Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905, as the only child of Anne-Marie Schweitzer and Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy. His father died of a fever, when Sartre was two years old. His mother raised him with help from her father, a teacher of German who introduced Jean-Paul to classical literature at a very early age.Then, as a teenager Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's essay Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He earned a degree in philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure - the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. In 1929 at the university he met his future life partner – Simone de Beavoir. They became inseparable, though they were not monogamous. They challenged together the „bourgeois” cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings. The conflict between destructive conformity and „authentic way of being” became the inspiration for Sartres early work – Being and Nothingness (1943), which is a massive structuralization of his concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism derives.
During World War II Sartre served as a meteorologist in the French Army. In 1940 he was captured by German troops and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war. In those days he wrote his first theatrical piece - Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. During this period of confinement Jean-Paul read Heidegger's Being and Time, later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology. Because of poor health He was released in 1941 and recovered teaching position at Lycée Pasteur near Paris. After coming back to Paris he he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté. After the War he became one of the most important and influential of French left-wing intellectual and a leading advocate of existentialism.
Existentialism is the 19th Century philosophy of personal existence introduced by Søren Kierkegaard according to which the subjective consciousness of the individual, and his solitary „leap into the unknown”, constitute the sole legitimate premise of all metaphysical and ethical speculation. In the ‘1930s a German Philosopher – Martin Heidegger resumed Kierkegaard’s philosophy with some changes. His main work is Being and Time (1927). Sartre never met Heidegger personally, but he read his books and made France the center of existentialism, where it turned from the most esoteric to the most popular philosophy, what caused its internal diversification. There were even some important differences between Heidegger and Sartre, although they both stood on the left side of this philosophy. Heidegger’s philosophy was mainly an ontology, and Sartre’s was more about ethics.
Sartres existentialism emphasizes individuals freedom and subjectivity. The introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism and humanism (1946). He claims that human is a being for-itself (pour soi), whose existence is ahead of his essence. Essence does not constitute human’s existence. In fact, tere is no essence – our acts are our own choice, choice of essence. We can make choice of our essence, but not for existence, because we have to exist, so we can choose. Human being for-itself is the opposite of being in-itself (en soi), which combines both existence and essence. Being in-itself concerns objects made by human – first there is an essence, which constitutes of its existence. This duality of existence (for-itself and in-itself) is the fundamental element of existentialism.
Sartre associated the main ideas of existentialism with an energetic form of political activism, based nevertheless on the premise that an individual is answerable to himself alone, and has no responsibility greater than the responsibility to be who he really is. The individual is alone in the world burdened by a freedom and his acts, for which he must take full and elaborate responsibility.
At the same time there is no responsibility outside the act of commitment; a political stance may provide the channel through which commitment can flow, in which case it may fulfil the obligatory existential choice of the godless agent. Sartre claims that human beings choice must be, or at any rate ought to be, directed towards a political - specifically communist - end. In the last analysis – for Sartre existentialism is only an „enclave within Marxism”. He tried to synthesize existentialism and Marxism in the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), his major work after Stalin’s dead. An attempt to synthesize existentialism and Marxism is the first step of Sartre’s political philosophy, towards complex philosophy of revolutionary praxis.
Everything except humans existence is just an abstraction – ideas, religion, even outside objects. There is no natural law or objective morality. Human beings reification (conceding him essence) deprives him of freedom, subjectivity and humanity. A man can make true existential choice or loose himself in the bad faith. A person can loose his freedom of making existential choices by adopting roles and moral codes that bind him to public expectations. For Sartre the true model of human being is an antihero who rejects all bourgeois morality and custom. This hero disobeys all laws that are not affirmed subjectively, from the totalizing perspective of revolutionary praxis. The role of praxis is to „totalize” the experience available to the modern consciousness. This totalization occurs in action, and also shows that the world can be transformer by action – praxis.
During the Cold War Jean-Paul Sartre was dedicated politically, first by founding the RDR (Le Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire) party, then through his initial involvement with the French Communist Party. He embraced Marxism, travelled to Soviet Union, took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria. He became an eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War. Consequently, Sartre became a domestic target of the paramilitary Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), escaping two bomb attacks in the early '60s. He opposes the Vietnam War. The penetration with which he saw crime in al most etery aspekt of the western way of life was perfectly matched by ability to turn a blind eye to the crimes of communism. In the ‘60s Sartre went to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto „Che” Guevara, who he declars to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age" and the „era's most perfect man”. Firstly he supported the Revolution in Cuba, but later he disapproved Fidel Castro’s abuses. He also striked against Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Thus he wasn’t totally uncritical of communism.
He stood by students side in the May 1968 strikes in Paris. In 1972 he lost his sight, but it doesn’t stop him from political activity. He pursued the peace between Israelis and Arab People, appealed for the release of dissidents of the Soviet Union. In 1979 he asked the President of France for let the „boat people” from Vietnam in the country.
He died 15 April 1980 in Paris from edema of the lung.
Jean-Paul Sartre was an outstanding philosopher, novelist and playwright. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, got Legion of Honour and the professorship of Collège de France, but he refused to take of them. The only award he ever accepted was the „honoris causa” doctorate from the Jerusalem University. He claimed a man shouldn’t be „perpetuated” inter vivos. But the number of awards shows, how much dedicated intellectual he really was.