Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (around 1967)

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre [ ʒɑ̃ˈpɔl saʀtʀ̩ ] (born June 21, 1905 in Paris ; † April 15, 1980 ibid) was a French novelist , playwright , philosopher and publicist . He is regarded as a pioneer and main exponent of existentialism and a parade figure of the French intellectuals of the 20th century.

Life and work

Childhood and school days

Sartre was born in Paris as the son of the naval officer Jean-Baptiste Sartre (1874-1906). The father died of yellow fever just 15 months after the birth of his son Jean-Paul . His young mother Anne-Marie (1882–1969) then moved back to her parents. There Sartre grew up under the influence of his grandfather Charles Schweitzer, an uncle of Albert Schweitzer and high school teacher ( agrégé ) for the subject German. He was tutored at home by him and by changing private tutors. He began to read very early (also in German), but as a boy suffered clouding of the lens in his right eye, which gradually went blind and wandered outwards, so that over time he squinted more and more. Up to the age of ten he had little contact outside of his family, in which he was and remained the only child. He then went to the prestigious Lycée Henri IV high school . At almost sixty, he described this childhood in Les mots (The Words).

In 1917 his mother remarried and moved with him to her new husband, a friend of the deceased, in La Rochelle - two changes that the twelve year old found difficult to cope with. In addition, his grandfather broke with him when he learned that the boy had taken money from the household purse to ingratiate himself with sweets from his new classmates.

In 1920 Sartre was sent back to Paris and attended - now as a boarding school student - again the Henri IV . Here he made friends with a classmate, later fellow writer Paul Nizan , who introduced him to contemporary literature. In 1922 he passed the baccalaureate and decided, together with Nizan, to study at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), the elite university for teaching subjects. Therefore, both switched to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , whose preparatory classes ( classes préparatoires ) for the ENS were supposedly better than those of Henri IV.

Studies, career entry and war

In 1923 Sartre was able to accommodate a novella and a few chapters of novels in small magazines, at the same time he began to be interested in philosophy. In 1924 he took sixth place in the entrance examination ( concours ) for the ENS. He shared his dorm room there with Nizan, who was also admitted.

The four years at the ENS were a happy time for Sartre: he read a lot and worked regularly every day from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., which he maintained throughout his life. He completed courses and exams in psychology , moral philosophy , sociology , logic , metaphysics and Latin , and was interested in the new art form of film and in jazz imported from America . He also took boxing lessons, because "le petit homme" (the little man), as he was called by his friends, was only 1.56 m tall.

On Sunday visits to his parents, who had meanwhile moved to Paris, he had heated debates with his stepfather, who referred to him as “communiste patenté” (communist with letter and seal). Sartre, unlike his friend Nizan, was not a member of the French Communist Party , but he was a sympathizer and, together with Nizan, refused, for example, the quasi-compulsory training as reserve officer for ENS students.

A first attempt at love also falls during this time: Sartre had met a distant young relative from Toulouse at a funeral , but who, however, frustrated him at their rare short meetings, similar to his alter ego Roquentin later in the novel La Nausée ( The disgust ) gets frustrated by his girlfriend Anny.

Philosophically, Sartre, who had always felt superfluous ( de trop ) in the family of his grandfather and then his stepfather , began to develop a “theory of contingency ” according to which human life was a product of chance and not necessarily a meaning guaranteed by higher powers have.

In 1928, in the recruitment test ( agrégation ) for the post of high school teacher, he received only the 50th place, which was not sufficient for a position, allegedly because he had tried to express original ideas.

After Nizan got married, Sartre felt that he had to do the same and asked his parents for the hand of a young woman he had met; however, he was turned away. A little later, while preparing for the second attempt on “l'agreg”, he met his future companion Simone de Beauvoir . Both were accepted, Sartre in first place this time, Beauvoir in second place.

While Beauvoir was sent to Marseille when she was only 21 years old, Sartre began his military service with the meteorologists in Tours . His instructor was ENS comrade Raymond Aron , who was a year older than him and later became an important sociologist and philosopher. Since the service was not very demanding on him, Sartre wrote a lot: poems, the beginning of a novel, drafts for plays.

