French thinker born in 1905,
engagement philosopher, existentialist, writer, Nobel Prize winner (he declined it).
His existentialist philosophy, proposes no god, no
ethic, no moral, and was meant to be a cleaning of the old
secular values, where god is replaced by some ethical statements. It completely denied the existence of some kind of rules on to behave. The solution was the subject being conscious of his position towards the world, his question was made to be: "
What would happen if all acted this way?"
The decision of the subject in
good faith, and freedom, was
the real act of man.
His literature, not meant to be a completion of his philosophical work, but a parallel creation, nevertheless contained a lot of his philosophical symbols and the characters were situated inside the existential anguish that Sartre described as the consequence of freedom.
Here are some of Sartre's more memorable and delectable citations or extracts:
”I have replaced my earlier notion of consciousness (although I still use the word a lot), with what I call le vecu - ‘lived experience’. I will try to describe in a moment what I mean with this term, which is neither the preconscious, nor the unconscious, nor consciousness, but the terrain in which the individual is perpetually overflowed by himself and his riches and consciousness plays the trick of determining itself by forgetfulness.” (1969)
“A simple formula would be to say that life taught me la force des choses – the power of circumstances.” (1969)
“But the most striking feature of the man, it seems to me, was the metaphysical anguish which he endured so openly and modestly. Not a single day passed without him being tempted to kill himself. But this suspended death gave him a kind of charming and destructing irony - his native intelligence, which was above all the art of finding and establishing in his daily life, and even in his perception, a lethal duet to which he submitted all the objects of this world.” (Mallarme: the poetry of suicide)
garcin: Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? ...Ah, I see; it's life without a break.
valet: What are you talking about?
garcin: Your eyelids. We move ours up and down. Blinking, we call it. It’s like a small black shutter that clicks down and makes a break. Everything goes black; one's eyes are moistened. You can't imagine how restful, refreshing, it is. Four thousand little rests per hour. Four thousand little respites--just think!...So that's the idea. I'm to live without eyelids.
huis clos: Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why,now,should it be disagreeable? ...Ah,I see; it's life without a break.(Huis Clos)
Biography of the man:
1905 - born 21 June
1906 - 21 September his father dies, due to a lung disease. Sartre goes to Paris with his mother, to live with his grandparents
1914 - First World War
1917 - His mother marries Joseph Mancy
1917 - Enters the Lyceum of La Rochelle
1918 - First World War ends
- Starts teaching in Lyceum
1938 - Publishes La Nausee
1939 - Second World War starts. He enters the army as a meteorologist, June 21
1940 - Taken prisoner by the German force.
1941 - March: regains freedom. April 2nd, returns to Paris after a year spent out of the city
1943 - June 3rd Les Mouches
1943 - June: Nothingness and being
1944 - Huis Clos
1944 - Paris is liberated
1945 - Travels to USA
1954 - Travels to USSR
1958 - The Freud Scenario
1960 - Critique de la raison dialectique
1960 - Travel to Cuba
1960 - Camus dies
1967 - Travel to Israel
1964 - Wins Nobel prize and rejects it
1970 - Becomes director of la cause du people
1972 - Sartre par lui meme by contat and astruc
1978 - Publishes Pouvoir et Liberte in Temps Modernes
1980 - April 15, dies in Broussais hospital