Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most influential existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century, was born in Paris on July 21, 1905. When Sartre was barely over a year old, his father Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer, caught a fever and died. His mother, an Alsatian woman named Anne-Marie Schweitzer, moved with her infant son back to her father's house after her husband died. Sartre's grandfather, a high school teacher, was very influential on Sartre's upbringing, acting as a tutor and teaching him mathematics and classical literature. Sartre's mother eventually remarried, and he moved with her and his step-father to La Rochelle.

Sartre began attending L'Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris beginning in 1924. He had recently become fascinated with philosophy, and readily devoured the works of Heidegger and Husserl, as well as classic philosophers like Descartes, Kant, and Kierkegaard. It was while in school that Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir, a young woman who was also an aspiring philosopher, as well as a feminist. They were both enamoured with Marxist thought, which inspired them to challenge bourgeois and traditional cultural values. The deep friendship (and casual romance) between Sartre and de Beauvoir lasted for their whole lives. When he graduated from L'Ecole in 1929, he became a philosophy professor, teaching first at Le Havre, then taking a break to study philosophy in Berlin, and finally returning as a teacher to Lycee Pasteur in Paris. In 1940 Sartre was captured as a German prisoner of war while serving the French army as a meteorologist. He spent nearly a year in captivity, during which time he wrote a play (Sartre, though very prolific in his strictly philosophical writings, would always be most popular for his plays). He was finally allowed to return to Paris, where he again took up teaching, along with starting the resistance group Socialisme et Liberte with de Beauvoir and others. This activism did not last long, and so Sartre turned his energies toward writing, and soon had written some of his most well known works: the monumental work of phenomenology, Being and Nothingness, and two plays, No Exit and The Flies.

Sartre also regularly contributed his thoughts in the form of newspaper articles, especially to the socialist paper Combat, whose editor was another philosopher by the name of Albert Camus. Camus eventually rejected the communist circle, and was critical of Sartre's pretensions to 'resistance', believing that Sartre merely 'resisted' on paper but not in action.

Sartre was rather politically active after this first phase of his career, however, and traveled all over the world participating in various causes. At this time he also refined his intellectualism, continuing to write and evaluate the post-WWII world. His activism ranged from protesting the Vietnam War and supporting Algerian independence from France, to meeting Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba during the 1960s. Sartre was becoming quite a figure in current philosophical thought as well. As his personal philosophy had grown more sophisticated, he had further developed his brand of existentialism that centered on being and and person's responsibility to essentially create himself--without reference to a god or any sort of pre-ordained intentionality. There is no higher purpose than what man freely chooses and creates for himself. Sartre was also artistically inclined, and saw art as a venue for this inherently creative element of man's existence.

Toward the end of Sartre's life, he experienced consistently ailing health, although that did not stop his writing or involvement with causes like student rebellions during the 1960s. He worked very hard at his writing, and this took it's toll along with the high drug consumption that he used to keep himself going. Furthermore, his vision was nearly gone by 1973. Sartre died on April 15, 1980, after suffering an edema of the lung. A household name, his funeral included a two-hour march that was attended by up to 50,000 people. He is buried in Paris, at the Cimetiere de Montparnasse.