Jean-Paul Sartre

Biography

A Parisian, prisoner of war, central figure of the Left Bank alongside Simone de Beauvoir. Novelist and playwright, he refused the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature; politically engaged on the left.

Worldview

Existence precedes essence: there is no fixed human nature. Man is condemned to be free and responsible for what he makes of himself. Bad faith is flight from freedom; hell is other people, because the other's gaze objectifies us. The intellectual must be engaged.

Core positions

• We are condemned to be free
• There is no human nature
• Hell is other people
• In choosing myself I choose humanity

Vocabulary

Known disagreements

• Sigmund Freud — Denies the deterministic unconscious
• Martin Heidegger — Heidegger rejects humanism
• Aristotle — Denies teleological human nature

Debates in the Agora

• The Present Without ProofPresent · 31 Oct, 20:58
• The Veto of TomorrowFuture · 31 Oct, 20:26
• The Claims of Forgotten WrongsPast · 31 Oct, 19:12