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My name is Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905-1980). I was born in Paris in 1905, studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1924 to 1929 and became Professor of Philosophy at Le Havre in 1931. With the help of a stipend from the Institut Français I studied in Berlin (1932) the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. After further teaching at Le Havre, and then in Laon, I taught at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris from 1937 to 1939. Since the end of the Second World War, I have been living as an independent writer.
I am one of those writers for whom a determined philosophical position is the centre of their artistic being. Although drawn from many sources, for example, Husserl's idea of a free, fully intentional consciousness and Heidegger's existentialism, the existentialism I formulated and popularized is profoundly original. Its popularity and that of its author reached a climax in the forties, and my theoretical writings as well as my novels and plays constitute one of the main inspirational sources of modern literature. In my philosophical view atheism is taken for granted; the "loss of God" is not mourned. Man is condemned to freedom, a freedom from all authority, which he may seek to evade, distort, and deny but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being. The meaning of man's life is not established before his existence. Once the terrible freedom is acknowledged, man has to make this meaning himself, has to commit himself to a role in this world, has to commit his freedom. And this attempt to make oneself is futile without the "solidarity" of others.
The conclusions a writer must draw from this position were set forth in "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?" (What Is Literature?), 1948: literature is no longer an activity for itself, nor primarily descriptive of characters and situations, but is concerned with human freedom and its (and the author's) commitment. Literature is committed; artistic creation is a moral activity.
While the publication of his early, largely psychological studies, L'Imagination (1936), Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Outline of a Theory of the Emotions), 1939, and L'Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination (The Psychology of Imagination), 1940, remained relatively unnoticed, my first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), 1938, and the collection of stories Le Mur (The Wall and other Stories), 1938, brought me immediate recognition and success. They dramatically express my early existentialist themes of alienation and commitment, and of salvation through art.
My central philosophical work, L'Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943, is a massive structuralization of my concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism derives. The existentialist humanism which I propagate in my popular essay L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946, can be glimpsed in the series of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), 1945-49.
I am perhaps best known as a playwright. In Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943, the young killer's committed freedom is pitted against the powerless Jupiter, while in Huis Clos (No Exit), 1947, hell emerges as the togetherness of people.
I have engaged extensively in literary critisicm and have written studies on Baudelaire (1947) and Jean Genet (1952). A biography of my childhood, Les Mots (The Words), appeared in 1964.
"Consciousness is a being whose existence posits its essence, and inversely it is consciousness of a being, whose essence implies its existence; that is, in which appearance lays claim to being. Being is everywhere...We must understand that this being is no other than the transphenomenal being of phenomena and not a noumenal being which is hidden behind them...It requires simply that the being of that which appears does not exist only in so far as it appears. The transphenomenal being of what exists for consciousness is itself in itself.... Consciousness is the revealed-revelation of existents, and existents appear before consciousness on the foundation of their being...Consciousness can always pass beyond the existent, not toward its being, but toward the meaning of this being. A fundamental characteristic of its transcendence is to transcend the ontic toward the ontological. The meaning of the being of the existent in so far as it reveals itself to consciousness is the phenomenon of being...This elucidation of the meaning of being is valid only for the being of the phenomenon....For being is the being of becoming and due to this fact it is beyond becoming. It is what it is. This means that by itself it can not even be what it is not...It is full positivity. It knows no otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being. It can support no connection with the other. It is itself indefinitely and it exhausts itself in being...Consciousness absolutely can not derive from anything, either from another being, or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity." (Being and Nothingness, 1943)
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"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (from L'Être et le Néant / Being and Nothingness, 1943)
…“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because…when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. … But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.
Me on the often misinterpreted line from my famous play, No Exit
"La philosophie apparaît à certains comme un milieu homogène: les pensées y naissent, y meurent, les systèmes s'y édifient pour s'y écrouler. D'autres la tiennent pour une certaine attitude qu'il serait toujours dans notre liberté d'adopter. D'autres pour un secteur déterminé de la culture. A nos yeux, la Philosophie n'est pas; sous quelque forme qu'on la considère, cette ombre de la science, cette éminence grise de l'humanité n'est qu'une abstraction hypostasiée. En fait, il y a des philosophies. Ou plutôt - car vous n'en trouverez jamais plus d'une à la fois qui soit vivante - en certaines circonstances bien définies, une philosophie se constitue pour donner une expression au mouvement général de la société; et, tant qu'elle vit, c'est elle qui sert de milieu culturel aux contemporains. Cet objet déconcertant se présente à la fois sous des aspects profondément distincts dont il opère constamment l'unification... Une philosophie, quand elle est dans sa pleine virulence, ne se présente jamais comme une chose inerte, comme l'unité passive et déjà terminée du Savoir; née du mouvement social, elle est mouvement elle-même et mord sur l'avenir: cette totalisation concrète est en même temps le projet abstrait de poursuivre l'unification jusqu'à ses dernières limites; sous cet aspect, la philosophie se caractérise comme étant une méthode d'investigation, et d'explication; la confiance qu'lle met en elle-même et da,s son développement future ne fait que reproduire les certitudes de la classe qui la porte." (Critique de la raison dialectique.)