Angustia existencial jean paul sartre biography

As Merleau-Ponty observed, Sartre stressed oppression over exploitation, individual moral responsibility over structural causation but without denying the importance of the latter. Admittedly, it does seem compatible angustia existencial jean paul sartre biography a wide variety of life choices. We could say that authenticity is fundamentally living this ontological truth of one's situation, namely, that one is never identical with one's current state but remains responsible sustaining it.

The former is the more prevalent form of self deception but the latter is common to people who lack a sense of the real in their lives. Sartre sometimes talks as if any choice could be authentic so long as it is lived with a clear awareness of its contingency and responsibility. But his considered opinion excludes choices that oppress or consciously exploit others.

In other words, authenticity is not entirely style; there is a general content and that content is freedom. Sartre's thesis is that freedom is the implicit object of any choice, a claim he makes but does not adequately defend in his Humanism lecture. As he grew more cognizant of the social dimension of individual life, the political and the ethical tended to coalesce.

It purports to question many of the main propositions of his ethics of authenticity, yet what has appeared in print chiefly elaborates claims already stated in his earlier works. But since the tapes on which these remarks were recorded are unavailable to the public and Sartre's illness at the time they were made was serious, their authority as revisionary of his general philosophy remains doubtful.

If ever released in its entirety, this text will constitute a serious hermeneutical challenge. He emerged committed to social reform and convinced that the writer had the obligation to address the social issues of the day. He founded the influential journal of opinion, Les Temps moderneswith his partner Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron and others.

After a brief unsuccessful attempt to help organize a nonCommunist leftist political organization, he began his long love-hate relationship with the French Communist Party, which he never joined but which for years he considered the legitimate voice of the working class in France. This continued till the Soviet invasions of Hungary in Still, he continued to sympathize with the movement, if not the Party, for some time afterwards.

Each suspended his or her personal interests for the sake of the common goal. No doubt these practices hardened into institutions and freedom was compromised once more in bureaucratic machinery. But that brief taste of genuine positive reciprocity was revelatory of what an authentic social existence could be. Sartre came to recognize how the economic conditions the political in the sense that material scarcity, as both Ricardo an Marx insisted, determines our social relations.

In Sartre's reading, scarcity emerges as the source of structural and personal violence in human history as we know it. Never one to avoid a battle, Sartre became embroiled in the Algerian War, generating deep hostility from the Right to the point that a bomb was detonated at the entrance to his apartment building by supporters of a French Algeria.

Sartre's political critique conveyed in a series of essays, interviews and plays, especially The Condemned of Altonaonce more combined a sense of structural exploitation in this case, the institution of colonialism and its attendant racism with an expression of moral outrage at the oppression of the Muslim population and the torture of captives by the French military.

Mention of the play brings to mind the role of imaginative art in Sartre's philosophical work. Sartre often turned to literary art to convey or even to work through philosophical thoughts that he had already or would later conceptualize in his essays and theoretical studies. Which brings us to the relation between imaginative literature and philosophy in his work.

And this is what existentialism is chiefly about: challenging the individual to examine their life for intimations of bad faith and to heighten their sensitivity to oppression and exploitation in their world. Historical accuracy and historical actuality are breadth. Some interpret the imperative to define oneself as meaning that anyone can wish to be anything.

However, an existentialist philosopher would say such a wish constitutes an inauthentic existence — what Sartre would call " bad faith ". Instead, the phrase should be taken to say that people are defined only insofar as they act and that they are responsible for their actions. Someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person.

Such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity cruel persons. This is opposed to their genes, or human naturebearing the blame. As Sartre said in his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism : "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. Jonathan Webber interprets Sartre's usage of the term essence not in a modal fashion, i.

Humans are different from houses because—unlike houses—they do not have an inbuilt purpose: they are free to choose their own purpose and thereby shape their essence; thus, their existence precedes their essence. Sartre is committed to a radical conception of freedom: nothing fixes our purpose but we ourselves, our projects have no weight or inertia except for our endorsement of them.

Sedimentations are themselves products of past choices and can be changed by choosing differently in the present, but such angustia existencial jeans paul sartre biography happen slowly. They are a force of inertia that shapes the agent's evaluative outlook on the world until the transition is complete. Sartre's definition of existentialism was based on Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time In the correspondence with Jean Beaufret later published as the Letter on HumanismHeidegger implied that Sartre misunderstood him for his own purposes of subjectivism, and that he did not mean that actions take precedence over being so long as those actions were not reflected upon.

The notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This can be highlighted in the way it opposes the traditional Abrahamic religious perspective, which establishes that life's purpose is the fulfillment of God's commandments.

To live the life of the absurd means rejecting a life that finds or pursues specific meaning for man's existence since there is nothing to be discovered. According to Albert Camus, the world or the human being is not in itself absurd. The concept only emerges through the juxtaposition of the two; life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit.

These are considered absurd since they issue from human freedom, undermining their foundation outside of themselves. The absurd contrasts with the claim that "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person.

Many of the literary works of KierkegaardBeckettKafkaDostoevskyIonescoMiguel de UnamunoLuigi Pirandello[ 36 ] [ 37 ] [ 38 ] [ 39 ] SartreJoseph Hellerand Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. It is because of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Camus claimed in The Myth of Sisyphus that "There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.

The possibility of having everything meaningful break down poses a threat of quietismwhich is inherently against the existentialist philosophy. The ultimate hero of absurdism lives without meaning and faces suicide without succumbing to it. Facticity is defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as the in-itselfwhich for humans takes the form of being and not being.

It is the facts of one's personal life and as per Heidegger, it is " the way in which we are thrown into the world. However, to say that one is only one's past would ignore the change a person undergoes in the present and future, while saying that one's past is only what one was, would entirely detach it from the present self. A denial of one's concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and also applies to other kinds of facticity having a human body—e.

Facticity is a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one did not choose birthplace, etc. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" as being past, for instanceit cannot determine a person: the value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person.

As an example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and the other who remembers everything. Both have committed many crimes, but the first man, remembering nothing, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for "trapping" him in this life.

There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past. However, to disregard one's facticity during the continual process of self-making, projecting oneself into the future, would be to put oneself in denial of the conditions shaping the present self and would be inauthentic. The origin of one's projection must still be one's facticity, though in the mode of not being it essentially.

An example of one focusing solely on possible projects without reflecting on one's current facticity: [ 42 ] would be someone who continually thinks about future possibilities related to being rich e. In this example, considering both facticity and transcendence, an authentic mode of being would be considering future projects that might improve one's current finances e.

Another aspect of facticity is that it entails angst. Freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity and the lack of the possibility of having facticity to "step in" and take responsibility for something one has done also produces angst. Another aspect of existential freedom is that one can change one's values. One is responsible for one's values, regardless of society's values.

The focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of responsibility one bears, as a result of one's freedom. The relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency and a clarification of freedom also clarifies that for which one is responsible. Many noted existentialists consider the theme of authentic existence important.

Authenticity involves the idea that one has to "create oneself" and live in accordance with this self. For an authentic existence, one should act as oneself, not as "one's acts" or as "one's genes" or as any other essence requires. The authentic act is one in accordance with one's freedom. A component of freedom is facticity, but not to the degree that this facticity determines one's transcendent choices one could then blame one's background for making the choice one made [chosen project, from one's transcendence].

Facticity, in relation to authenticity, involves acting on one's actual values when making a choice instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomlyso that one takes responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values. In contrast, the inauthentic is the denial to live [ clarification needed ] in accordance with one's freedom.

This can take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, convincing oneself that some form of determinism is true, or "mimicry" where one acts as "one should". How one "should" act is often determined by an image one has, of how one in such a role bank manager, lion tamer, sex worker, etc. In Being and NothingnessSartre uses the example of a waiter in "bad faith".

He merely takes part in the "act" of being a typical waiter, albeit very convincingly. The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and responsibility and the extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom. The Other written with a capital "O" is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity.

However, it has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity.

To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world the same world that a person experiences —only from "over there"—the world is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same things.

This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look sometimes the Gaze. While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way that one experiences the Other as seen by him, as subjectivityin existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of freedom.

This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. When one experiences oneself in the Look, one does not experience oneself as nothing no thingbut as something some thing. In Sartre's example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole, the man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in. He is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room.

Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is then filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing—as a Peeping Tom. For Sartre, this phenomenological experience of shame establishes proof for the existence of other minds and defeats the problem of solipsism.

For the conscious state of shame to be experienced, one has to become aware of oneself as an object of another look, proving a priori, that other minds exist. Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is possible that the creaking floorboard was simply the movement of an old house; the Look is not some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the Other sees one there may have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that person.

It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.

It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear that has an object. While one can take measures to remove an object of fear, for angst no such "constructive" measures are possible. The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions and to the fact that, in experiencing freedom as angst, one also realizes that one is fully responsible for these consequences.

