"Man is a useless passion."

Sartre is probably the best known of the existentialists, and clearly straddles the line between philosopher and psychologist (and social activist as well!). Jean-Paul Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France, the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre and his wife Anne-Marie. His father died one year later of colitis, so his mother took him to live with her grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, a German professor at the Sorbonne and the uncle of the famous missionary-philosopher Albert Schweitzer.

Rather lost in the disciplined household of her grandfather, Anne-Marie and her small but highly intelligent son grew very close. A childhood illness left Sartre blind in one eye, which drifted outward and up, so he forever seemed to be looking elsewhere. Lonely, he began to write stories and plays as an escape.

Anne-Marie escaped her grandfather's house by getting remarried when Jean-Paul was twelve. Jean-Paul became rebellious and unmanageable, so he was sent to a boarding school. There, he continued his trouble-making ways, and frequently spent time in detention.

After lycée (roughly, high school), Sartre attended the Ecole Normale Superieure at the Sorbonne. Brilliant but disorganized and inattentive, he placed last out of 50 students on his exit exams. The following year, he studied with a young woman named Simone de Beauvoir, and graduated in 1929. He placed first this time, and she second. They would have a strong but open love relationship until their deaths.

After graduation, Sartre taught at a series of lycées for many years.  He spent one year in Berlin attending lectures by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.  This approach would figure prominently in several of his philosophical works, including Imagination (1936), Sketch for a Theory of Emotions (1939), and The Psychology of Imagination (1940)

In 1938, Sartre published his first novel, Nausea.  In this novel, he writes about the feelling of nausea that his character feels when he contemplates the "thickness" of the material world, including other people and his own body.  The novel is strange, but the descriptions are compelling, and Sartre began to make a name for himself.

In 1939, Sartre was drafted into the army.  He was taken prisoner in 1940 and released a year later.  His experiences as a participant in the resistance would color many of his later works.  In June of 1943, his play The Flies opened in Paris.  Even though it was blatantly anti-Nazi, the play was sometimes attended by Nazi officers!

Also in 1943, he published his masterpiece, L'être et le néant (Being and Nothingness).  In this large and difficult work, he outlined his theory that human consciousness was a sort of no-thing-ness surrounded by the thickness of being.  As a "nothingness," human consciousness is free from determinism, resulting in the difficult situation of our being ultimately responsible for our own lives.  "Man is condemned to be free."  On the other hand, without an "essence" to provide direction, human consciousness is also ultimately meaningless.

"All existing things are born for no reason, continue through weakness and die by accident....  It is meaningless that we are born;  it is meaningless that we die."

Perhaps his best known philosophical point is "existence precedes essence."  In the case of non-human entities, an essence is something that is prior to somethings actual existence.  A table's essence is the intention that its creator, builder, or user has for it, such as its general shape, components, and function.  A woodchuck's essence is in its genetic inheritance, its instincts, and the conditions of its environment -- and its entire life is sort of the playing out of a program.  But a human being, according to Sartre, doesn't have a true essence.  Oh, sure, we have our general shape, our genetics, our upbringings and the like.  But they do not determine our lives, they only set the stage.  It is we ourselves who shape our lives.  We are the ones who choose what to do with the raw materials nature has provided us.  We create ourselves.  And our "essence" is only clear when our whole life is done.  Another way to put it is that our "essence" is our lack of essence; our "essence" is our freedom.

In 1944, he produced one of his most famous play, Huis Clos or No Exit.  This play, and several others, present the problem of living with one's fellow man, and are quite pessimistic.  "Hell is other people" is the famous quote from No Exit.

After World War II, Sartre became increasingly concerned with the issue of social responsibility.  He postulated that being free meant not only being responsible for your own life, but being responsible for the lives of all human beings.  He outlined this idea in Existentialism and Humanism (1946) and a novel called Les Chemins de la Liberté (Paths of Liberty, 1945, never completed).

"But if existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men."

Sartre also wrote deep psychological examinations of famous French writers:  Baudelaire (1947), Jean Genet (1952), and Flaubert (two of three volumes completed in 1971 and 1972).  In these, he looks at these writers from existential, psychoanalytic, and Marxist perspectives, in an effort to create the most complete phenomenological portraits possible.  The books are, unfortunately, practically unreadable!

Sartre was an admirer of Karl Marx's writings, and of the Soviet Union.  His support of Russian communism ended in 1956 when the Russian army marched into Budapest to stop the Hungarian efforts at independence. (My own family emigrated to the US from the Netherlands in that year, fearful of a third world war.)  Still hopeful, he wrote a critical analysis of Marxism in 1960 supporting the fundamental ideas of Marx, but criticizing the Russian form Marxism had taken.

In 1963, he published his autobiography, Les Mots (Words).  He was awarded the Nobel Prize the following year, but he refused it on political grounds.  Here is an example of his evocative style:

"I'm a dog. I yawn, the tears roll down my cheeks, I feel them. I'm a tree, the wind gets caught in my branches and shakes them vaguely. I'm a fly, I climb up a window-pane, I fall, I start climbing again. Now and then, I feel the caress of time as it goes by. At other times - most often - I feel it standing still. Trembling minutes drop down, engulf me, and are a long time dying. Wallowing, but still alive, they're swept away.  They are replaced by others which are fresher but equally futile. This disgust is called happiness."

Toward the end of the 1970's, Sartre's health began to degenerate.  His bad habits included smoking two packs of unfiltered French cigarettes a day, heavy drinking, and the use of amphetamines to help him stay awake while writing.  He died on April 15, 1980, of lung cancer.  Simone de Beauvoir tried to stay with his body and had to be taken away by attendants.  His funeral procession was attended by over 50,000 mourners.

This philosophy of existentialism, as difficult as it is to express and live, had a great impact on any number of thinkers in this century.  Among them are philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Buber, Ortega y Gassett, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich, Merleau-Ponty, psychologists such as Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Erich Fromm, Rollo May, and Viktor Frankl, and even the post-modernist movement’s Foucault and Derrida.  Less directly, existentialism has influenced American psychologists such as Carl Rogers.  The influence continues to this day.

*Spiegelberg, Herbert (1965).  The Phenomenological Movement.  The Hague:  Martinus Nijhoff.

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree