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152-415: No Fear T-shirts were very popular from the early-1990s to early-2000s, peculiarly not having been endorsed by any celebrities. Shirts typically featured existential slogans or quotes that touted the virtues of extreme sports . Common themes that flagrantly touted absolute intolerance of included death anxiety , laziness inclination, conforming to social norms, and the adherence to the law. Distribution of

304-516: A catchphrase meaning communist activists should not tell the whole truth to the workers in order to avoid decline in their revolutionary enthusiasm. In 1954, just after Stalin's death, Sartre visited the Soviet Union, which he stated he found a "complete freedom of criticism" while condemning the United States for sinking into "prefascism". Sartre wrote about those Soviet writers expelled from

456-427: A leap of faith is a possible means for an individual to reach a higher stage of existence that transcends and contains both an aesthetic and ethical value of life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism , and various strands of psychotherapy. However, Kierkegaard believed that individuals should live in accordance with their thinking. In Twilight of

608-414: A media prank following Charles Lindbergh 's successful New York City–Paris flight; Sartre & Co. called newspapers and informed them that Lindbergh was going to be awarded an honorary École degree. Many newspapers, including Le Petit Parisien , announced the event on 25 May. Thousands, including journalists and curious spectators, showed up, unaware that what they were witnessing was a stunt involving

760-454: A teacher of German who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age. When he was 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 ). As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson 's essay Time and Free Will: An Essay on

912-634: A tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes , which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967. His work after Stalin's death, the Critique de la raison dialectique ( Critique of Dialectical Reason ), appeared in 1960 (a second volume appearing posthumously). In the Critique Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity

1064-467: A Lindbergh look-alike . The scandal led Lanson to resign. In 1929 at the École normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir , who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous . The first time Sartre took the agrégation , he failed. He took it

1216-562: A No Fear energy drink was through partnership with SoBe . Flavors and versions currently consist of: No Fear was the official energy drink of the World Extreme Cagefighting , and sponsored fighter Urijah Faber . No Fear began a promotion in 2009 to earn No Fear "cred" by entering codes found under the tab of the cans. Participants could use points earned to acquire No Fear gear. Grand prizes include admission to: On February 12, 2008, World Extreme Cagefighting announced that

1368-416: A better car, bigger house, better quality of life, etc.) without acknowledging the facticity of not currently having the financial means to do so . In this example, considering both facticity and transcendence, an authentic mode of being would be considering future projects that might improve one's current finances (e.g. putting in extra hours, or investing savings) in order to arrive at a future-facticity of

1520-536: A bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it. He was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, and remains one of only two laureates to do so. According to Lars Gyllensten , in the book Minnen, bara minnen ("Memories, Only Memories") published in 2000, Sartre himself or someone close to him got in touch with

1672-478: A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which is to say that individuals shape themselves by existing and cannot be perceived through preconceived and a priori categories, an "essence". The actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called their "true essence" instead of an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Human beings, through their own consciousness , create their own values and determine

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1824-541: A concrete world. Although Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy in the 1940s, Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed" to that of Sartre. Unlike Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929. In Germany, the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers —who later described existentialism as a "phantom" created by the public —called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Existenzphilosophie . For Jaspers, " Existenz -philosophy

1976-410: A condition of every action. Despair is generally defined as a loss of hope. In existentialism, it is more specifically a loss of hope in reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds their being-thing compromised, they would normally be found in

2128-556: A domestic target of the paramilitary Organisation armée secrète (OAS), escaping two bomb attacks in the early '60s. He later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence . (He had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm , who became his adopted daughter in 1965.) He opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized

2280-508: A drama concerning Christmas. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Martin Heidegger 's Sein und Zeit , later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology . Because of poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight and exotropia affected his balance), Sartre was released in April 1941. According to other sources, he escaped after a medical visit to

2432-707: A form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena—"the Other"—that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserted, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the Look" of "the Other" (i.e., possessed by another person—or at least one's idea of that other person). An existentialist reading of

2584-643: A leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism . Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology ). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory , post-colonial theory , and literary studies . He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution." Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir . Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged

2736-415: A major work on these themes, The Destiny of Man , in 1931. Gabriel Marcel , long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925) and in his Metaphysical Journal (1927). A dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found his philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical alienation:

2888-479: A man unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism , quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis . Other Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment ,

3040-432: A meaning to their life. This view is in contradiction to Aristotle and Aquinas , who taught that essence precedes individual existence. Although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger, and Kierkegaard: The subjective thinker's form , the form of his communication, is his style . His form must be just as manifold as are

3192-566: A meaningless universe", considering less "What is the good life?" (to feel, be, or do, good), instead asking "What is life good for?". Although many outside Scandinavia consider the term existentialism to have originated from Kierkegaard, it is more likely that Kierkegaard adopted this term (or at least the term "existential" as a description of his philosophy) from the Norwegian poet and literary critic Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven . This assertion comes from two sources: Sartre argued that

