One of the fathers of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) acquired larger-than-life status in Western Europe due to his fiction, movies, political activism, love affairs, and provocative philosophy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, but declined the distinction, saying that a true writer must remain aloof from such honors.
Sartre was born in Paris, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy and met his lifelong partner, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). He studied for two years in Germany, then returned to France to write Nausea, a seminal existentialist novel.
During World War II, Sartre was drafted into the French army, captured by the Germans, and held for nine months in a Nazi prison camp. He was released due to poor health (he had lost sight in one eye at age three). For the rest of the war, Sartre contributed to underground magazines and organized opposition among intellectuals to the Nazi occupation. He also embraced Communism at this time and published the landmark existentialist treatise Being and Nothingness in 1943.
Existentialism, a movement influenced by earlier European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), amounted to a repudiation of almost all classic Western philosophy since Plato (c. 429–347 BC). It takes its name from the famous motto “Existence precedes essence.” Roughly speaking, the existentialists believed that humans create their own lives and beings and there are no metaphysical or religious forms that define them.
After World War II, Sartre and Albert Camus (1913–1960) emerged as two of the most famous French existentialists. Sartre—in part because of his public involvement with controversial political stances and his high-profile relationship with Beauvoir—became a pillar of French culture, the archetype of the café-dwelling Left Bank intellectual.
Sartre’s personal life included numerous affairs with young admirers; he sometimes had four or five mistresses at a time. He would then chronicle his exploits in candid letters to Beauvoir (to whom he had promised “transparency,” if not monogamy). Still, the two philosophers remained inseparable until his death from a lung infection at age seventy-four.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Sartre’s books were banned en masse by the Catholic Church in 1948.
- One of his most famous quotes, from the play No Exit (1944), is “Hell is other people.”
- Before receiving the Nobel Prize, Sartre wrote a letter to the Nobel Institute in Sweden, asking to be removed from consideration. The letter was never opened, however.
