Biography

Family: Born June 21, 1905, in Paris, France; died April 15, 1980, of a lung ailment, in Paris, France; son of Jean-Baptiste (a naval officer) and Anne-Marie (Schweitzer) Sartre; children: Arlette el Kaim-Sartre (adopted). Education: Attended Lycee Louis-le-Grand; Ecole Normale Superieure, agrege de philosophie, 1930; further study in Egypt, Italy, Greece, and in Germany under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

Politics: He is a Marxist, but not party member. Atheist.

Military/Wartime Service: Meteorological Corps, 1929-31; French Army, 1939-40; prisoner of war in Germany for nine months, 1940-41. Served in Resistance Movement, 1941-44, wrote for its underground newspapers, Combat and Les Lettres Francaises. One of the founders of the French Rally of Revolutionary Democrats.

Memberships: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Modern Language Association of America (honorary fellow).

Career: Philosopher and author of novels, plays, screenplays, biographies, and literary and political criticism. Professeur of philosophy at Lycee le Havre, 1931-32 and 1934-36, Institut Francais, Berlin, 1933-34, Lycee de Laon, 1936-37, Lycee Pasteur, 1937-39, and Lycee Condorcet, 1941-44. Founded Les Temps modernes, 1944, editor, beginning 1945. Lecturer at various institutions in United States, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton universities, and in Europe, the U.S.S.R., and China.

Award(s):

Roman populiste prize, 1940, for Le Mur; French Legion d'honneur, 1945 (refused); New York Drama Critics Award for best foreign play of the season, 1947, for No Exit; French Grand Novel Prize, 1950, for La Nausee; Omegna Prize (Italy), 1960, for total body of work; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1964 (refused); received honorary doctorate from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1976.

Basic Ideas:

• Personal Responsibility

  • Excuses for failing to engage::

    • "What can I do about it?"- an appeal to individual impotence.

    • "I didn't start the war, did l?"- an appeal to personal innocence.

    • "Everyone else is doing it"- an appeal to the "herd,"

    • “I'm just looking out for myself (the same way everyone else is)" an appeal to human nature. the instinct for self-preservation.

    • "I couldn't help it; I had no choice" - the appeal to helplessness.

    • "I couldn't help it; I was afraid'" - the appeal to emotions.

  • Against all such excuses. Sartre wants to argue that we are "absolutely free.” We are responsible for what we do, what we are. and the way our world is. This does not mean (what is absurd) that everyone can do (succeed in) anything they choose. It does mean that there are no ultimate constraints on consciousness.

  • Sartre's harsh view is that everyone is responsible for his or her situation.

• Emotions

  • Sartre's early essay on emotions calls them “magical transformations of the world,"

  • Emotions are choices, strategies for coping with a difficult world. Emotions are not mere sensations or "feelings. They have "intentionality. They also have "finality" or purpose.

  • Sartre begins his lifelong attack on Freud. He rejects Freud's ''unconscious'' and ^“psychic determinism." Sartre rejects "the unconscious."

  • Sartre also rejects the very idea of "psychic determinism," the notion that human emotions, thoughts, and decisions are caused by antecedent conditions and external events. They are not to be construed as forces 'within us.' the Freudian ¹¹id," acting upon us against our will (and apart from our knowledge).

  • Emotions, then, are always about something. An emotion is a strategy for dealing with the world.

  • Sartre develops his own brand of psychoanalysis, "existential" psychoanalysis.

• Sartre's Phenomenology

  • Sartre borrows heavily from Husserl.

  • He tells us that consciousness is freedom. Consciousness is also “nothingness.”

  • Because consciousness is intentional, it is always about something other than itself and outside the nexus of causal relations.

  • Consciousness has the power of negation, and we are always able to distance ourselves from objects of consciousness, including our own mental states.

  • In separating consciousness and the world, Sartre is a Cartesian. Freedom and responsibility have their source in consciousness.

  • Sartre adopts a “two standpoints." view, much like his illustrious predecessor Kant. From the first-person phenomenological perspective, we cannot see ourselves as anything other than free. But from a naturalistic (scientific) standpoint, we can view ourselves as creatures that can be explained by biology and the other natural sciences.

  • Existential Phenomenology:

    • Sartre uses the word “spontaneity" to carve out a middle range between deliberate agency and mindless habit.

    • anguish is an experience of our own freedom.

    • shame is an experience of the existence of other people.

    • nausea is an experience of the pervasiveness of Being.

