Viola
Christina Viola
Dr. Law
Ethics and Tragedy
May 6, 2004
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre was a French philosopher and existentialist writer. He was born on June 21, 1905 in Paris, France. At age eight, Jean-Paul started writing small plays inspired from the puppets his mother gave him. By the time Germany declared war in Europe in 1914, Sartre had written his first short story. His story was about a French private who captured the Kaiser, and to show that he was superior to the Germans, the Frenchman challenged the Kaiser to a fistfight and won. (Wyatt) “Sartre felt a sense of power and control when writing.” (Ibid) In 1917, Sartre attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He graduated from the Ècole Normale Supérieure in 1929. That same year he served in the French military for eighteen months. From 1931 to 1945 he worked as a teacher and traveled in Egypt, Greece, and Italy. In 1933-34 he lived in Berlin and studied the writings of the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. (kirjasto.com) In 1938, Nausea was published. In the novel “he described the horror and mystery which a man experiences when he considers the unexplainable fact of a thing’s existence.” (Soll) During World War II, Sartre was back into the military. He was captured and held hostage. While he was being held he started writing Being and Nothingness. In this philosophical work, “Sartre investigated the nature and forms of existence or being. He claimed that human existence, which he called ‘being-for-itself’ is radically different from the existence of such inanimate objects as tables, which he called ‘being-in-itself’.”(Ibid) In June 1943, his play, The Flies, an anti-Nazi play, opened and then closed shortly after only forty performances. (Wyatt) In Paris, he started writing political columns in magazines. After the war he started writing monthly literary and political reviews and founded the magazine Les Temps Modernes. After World War II, existentialism grew as a philosophical ideology. It was at this time that Sartre became a Marxist believer, and a popular atheistic existentialist philosopher. (Landry) “In 1946, in his essay Existentialism and Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre defined existentialism as the doctrine that, for mankind, ‘existence preceded essence’.” (Soll) Sartre said: “Man is a useless passion.” He identified this idea of perfectly self-sufficient beings who are the cause of their own existence as the traditional idea of God. (Ibid) He believed that there is no God, so humans must rely on their own choices and morals. He believed that no man can escape choosing, because even the choice not to choose is a choice in itself. Sartre wrote, “Existence is prior to essence. Man is nothing at birth and throughout his life he is no more than the sum of his past commitments. To believe in anything outside his own will is to be guilty of ‘bad faith’. Existentialist despair and anguish is the acknowledgement that man is condemned to freedom.” (Landry) This means that man, through life, defines who he is through living, while objects are what they are until they are destroyed. As humans we have the ability to think, reason, and grow. We define our lives with the choices we make, and every thing we do is a choice, even the option not to choose.
