Jean Paul Sartre : French Activist

1442 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: jean paul sartre;radical freedom and responsibility

Throughout the post World War Two era, many people became homeless in countries such as France, Poland, Belgium and other territories of war because of the economic collapse. A Cold War also emerged between the two rising power countries in the world, the USSR and the United States. The emergence of the United Nations, which was a council where the countries of the world could get together so they could discuss global issues, had given some hope to those but only on the surface. In France specifically, there were homeless people all over because of economic weakness, little military power because of Hitler’s occupation of France, and most importantly the corrupted psychology of the people. Jean Paul Sartre became part of the miserable France after World War Two. Sartre fit right into the era of doubt and dismay. He was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and critic. He also became one of the primary figures in philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, along with being a leading figure in 20th century philosophy and Marxism. When Sartre was captured during World War Two by German troops, he realized no person existed that did not make an impact on the entire human race such as Hitler who had made a negative impact on the world. What makes Sartre unique to the era of misery in France because he questioned God and changed France’s presence in the world by making the French change how they acted towards one another and how to question, with the new philosophy of existentialism that states one person fashions the entire race.
As France’s presence in the world collapsed and finally women started to have rights when he became partners with Simone de Beauvoir, who was...

... middle of paper ...

...existed somewhere in the universe, which is how he changed the world. Sartre took the broken and put it together into the philosophy of Existentialism.

Works Cited

Magill, Frank N. “Jean-Paul Sartre.” 20th Century 1901-2000. Pasadena, California.
Salem Press Inc, 2008. Print.
Malhorta, Ashok Kumar. Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism in Literature and Philosophy.
“Chapter 4 Nausea.” Oneonta, New York: Department of Philosophy the state University of New York, 1995. Print.
McGreal, Ian P. “Jean-Paul Sartre” Great Thinkers of the Western World. New York,
NY: Harper Collin Publishers Inc, 1992. Print.
Sartre, Jean Paul. “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean
Paul Sartre 1946. World Publishing Company, Feb. 2005. Web. 02 Apr. 2014. Print.
Stanford. “Jean Paul Sartre.” Stanford University. Stanford, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2014.
Print.

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Cordwainer Smith's Alpha Ralpha Street

    1125 Words  | 3 Pages

    The term existentialist, according to Sartre, means existence precedes essence. This means that an individual first exists, and then they exercise free will over themselves to do things that define themselves, thus their essence. For this ideology to work for Sartre, an atheistic stance needs to be taken. This is so because of how he defines God. God is compared to an artisan producing a knife, through a definition and a formula. Thus, “when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating.” Under this identification of God, that Sartre dictates is a common implication in philosophical writings, God creates with intent and seemingly, purpose. Hence, God

    Read More

  • Jean-Paul Sartre - Problems with the Notion of Bad Faith

    4319 Words  | 9 Pages

    Schlipp, Paul Arthur ed. The Philosophy Of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Library of Living Philosophers Vol. XVI, La Salle, Ill: Open Court 1981.

    Read More

  • Existentialism in Night

    998 Words  | 2 Pages

    In his essay “Existentialism”, Jean Paul Sartre discusses the main beliefs of existentialism. Perhaps the most important belief of existentialism is that there is no human nature, and there is no God. This means that each individual man has control of his own destiny. The definition of each individual man is the sum of his life and all he has accomplished in his life. He is also responsible for all the choices and actions he makes in his life. These types of choices and actions can be seen in the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel. This book is a story about a boy, Wiesel, who is taken to a concentration camp with his family. It follows him and his father through their trials and movement from Auschwitz to Burkenau, and to Buna and how they continue to narrowly escape death. By the end of the story, readers see how Wiesel has become indifferent to the horrors of the camps. From the beginning to this point in the book, Wiesel and other characters make decisions that Sartre would call existentialist.

    Read More

  • Existentialism In 13 Going On Thirty By Jean-Paul Sartre

    1391 Words  | 3 Pages

    In his lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre discusses common misconceptions people, specifically Communists and Christians, have about existentialism and extentanitalists (18). He wants to explain why these misconceptions are wrong and defend existentialism for what he believes it is. Sartre argues people are free to create themselves through their decisions and actions. This idea is illustrated in the movie 13 Going on Thirty, where one characters’ decision at her thirteenth birthday party and her actions afterwards make her become awful person by the time she turns thirty. She was free to make these decisions but she was also alone. Often the idea of having complete free will at first sounds refreshing, but when people

    Read More

  • Exploring Existential Ethics: Beauvoir's Response to Sartre

    647 Words  | 2 Pages

    At the end of Being and Nothingness,Jean-Paul Sartre concedes that he has not overcome one of the key objections to existentialism viz., an outline of ethics, and states that he will do so later. Although Sartre attempted the project of an existential ethics, it was never quite completed. Enter Simone De Beauvoir. In this book, De Beauvoir picks up where Sartre has left us, refusing to answer the question of ethics. For De Beauvoir, human nature involves and ontological ambiguity whose finitude is bound in a duality. This duality of body and consciousness is the ambiguity which remakes nature the way we want it to be as a facticity of transcendence. It is within this understanding that the project of ethics must begin in ambiguity. However,

    Read More

  • Jean-Paul Sartre and Radical Freedom

    1790 Words  | 4 Pages

    The key belief of existentialists is that existence precedes essence. In order to understand that claim we must first understand what Jean- Paul Sartre means by the term “essence.” He gives an example of a person forging a paper-cutter. When an individual sets out to make any object, he/she has a purpose for it in mind and an idea of what the object will look like before beginning the actual production of it, so this object has an essence, or purpose, before it ever has an existence. The individual, as its creator, has given the paper-cutter its essence. Using the paper cutter example, Sartre argues that human beings cannot have an essence (or purpose) before their “production,” becaus...