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3344-580: A meeting that the Socialisme et Liberté assassinate prominent war collaborators like Marcel Déat , but de Beauvoir noted his idea was rejected as "none of us felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades". The British historian Ian Ousby observed that the French always had far more hatred for collaborators than they did for the Germans, noting it was French people like Déat that Sartre wanted to assassinate rather than

3496-413: A metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement", meaning that he thought Sartre had simply switched the roles traditionally attributed to essence and existence without interrogating these concepts and their history. The notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of

3648-501: A modest pay rise, further leading to purchase of an affordable car. Another aspect of facticity is that it entails angst . Freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity and the lack of the possibility of having facticity to "step in" and take responsibility for something one has done also produces angst. Another aspect of existential freedom is that one can change one's values. One is responsible for one's values, regardless of society's values. The focus on freedom in existentialism

3800-648: A person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, they are in perpetual despair—and as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence found in conventional reality on which to constitute the individual's sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in Either/Or : "Let each one learn what he can; both of us can learn that a person's unhappiness never lies in his lack of control over external conditions, since this would only make him completely unhappy." In Works of Love , he says: When

3952-510: A radical distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted naturalistically, but as a being created in God's image, an originator of free, creative acts. He published

4104-675: A resister who wrote. In 1945, after the war ended, Sartre moved to an apartment on the rue Bonaparte , where he was to produce most of his subsequent work and where he lived until 1962. It was from there that he helped establish a quarterly literary and political review , Les Temps modernes ( Modern Times ), in part to popularize his thought. He ceased teaching and devoted his time to writing and political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté ( The Roads to Freedom ) (1945–1949). The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to

4256-411: A revolution. Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara . After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age" and the "era's most perfect man". Sartre would also compliment Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of

4408-446: A role (bank manager, lion tamer, sex worker, etc.) acts. In Being and Nothingness , Sartre uses the example of a waiter in "bad faith". He merely takes part in the "act" of being a typical waiter, albeit very convincingly. This image usually corresponds to a social norm, but this does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic. The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and responsibility and

4560-451: A second period—when the world was perceived as split into communist and capitalist blocs—of highly publicized political involvement. Sartre tended to glorify the Resistance after the war as the uncompromising expression of morality in action, and recalled that the résistants were a "band of brothers" who had enjoyed "real freedom" in a way that did not exist before nor after the war. Sartre

4712-527: A second time and virtually tied for first place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded first place, with Beauvoir second. From 1931 until 1945, Sartre taught at various lycées of Le Havre (at the Lycée de Le Havre, the present-day Lycée François-Ier (Le Havre)  [ fr ] , 1931–1936), Laon (at the Lycée de Laon, 1936–37), and, finally, Paris (at the Lycée Pasteur , 1937–1939, and at

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4864-571: A simple man with few possessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the May 1968 strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience . President Charles de Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrest Voltaire ". In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied: I would like [people] to remember Nausea , [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and

5016-761: A single force between the blocs, not a third bloc, but an autonomous force which will refuse to allow itself to be torn into shreds between American optimism and Russian scientificism. About the Korean War, Sartre wrote: "I have no doubt that the South Korean feudalists and the American imperialists have promoted this war. But I do not doubt either that it was begun by the North Koreans". In July 1950, Sartre wrote in Les Temps Modernes about his and de Beauvoir's attitude to

5168-530: A sort of morality in the religious (although he would not agree that it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical), and Jean-Paul Sartre 's final words in Being and Nothingness (1943): "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory (or impure) reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work." Some have argued that existentialism has long been an element of European religious thought, even before

5320-435: A state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses the ability to sing may despair if they have nothing else to fall back on—nothing to rely on for their identity. They find themselves unable to be what defined their being. What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when they are not overtly in despair. So long as

5472-409: A statement by Sartre explaining his refusal. He said he did not wish to be "transformed" by such an award, and did not want to take sides in an East vs. West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution. Nevertheless, he was that year's prizewinner. Though his name was then a household word (as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained

5624-500: A teleological fashion: "an essence is the relational property of having a set of parts ordered in such a way as to collectively perform some activity". For example, it belongs to the essence of a house to keep the bad weather out, which is why it has walls and a roof. Humans are different from houses because—unlike houses—they do not have an inbuilt purpose: they are free to choose their own purpose and thereby shape their essence; thus, their existence precedes their essence . Sartre

5776-416: A threat of quietism , which is inherently against the existentialist philosophy. It has been said that the possibility of suicide makes all humans existentialists. The ultimate hero of absurdism lives without meaning and faces suicide without succumbing to it. Facticity is defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943) as the in-itself , which for humans takes the form of being and not being. It

