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Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 and died in 1980. He was not only a leading philosopher of his generation but also a playwright, novelist, political theorist, and literary critic. He learned much in his grandfather's library before he enrolled at the Ecole Normale in Paris. In 1931 he became a teacher of philosophy in Le Havre. He moved to Paris in 1937. His philosophical novel Nausea was published the following year. His first major philosophical book was published in 1940, L'Imaginaire. When the war came, Sartre was mobilized in 1940 and served as a meteorologist in the French Army. He was captured and imprisoned, and when he was released he returned to Paris and took up his post as teacher of philosophy once more. He achieved fame with the Liberation.

In the essay "Portrait of an Anti-Semite," Sartre explores the thinking of people who use a group or class as a scapegoat for all their own problems and who ascribe beliefs and attitudes to that other group. Specifically, he is talking about those who ascribe all or part of the misfortunes of France to the presence of Jewish elements in French society. He begins by considering what it means to hold an opinion and shows how this sort of opinion attaches itself to others and reshapes them without itself changing. For Sartre, such ideas are dangerous and false. Indeed, he says that anti-Semitism is actually a passion and not merely an idea.

This article takes an existentialist position as its framework. Sartre first notes that anti-Semitism is not a matter of experience and so are inauthentic because the idea has not been examined. At the same time, there is an existential element in the belief because, as Sartre indicates, it is freely chosen, and no external factor can induce antisemitism in the antisemite. He finally concludes that antisemitism is actually fear of man's fate, and the antisemite wants to be everything but a man.

I am anti- a number of thing...

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Jean-Paul Sartre. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:25, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682538.html