At the beginning of the 1931 school year, when he was 26, the Ministry of Education sent him to Le Havre as a grammar school teacher of philosophy.

Sartre and Beauvoir at the Balzac monument

He and Beauvoir continued to meet regularly in Paris, which remained the center of their lives. Sartre was soon popular with his students as an interesting teacher, but was decried as arrogant by his colleagues. He began to work on a Factum sur la contingence ( polemical pamphlet about chance), a polemical - satirical work against what in his opinion was overly optimistic and positive school philosophy, which he had to administer according to the curriculum. In 1932 he traveled with Beauvoir to Brittany, Spain and what was then Spanish Morocco, which he paid for from grandmother Schweitzer's small inheritance.

At the next school year she was transferred to nearby Rouen so that they could meet more comfortably. Together they were interested in Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis . Sartre discovered the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl , but also the novels of Hemingway . In 1933 they traveled together again, this time to London and Italy.

In the autumn of 1933 Sartre went to the Institut français in Berlin for a year as a scholarship holder . Here he read Husserl and Heidegger , Faulkner and Kafka and began to develop a novel from the factum , which later became La Nausée ( The Disgust ). He was only marginally interested in politics ; like many left-wing intellectuals, he considered Hitler's recent takeover to be a temporary ghost. After the scholarship expired, he traveled with Beauvoir through Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, which was newly created in 1918 .

From autumn 1934 he taught again in Le Havre, where he felt lonely and out of place and eventually became depressed. Because the general mood was also bad in the port city, which suffered particularly badly from the global economic crisis , which had now also hit France three or four years later. Sartre 's depression was exacerbated by phases of madness and panic because in 1935, after he had started to write a doctoral thesis on the imagination, a doctor friend of his had injected him with the drug mescaline . One of these drug psychoses even took him to a psychiatric clinic for two weeks . On July 14, 1935, he and Beauvoir took part in the mass anti-fascist rally in Paris, with which the French left-wing parties and trade unions reacted to the growing pressure of the fascist forces in France too.

In 1936 Sartre finished the novel he had been working on since Berlin. He was very disappointed when the Gallimard publishing house rejected the manuscript. Nevertheless, he now wrote further narrative texts. In his own eyes, he had evidently become a fiction writer, and he was encouraged by Beauvoir, who was now also writing a novel.

In May and June 1936 neither of them went to the polls on principle, but were enthusiastic when the left “ Popular Front ” won the elections. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July also deeply moved Sartre. However , he rejected the idea of joining the anti-fascist International Brigades as a volunteer , especially since he had just been transferred to Laon and promoted to teacher for preparatory classes for the ENS. After a trip to Italy with Beauvoir, he processed the subject of the Spanish Civil War in the short story Le Mur (The Wall), which André Gide accepted for the Nouvelle Revue Française and which attracted attention when it appeared there in July 1937. In Le Mur , Sartre creates a borderline situation of human existence in the form of a radical analysis of the fear of death of three people sentenced to death in the Spanish Civil War by the Falange . A topic that he later took up again several times. Also in 1937 his novel was finally accepted, with the publisher Gallimard proposing to shorten the text and to change the originally planned title Melancholia in La Nausée (actually: the nausea, the nausea).

For the school year 1937/38 Sartre was transferred to the Paris suburb of Neuilly , and Beauvoir also got a job in Paris. They now lived in two rooms separated by a floor in a small hotel (Hotel Mistral) in the 4th arrondissement . They didn't think about getting married: Sartre didn't value a bourgeois existence and Beauvoir saw herself primarily as a writer and part of that was that she didn't want to be a wife or mother.

In April 1938, La Nausée came out with success : a novel whose first-person narrator Roquentin has similar problems with meaning and self-discovery as Sartre had in the years of Le Havre, and which, like him, does not ultimately solve the crisis by suicide. but with the decision to become a novelist. An anthology with stories from the past three years, which Sartre published in 1939 under the title Le Mur , also received positive attention. At the same time, Gide commissioned him to write a series of articles on modern authors for the Nouvelle Revue Française : Sartre had made his breakthrough. He was now on a larger novel project and began its first volume L'Âge de raison (The time of maturity).

