the world and co-founded the journal Les Temps modernes; in 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Being and Nothingness starts from consciousness, which is not a thing but a power to negate: we can always imagine what is not, so we are never simply what we are. Hence “existence precedes essence”: there is no fixed human nature or God-given purpose, and we define ourselves by our choices. This freedom is a burden, and we flee it in “bad faith”, like a waiter playing at being a waiter as if he had no choice. In the later Critique of Dialectical Reason he tried to fit this freedom into Marxist history.
Works
Shaped by
1859–1938Edmund HusserlSartre studied Husserl in Berlin in 1933–34.1889–1976Martin HeideggerGerman philosopher of Being, compromised by his Nazi party membership1596–1650René DescartesSartre took the Cartesian cogito as his starting point.1818–1883Karl MarxIn Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he tried to join existentialism and Marxism.1908–1986Simone de BeauvoirLifelong partners who read and criticised each other’s drafts; how much Beauvoir shaped Sartre’s philosophy is debated.Shaped
1908–1986Simone de BeauvoirFrench existentialist whose The Second Sex reshaped feminism1915–1980Roland BarthesWriting Degree Zero (1953) answered Sartre’s What Is Literature?1925–1961Frantz FanonSartre prefaced The Wretched of the Earth; Fanon had earlier criticised Sartre’s essay “Black Orpheus”.Argued against
1913–1960Albert CamusSartre’s journal attacked Camus’s The Rebel in 1952, ending their friendship.Criticised by
1908–1961Maurice Merleau-PontyMerleau-Ponty broke with Sartre over communism in the 1950s.1908–2009Claude Lévi-StraussThe Savage Mind (1962) ends with an attack on Sartre’s philosophy of history.1926–1984Michel FoucaultFoucault called Sartre’s late work the effort of “a man of the nineteenth century” to think the twentieth.Meanwhile, in other traditions
1900–1990Nishitani KeijiKyoto School thinker of nihilism and emptiness1900–1976Gilbert RyleOxford philosopher who mocked the “ghost in the machine”1902–1994Karl PopperViennese-born philosopher of science and defender of the open society1908–2000W. V. O. QuineHarvard logician who attacked the analytic–synthetic distinction1909–1995Mou ZongsanLeading second-generation New Confucian and translator of Kant1910–1989A. J. AyerOxford philosopher who brought logical positivism to English readersOn the record
Beauvoir influenced Sartre’s philosophy.
How far is debated. Beauvoir herself called her philosophy an elaboration of Sartre’s, but since the 1990s scholars have asked whether ideas in Being and Nothingness (1943) first appeared in her novel She Came to Stay (1943); her diaries show ideas developed before, alongside and often against his.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Simone de Beauvoir”