Sartre Simplified Essay Research Paper Jean Paul

Sartre Simplified Essay, Research Paper

Jean Paul Sartre was born in Paris, France on June 21, 1905. When Sartre was fifteen months old, his father died and Sartre was sick with enteritis. When Sartre was well again, his mother took him to live with his grandparents in Meudon. As a kid, Sartre was given everything and always was treated like a kid. Around 1909, Sartre suffered leucoma in his right eye. This left him half blind and wall eyed. Sartre was educated at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He took to writing, and was thought by everyone to end up a writer. At this time his mother remarried, and they moved to La Rochelle. In 1920, he moved back to Paris, and in June he passed the first part of the baccalaureate, and in 1922 he passed the second part. He wrote a thesis in 1927 but failed the exam, and in 1929 he not only passed the exam he placed first in it. At this time he was unofficially engaged with a grocer’s daughter. Then, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who had placed second on the exam. Their close relationship endured for more than a half of a century, until his death. They never did marry thought, saying that they had no need for the bourgeois formalities of marriage.

He started to take interest in philosophy at an early age at the school. A teacher at the Ecole named Henri Bergson who wrote Essai sur les donnes de la conscience left him in awe at philosophy. Sartre taught philosophy in various lycees in France. After this, Sartre went to the Institut Francais in Berlin to study Husserl s Phenomenology. This was:

1. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking.

2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism (also called objectivism and positivism), which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance.

3. Positively speaking, phenomenologists tend to justify cognition (and some also evaluation and action) with reference to what Edmund Husserl called Evidenz, which is awareness of a matter itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct, and adequate way for something of its kind.

4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known.

5. Phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called “encountering” as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon “objects as they are encountered” (this terminology is not widely shared, but the emphasis on a dual problematics and the reflective approach it requires is).

6. Phenomenologists tend to recognize the role of description in universal, a priori, or “eidetic” terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds; and

7. Phenomenologists tend to debate whether or not what Husserl calls the transcendental phenomenological epoch and reduction is useful or even possible.

Husserl was the greatest influence of Sartre. In 1936, Sartre wrote Transcendental Ego at the Institut. Sartre said I wrote it actually under the direct influence of Husserl… When World War II broke out, he was drafted into the French Military. From 1940 to 1941 he was a German Prisoner of War. When he was released, he was very active in the French Resistance and started his own socialism and liberty resistance group. After the War, Sartre took up a teaching job at the lycee Condorcet, the lycee Henri IV, and the lycee at Havre. These teaching jobs were very short lived and after it he completely devoted his life to his writings, which totaled over thirty volumes. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, but refused saying to accept such an award would compromise his integrity as a writer. In 1962 he adopted Arlette Elkaim, a gifted musician. In 1970, Sartre accepted the nominal editorship for several leftist publications. In 1972, thinking that “every man is a political animal,” he started to edit a paper called Liberation.

In 1976, a film was made in Paris about him, and he accepted a doctorate form the Hebrew University. It was at this time that he claimed he was no longer a Marxist.

Sartre died on April 15, 1980, after a visit to Israel with his adopted daughter.

Sartre s philosophy was that of existentialism. He had combined works of Edmund Husserl, G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, and Karl Marx. This theory relates philosophical theory to life, literature, psychology, and political action. Sartre s theory can be summed up into 20 categories:

1. EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. “Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.” This means that what we do, how we act in our life, determines our apparent “qualities.” It is not that someone tells the truth because she is honest, but rather she defines herself as honest by telling the truth again and again.

I am a professor in a way different than the way I am six feet tall, or the way a table is a table. The table simply is; I exist by defining myself in the world at each moment.

2. SUBJECT RATHER THAN OBJECT. Humans are not objects to be used by God or a government or corporation or society. Nor we to be “adjusted” or molded into roles –to be only a waiter or a conductor or a mother or worker. We m