There is nothing in people genetically, for instance that acts in their stead—that they can blame if something goes wrong. Therefore, not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences and, it can be claimed, human lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread. However, this does not change the fact that freedom remains a condition of every action.

Despair is generally defined as a loss of hope. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds their being-thing compromised, they would normally be found in a state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses the ability to sing may despair if they have nothing else to fall back on—nothing to rely on for their identity.

They find themselves unable to be what defined their being. What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when they are not overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, they are in perpetual despair—and as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence found in conventional reality on which to constitute the individual's sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition.

When the God-forsaken worldliness of earthly life shuts itself in complacency, the confined air develops poison, the moment gets stuck and stands still, the prospect is lost, a need is felt for a refreshing, enlivening breeze to cleanse the air and dispel the poisonous vapors lest we suffocate in worldliness. Lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all.

Love hopes all things—yet is never put to shame. To relate oneself expectantly to the angustia existencial jean paul sartre biography of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision.

Existentialists oppose defining human beings as primarily rational, and, therefore, oppose both positivism and rationalism. Existentialism asserts that people make decisions based on subjective meaning rather than pure rationality. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical free will and our awareness of death.

Kierkegaard advocated rationality as a means to interact with the objective world e. Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena—"the Other"—that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom.

To try to suppress feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserted, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the Look" of "the Other" i. An existentialist reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that they are an existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of events.

Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing these commandments upon them, but as though they are inside them and guiding them from inside. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life—or the learner who should put it to use?

Although nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another since both are rooted in the human experience of anguish and confusion that stems from the apparent meaninglessness of a world in which humans are compelled to find or create meaning. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to moral or existential nihilism.

A pervasive theme in existentialist philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Albert Camus 's philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus : "One must imagine Sisyphus happy". We shall devote to them a future work. Some have argued that existentialism has long been an element of European religious thought, even before the term came into use.

According to Wahl, "the origins of most great philosophies, like those of PlatoDescartesand Kantare to be found in existential reflections. Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century.

They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom.

Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his own values and creates the very terms they excel under. By contrast, Kierkegaard, opposed to the level of abstraction in Hegel, and not nearly as hostile actually welcoming to Christianity as Nietzsche, argues through a pseudonym that the objective certainty of religious truths specifically Christian is not only impossible, but even founded on logical paradoxes.

Yet he continues to imply that a leap of faith is a possible means for an individual to reach a higher stage of existence that transcends and contains both an aesthetic and ethical value of life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernismand various strands of psychotherapy.

In Twilight of the IdolsNietzsche's sentiments resonate the idea of "existence precedes essence. No one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment Man is not the effect of some special purpose of a will, and end The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian, Dostoyevsky.

Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanismquoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. Other Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishmentthe protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoyevsky himself.

In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers explored existentialist ideas. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugoin his book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nationsemphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Sartre was generally stridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating a multiculturalism avant la lettreas Michael Walzer has argued in his Preface to Anti-semite and Jew Walzer xiv.

His books and more journalistic writings typically call out what he saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race, and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. There is an obvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues from Sartrean existentialism.

Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre, since it typically perhaps necessarily involves believing in essences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. His Notebooks suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. This is also the key argument of Anti-semite and the Jewcomposed very quickly in and without much detailed knowledge of Judaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passive anti-semitism of many French citizens.

The text was written following the Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust were widely known.

Angustia existencial jean paul sartre biography

Sartre was aiming to understand and critique the situation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of the French Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all. The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit or implicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excluding others, notably the Jew.

Now, of course, few of his contemporaries would admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to being racist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks are clear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma of authenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choose between their concrete practical identities religious and cultural and more universal ascriptions liberty, etc.

Sartre consistently ascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectives are ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him, it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Nazi regime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviously egregious activities were sustained by their society and the individuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of bad faith.

Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface to Black Orpheusan anthology of negritude poetry. He called for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on the side of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged such interventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category of race itself as an example of bad faith.

Here the reception from Frantz Fanon and others was mixed. In Black Skin, White MasksFanon argues this effectively undermined his own lived-experience and its power see entries on negritude and Fanon ; cf. Continuous with insights from his What is Literature? His literary works hence are typically both philosophical and political. Although the number of these works diminished over time, there is still a powerful literary exploration of the philosophical and political themes of the Critique in the play, The Condemned of Altona We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like Sartre, to conclude.