5928-494: A will, and end..." Within this view, Nietzsche ties in his rejection of the existence of God, which he sees as a means to "redeem the world." By rejecting the existence of God, Nietzsche also rejects beliefs that claim humans have a predestined purpose according to what God has instructed. The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian, Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground portrays

6080-400: Is authenticity . Existentialism would influence many disciplines outside of philosophy, including theology , drama, art, literature, and psychology. Existentialist philosophy encompasses a range of perspectives, but it shares certain underlying concepts. Among these, a central tenet of existentialism is that personal freedom, individual responsibility, and deliberate choice are essential to

6232-405: Is a Humanism : "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards." The more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: a person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Jonathan Webber interprets Sartre's usage of the term essence not in a modal fashion, i.e. as necessary features, but in

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6384-520: Is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that prioritize the existence of the human individual, study existence from the individual's perspective, and conclude that, despite the absurdity or incomprehensibility of the universe, individuals must still embrace responsibility for their actions and strive to lead authentic lives . In examining meaning , purpose, and value , existentialist thought often includes concepts such as existential crises , angst , courage , and freedom . Existentialism

6536-401: Is a form of necessity for freedom, which can never be given up." This theory relies upon his position that there is no creator, and is illustrated using the example of the paper cutter . Sartre says that if one considered a paper cutter, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because there

6688-473: Is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one did not choose (birthplace, etc.), but a condition of freedom in the sense that one's values most likely depend on it. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" (as being past, for instance), it cannot determine a person: the value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person. As an example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and

6840-403: Is associated with several 19th- and 20th-century European philosophers who shared an emphasis on the human subject, despite often profound differences in thought. Among the 19th-century figures now associated with existentialism are philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche , as well as novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky , all of whom critiqued rationalism and concerned themselves with

6992-411: Is better understood as a general approach used to reject certain systematic philosophies rather than as a systematic philosophy itself. In a lecture delivered in 1945, Sartre described existentialism as "the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism ". For others, existentialism need not involve the rejection of God, but rather "examines mortal man's search for meaning in

7144-465: Is committed to a radical conception of freedom: nothing fixes our purpose but we ourselves, our projects have no weight or inertia except for our endorsement of them. Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, holds that there are various factors, grouped together under the term sedimentation , that offer resistance to attempts to change our direction in life. Sedimentations are themselves products of past choices and can be changed by choosing differently in

7296-404: Is fully responsible for these consequences. There is nothing in people (genetically, for instance) that acts in their stead—that they can blame if something goes wrong. Therefore, not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences (and, it can be claimed, human lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread). However, this does not change the fact that freedom remains

7448-464: Is generally considered to have originated with Kierkegaard, the first prominent existentialist philosopher to adopt the term as a self-description was Sartre. Sartre posits the idea that "what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence ", as the philosopher Frederick Copleston explains. According to philosopher Steven Crowell , defining existentialism has been relatively difficult, and he argues that it

7600-514: Is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom. It can also be seen in relation to

7752-722: Is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism ( L'existentialisme est un humanisme , 1946), originally presented as a lecture. Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy , and Anne-Marie (Schweitzer). When Sartre was two years old, his father died of an illness, which he most likely contracted in Indochina . Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon , where she raised Sartre with help from her father Charles Schweitzer,

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7904-423: Is in. He is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is then filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing—as a Peeping Tom . For Sartre, this phenomenological experience of shame establishes proof for

8056-538: Is never put to shame. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision. Existentialists oppose defining human beings as primarily rational, and, therefore, oppose both positivism and rationalism . Existentialism asserts that people make decisions based on subjective meaning rather than pure rationality. The rejection of reason as

8208-402: Is no Creator. Thus: "existence precedes essence". This forms the basis for his assertion that because one cannot explain one's own actions and behavior by referring to any specific human nature, they are necessarily fully responsible for those actions. "We are left alone, without excuse." "We can act without being determined by our past which is always separated from us." Sartre maintained that

8360-450: Is not a concern. The setting is inwardness in existing as a human being; the concretion is the relation of the existence-categories to one another. Historical accuracy and historical actuality are breadth. Some interpret the imperative to define oneself as meaning that anyone can wish to be anything. However, an existentialist philosopher would say such a wish constitutes an inauthentic existence – what Sartre would call " bad faith ". Instead,

8512-745: Is not an abstract matter, but is always situated (" en situation "). Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt , he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at various times in Zionism and Hasidism . In 1938, he moved permanently to Jerusalem . His best-known philosophical work

8664-469: Is often reduced to moral or existential nihilism . A pervasive theme in existentialist philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Albert Camus 's philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): "One must imagine Sisyphus happy". and it is only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss morality or one's self-created meaning: Søren Kierkegaard regained

8816-473: Is one in accordance with one's freedom. A component of freedom is facticity, but not to the degree that this facticity determines one's transcendent choices (one could then blame one's background for making the choice one made [chosen project, from one's transcendence]). Facticity, in relation to authenticity, involves acting on one's actual values when making a choice (instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomly), so that one takes responsibility for

