Born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, Sartre was the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. Sartre became interested in philosophy after reading Henri Bergson’s “Time and Free Will” when he was a young man. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, where he also met Simone de Beauvoir, then a student at the Sorbonne. The two became lifelong partners, albeit hardly monogamous. Their unconventional lifestyle became a dimension of their challenge to the norms of “bourgeois” society.
During World War II, Sartre was conscripted into the French army in 1939. Captured by German troops in 1940, he was held for nine months as a POW. A civilian by 1941, he taught at Lycée Pasteur and became active in the French underground as a founding member of the clandestine group Socialisme et Liberté and was a contributor to Combat, the newspaper (edited by Albert Camus) of the Resistance. During the war, he also wrote Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), his key expression of Existentialism, in which he made the central claim of this philosophy: “existence precedes essence,” thus standing on its head the traditional view that the essence, or nature, of a thing is more fundamental than the thing’s mere existence. From this reversal flowed Sartre’s ontological theories, including his contention that humans create, through consciousness, their own identity, values, and purposes in life because human beings possess no inherent value or even identity.
In Existentialism, ontology is distinct from metaphysics, mainly because it is descriptive rather than causally explanatory, which is the province of metaphysics. Sartre essentially rejected the validity of explanation in a strictly philosophical sense. Nevertheless, in his political philosophy, he dealt extensively in causal explanation. This aspect of his thought merged with his postwar leftist activism, although he found Marxism flawed as a philosophical position if not as a political and social guide. He also ventured outside of philosophy into psychology in his detailed exploration of the phenomenology of consciousness, arguing in his The Psychology of Imagination (1940; also titled The Imaginary) that imagination, in contrast to perception (in which intention plays only a subordinate role), is highly intentional and, in effect, frees human beings from ontology. Sartre extended this liberating intentionality to emotions as well. Thus, his psychology circled back from psychology to philosophy in an argument that freedom is ontological. Humans are free because they are not a self or, as Sartre put it, an “in-itself,” but, rather, a presence-toself. In effect, then, we are all “other” with respect to ourselves.
Sartre was an ethical philosopher, who argued for individual moral responsibility based on “authenticity,” which he defined as the degree to which one’s actions flow from or are congruent with one’s beliefs and desires irrespective of external pressure or coercion.
Sartre wrote plays and novels, including the drama No Exit (1944) and the novel Nausea (1938), both “existential” in theme and content, and he also made forays into aesthetics, most notably in his 1947 essay collection titled What Is Literature? He defined literary writing as a form of “acting in the world,” which, like other action, produces effects for which the actor (author) must assume responsibility. Sartre believed that literature and other aesthetic work had significant power. Rejecting the “art for art’s sake” aesthetic standard, he argued that art should address social, political, and moral issues of importance.
In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he declined because he refused all official distinctions on principle as a compromise of his authenticity. During the 1970s, he was plagued by ill health exacerbated by overwork, the use of amphetamines, and an addiction to cigarettes. He died on April 15, 1980 from pulmonary edema and was buried at Montparnasse Cemetery. When Simone de Beauvoir died six years later, she was buried in the same grave.