If he and Beauvoir had previously been almost haughty “free-floating intellectuals” (a word created by the sociologist Karl Mannheim ), now they began to get involved politically in view of Hitler's increasing urge to expand. When France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, Sartre was drafted. He spent “ La drôle de guerre ”, the war that was initially not one, in Alsace, where he wrote his novel and a diary and made notes for a philosophical treatise. In April 1940 he was able to receive the “prix du roman populiste” while on vacation in Paris. While the German attack threw France into chaos after May 10, 1940, Sartre wrote feverishly on the last pages of L'Âge de raison . At the end of June, shortly before the armistice, he and his unit were taken prisoner. A German officer took the finished manuscript from him, but kept it and sent it back to him later.

Sartre spent almost happy months in Stalag XII D in Trier . He made friends, for example with the Jesuit priest Paul Feller (1913–1979), and wrote a hidden political play, Bariona ou le Fils du tonnerre ( B. or the son of thunder ), which he performed with comrades at Christmas. Unlike the other prisoners who were gradually distributed as forced laborers to German factories and farms, Sartre was released in March 1941 with the help of a courtesy certificate (partial blindness of the right eye). Beauvoir, who had apparently come to terms with the new conditions in France, was struck by the “rigidity of his moralism” that he brought with him from the camp.

Both now activated old acquaintances and founded the resistance group Socialisme et liberté (Socialism and Freedom), which was directed more against the Vichy regime than against the German occupiers, who at that time were barely noticed in France. Sartre's attempts to establish contacts with communist acquaintances and to work with them failed. The communists, who had already built up an underground resistance organization after the ban in 1939 and who began assassinating German soldiers after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, considered him to be an anarcho-left petty-bourgeois intellectual, who was a direct Actions were just as useless as the character Hugo in the play Les mains sales (The dirty hands). They also distrusted him because of his unusually quick release from captivity and spread the rumor that he was an agent of the German Gestapo .

In the summer, Sartre and Beauvoir made a strenuous and adventurous trip to the unoccupied southern France by bike in order to seek contacts with politically left-wing authors who had withdrawn there. The action was unsuccessful. After all, on this trip he developed the concept for his play Les Mouches (The Flies), in which an Oreste who resembles himself kills the tyrant Égisthe, who resembles the head of state Pétain, but is rejected by the people he wants to liberate and disappointed in their political ones Immaturity leaves the country. With the repentance ritual of the people of Argos, Sartre alludes to Pétain's allegations that the French were responsible for their own defeat through the “spirit of pleasure” (“esprit de jouissance”) to which they had become accustomed during the Popular Front.

Just as frustrated as his Oreste, Sartre dissolved his resistance group in 1942 and limited himself to writing. He completed Les mouches and worked on his main philosophical work, L'Être et le néant (The being and the nothing) . In October he was transferred to one of the best high schools in Paris, the Lycée Condorcet , where he received a post that had become vacant after the forced retirement of a colleague of Jewish origin. In 1942 he finished L'Être et le néant and began the second volume of his novel trilogy , Le Sursis (The Delay ).

From 1942/43 Sartre became active again in the now slowly growing resistance and joined the Comité national des écrivains (National Committee of Writers).

In the spring of 1943, despite the shortage of paper, L'Être et le néant and Les mouches were published . The latter was even premiered on June 3rd - with the approval of the German censorship, but only with moderate success. Later that year, Sartre wrote his first film screenplay Les jeux sont faits ( The game is over ) and, in a few days, the play Huis clos ( Closed Society ), a drama about a man and two women who use all the tricks of psychological terror to make each other make life hell where the fiction thinks they are. When Huis clos caused a scandal on May 27, 1944, it confirmed Sartre as a central figure in the intellectual Paris of the time. In fact, by now he knew all the people who were or should become important there, such as Jean Cocteau , Michel Leiris , Albert Camus , Raymond Queneau , Georges Bataille , Boris Vian , Jean Genet , Armand Salacrou and Jacques Lacan .