• Bad Faith

  • Sartre, following Heidegger. claims to have an ontology, a theory about the basic makeup of the world. It contains three elements: being-for­ itself, the being of consciousness; being-in·itself, the existence of things; and being-for-others, one's essential relationships with other people. What he ultimately seeks is a theory of the self. He thus distinguishes between "facticity'' (facts true of us) and '"transcendence" (our need to make choices and interpret the world). Sartre tells us that the desire to be both in-itself and for-itself is the desire to be God and that confusing facticity and transcendence is "bad faith."

  • Sartre distinguishes between consciousness and the self. In an early essay, "The Transcendence of the Ego,'' Sartre argued that consciousness is not the self. The self is "out there in the world, like the consciousness of another." The self, he goes on to argue, is a product, an accumulation of actions, habits, achievements, and failures. Sometimes other people know us better than we do. Consciousness doesn't contain the "I," the self.

  • Human existence is both being-in-itself and being-for-itself. As embodied in a particular place at a particular time in particular circumstances, we have what Sartre (following Heidegger) calls "facticity” or facts that are true about us. As consciousness, we have what Sartre calls "transcendence.” (Heidegger's ''existence"). The term "transcendence" means "outside of' but serves several very different uses for Sartre.

    • It refers. first of all, to our transcendence of the "facts." Desires or plans reach beyond facts.

    • It also refers to our transcendence of the present into the future.

    • We are to be described by our personalities and our plans "I am what I am not." (dialectics.)

  • Facticity and transcendence limit each other

  • We falsify ourselves by subscribing exclusively to facticity or transcendence. Either alone leads to bad faith, but bad faith is inescapable.

  • Sartre raises serious questions about what should count as an "ethics." Sartre does not in fact reject morality. He establishes an ethics of what is more commonly called "integrity”

• Being-for-Others

  • Being-for-others is presented in contrast to traditional skeptical problems concerning our knowledge of the existence of other people. Many philosophers have argued that we know of the existence of other people through an obvious kind of inference. Sartre insists that our knowledge of other people comes first of all from being looked at by them, for example, when we are embarrassed or ashamed. Accordingly, our relations with others are essentially confrontations and conflict. In No Exit, one of his characters notes, "Hell is other people."

  • Our primary knowledge of other people comes not from observing them but rather from being looked at by them. Thus, shame is our conduit into the interpersonal world.

  • We are all, in essence, always on trial.

  • Being-for-others is being objectified according to their judgments. Bad faith is seeing ourselves only as others do - or only as we do.

  • Sartre, like Camus, seriously considers the prevalence of guilt as a necessary outcome of human awareness and being for others.

  • For Sartre, however, the notion of responsibility takes priority over the more pathological notion of guilt, a secular notion of original sin.

WRITINGS:

PHILOSOPHY

• L'imagination, Librairie Felix Alcan, 1936, French and European Publications, 1970, translation by Forrest Williams published asImagination: A Psychological Critique, University of Michigan Press, 1962.

• Esquisse d'une theorie des emotions, Hermann, 1939, translation by Bernard Frechtman published as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, Philosophical Library, 1948, translation by Philip Mairet published as Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Methuen (London), 1962.

• L'imaginaire: Psychologie phenomenologique de l'imagination, Gallimard, 1940, translation published as The Psychology of Imagination, Philosophical Library, 1948.

• L'etre et le neant: Essai d'ontologie phenomenologique, Gallimard, 1943, translation by Hazel E. Barnes published as Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (also see below), Philosophical Library, 1956, abridged edition, Citadel, 1964.

• L'existentialisme est un humanisme, Nagel, 1946, translation by Frechtman published as Existentialism (also see below), Philosophical Library, 1947, translation by Mairet published asExistentialism and Humanism, Methuen, 1948.

• Existentialism and Human Emotions (selections fromExistentialism and Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology), Philosophical Library, 1957.

• Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, translation by Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, Noonday, 1957, original French edition published as La Transcendance de l'ego: Esquisse d'une description phenomenologique, J. Vrin, 1965.

• Critique de la raison dialectique: Precede de Question de methode, Gallimard, 1960, translation by Alan Sheridan-Smith published as Critique of Dialectical Reason: Theory of Practical Ensembles, Humanities, 1976.

• (With others) Marxisme et Existentialisme, Plon, 1962, translation by John Matthews published as Between Existentialism and Marxism, NLB, 1974.

• Choix de textes, edited by J. Sebille, Nathan, 1962, 2nd edition, 1966.

