Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris, France. His father, a naval officer, died when Sartre was fifteen months old, and he was raised largely by his mother and maternal grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a language teacher and uncle of Albert Schweitzer. Sartre showed strong literary inclinations from childhood.

He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he first encountered Simone de Beauvoir, beginning a lifelong intellectual and personal relationship. He passed the agregation examination in philosophy in 1929, ranking first. He subsequently spent a year in Berlin, where he studied the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, work that would significantly shape his philosophical development.

Sartre's early philosophical writing included The Imagination (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), and The Imaginary (1940). His novel Nausea (1938) was his first major literary work, exploring themes of contingency and the absurdity of existence through the diary of a protagonist confronting the sheer fact of being.

Being and Nothingness (1943), written partly while Sartre was a prisoner of war in Germany and completed after his release, is his principal philosophical work. Drawing on phenomenological methods, it argued that human consciousness is characterized by radical freedom and that existence precedes essence, meaning that human beings define themselves through their choices and actions rather than being determined by a prior nature.

After the liberation of France, Sartre became a major public intellectual, co-founding and editing the journal Les Temps Modernes with de Beauvoir and others. His plays, including No Exit (1944) and The Flies (1943), and his novel trilogy Roads to Freedom brought existentialist themes to wider audiences. His lecture Existentialism is a Humanism (1945) was widely distributed.

Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 but refused it, stating that he did not wish to be institutionalized and that a writer should refuse to be transformed into an institution. He continued to publish philosophical works, including the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).

He died on 15 April 1980 in Paris. His funeral drew an estimated fifty thousand people.