After the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, he and Beauvoir preferred to leave Paris. They did not return to the city until after the withdrawal of German troops began (August 25).

Since Sartre was now able to make a living from his work as a writer, he took a leave of absence from school and finally quit it entirely. When his stepfather died in early 1945, he moved in with his mother. He did not realize temporary marriage plans with a French woman whom he had met in the winter of 1944/45 during a stay in the USA.

The big time

1951 in Venice

In the post-war years, Sartre was the leading French intellectual: his L'Être et le néant (The being and the nothing) and the essay L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a humanism) from 1946 were considered the main works of the new, mainly by The philosophy of existentialism created for him , the core message of which is that man is “thrown” into existence by the chance of his birth and must actively try to give life a meaning.

His novels sold well: L'Âge de raison and Le Sursis appeared together in 1946 under the title Les chemins de la liberté ( The Paths of Freedom ), and in 1949 the third part of the trilogy was added with the title La Mort dans l ' âme (death in the soul).

His pieces have been played on all French and many European stages:

1946 Morts sans sépulture (dead without burial) as well
La Putain respectueuse (The Honorable Whore), in which Sartre processes experiences from his trip to America in 1945;
1948 Les mains sales (The dirty hands), where Sartre projects himself into the figures of the young bourgeois anarchist Hugo and the socialist real politician Hoederer.

Sartre was also very active as a publicist . The magazine Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), which he founded and edited , became a forum for many distinguished authors.

Jean-Paul Sartre (center) and Simone de Beauvoir in conversation with Che Guevara in Cuba (1960)

Accordingly, his life became more and more eventful. He gave interviews and went - often together with Beauvoir - on lecture tours at home and abroad.

He also remained politically active: in 1948 he co-founded the Comité français d'échanges avec l'Allemagne nouvelle and a short-lived new party that was to tread a “third path” between socialists and communists. However, in 1952, on the occasion of the arrest of Jacques Duclos, the then parliamentary group leader of the PCF, he sided with the communists, which resulted in a break with a number of moderate left intellectuals, for example Camus , whom he betrayed the aims of the left accused. In 1956 Sartre again turned his back on the communists because he disapproved of the Soviet intervention in Hungary . In his work Critique de la raison dialectique ( Critique of Dialectical Reason ), published in 1960, he attempted to combine Marxist dialectics with existentialism and its emphasis on free will .

In the 50s and 60s he was on the one hand a critic of Stalinism , but refrained from further criticism after his trips to the Soviet Union. In the May riots in 1968 he sided with left-wing students, and from 1970 to 1973 he was a companion of the French Maoists . Until the end he campaigned for the disenfranchised in this world, as in 1979 with Raymond Aron for the campaign “A Ship for Vietnam”.

During these years he still wrote a lot, for example articles critical of literature (collected in the volumes Situations , 1947-65) and essays on literary theory - especially Qu'est-ce que la littérature (What is literature), which demanded political commitment from the author , 1947 - but also author monographs on Baudelaire , 1947, Jean Genet , 1952, Mallarmé , 1953, and Gustave Flaubert , 1971–72; There were also some dramas , including 1951 Le Diable et le bon Dieu (The Devil and God) or 1959 Les séquestrés d'Altona (The Trapped in Altona) and 1963 the autobiographical work Les Mots (The Words), which reflects his childhood .

Since 1949, Sartre was increasingly perceived by the public as a “maître à penser” (thought leader) and intellectual who raised his voice on the major and some minor problems of the nation and against human rights violations in the French colonial wars (Algerian war, Indochina war ) and later protested in Vietnam ( Vietnam War ) or in the Communist Eastern Bloc. This earned him not only admiration, but also the hatred of many right-wing French people. In 1960 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Last years

Gravestone of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at Cimetière Montparnasse (2014)

In 1964 Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature , although he had already announced his rejection in advance and then upheld it at a press conference in the literary café “ Café de Flore ” in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. He wanted to keep his independence. However, since the statutes do not provide for a rejection of the award, he is considered the award winner. In 1975 he is rumored to have asked the Swedish Academy for the prize money of 273,000 kroner; but since the deadline had already expired in 1965, it fell back to the Nobelfonds.

