Jean-Paul Sartre
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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. Sartr
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concept of authenticity is used to indicate the value of examining beliefs rather than merely having them.
Different philosophers have approached these issues from different perspectives and shown an existentialist point of view. In terms of his method, for instance, Nietzsche is a precursor of existentialism, contrasted with the rationalism he says had prevailed since the time of Socrates. Nietzsche examined the way history had been catalogued, studied, and in his view abused since the time of the Greeks and considered Socrates and Plato as standing in anticipation of the great calamity of Christianity, which he referred to as "Platonism for the people." Nietzsche considered the triumph of Christianity over Rome as the triumph of slave-morality over master-morality.
Other philosophers such as Jaspers and Kierkegaard also questioned traditional philosophy and suggested ways in which a reexamination of issues would serve. Dostoyevsky developed a form of existentialist philosophy embodied in his fiction. For the existentialist, the issues that have to be resolved are those that arise from life, and in this sense the existentialist tries to bring philosophy back to earth and back to life rather than allowing it to fly to
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Anti-Semite Sartre, Jaspers Kierkegaard, God Dead, Basle University, Friedrich Nietzsche, Le Havre, Jean-Paul Sartre, French Army, Socrates Plato, Socrates Nietzsche, traditional philosophy, examine beliefs, teacher philosophy, human life,
Approximate Word count = 1527
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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