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Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was not only a leading philosopher of his generation but also a playwright, novelist, political theorist, and literary critic. Sartre in his writings in the 1940s and after was reacting to the horrors of war, in this case World War II, but he was viewing the devastation of war not in terms of its effect on a specific country or people but on humanity. He was continuing in an intellectual tradition extending back to the nineteenth century and to the works of Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. His philosophy is not collective in the way Marxism is nor built on social classes and hierarchies in the way Hitler's is. His view is described as a contemporary form of humanism, with the individual at the center and with a belief in the ability of each individual to shape his or her own existence. Sartre's philosophy was a reaction to the collectivism of both the Communists and the Fascists. He did not center human actions on a political entity such as the fatherland or on a sense of racial identity. Instead, he begins with the human-centered situation of life and rejects the view that defines human essence or being and then tries to determine the purpose and values of human existence from that identity. For Sartre, God is not necessary and is in fact non-existent, and so man is free in a way that can be terrifying and that imposes responsibility.

Sartre was born in Paris in 1905, the son of a naval engineer. His mother was first cousin to Albert Schweitzer. His father died of fever when the boy was only a year old, and Jean-Paul was raised thereafter by his grandfather, Charles, from whom he received an education and certain values which he would cite later as having been vital in his formation as a writer and philosopher. From a young age, he was tending more and more toward the life of a writer. Jean-Paul was slight of build and suffered from leucoma of the right eye, which would lead to loss of sight ...

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Jean-Paul Sartre. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:50, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1705135.html