His relationship with Beauvoir (still per "you") continued, but had gradually loosened. From 1973 he was practically blind and unable to write. Nevertheless, he tried to continue to be present, including with interviews and occasional public appearances. In 1974, for example, his visit to what he believed to be a political prisoner and RAF member Andreas Baader in the Stuttgart prison attracted public attention. In 1977, like around sixty other intellectuals, he signed an appeal for the decriminalization of pedophilia , which appeared in the Liberation and Le Monde newspapers. The appeal was initiated by the pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff . In 1979 he took part in a press conference in favor of the Vietnamese refugees known as " boat people " . In April 1980 the newspaper Nouvel Observateur published part of the conversations he had had with Benny Lévy . This dialogue, which appeared in Germany in 1993 under the title Brotherhood and Violence , surprised the public and also irritated Beauvoir. Sartre discussed new positions with his interlocutor, especially with regard to interpersonal relationships and the question of the “social conditions of successful self-relationships”. One saw in these conversations a rapprochement between Sartre and Lévy's philosophy and his Jewish faith.

Jean-Paul Sartre died in Paris on April 15, 1980 at the age of 74. He remained a well-known figure in public life to the end: His death was noticed around the world and 50,000 people followed the coffin at his funeral in Paris.

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philosophy

In the philosophical essay The Transcendence of the Ego ( La transcendance de l'ego. Esquisse d'une description phénoménologique ), which appeared in 1936/37, Sartre shows himself to be an independent philosopher. Here Sartre worked on topics that from now on occupied him repeatedly: What is the ego like? The I and the psychic as objects. The transcendental consciousness. “It is sufficient that the I is at the same time as the world and that the purely logical, subject-object duality finally disappears from philosophical considerations. The world did not create the I and the I did not create the world, they are two objects for the absolute impersonal consciousness through which they find each other connected. "

1938 is literature for Sartre world exploration and philosophy problem solving. Literature is supposed to reveal the world by cleverly combining words. Philosophy, on the other hand, works with sometimes ambiguous terms. Increasing literature as an instrument of knowledge is itself part of his philosophical program. Prosaic language is useful in two ways: It is an instrument for exploring the world in literature, and it should have meanings that are as clear as possible. Early on, Sartre dealt intensively with the difference between prose and poetry.

For Sartre, language is the preferred instrument and means of expression for getting to know and portraying the world, a view that is implicitly expressed in the novel The Disgust ( la nausée ).

In the novel Der Ekel Sartre postulates an opposition between existence and being. Erik Michael Vogt says: “Behind existence is being, just as behind the hand of Roquentin is the hand of Rollebon (...). Existence becomes the place of a previous inscription through being. ”The truth of existence can only be conveyed through language and in this respect is never pure and, in contrast to being, never a state without language, without signs.

The philosophy of The Transcendence of the Ego and The Disgust flows into that of Being and Nothing ( L'être et le néant , 1943) - Sartre's main philosophical work before his turn to Marxism. This is about being and the two regions of being in-itself and for-itself (consciousness).

Consciousness and the things of the world (in-itself) can never have the same identity. A consciousness is always an awareness-of-something. Being (of the in-itself) offers itself to disclosure only in appearance. “Being is actually opaque to itself precisely because it is filled with itself. We express that better when we say that being is what it is . ”(Being and nothing, p. 42) Consciousness is independent of the in-itself, it is its own region of being. “The being of consciousness therefore remains contingent insofar as this being in itself is in order not to deny itself in-for-itself, that is, it does not belong to consciousness, to give it to itself or to receive it from others.” (Being and the nothingness, p. 176) From this it follows that consciousness and reflection are not one. "The reflection is the for-itself, that of having consciousness itself." (Being and Nothingness, p 289) Since the for-itself temporalized (awareness), the reflection is the for-itself almost immediately given. However, Sartre strictly separates consciousness and reflection.