• Essays in Aesthetics, selected and translated by Wade Baskin, Philosophical Library, 1963.

• Search for a Method, translation by Barnes, Knopf, 1963, published as The Problem of Method, Methuen, 1964, original French edition published as Question de methode, Gallimard, 1967.

• The Philosophy of Existentialism, edited by Baskin, Philosophical Library, 1965.

• The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (translated excerpts), edited by Robert Denoon Cummings, Random House, 1965.

• Of Human Freedom, edited by Baskin, Philosophical Library, 1967.

• Essays in Existentialism, selected and edited with a foreword by Baskin, Citadel, 1967.

• The Wisdom of Jean-Paul Sartre (selections from Barnes's translation of Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology), Philosophical Library, 1968.

• Textes choisis, edited by Marc Beigbeder and Gerard Deledalle, Bordes, 1968.

• Verite et existence, edited by Arlette el Kaim-Sartre, Gallimard, 1990.

FICTION

• La Nausee, Gallimard, 1938, translation by Lloyd Alexander published as Nausea, New Directions, 1949, published as The Diary of Antoine Requentin, J. Lehmann, 1949, new edition with illustrations by Walter Spitzer, Editions Lidis, 1964, new translation by Robert Baldick, Penguin, 1965.

• Le Mur, Gallimard, 1939, translation published as The Wall, and Other Stories, preface by Jean-Louis Curtis, New Directions, 1948.

• Les Chemins de la liberte, Volume 1: L'age de raison, Gallimard, 1945, new edition with illustrations by Spitzer, Editions Lidis, 1965, Volume 2: Le Sursis, Gallimard, 1945, Volume 3: La Mort dans l'ame, Gallimard, 1949, French and European Publications, 1972; translation published as The Roads of Freedom, Volume 1: The Age of Reason, translation by Eric Sutton, Knopf, 1947, new edition with introduction by Henri Peyre, Bantam, 1968, Volume 2: The Reprieve, translation by Sutton, Knopf, 1947, Volume 3: Iron in the Soul, translation by Gerard Hopkins, Hamish Hamilton, 1950, translation by Hopkins published as Troubled Sleep, Knopf, 1951.

• Intimacy, and Other Stories, translation by Alexander, Berkley Publishing, 1956.

PLAYS

• Les Mouches (also see below; produced in Paris at Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, 1942; translation by Stuart Gilbert produced as The Flies in New York City at President Theatre, April 17, 1947), Gallimard, 1943, new edition edited by F. C. St. Aubyn and Robert G. Marshall, Harper, 1963.

• Huis-clos (also see below; produced in Paris at Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, 1944; translation by Marjorie Gabain and Joan Swinstead produced as The Vicious Circle in London at Arts Theatre Club, 1946; translation by Paul Bowles produced as No Exit on Broadway at Biltmore Theatre, 1946), Gallimard, 1945, new edition edited by Jacques Hardre and George B. Daniel, Appleton, 1962.

• The Flies (also see below) [and] In Camera, translation by Gilbert, Hamish Hamilton, 1946, published with No Exit, Knopf, 1947, original French edition published as Huis-clos [and] Les Mouches, Gallimard, 1964.

• Morts sans sepulture (also see below; produced with La Putain respectueuse in Sweden at Theatre Goeteborg, 1946; produced in Paris at Theatre Antoine, 1946; translation produced as Men without Shadows on the West End at Lyric Theatre, 1947; translation produced as The Victors in New York City at New Stages Theatre, 1948), Marguerat, 1946.

• La Putain respectueuse (also see below; produced with Morts sans sepulture at Theatre Goeteberg, 1946; produced at Theatre Antoine, 1946), Nagel, 1946, translation published as The Respectful Prostitute (also see below; produced at New Stages Theatre, 1948; produced on Broadway at Cort Theatre, 1948), Twice a Year Press, 1948.

• Theatre I (contains Les Mouches, Huis-clos,Morts sans sepulture, and La Putain respectueuse), Gallimard, 1947.

• Les jeux sont faits (screenplay; produced by Gibe-Pathe Films, 1947), Nagel, 1947, new edition edited by Mary Elizabeth Storer, Appleton, 1952, translation by Louise Varese published as The Chips Are Down, Lear, 1948.

