Jean-Paul Sartre: biography of an existentialist philosopher

Philosopher, playwright, activist, political journalist, writer… Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most prominent representatives of existentialism and humanist Marxism.. His work contains the essence of contemporary thought and those valuable reflections on the complex relationship between the self and society. His ideas, his legacy, have been key to psychology.

Influenced by other great German thinkers such as Husser and Heidegger, Sartre He was that man capable of winning the Nobel Prize and declining it. All due to the firm need to be consistent with its ideological principles. He was also that figure capable of taking up arms to fight for the liberation of an African people and thereby showing us that freedom, as such, required an authentic commitment.

Likewise, and beyond his role as a philosopher, as an activist and writer, it is interesting to focus on the impact of his work in the psychological context. Jean-Paul Sartre laid the foundations of a new current, the existential-humanist one. His position based on man’s responsibility for his actions, on self-knowledge and his well-known premise of “I think therefore I am”, They marked a before and after.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the biography of an activist philosopher

Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. He was the son of a naval soldier. However, the early loss of his father made his education as different as it was decisive. He was raised by his mother and grandfather. Anne Marie Schweitzer would transmit to him a passion for literature, while Albert Schweitzer would introduce him to philosophy.

Therefore, he did not hesitate to follow that intellectual trend. So that In 1929 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy at an elitist center such as the Ecole Normale Supérieure. It was precisely during this student period that he met Simone de Beauvoir, who would be his companion for life and that indispensable intellectual ally in his daily life.

Now, everything would change quite a bit with the outbreak of World War II. In fact, He became a prisoner of the Germans. Episode that would mark his subsequent work, once he regained his freedom in 1941.. It didn’t take her too long to return to active life, collaborating with Albert Camus on Combat, the Resistance newspaper.

A man committed to freedom and social activism

In 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would begin a joint project of great social inspiration. It was the political and literary magazine “Les temps modernes”. His socialist ideals and his contacts with communism already fully marked this decisive stage in his biography.

He was a fierce critic of the Vietnam War. The purpose was set to show the world the crimes and injustices carried out by the United States. Later, in 1964, Sartre would receive the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the field of thought. However, as we have already noted, he rejected it.

According to Sartre, accepting the Nobel Prize caused us to lose that critical vision as a philosopher, as a mind committed to social activism and intellectual independence. He spent his entire life supporting countless causes and lived humbly.

He died on April 15, 1980. He was 74 years old, and thousands of people attended his funeral. He rests in the Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris.

Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre’s greatest literary contribution

To understand the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre and his contribution to existential-humanist It is necessary that we approach his debut work: The nausea. This book, beyond its undoubted literary quality, urged the society of the time to understand the world in a different way. Through a more awake, critical and profound vision.

References of The nausea

Sartre wrote this work when he was just over 26 years old and when he was in Berlin, coinciding with Hitler’s arrival to power.. At that time, the only thing he did was read his two theoretical references: Husserl and Heidegger. He felt an absolute fascination with the concept of phenomenology of the first and with that way of describing events through perception, through the impressions that the exterior leaves on our minds.

In that way, Sartre’s best-known book is a phenomenological exercise in which he describes his own experience as a teacher at a high school in Le Havre. In that context, the only thing he felt and perceived was darkness, emptiness, lack of meaning in the face of everything that was happening around him.

Antoine Roquentin, Sartre’s alter ego

The protagonist of The nausea is Antoine Roquetin, Sartre’s alter ego. We are faced with a young man who arrives from Indochina to settle in an imaginary city with a very specific purpose: to write a biography about an 18th century aristocrat. The only thing our protagonist does is write, interact with the owner of the hotel, listen to jazz and talk to Autodidacto, a creature eager for knowledge who consumes one book after another.

In this unique setting the plot of The nausea. A work where the reader also “consumes” page after page, the deep apathy of the protagonist. His disgust, his incomprehension of everything that surrounds him. Everything is subject to chance, everything gravitates to its own rhythm to the point that everyday life takes on terrifying overtones.

Something that we must keep in mind about this work to understand it is the following. What Sartre describes to us takes place between 1936 and 1938. At that time, not only the rise of Nazism in Germany took place. Also, a profound moral crisis arose in French society, which he witnessed and which he masterfully reflected in Nausea.

Final thoughts

In this work he left us messages that can (and should) be applied at any historical moment:

Let us think about it and do not hesitate to return, from time to time, to this exceptional legacy left to us by a great existentialist philosopher: Jean-Paul Sartre.

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