The ego also belongs to the region of being of the in-itself. “As soon as consciousness emerges, it makes itself personal through the pure non-stop movement of reflection : for what gives a being personal existence is not the possession of an ego - which is only the sign of personality - but the fact for to exist as a presence within oneself. ”Consciousness sets itself as awareness (of) itself. The for-itself cannot be the ground of its own being and is always conditioned by an in-itself. Sartre calls the for-itself the “crack in being”, the nothingness that is made through being. The for-itself has a positing, set distance from objects of all kinds, whether material, biological, psychological. For-itself and in-itself are two different regions of being of the same being. The for-itself, the consciousness, is not, it exists, because it always keeps distance from being, also from itself (from its own being), it continually borrows its being from being, without being caught by being and thereby to freeze; it is the nothing in being that is meant.

It becomes clear why Sartre's philosophy of these years is often referred to as the idealistic (French) philosophy of consciousness .

The implications of his philosophy of these years, especially of disgust and his first major philosophical work, Das Sein und das Nothing , can be summarized as follows:

Sartre is an anti-naturalist. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he believes in evil. For him there is an unbridgeable tension between man and the world. “The spirit of seriousness” does not want to face the experience of contingency, of disgust. “The citizen” - not as a sociological category - considers the existing order and organization of the world to be necessary and sensible (“spirit of seriousness”) and legitimate. “The citizen” is, he rests in being, he is connected with being. "The citizen" is to be understood here as an ontological category. For Sartre, however, nothing is necessary, there are no natural relationships with one another or with the world. One cannot escape contingency, it is absolute, life has no meaning. There is no cure that can erase the insurmountable break between consciousness and the things of the world, no metaphysical salvation. Nor does Sartre put any meaning into the past that it does not have. The past is not a community. The citizen's authority is based on his and her ancestors' allegedly meaningful and justifying past. Citizens believe that this past was just waiting for them, that they were the goal of times past, and that this applies to both the individual citizen and the bourgeoisie as a whole.

There are various passages in Der Ekel as in The Childhood of a Chef ( L'enfance d'un chef ), which describe this typically bourgeois justifying approach to the past.

In Der Ekel the first-person narrator also experiences the unsettling aspects of this attitude: “All those who belonged to the Bouville elite between 1875 and 1910 were there, men and women, carefully painted by Renaudas and Bordurin.
The men built Sainte-Cécile-de-la-Mer. They founded […] […] They put down the notorious Docker strike of 1898 and in 1914 sacrificed their sons to their fatherland. […] From the place of honor the merchant P […] gave me a clear look. [...] Then I understood everything that separated us: what I might think of him did not affect him; it was nothing more than psychology as practiced in novels. But his judgment pierced me like a sword. "

The citizen could not imagine the world differently than it was. Logically, a few years later, Sartre sketched the collaborator as a person who surrendered to a fait accompli. In doing so, however, the collaborator assumes the perspective of the future, from which every past and every misery would lead to a happy ending and would be repealed therein.

Sartre denies external constraints of a social, natural or divine kind. These are coincidences. However, it is only the limits of man's situation, not the limits of his freedom. Humans have the contingency to accept and integrate these boundaries and thus the possibility of crossing them. Freedom is thus the tiny movement beyond what is given. The human being bears responsibility insofar as he is the one who takes on what is given and at the same time can negate what is given in his freedom with this taking in.

Trapped in a tower, a person cannot escape easily, but he can plan to escape, he can deal with the possibility of escape. Man can always project himself beyond the situation, even if he fails. Failure is not the opposite of freedom, but a human possibility that arises from freedom. Things don't resist us. Our designs can turn things into resistance. Sartre's example: The rock leading to the summit can only offer me resistance if I have resolved to climb the summit.