They certainly presage issues that are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre and secondary literature that are relevant for this article. References to Situations will be abbreviated as Sit. Jack would like to acknowledge Marion Tapper, who taught him Sartre as an undergraduate student.

In addition, he would like to thank Steven Churchill, with whom he has worked on Sartre elsewhere and the work here remains indebted to those conversations and collaborations. Thanks also to Erol Copelj for feedback on this essay. Life and Works 2. Transcendence of the Ego: The Discovery of Intentionality 3. Imagination, Phenomenology and Literature 4.

Being and Nothingness 4. Negation and freedom 4. Existential Psychoanalysis and the Fundamental Project 6. Existentialist Marxism: Critique of Dialectical Reason 7. Politics and Anti-Colonialism Bibliography A. Primary Literature B. Imagination, Phenomenology and Literature For many of his readers, the book on the Imaginary that Sartre published in constitutes one of the most rigorous and fruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenological investigations.

In this sense, Sartre concludes, one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certain nothingness. Sartre [ 14] The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediate consciousness of the nothingness of its object. This is for instance what happens when we go to the theatre or read a novel: To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees.

Sartre [ 64] The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator or reader from projecting herself into this world as if it was real. Even a cubist painting, which might not depict nor represent anything, still functions as an analogon, which manifests an irreal ensemble of new thingsof objects that I have never seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects.

Sartre [ ] Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal objects through verbal analogons. In order for the world of the novel to offer its maximum density, the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be.

Sartre [ 60] In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when we reduce the other to some ostensible identity e. Sartre [ ] 5. As he puts it: Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of a past.

Sartre [ ] Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, in agreement with the free project that orients his or her existence towards the future. Sartre addresses this objection in Being and Nothingnessclaiming that if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must by the same token be known by him; quite the contrary.

Never a member of the French Communist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cards on the table: we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. Sartre [ 21] Critique offers a systematic attempt to justify these two perspectives and render them compatible.

Sartre says, Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. Sartre [ 56] Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor that determines and orients history and the field of possibilities. It is the reign of necessity, the domain … in which inorganic materiality envelops human multiplicity and transforms the producer into its product.

Sartre a [ ] For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Flynnalso see previous version of this entry [Flynn []] and cf. Sartre a [ —3]. Bibliography This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre and secondary literature that are relevant for this article. McCleary trans. Primary Literature A. Translated as NauseaRobert Baldick trans.

Reprinted in Situations 1. Fell trans. Barnes trans. Translated as Existentialism is a HumanismJohn Kulka ed. Translated as Anti-semite and JewGeorge J. Becker trans. Translated as BaudelaireMartin Turnell trans. Hamilton, First produced Collected in Situations II. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk trans. Later to be a foreword for Sartre Translated as Search for a MethodHazel E.

Reprinted New York: Random House, Reprinted in with a forward by Fredric Jameson, London: Verso. The second unfinished volume was published posthumously in Translated as The WordsBernard Frechtman trans. Partially published in Situations IX. Reprinted New York: Collier Books, Idt and G. The title, The Words, refers to the idolatry of literature he had practiced up to about The autobiography was judged by Francis Jeanson in Sartre dans sa vie as "the most accessible, and doubtless the most successful, of all the non- philosophical works of Sartre.

As a study in characters his mother, his grandfather, the Alsatian bourgeoisie from which they sprang, his father's familyit is superb. As self-analysis, it is even more outstanding. Few writers have portrayed so searchingly their early childhood and their choice of a vocation or have judged so severely the adult who grew from the child.

The book was, Sartre says within its pages, the fruit of an awakening from "a long, bitter, and sweet delusion. At the opposite extreme is Sartre's final biographic work, The Family Idiot, a 2,page analysis of Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert had long interested Sartre, both attracting him and repulsing him. Sartre wanted to explore chiefly the particular circumstances and the dialectical relationships that made Flaubert into a bourgeois who hated the bourgeoisie, a passive man incapable of pursuing an ordinary career, and, generally, a misfit and a neurotic, as well as a great writer.

The investigation ranges far afield, from Flaubert's antecedents and family, to his infancy reconstructed with the help of Sartre's dialectical method, here called progressive-regressive and youth, to all aspects of the social and economic situation in which he matured. Sartre wished to show, he said in an interview given to Le Monde, that "everything can be communicated After Sartre published and saw into production two theatrical adaptations and three original plays, two of which are surely among his greatest.

