Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into
the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up
to you to give [life] a meaning.”
BACKGROUND
• a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political
activist, biographer, and literary critic, as well as a
leading figure in 20th-century French
philosophy and Marxism.
• Born in Paris, France in June 21, 1905
• the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of
the French Navy, and Anne-Marie (Schweitzer).
• At two years old, his father died of an illness
• At twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and the family
moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently
bullied, in part due to the wandering of his blind right
eye (sensory exotropia).
EDUCATION
• He attended the Lycée Henri IV in Paris and, later on,
the lycée in La Rochelle.
• In the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy
upon reading Henri Bergson's essay Time and Free
Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness.
• He studied and earned certificates in psychology,
history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy, ethics
and sociology, and physics in Paris at the École
normale supérieure, an institution of higher education
that was the alma mater for several prominent French
thinkers and intellectuals
PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCE
• The most decisive influence on Sartre's philosophical
development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre
Kojève's seminars, which continued for a number of
years.
KEY EXPERIENCES
• From 1931 until 1945, Sartre taught at
various lycées of Le Havre
• In 1932, Sartre read Voyage au bout de la
nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a book that had a
remarkable influence on him
• In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at
the Institut français d'Allemagne in Berlin where he
studied Edmund Husserl's phenomenological
philosophy
• In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army,
where he served as a meteorologist.
• After WORLD WAR II, he became an outspoken
admirer of the Soviet Union
ACHIEVEMENT/S
• Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was awarded in
October 1964.
- Yet declined and he always refused official
distinctions because did not want to be
“institutionalised”.
CONTRIBUTIONS
• His major contribution to twentieth-century thinking
was his system of existentialism, an ensemble of ideas
describing humans' freedom and responsibilities
within a framework of human dignity.
• Sartre’s theoretical writings as well as his novels and
plays constitute one of the main inspirational sources
of modern literature.
FAMOUS WORKS
• Nausea (1938)
• Being and Nothingness (1943)
• Existentialism and Humanism (1946).
DEATH
• Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially
because of the merciless pace of work
• He suffered from hypertension, and became almost
completely blind in 1973.
• Sartre was a notorious chain smoker, which could also
have contributed to the deterioration of his health.
• Sartre died on 15 April 1980 in Paris from pulmonary
edema.
• He had not wanted to be buried at Père-Lachaise
Cemetery between his mother and stepfather, so it
was arranged that he be buried at Montparnasse
Cemetery.
• At his funeral on Saturday, 19 April, 50,000 Parisians
descended onto boulevard du Montparnasse to
accompany Sartre's cortege. The funeral started at
"the hospital at 2:00 p.m., then filed through the
fourteenth arrondissement, past all Sartre's haunts,
and entered the cemetery through the gate on the
Boulevard Edgar Quinet".
• Sartre was initially buried in a temporary grave to the
left of the cemetery gate. Four days later the body was
disinterred for cremation at Père-Lachaise Cemetery,
and his ashes were reburied at the permanent site in
Montparnasse Cemetery, to the right of the cemetery
gate.