8968-578: Is related to the limits of responsibility one bears, as a result of one's freedom. The relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency and a clarification of freedom also clarifies that for which one is responsible. Many noted existentialists consider the theme of authentic existence important. Authenticity involves the idea that one has to "create oneself" and live in accordance with this self. For an authentic existence, one should act as oneself, not as "one's acts" or as "one's genes" or as any other essence requires. The authentic act

9120-472: Is suicide." Although "prescriptions" against the possible deleterious consequences of these kinds of encounters vary, from Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers. The possibility of having everything meaningful break down poses

9272-490: Is that people, as humans, are "condemned to be free". He explained, "This may seem paradoxical because condemnation is normally an external judgment which constitutes the conclusion of a judgment. Here, it is not the human who has chosen to be like this. There is a contingency of human existence. It is a condemnation of their being. Their being is not determined, so it is up to everyone to create their own existence, for which they are then responsible. They cannot not be free, there

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9424-417: Is the facts of one's personal life and as per Heidegger, it is " the way in which we are thrown into the world ." This can be more easily understood when considering facticity in relation to the temporal dimension of our past: one's past is what one is, meaning that it is what has formed the person who exists in the present. However, to say that one is only one's past would ignore the change a person undergoes in

9576-763: Is the reflection on a shared situation. In Italy, in France, in Benelux, in Sweden, in Norway, in Germany, in Greece, in Austria, everywhere we find the same problems and the same dangers ... But this cultural polity has prospects only as elements of a policy which defends Europe's cultural autonomy vis-à-vis America and the Soviet Union, but also its political and economic autonomy, with the aim of making Europe

9728-537: Is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life—or the learner who should put it to use?" Philosophers such as Hans Jonas and Rudolph Bultmann introduced the concept of existentialist demythologization into the field of Early Christianity and Christian Theology , respectively. Although nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another since both are rooted in

9880-496: Is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself...This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker". Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre ( / ˈ s ɑːr t r ə / , US also / ˈ s ɑːr t / ; French: [saʁtʁ] ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic , considered

10032-524: The Bible would demand that the reader recognize that they are an existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of events. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of "truths" that are outside and unrelated to the reader, but may develop a sense of reality/God. Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing these commandments upon them, but as though they are inside them and guiding them from inside. This

10184-590: The Café de Flore between intellectuals had changed, as the fear that one of them might be a mouche (informer) or a writer of the corbeau (anonymous denunciatory letters) meant that no one really said what they meant anymore, imposing self-censorship. Sartre and his friends at the Café de Flore had reasons for their fear; by September 1940, the Abwehr alone had already recruited 32,000 French people to work as mouches while by 1942

10336-521: The Communist Party . For a time in the late 1940s, Sartre described French nationalism as "provincial" and in a 1949 essay called for a "United States of Europe". In an essay published in the June 1949 edition of the journal Politique étrangère , Sartre wrote: If we want French civilization to survive, it must be fitted into the framework of a great European civilization. Why? I have said that civilization

10488-799: The Lycée Condorcet , 1941–1944; see below ). 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. Aron had already advised him in 1930 to read Emmanuel Levinas 's Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl ( The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology ). The neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in

10640-469: The Stalinist repressions and purges . Sartre argued that "the masses were not ready to receive the truth". In 1969 Sartre, along with other fifteen prominent French writers, including Louis Aragon and Michel Butor , signed the letter of protest against the expulsion of "the writer most representative of the great Russian tradition, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – already a victim of Stalinist repression", from

10792-556: The Union of Soviet Writers . In 1973 he argued that "revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, and their death is the only way". A number of people, starting from Frank Gibney in 1961, classified Sartre as a " useful idiot " due to his uncritical position. Sartre came to admire the Polish leader Władysław Gomułka , a man who favored a "Polish road to socialism" and wanted more independence for Poland, but

10944-417: The concierge forced the door, you would find two chairs standing close together in the hall with the fag-ends of German cigarettes on the floor between their legs. If the wife or mother of the man who had vanished had been present at his arrest, she would tell you that he had been taken away by very polite Germans, like those who asked the way in the street. And when she went to ask what had happened to them at

11096-496: The cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois , in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity ( mauvaise foi , literally, ' bad faith ') and an " authentic " way of " being " became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness ( L'Être et le Néant , 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy

11248-776: The offices in the Avenue Foch or the Rue des Saussaies she would be politely received and sent away with comforting words" [No. 11 Rue des Saussaies was the headquarters of the Gestapo in Paris]. Sartre wrote the feldgrau ("field grey") uniforms of the Wehrmacht and the green uniforms of the Order Police which had seemed so alien in 1940 had become accepted, as people were numbed into accepting what Sartre called "a pale, dull green, unobtrusive strain, which

