Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980

Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th-century French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist, the leading public exponent of existentialism in the post-war period. His major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, develops a phenomenological account of consciousness, freedom, and the situated character of human existence. The 1946 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism summarises his central thesis that existence precedes essence, and his plays and novels, including No Exit and Nausea, dramatize existential themes for a wide audience. He turned increasingly toward Marxism in his later work, attempting to integrate existential freedom with historical materialism. Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and remained a prominent voice in French political life throughout the post-war era.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was the most prominent French intellectual of the postwar generation. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure with Beauvoir, taught philosophy in Le Havre and Berlin (where he encountered Heidegger), served in the French army at the start of World War II, was briefly a prisoner of war, and emerged from the German occupation as the central voice of French existentialism.

Being and Nothingness (1943) is Sartre's major philosophical work — an existential phenomenology built from Heideggerian materials but reframed as a philosophy of human freedom. Consciousness, on Sartre's account, is the for-itself, a nothingness that confronts the in-itself of brute being and projects meaning into a meaningless world. Existence precedes essence; we are condemned to choose; bad faith is the project of denying our own freedom. The wartime lecture L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1945) made the framework accessible to a broad public.

Sartre's later work — the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) — sought to integrate existentialism with Marxism. His commitment to communism, his break with Camus over Soviet repression, his refusal of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, and his enduring lifelong partnership with Simone de Beauvoir made him a public figure as much as a philosopher. He died in Paris in 1980; the funeral procession of fifty thousand mourners marked the close of an intellectual era.