The person is free in a situation, not in a vacuum: “So we slowly sense the paradox of freedom: there is freedom only in a situation , and there is a situation only through freedom. Everywhere human reality encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created; but these resistances and obstacles sense only in the free choice and the free choice of the human reality is . "

He formulates his thesis most succinctly with the sentence “ Existence precedes essence ” (“L'existence précède l'essence”) - only man's bare existence is predetermined; he has to invent what defines him in the end. That existence precedes the being, the essence, is a formulation that requires caution. The wording comes from a lecture given on October 29, 1945, the print version of which in the following period unfortunately became one of Sartre's best-known texts. The presentation of his philosophical theses in this lecture is - also according to his own view - a very smooth and not very successful one. According to Annie Cohen-Solal, the print version of the lecture “was for a long time, to the greatest horror of Sartre, as an 'existentialist Bible', as an early 'little red book' and a simplified abridged version of L'être et le néant ”. In this lecture, this formulation also stands for “that man first exists, meets himself, enters the world, and only then defines himself.” A rather mechanistic description in comparison to being and nothing , because that existence going ahead of the essence should not describe a temporal sequence, but an ontological one. In human reality, of course, existence and being cannot be separated. Sartre would admit that the essence of the human being emerges at the same time as the human existence.

“What does he actually say about humanism, about this philosophy of man, which [...] was denounced and whose last bulwark he was accused of being? He is the author of a book, Der Ekel , which […] long before the famous and perhaps also annoying lecture Existentialism is a humanism paints the hilarious, but also relentless portrait of what he himself understands by humanism.
[...]
Is existentialism a humanism? But no, definitely not. Rather, the first manifestation of contemporary anti-humanism. This early existentialism made the process of all forms of humanism in a hitherto unknown way and more radically than all representatives of the 'thinking of' 68 'together. "

However, Sartre postulates a kind of categorical imperative here when he asserts that the demand for freedom by the individual automatically leads to what Klaus Hartmann has called an “ethical idea from extra ” based on being and the nothing can not be justified and is probably due to the historical economic situation.

The texts of the anti-humanist Sartre, the anarchic libertarian Sartre, in contrast to the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason , include reflections on the Jewish question . If Judaism is described far too little in this text from the perspective of Judaism itself, the date of the publication of a text on anti-Semitism of intellectual magnitude alone testifies to it. The text was first published in full in 1946, at a time when most of the people in France did not want to know anything about the involvement and involvement in the Holocaust. An excerpt from the last paragraph of the text: “We are all in solidarity with the Jews because anti-Semitism leads straight to National Socialism. And if we don't respect the person of the Jew, who should respect us? [...] we say that anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem: it is our problem. [...] No French will be free until the Jews have their full rights. No French will be safe as long as a Jew in France and throughout the world still has to fear for his life. "

However , Sartre experienced the abstractness of his own thesis of the absolute freedom of the individual in the face of historical reality ( war , Holocaust ) when he was called up. On the basis of this experience, which happened to him not voluntarily, he gradually modified his philosophy. Works such as Le diable et le bon dieu , 1951, and Critique de la raison dialectique , 1960, now affirm that the essence of people, the reality of their existence and actions, are sustainably shaped by society. In his life as in his work, Sartre turned increasingly to Marxism.

“Life” taught him “'the power of things'”, said Sartre in an interview in 1969, and: “I am convinced that people can always make something out of what one makes of them. Today I would define the term freedom as follows: Freedom is that little movement that turns a completely socially conditioned being into a person who does not represent in everything that comes from being conditioned. ”These insights were not entirely new, because they were In Being and Nothing , for example, he spoke of the “coefficient of adversity of things”. Now “things” are especially social conditions. Even at the time of Being and Nothing , Sartre did not mean that individual decisions could be made independently of real events. For him it was and is still about the design - not in the sense of an individual decision, but rather the design, which as a whole is the basis of individual action and thus at the same time the transgression of the present situation towards a future; the design that defines the being of the individual.

In this sense, Sartre did not abandon the basic thesis that existence comes before essence (esse), even at the time when he integrated existentialism into Marxism. That is to say: The essence of man as a species cannot be defined, is not created unchangeably, has not fallen from heaven, but rather the individual person continually creates his own being. “Existence comes before being” is a negative definition of the human species.