11400-671: The 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit . In 1939, Sartre was drafted into the French Army , where he served as a meteorologist . He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux , and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war —in Nancy and finally in Stalag XII-D  [ fr ] , Trier , where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre ,

11552-468: The Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines. In his essay "Paris under the Occupation ", Sartre wrote that the "correct" behaviour of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the occupation, accepting what was unnatural as natural: The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on

11704-476: The God-forsaken worldliness of earthly life shuts itself in complacency, the confined air develops poison, the moment gets stuck and stands still, the prospect is lost, a need is felt for a refreshing, enlivening breeze to cleanse the air and dispel the poisonous vapors lest we suffocate in worldliness. ... Lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all. Love hopes all things—yet

11856-544: The Good Lord , and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason . Then my essay on Genet , Saint Genet . ... If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived, ... how I lived in it, in terms of all

12008-450: The Idols , Nietzsche's sentiments resonate the idea of "existence precedes essence." He writes, "no one gives man his qualities-- neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself...No one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment...Man is not the effect of some special purpose of

12160-550: The Immediate Data of Consciousness . He attended the Cours Hattemer , a private school in Paris. He studied and earned certificates in psychology, history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy, ethics and sociology, and physics, as well as his diplôme d'études supérieures  [ fr ] (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), an institution of higher education that

12312-656: The No Fear energy drink had been entered into a deal with the WEC as the promotion's official presenting sponsor and exclusive energy drink sponsor. The partnership was begun with an event that took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the next day. No Fear had a sponsor for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series with NASCAR driver Boris Said . It has also sponsored Team Pacquiao on many occasions. Existentialism Existentialism

12464-414: The Other as seen by him, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. When one experiences oneself in the Look, one does not experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something (some thing). In Sartre's example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole, the man is entirely caught up in the situation he

12616-469: The Paris Kommandantur was receiving an average of 1,500 letters per day sent by the corbeaux . Sartre wrote under the occupation Paris had become a "sham", resembling the empty wine bottles displayed in shop windows as all of the wine had been exported to Germany, looking like the old Paris, but hollowed out, as what had made Paris special was gone. Paris had almost no cars on the streets during

12768-575: The Soviet Union: As we were neither members of the [Communist] party nor its avowed sympathizers, it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrel over the nature of this system, provided that no events of sociological significance had occurred. Sartre held that the Soviet Union was a "revolutionary" state working for the betterment of humanity and could be criticized only for failing to live up to its own ideals, but that critics had to take in mind that

12920-559: The Soviet Writers' Union "still had the opportunity of rehabilitating themselves by writing better books". Sartre's comments on Hungarian revolution of 1956 are quite representative to his frequently contradictory and changing views. On one hand, Sartre saw in Hungary a true reunification between intellectuals and workers only to criticize it for "losing socialist base". In 1964 Sartre attacked Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" which condemned

13072-471: The Soviet state needed to defend itself against a hostile world; by contrast Sartre held that the failures of "bourgeois" states were due to their innate shortcomings. The Swiss journalist François Bondy wrote that, based on a reading of Sartre's numerous essays, speeches and interviews "a simple basic pattern never fails to emerge: social change must be comprehensive and revolutionary" and the parties that promote

13224-586: The Swedish Academy in 1975 with a request for the prize money, but was refused. In 1945, he had refused the Légion d'honneur . The Nobel prize was announced on 22 October 1964; on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and warning that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread; on 23 October, Le Figaro published

13376-628: The Third World into revolution while also praising more moderate Communist leaders like Gomułka. As an anti-colonialist, Sartre took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria, and the use of torture and concentration camps by the French in Algeria. He became an eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatories of the Manifeste des 121 . Consequently, Sartre became

13528-603: The University of Salamanca, Unamuno wrote a short story about a priest's crisis of faith, Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr , which has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset , writing in 1914, held that human existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: " Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia " ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human existence

13680-477: The Wehrmacht meant he had been complicit in the Occupation. Ousby wrote: "But, in however humble a fashion, everyone still had to decide how they were going to cope with life in a fragmenting society ... So Sartre's worries ... about how to react when a German soldier stopped him in the street and asked politely for directions were not as fussily inconsequential as they might sound at first. They were emblematic of how

13832-402: The Wehrmacht which led Sartre to remark "We could not be natural ". French was a language widely taught in German schools and most Germans could speak at least some French. Sartre himself always found it difficult when a Wehrmacht soldier asked him for directions, usually saying he did not know where it was that the soldier wanted to go, but still felt uncomfortable as the very act of speaking to

13984-447: The act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values. In contrast, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one's freedom. This can take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, convincing oneself that some form of determinism is true, or "mimicry" where one acts as "one should". How one "should" act is often determined by an image one has, of how one in such

14136-434: The apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom . Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser. Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Übermensch are representative of people who exhibit freedom , in that they define

14288-428: The aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself. Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work (and the use of amphetamine ) he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert ( The Family Idiot ), both of which remained unfinished. He had hypertension, and became almost completely blind in 1973. Sartre

