Jean-Paul Sartre: Biography Of An Existentialist Philosopher

Philosopher, playwright, activist, political journalist, writer … Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most prominent representatives of existentialism and humanist Marxism. His work contains the essence of contemporary thought and those valuable reflections between the complex relationship between the self and society. His ideas, his legacy, have been key to psychology.

Influenced by other great German thinkers such as Husser and Heidegger, Sartre was that man capable of winning the Nobel Prize and declining it. All due to the firm need to be consistent with its ideological principles. He was also that figure capable of taking up arms to fight for the liberation of an African people and thereby showing us that freedom, as such, required a genuine commitment.

Likewise, and beyond his facet as a philosopher, as an activist and writer, it is interesting to influence the impact of his work in the psychological context. Jean-Paul Sartre laid the foundations for a new trend, the existential-humanist.   His position based on man’s responsibility for his actions, on self-knowledge and his well-known premise of   “I think therefore I am”, marked a before and after.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the biography of an activist philosopher

Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. He was the son of a naval soldier. However, the early loss of his father made his education as different as it was decisive. He was raised by his mother and grandfather. Anne Marie Schweitzer, would transmit him the passion for literature, while Albert Schweitzer would initiate him in philosophy.

He did not therefore hesitate to follow that intellectual current. So  in 1929 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy at an elite center such as the  École Normale Supérieure . It was precisely during this student period that he met Simone de Beauvoir, who would be his lifelong companion and that indispensable intellectual ally in his day-to-day life.

However, everything would change a lot with the outbreak of World War II. In fact, he became a prisoner of the Germans. Episode that would mark his later works, once he was released in 1941. It did not take him long to return to active life collaborating with Albert Camus in Combat, the newspaper of the Resistance.

A man committed to freedom and social activism

In 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir began a joint project of great social inspiration. It was about the political and literary magazine “Les temps modernes”. His socialist ideals and his contacts with communism already fully marked this decisive stage in his biography.

He was a fierce critic of the Vietnam War. The purpose was to show the world the crimes and injustices carried out by the United States. Later, in 1964, Sartre would receive the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the field of thought. However, as we have already pointed out, he rejected it.

According to Sartre, accepting the Nobel caused the loss of that critical vision as a philosopher, as a mind committed to social activism and intellectual independence. He spent his entire life in solidarity with infinite causes and lived in a humble way.

He died on April 15, 1980. He was 74 years old, and thousands of people attended his funeral. Rest in the Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris.

Nausea , Jean-Paul Sartre’s greatest literary contribution

To understand the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre and his contribution to humanist existentialism it  is necessary that we approach his debut feature: Nausea. This book, beyond its undoubted literary quality, urged the society of the time to understand the world in a different way. Through a more awake, critical and profound vision.

Referents of Nausea

Sartre wrote this work with little more than 26 years and when he was in Berlin, coinciding with the arrival of Hitler to power. At that time, all he did was read his two theoretical referents: Husserl and Heidegger. I felt an absolute fascination for the concept of the phenomenology of the former and for this way of describing events through perception, of the impressions that the outside leaves on our mind.

In this way, Sartre’s best-known book is a phenomenological exercise in which he describes his own experience as a teacher at a Le Havre high school. In this context, the only thing he felt and perceived was darkness, emptiness, meaningless to everything that was happening around him.