Jean Paul Sartre

Jean Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre is perhaps the best known philosopher of the twentieth century and is often considered to be the father of Existentialist philosophy.   He had an insatiable pursuit for philosophical reflection and in the latter years of his life became very active politically, which gave him international recognition as well.  
Born on April 21, 1905 in Paris to Jean-Baptiste and Anne-Marie Sartre, Jean-Paul was an only child.   His father died when he was fifteen months old, so he lived with his mother and maternal grandfather, Charles Schweitzer; brother of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer.   Charles Schweitzer saw the opportunity to tutor the very intelligent Sartre and began working with him in mathematics and classic literature (Wyatt).   Sartre was an awkward child – small in stature, almost completely blind in one eye and cross-eyed.   He received education from some of the most prestigious schools in Paris and during these years met several people who would later on become very prominent in the Beaux Arts or politics (Hayes).   It was while at the Ecole Normale Supérieure that he met his lifetime friend Raymond Aron and Simone de Beauvoir, who would become his longtime companion; it was a very unconventional relationship – the two never lived together and often had other lovers during their relationship (Flynn).   During 1933, he studied the writings of German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger while attending the French Institute in Berlin.   While a junior lecturer at the Lyceé du Havre, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea) (1938).   In 1939 he was drafted into the French army, assigned to the 70th Division in Nancy and then transferred to Morsbonn military camp.   While stationed there, he began writing L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943).   He was captured and imprisoned by the Nazis from 1940-1941 and it was during this time that he started rereading ontologist Heidegger.   He also wrote his first play, Bariona: ou Iejils...