    Read More

  • Social Injustice in France

    1613 Words  | 4 Pages

    Social injustice had always been an uncorrected shortcoming for France from the early 19th century to the present. While the social injustice that appeared in the form of French religious persecution was much more visible during the early 19th century than in the reasonably tolerant 21st century, as seen in the contrasting cases of the Anti-Sacrilege Act in 1825 and the About-Picard Law in 2001, social injustice was a ubiquitous presence in many religious institutions of France. In a different degree of paramountcy, the social injustice manifested in the style of French political inequalities remains to be a perennial prejudice against the “forgotten man”, one clear-cut case being the anti-Semitic and espionage controversy of the Dreyfus Affair in the modern 20th century. In the same way, the social injustice seen in the economic discrimination in France was so prominent that literary works such as Les Miserables by eminent novelist Victor Hugo and its more modern philosophical counterpart, La Misère Du Monde by prominent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu continually emphasized on the French economic inequalities between the inferior social classes and bourgeois-esque citizens. While religious persecution in France was more visible in the 1800s than that of recent times, the social injustice seen in the case of political inequalities and economic discriminations remained more or less the same throughout the 19th and 21st centuries.

    Read More

  • Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy: Radical Freedom and Responsibility

    1238 Words  | 3 Pages

    Existentialism is a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining his or her own development through acts of the will. To Sartre, saying that som...

    Read More

  • Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

    1521 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...ar idea with Stephen; they both wanted to do anything and create their own human nature, and our value of freedom through those free choices. Generally, Sartre suggested that men have freedom to construct their nature and essence through their actions.

    Read More

  • Comparison: Jean-Paul Sarte & Martin Buber's Theories

    1798 Words  | 4 Pages

    In order to explicate Sartre’s notion of intersubjectivity I will follow the progression that Sartre takes in Being and Nothingness. I will first distinguish between “being-for-itself” and “being-for-others”. Second, I will provide an explication of the subject’s encounter with the Other as an object. Third, I will explain the significance of “the look”. Here I will show how the look provides the foundation for the self. I will also show how the look of the Other affects the subject’s freedom.

    Read More

  • Comparing Albert Camus' The Stranger (The Outsider) and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea

    2127 Words  | 5 Pages

    Nausea refuses to assign order to its events by choosing not to justify them with psychology or cause. Roquentin finds himself unable to pick up a piece of paper, for no apparent physical reason. However, he refuses to psychoanalyze the event. He writes that he will not traffic in "secrets or soul states," or to "play with the inner life" (9). When he cannot pick up the paper, he decides that no explanation is necessary: he simply decides "I was unable" (10). By not assigning psychology, Roquentin allows the event to have a gratuitous existence. Similarly, ...

    Read More

  • The meaning of the suffering of Meursault from the angle of existentialist crisis

    2072 Words  | 5 Pages

    Existentialism tends to focus on the question of human existence — the feeling that there is no purpose, indeed nothing, at the core of existence. The term itself suggests one major theme: the stress on concrete individual existence and, consequently, on subjectivity, individual freedom, and choice. Sartre did not believe in God, so there was no place for the essence of humanity to be before human existence. For Existentialists like Sartre, the absence of God has a much larger significance than the metaphysics of creation. Without God there is no purpose, no value, and no meaning in the world. Existentialism posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them. Meursault, the main character and narrator of The Outsider, lives existentially and knows that his life will terminate one day. To Meursault, Life is all a person possesses, and there is no intrinsic meaning in life:

    Read More

  • Existentialism By Jean-Paul Sartre: The Common Man's Meaning

    1287 Words  | 3 Pages

    Existentialism is a term that was coined specifically by Jean-Paul Sartre in regards to his own life. Sartre had adopted the Atheistic approach to life and its meaning, and while he was not the first or only one to do so, was the first and only one to come up with a way to describe it. Under Existentialism, man lives without higher power or guidance and must rely solely on himself and what he is aiming to do in order to lead a fulfilling life. This can be anything. Critics of Sartre propose that, because such a vast array of options exists within the meaningfulness of life, this philosophy is obsolete and trivial in nature. This is not true, as it is seen in everyday examples – celebrities, namely – that a thirst

    Read More

  • Rejection of Existentialism

    823 Words  | 2 Pages

    In his defense of existentialism, Sartre first defines the unifying factor of existentialism, (for both atheist and deist alike), as the belief that existence precedes essence. To help illustrate his point he presents the example of a paper knife, an object that possess a set of qualities that enable it to carry out its purpose. He states that it would not have been created without a particular purpose, therefore its essence precedes its existence. (Sartre) Sartre rejects this idea when it comes to mankind and declares that humans in themselves have no nature and define themselves after coming into existence. This stems from his atheistic worldview, in which the rejection of a higher power leads him to accept the fact that humans are the “Creator”, the first to exist, and it is our job to give meaning to the rest of the world.

    Read More

  • John Paul Sartre

    808 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sartre based his views on the basic ideas of existentialism. The idea that existence precedes essence is the central factor in the atheistic view of man. The belief that existence precedes essence states that there is "no pre-existing concept of man." (2) In the existentialist view, man is what he makes of himself.

    Read More

More about Jean Paul Sartre : French Activist

Open Document