• Les Mains sales (also see below; produced at Theatre Antoine, 1948; translation by Kitty Black produced as Crime Passionnel on the West End at Lyric Theatre, 1948, and adapted by Daniel Taradash and produced as The Red Gloves in New York City at Mansfield Theatre, 1948), Gallimard, 1948, published as Les Mains sales: Piece en sept tableaux, edited by Geoffrey Brereton, Methuen, 1963, new edition with analysis and notes by Gaston Meyer, Edition Bordas, 1971.

• L'engrenage (screenplay), Nagel, 1948, translation by Mervyn Savill published as In the Mesh, A. Dakers, 1954.

• Three Plays (contains The Victors, Dirty Hands [translation of Les Mains sales], and The Respectable Prostitute), translation by Lionel Abel, Knopf, 1949.

• Three Plays: Crime Passionnel, Men without Shadows, [and] The Respectable Prostitute, translation by Black, Hamish Hamilton, 1949.

• Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (produced at Theatre Antoine, 1951), Gallimard, 1951, translation by Black published as Lucifer and the Lord (also see below), Hamish Hamilton, 1953, published as The Devil and the Good Lord, and Two Other Plays, Knopf, 1960.

• (Adapter) Alexandre Dumas, Kean (also see below; produced in Paris at Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, 1953), Gallimard, 1954, translation by Black published as Kean, or Disorder and Genius, Hamish Hamilton, 1954, Vintage, 1960.

• No Exit, and Three Other Plays (contains No Exit,The Flies, Dirty Hands, and The Respectful Prostitute), Random House, 1955.

• Nekrassov (also see below; produced at Theatre Antoine, 1955), Gallimard, 1956, translation by Sylvia and George Leeson published asNekrassov (produced in London at Royal Court Theatre, 1957), Hamish Hamilton, 1956, French and European Publications, 1973.

• Les Sequestres d'Altona (also see below; produced in Paris at Theatre de la Renaissance, 1959), Gallimard, 1960, new edition edited and with an introduction by Philip Thody, University of London Press, 1965, translation by S. Leeson and G. Leeson published as Loser Wins, Hamish Hamilton, 1960, published as The Condemned of Altona (also see below; produced on Broadway at Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 1966), Knopf, 1961.

• Crime Passionnel: A Play, translation by Black, Methuen, 1961.

• Theatre (contains Les Mouches, Huis-clos,Morts sans sepulture, La Putain respectueuse, Les Mains sales, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, Kean, Nekrassov, and Les Sequestres d'Altona), Gallimard, 1962.

• Bariona, Anjou-Copies, 1962, 2nd edition, E. Marescot, 1967.

• The Condemned of Altona, Men without Shadows, [and] The Flies, Penguin, 1962.

• Orphee Noir (first published in Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise, Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), translation by S. W. Allen published as Black Orpheus, University Place Book Shop, c. 1963.

• La Putain respectueuse, piece en un acte et deux tableaux: Suivi de Morts sans sepulture, piece en deux actes et quatre tableax, Gallimard, 1963.

• The Respectable Prostitute [and] Lucifer and the Lord, translation by Black, Penguin, 1965.

• (Adapter) Euripides, Les troyennes (produced in Paris at Theatre National Populaire, 1965), Gallimard, 1966, translation by Ronald Duncan published as The Trojan Women (also see below), Knopf, 1967.

• Three Plays (contains Kean, or Disorder and Genius,Nekrassov, and The Trojan Women), Penguin, 1969.

• Five Plays (contains No Exit, The Flies, Dirty Hands, The Respectful Prostitute, and The Condemned of Altona), Franklin Library, 1978.

Also author of screenplay Typhus, 1944, of an unpublished play All the Treasures of the Earth, and of screenplay Les Sorcieres de Salem adapted from Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

LITERARY CRITICISM AND POLITICAL WRITINGS

• Reflexions sur la question juive, P. Morihien, 1946, translation by George J. Becker published as Anti-Semite and Jew, Schocken, 1948, translation by Erik de Mauney published as Portrait of the Anti-Semite, Secker & Warburg (England), 1948.

• Gallimard, 1947, translation by Martin Turnell published as Baudelaire, Horizon (London), 1949, New Directions, 1950.

• Situations I, Gallimard, 1947, published as Critiques litteraires, 1975.

• Situations II, Gallimard, 1948.

• Qu'est-ce que le litterature? (first published inSituations II ), Gallimard, 1949, translation by Frechtman published as What Is Literature?, Philosophical Library, 1949, published as Literature and Existentialism, Citadel, 1962.

• Situations III, Gallimard, 1949.

