Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre was born on
21st June,1905 in Paris and was the only child of his parents. His
father was in French Navy and died of fever when Stare was two years
old. His mother was first cousin of Nobel laureate Albert
Schweitzer.
He showed interest
in philosophy even during his teens and Henri Bergson's essay
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
seemed to have an influence over him. He did his Degree in
Philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, that was the alma
mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. He was
influenced by Western Philosophy and its proponents such as
Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard,
Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, among others. Alexandre
Kojève's seminars had also great influence on Young Sartre who
attended them with punctuality for several years.
In 1929 he met Simone de Beauvoir,
who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted
philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two were romantically attached
throughout life though they were not monogamous.
During
Second World War days, Satre was a political activist and participated
in resistance movements against the Germans. He also contributed
articles to Combat, a magazine published by Albert Camus. But
soon he lost interest in active resistance because of
non-participation of fellow writers and devoted time to writing.Being
and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit were penned
during this period. None of these was censored by the Germans, and
also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines. In Post
War period, Satre became a strong advocate of Marxism. He
opposed French Rule in Algeria, joined hands with Bertrand Russel in
opposing Vietnam War and became a target of Right Wing Militia.Satre
had great fascination for Che Guevara, was impressed by him and
after Guevara's death, would declare him to be "not only an
intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"
Towards the end of his life, Satre became an anarchist and died due to
merciless pace of work coupled with uninhibited drug use.
Satre
was the chief proponent of the Philosophy of Existentialism which
became a major philosophical cult in later years.His original works
are in French.
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