14440-452: The burden of our free, individual existence. "We can oppose authenticity to an inauthentic way of being. Authenticity consists in experiencing the indeterminate character of existence in anguish. It is also to know how to face it by giving meaning to our actions and by recognizing ourselves as the author of this meaning. On the other hand, an inauthentic way of being consists in running away, in lying to oneself in order to escape this anguish and

14592-415: The claim that "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person. Because of the world's absurdity, anything can happen to anyone at any time and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the absurd. Many of

14744-427: The concepts of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. We need to experience "death consciousness" so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge. Death draws the final point when we as beings cease to live for ourselves and permanently become objects that exist only for the outside world. In this way death emphasizes

14896-566: The condition of African Americans in the United States—specifically the racism and discrimination against them in the country—in his second Situations collection. Then, in 1948, for the introduction of Léopold Sédar Senghor 's l'Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry) , he wrote "Black Orpheus" (re-published in Situations III), a critique of colonialism and racism in light of

15048-486: The continual process of self-making, projecting oneself into the future, would be to put oneself in denial of the conditions shaping the present self and would be inauthentic. The origin of one's projection must still be one's facticity, though in the mode of not being it (essentially). An example of one focusing solely on possible projects without reflecting on one's current facticity: would be someone who continually thinks about future possibilities related to being rich (e.g.

15200-589: The cultural movement in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s associated with the works of the philosophers Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , and Albert Camus . Others extend the term to Kierkegaard, and yet others extend it as far back as Socrates . However, it is often identified with the philosophical views of Sartre. The labels existentialism and existentialist are often seen as historical conveniences in as much as they were first applied to many philosophers long after they had died. While existentialism

15352-464: The dilemmas of the Occupation presented themselves in daily life". Sartre wrote the very "correctness" of the Germans caused moral corruption in many people who used the "correct" behavior of the Germans as an excuse for passivity, and the very act of simply trying to live one's day-to-day existence without challenging the occupation aided the " New Order in Europe", which depended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals. Throughout

15504-535: The empty sky. Cut off from the rest of the world, fed only through the pity or some ulterior motive, the town led a purely abstract and symbolic life". Sartre himself lived on a diet of rabbits sent to him by a friend of de Beauvoir living in Anjou . The rabbits were usually in an advanced state of decay, full of maggots, and despite being hungry, Sartre once threw out one rabbit as uneatable, saying it had more maggots in it than meat. Sartre also remarked that conversations at

15656-475: The end of his life, Sartre began to describe himself as a "special kind" of anarchist. In 1964 Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les Mots ( The Words ). The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust , whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned ultimately as

15808-420: The existence of other minds and defeats the problem of solipsism . For the conscious state of shame to be experienced, one has to become aware of oneself as an object of another look, proving a priori, that other minds exist. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity. Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is possible that the creaking floorboard

15960-534: The existentialist label in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris , published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme ( Existentialism Is a Humanism ), a short book that helped popularize existentialist thought. Marcel later came to reject the label himself in favour of Neo-Socratic , in honor of Kierkegaard's essay " On the Concept of Irony ". Some scholars argue that the term should be used to refer only to

16112-406: The extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom. The Other (written with a capital "O") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity . However, it has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits

16264-411: The eye almost expected to find among the dark clothes of the civilians". Under the occupation, the French often called the Germans les autres ("the others"), which inspired Sartre's aphorism in his play Huis clos (" No Exit ") of " l'enfer, c'est les Autres " ("Hell is other people"). Sartre intended the line " l'enfer, c'est les Autres " at least in part to be a dig at the German occupiers. Sartre

16416-578: The first part of the essay, "Portrait de l'antisémite", the year before in Les Temps modernes, No. 3. In the essay, in the course of explaining the etiology of "hate" as the hater's projective fantasies when reflecting on the Jewish question , he attacks antisemitism in France during a time when the Jews who came back from concentration camps were quickly abandoned. In 1947, Sartre published several articles concerning

16568-479: The first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with

16720-561: 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. Sartre's primary idea

16872-410: The human experience of anguish and confusion that stems from the apparent meaninglessness of a world in which humans are compelled to find or create meaning. A primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche was an important philosopher in both fields. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that

17024-431: The human individual searching for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through "secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world, characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather than merely to "information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there (as one thing might be in

17176-456: The life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in the eponymous character from the Miguel de Cervantes novel Don Quixote . A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at

17328-468: The literary works of Kierkegaard , Beckett , Kafka , Dostoevsky , Ionesco , Miguel de Unamuno , Luigi Pirandello , Sartre , Joseph Heller , and Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. It is because of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Camus claimed in The Myth of Sisyphus that "There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that

17480-673: The military governor of France, General Otto von Stülpnagel , and the popular slogan always was "Death to Laval !" rather than "Death to Hitler !". In August Sartre and de Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux . However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. Socialisme et liberté soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness , The Flies , and No Exit , none of which were censored by