The Devil and the Good Lord, his personal favorite, is, like the volume on Genet, concerned with values, absolutely and pragmatically. An uncompromising statement of atheism, the play explores in a historical context sixteenth-century Reformation Germany the interdependency of good and evil and illustrates the necessity of adopting means that suit the ends.

A second major play of the s is the lengthy The Condemned of Altona, which concerns a German World War II veteran who has barricaded himself in his room for years. Tended only by his sister, the veteran has persuaded himself that Germany won the war. Although concerned explicitly with that conflict and its aftermath, the play was intended to refer also to the Algerian War, then in progress.

The play impugns Nazi Germany and the type of men it produced--not just SS soldiers but also members of the upper bourgeoisie who found Nazism useful because it served their economic interests. More generally, it condemns capitalist Europe, whose conflicts over markets and expansion had caused two world wars. Declaring to John Gerassi--in a New York Times Magazine interview--that "commitment is an act, not a word," Sartre expressed his political beliefs by participating in demonstrations, marches, and campaigns, although he was not well he suffered from failing eyesight and circulatory troubles, among other ailments.

Sartre took stands on literally dozens of political and social issues around the world. Such topics as decent housing in France, conscientious objection in Israel, the Vietnamese War, repression in the Congo, Basque separatism, the troubles in Northern Ireland, torture in Argentina, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan show the range of his concerns.

Denouncing as ossified the French Communist Party and all other parties intellectually dependent upon the Soviet Union, Sartre supported Maoist attempts at a new radicalization of Marxist theory and action. This political activity both increased interest in his writings and made him notorious throughout Europe. From the beginning of his career, Sartre wanted to make people think, feel, see, and ultimately act differently.

Like his earlier views, summarized in Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre's later morality is both a difficult and a hopeful one. People can change, he proclaimed, but they would prefer to remain in their errors to practice injustice, for instance or to cling to what he had called bad faith. Because of the acceleration of violence and international competition, they must change, he insisted.

Since the oppressive and privileged classes will not willingly give up their privileges, these must be wrested from them by violence and revolution; then new relationships between human beings, based on reciprocity and openness instead of rivalry and secrecy, will be possible, Sartre declared. As his health deteriorated, Sartre wrote less but gave lengthy interviews that are a sort of intellectual autobiography.

He remained fascinated with himself and his career, perhaps more so than other great writers, but more surprisingly so, since he had wished to move away from the cult of the individual to the idea of the general man, "anyone at all," as he put it in The Words. He was, as Josette Pacaly declared in Sartre au miroir, "a Narcissus who does not like himself.

Twelve years after Sartre's death inhis daughter authorized the publication of several collections of letters that illuminate the private life and thoughts of the philosopher. Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, relates to the early years of the unconventional Sartre-de Beauvoir love relationship, the period during which he wrote his first fictional and philosophical works and during which Sartre served as a professor of philosophy at several universities.

Many angustia existencial jeans paul sartre biography that the novelist-philosopher included in such novels as The Age of Reason and Being and Nothingness "were angustia existencial jean paul sartre biography formulated in letters written at the beginning of [World War II], when, exiled from the distractions of Paris, he profited from the enforced leisure of camp life," according to Ronald Hayman in the New York Times Book Review.

The philosopher's experiences of serving as an officer attached to a French meteorological unit and, later, as a prisoner of war, are recounted through letters collected as Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, Connor in America. But the foremost philosopher of freedom, in prison, comes across rather well In these letters we almost casually discover an exemplary life.

Seen as a whole, Sartre's career reveals numerous contradictions. A bourgeois, he hated the middle classes and wanted to chastise them; "I became a traitor and remained one," he wrote in The Words. Yet he was not a true proletarian writer. An individualist in many ways and completely opposed to regimentation, he nevertheless attacked the individualistic tradition and insisted on the importance of the collectivity; he moved from the extremely solitary position of an existentialist to concern for society above all.

A writer possessed of an outstanding ear for language and other literary skills, he came to suspect literature as inauthentic and wrote a superb autobiography to denounce writing. An atheist, he often spoke with the fervor of an evangelist and repeated that man was responsible for his own errors and must mend his ways. A reformer and moralist, he led an existence that would seem to many decidedly immoral.

Of such contradictions, he was of course, aware. Catalano, Joseph S. Martin's Press, Fell, Joseph P. Fourny, Jean-Francois, and Charles D. Minahen, eds. Hayim, Gila J. Laing, Humanities, Laing, R. McMahon, Joseph H. Morris, Phyllis S. Ranwez, Alain D. Santoni, Ronald E. Stewart, John, ed.