• (With David Rousset and Gerard Rosenthal) Entretiens sur la politique, Gallimard, 1949.

• Saint Genet, comedien et martyr, Gallimard, 1952, translation by Frechtman published as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, Braziller, 1963.

• Literary and Philosophical Essays (excerpts from Situations I and III), translation by Annette Michelson, Criterion, 1955.

• Literary Essays (excerpts from Situations I and III), translation by Michelson, Philosophical Library, 1957.

• Sartre on Cuba, Ballantine, 1961.

• Situations IV: Portraits, Gallimard, 1964, translation by Benita Eisler published as Situations, Braziller, 1965.

• Situations V: Colonialisme et neo-colonialisme, Gallimard, 1964.

• Situations VI: Problemes du Marxisme, Part I, Gallimard, 1966.

• (Contributor) Aime Cesaire, Das politische Denken Lumumbas, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1966.

• Situations VII: Problemes du Marxisme, Part II, Gallimard, 1967.

• On Genocide, with commentary on the International War Crimes Tribunal by Sartre's adopted daughter, Arlette el Kaim-Sartre, Beacon, 1968.

• The Ghost of Stalin, translation by Martha H. Fletcher and John R. Kleinschmidt, Braziller, 1968, translation by Irene Clephane published as The Spectre of Stalin, Hamish Hamilton, 1969.

• Les Communistes et la paix (first published in Situations VI), Gallimard, 1964, translation by Fletcher and Kleinschmidt (bound with "A Reply to Claude Lefort" translated by Philip R. Berk) published as The Communists and Peace, Braziller, 1968.

• El Intelectual frente a la revolution, Ediciones Hombre Nuevo, 1969.

• Les Communistes ont peur de la revolution, J. Didier, 1969.

• (With Vladimir Dedijer) War Crimes in Vietnam, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1971.

• L'idiot de la famille, Gallimard, 1971, translation by Carol Cosman published as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, three volumes, University of Chicago Press, 1981-89.

• Situations VIII: Autour de 1968, French and European Publications, 1972.

• Situations IX: Melanges, French and European Publications, 1972.

• Situations X: Politique et Autobiographie, French and European Publications, 1976, translation by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis published asLife/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, Pantheon, 1977.

OTHER

• (Contributor) L'Affaire Henri Martin (title means "The Henry Martin Affair"), Gallimard, 1953.

• Sartre par lui-meme, edited by Francis Jeanson, Editions du Seuil, 1959, translation by Richard Seaver published as Sartre by Himself, Outback Press, 1978.

• (Author of text) Andre Masson, Vingt-Deux Dessins sur le Theme du Desir, F. Mourtot, 1961.

• Les Mots (autobiography), Gallimard, 1963, translation by Frechtman published as The Words, Braziller, 1964, translation by Clephane published as Words, Hamish Hamilton, 1964.

• Sartre por Sartre, edited by Juan Jose Sebreli, Jorge Alvarez, 1968.

• (Editor with Bertrand Russell) Das Vietnam Tribunal, Rowohlt Verlag, 1970.

• Gott ohne Gott (contains Bariona and a dialogue with Sartre), edited by Gotthold Hasenhuttl, Graz Verlag (Austria), 1972.

• Un theatre de situations, compiled and edited by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Gallimard, 1973, translation by Frank Jellinck published as Sartre on Theater, Pantheon, 1976.

• Oeuvres romanesques, edited by Contat and Rybalka, Gallimard, 1981.

• Cahiers pour une morale, Gallimard, 1983.

• Carnets de la drole de guerre, Gallimard, 1983, new edition, 1995.

• (With Simone de Beauvoir) Lettres au Castor et a quelques autres, Volume 1: "1926-1939," translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee as Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926-1939, Scribner, 1992, Volume 2: "1940-1963," Gallimard, 1984, translated by Fahnestock and MacAfee as Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1940-1963, Macmillan, 1993.

• Le scenario Freud, Gallimard, 1984, translation by Quintin Hoare published as The Freud Scenario, University of Chicago Press, 1985.

• The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre, Random House, 1985.

• Notes from a Phony War, Editions Gallimard, 1995.

• (With Benny Levy) Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian van den Hoven, University of Chicago Press, 1996.

• Existential Psychoanalysis, Regnery Pub. (Washington, D.C.), 1997.

Contributor to numerous books, anthologies, and periodicals. Editor ofLa Cause du peuple, beginning 1970, Tout!, beginning 1970, and Revolution!, beginning 1971.