17632-529: The nature of their own existence. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his own values and creates the very terms they excel under. By contrast, Kierkegaard, opposed to the level of abstraction in Hegel, and not nearly as hostile (actually welcoming) to Christianity as Nietzsche, argues through a pseudonym that the objective certainty of religious truths (specifically Christian) is not only impossible, but even founded on logical paradoxes. Yet he continues to imply that

17784-400: The occupation as the oil went to Germany while the Germans imposed a nightly curfew, which led Sartre to remark that Paris "was peopled by the absent". Sartre also noted that people began to disappear under the occupation, writing: One day you might phone a friend and the phone would ring for a long time in an empty flat. You would go round and ring the doorbell, but no-one would answer it. If

17936-472: The occupation, it was German policy to plunder France, and food shortages were always a major problem as the majority of food from the French countryside went to Germany. Sartre wrote about the "languid existence" of the Parisians as people waited obsessively for the one weekly arrival of trucks bringing food from the countryside that the Germans allowed, writing: "Paris would grow peaked and yawn with hunger under

18088-767: The ophthalmologist. Given civilian status, he recovered his teaching position at Lycée Pasteur near Paris and settled at the Hotel Mistral. In October 1941, he was given a position, previously held by a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law , at Lycée Condorcet in Paris. After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté ("Socialism and Liberty") with other writers Simone de Beauvoir , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Jean-Toussaint Desanti , Dominique Desanti , Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In spring of 1941, Sartre suggested with "cheerful ferocity" at

18240-525: The opposites that he holds together. The systematic eins, zwei, drei is an abstract form that also must inevitably run into trouble whenever it is to be applied to the concrete. To the same degree as the subjective thinker is concrete, to that same degree his form must also be concretely dialectical. But just as he himself is not a poet, not an ethicist, not a dialectician, so also his form is none of these directly. His form must first and last be related to existence, and in this regard he must have at his disposal

18392-416: The other who remembers everything. Both have committed many crimes, but the first man, remembering nothing, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for "trapping" him in this life. There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past. However, to disregard one's facticity during

18544-581: The pavement. They would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined, they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness which could find no practical expression. Sartre noted when Wehrmacht soldiers asked Parisians politely in their German-accented French for directions, people usually felt embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their best to help out

18696-451: The philosophy Sartre developed in Being and Nothingness. Later, while Sartre was labeled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted; not

18848-420: The phrase should be taken to say that people are defined only insofar as they act and that they are responsible for their actions. Someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (cruel persons). This is opposed to their genes, or human nature , bearing the blame. As Sartre said in his lecture Existentialism

19000-501: The poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, the religious. Subordinate character, setting, etc., which belong to the well-balanced character of the esthetic production, are in themselves breadth; the subjective thinker has only one setting—existence—and has nothing to do with localities and such things. The setting is not the fairyland of the imagination, where poetry produces consummation, nor is the setting laid in England, and historical accuracy

19152-423: The presence of another thing); it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other. Marcel contrasted secondary reflection with abstract, scientific-technical primary reflection , which he associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate—embodied—in

19304-420: The present and future, while saying that one's past is only what one was, would entirely detach it from the present self. A denial of one's concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and also applies to other kinds of facticity (having a human body—e.g., one that does not allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound—identity, values, etc.). Facticity is a limitation and a condition of freedom. It

19456-649: The present, but such changes happen slowly. They are a force of inertia that shapes the agent's evaluative outlook on the world until the transition is complete. Sartre's definition of existentialism was based on Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time (1927). In the correspondence with Jean Beaufret later published as the Letter on Humanism , Heidegger implied that Sartre misunderstood him for his own purposes of subjectivism, and that he did not mean that actions take precedence over being so long as those actions were not reflected upon. Heidegger commented that "the reversal of

19608-425: The previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear that has an object. While one can take measures to remove an object of fear, for angst no such "constructive" measures are possible. The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions and to the fact that, in experiencing freedom as angst, one also realizes that one

19760-544: The problem of meaning . The word existentialism , however, was not coined until the mid-20th century, during which it became most associated with contemporaneous philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre , Martin Heidegger , Simone de Beauvoir , Karl Jaspers , Gabriel Marcel , Paul Tillich , and more controversially Albert Camus . Many existentialists considered traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in style and content, to be too abstract and removed from concrete human experience. A primary virtue in existentialist thought

19912-450: The protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoyevsky himself. In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers explored existentialist ideas. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo , in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations , emphasized

20064-460: The pursuit of self-discovery and the determination of life's meaning. The term existentialism ( French : L'existentialisme ) was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s. When Marcel first applied the term to Jean-Paul Sartre , at a colloquium in 1945, Sartre rejected it. Sartre subsequently changed his mind and, on October 29, 1945, publicly adopted

20216-492: The responsibility for one's own existence." While Sartre had been influenced by Heidegger, the publication of Being and Nothingness did mark a split in their perspectives, with Heidegger remarking in Letter on Humanism : Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia . Sartre reverses this statement. But

20368-416: The revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz Fanon started to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution. A major theme of Sartre's political essays in the 1960s was of his disgust with the "Americanization" of the French working class who would much rather watch American TV shows dubbed into French than agitate for

20520-656: The revolutionary charges "may be criticized, but only by those who completely identify themselves with its purpose, its struggle and its road to power", deeming Sartre's position to be "existentialist". Sartre believed at this time in the moral superiority of the Eastern Bloc , arguing that this belief was necessary "to keep hope alive" and opposed any criticism of Soviet Union to the extent that Maurice Merleau-Ponty called him an "ultra-Bolshevik". Sartre's expression "workers of Billancourt must not be deprived of their hopes" ( Fr . "il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt"), became

20672-403: The same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences)—only from "over there"—the world is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of

20824-478: The source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical free will and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard advocated rationality as a means to interact with the objective world (e.g., in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient: "Human reason has boundaries". Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it

20976-464: The subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same things. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze ). While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way that one experiences

21128-498: The term came into use. William Barrett identified Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard as two specific examples. Jean Wahl also identified William Shakespeare 's Prince Hamlet (" To be, or not to be "), Jules Lequier , Thomas Carlyle , and William James as existentialists. According to Wahl, "the origins of most great philosophies, like those of Plato , Descartes , and Kant , are to be found in existential reflections." Precursors to existentialism can also be identified in

21280-576: The works of Iranian Muslim philosopher Mulla Sadra (c. 1571–1635), who would posit that " existence precedes essence " becoming the principle expositor of the School of Isfahan , which is described as "alive and active". Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher. He proposed that each individual—not reason, society, or religious orthodoxy—is solely tasked with giving meaning to life and living it sincerely, or "authentically". Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were two of

21432-588: The world or the human being is not in itself absurd. The concept only emerges through the juxtaposition of the two; life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit. This view constitutes one of the two interpretations of the absurd in existentialist literature. The second view, first elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard , holds that absurdity is limited to actions and choices of human beings. These are considered absurd since they issue from human freedom, undermining their foundation outside of themselves. The absurd contrasts with

21584-463: The world ran parallel". However he stood against the persecution of gays by Castro's government, which he compared to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and said: "In Cuba there are no Jews, but there are homosexuals". During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction member Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment. Towards

21736-415: The world. This can be highlighted in the way it opposes the traditional Abrahamic religious perspective, which establishes that life's purpose is the fulfillment of God's commandments. This is what gives meaning to people's lives. To live the life of the absurd means rejecting a life that finds or pursues specific meaning for man's existence since there is nothing to be discovered. According to Albert Camus,

21888-410: Was "merciless" in attacking anyone who had collaborated or remained passive during the German occupation; for instance, criticizing Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach from being executed. His 1948 play Les mains sales ( Dirty Hands ) in particular explored the problem of being a politically "engaged" intellectual. He embraced Marxism but did not join

22040-526: 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

22192-452: Was a very active contributor to Combat , a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus , a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, with the publication of Camus's The Rebel . Sartre wrote extensively post-war about neglected minority groups, namely French Jews and black people . In 1946, he published Anti-Semite and Jew , after having published

22344-458: Was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser , who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx. In the late 1950s, Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out

22496-449: Was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojève 's seminars, which continued for a number of years. From his first years in the École normale , Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters . In 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem , particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson . In the same year, with his comrades Nizan, Larroutis, Baillou and Herland, he organized

22648-504: Was loyal to the Soviet Union because of the Oder-Neisse line issue. Sartre's newspaper Les Temps Modernes devoted a number of special issues in 1957 and 1958 to Poland under Gomułka, praising him for his reforms. Bondy wrote of the notable contradiction between Sartre's "ultra Bolshevism" as he expressed admiration for the Chinese leader Mao Zedong as the man who led the oppressed masses of

22800-420: Was simply the movement of an old house; the Look is not some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the Other sees one (there may have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that person). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him. "Existential angst", sometimes called existential dread, anxiety, or anguish , is a term common to many existentialist thinkers. It

22952-493: Was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. (His 1928 MA thesis under the title "L'Image dans la vie psychologique: rôle et nature" ["Image in Psychological Life: Role and Nature"] was supervised by Henri Delacroix .) It was at ENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, friendship with Raymond Aron . Perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartre's philosophical development

23104-630: Was the short book I and Thou , published in 1922. For Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue that takes place in the so-called "sphere of between" ( "das Zwischenmenschliche" ). Two Russian philosophers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev , became well known as existentialist thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as 1905 in his book of aphorisms All Things Are Possible . Berdyaev drew

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