Sartre is late in attending the Heidegger reception in France. Sartre takes up Heidegger's idea that the basic constitution of human beings, conceptually understood as Dasein, is “being-in-the-world”: the being of Dasein is decided by the respective Dasein itself. However, Heidegger saw Sartre's philosophy of subject as a relapse into modern subjectivism. For Sartre, consciousness and thus the subject are constituted as for-itself in relation to something it perceives, the in-itself. Consciousness is thus constituted by defining itself negatively - as what it is not. This negation is nothing as belonging to the subject. While Sartre also emphasizes the absolute freedom of human beings, Heidegger tries to grasp existence through existentials. In his letter to Jean Beaufret , the letter on humanism , Heidegger responds to Sartre's statement in his lecture Existentialism is a humanism “we are on a level where there is nothing but people” with “precisément nous sommes sur un plan où il ya principalement l'Être. ”In this letter, Heidegger makes it clear that his and Sartre's ways of thinking are incompatible.

In general, one regards Heidegger's influence on Sartre, although the pioneers of French philosophy of the Sartre generation like to speak of the three Hs (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger), meanwhile not overly great. Sartre's reading of Heidegger is, as is so often the case with him, selective and eager to get ideas for his own philosophical project. Because of Henry Corbin's translation, “Dasein” becomes “réalité-humaine”, and Sartre quickly loses the Heidegger connotations. (Logically, in the new translation of Das Sein und das Nothing by Hans Schöneberg and Traugott König, the expression “réalité-humaine” is usually not retranslated with “Dasein”.) Sartre, who saw the problem of the idiosyncratic translations of Corbin into French, was suitable Heidegger's terms or their translations in such a way that they best use his philosophy. This was not only true of Heidegger's philosophy. “When he (Sartre) quotes or paraphrases authors, he usually does so from memory and [...] in an interpretive way. This unacademic approach to evoked texts, which is widespread in France and does not exclude misunderstandings, errors and false memories, proved to be extremely productive for Sartre - but not only for him. He is never concerned with the pedantic proof of a theoretical predecessor or a theoretical aporia . Rather, he uses remembered formulations of others as formulation aids to clarify his own thinking. ”According to Traugott König in his appendix on the new translation into Being and Nothing .

The influence of Hegel, Nietzsche and Husserl on Sartre is likely to be considerably greater than the influence of Heidegger, probably also that of Bergson and his literary role model Gide. In addition to Heidegger, Sartre often refers to Hegel, Bergson and Husserl in Das Sein und das Nothing , even if it is differentiated. Husserl's work is probably the one that Sartre had the most lasting influence. Sartre got to know his work through the study by Levinas, published in 1930, La théorie de l'intuition dans la phenoménologie de Husserl , which he read in 1933 before studying Husserl in the original 1933–1934 in Berlin. From a distance, Levinas himself does not seem to be entirely without effect on Sartre's philosophical work. In any case, Sartre's life, with all other twists and turns and positional and political changes, once in contact with them, never again turned away from phenomenology.

In the 1950s, Sartre revisited the standpoint of his existentialism and turned to society and history. The article Questions de la méthode ( questions of method ), which emerged from the casual work Marksizm i Egzystencjalizm for the Polish magazine Twórczosc, is to be regarded as the first major document showing that Sartre saw "Marxism as the inexorable philosophy of our time".

In this article Sartre diagnoses a standstill in Marxism. Existentialism as an ideology has its raison d'etre, because it is “the only concrete approach to reality”. It is true that “existentialism and Marxism aim at one and the same object; Marxism, however, has let man get absorbed in the idea, while existentialism seeks him everywhere he walks or stands , at work, at home and on the street. ”Sartre defends himself against an idea of man, the essence of man is not stipulated. Despite his turn to historical materialism, Sartre by no means abandons his standpoints without contradiction. In the "Conclusion" it says: The "'ideology' of existence [...] is in fact of the view that human reality, to the extent that it is made , eludes direct knowledge ."

After the methods of merging Marxism and existentialism have been named, the actual project takes place in the Critique of Dialectical Reason . Please note that in the original the Critique de la raison dialectique is preceded by the Questions de la méthode . The critical determination of dialectical reason is the correction of frozen Marxism. Marxism turns the dialectic of human treatment of nature in the first step into an all-encompassing natural dialectic to which people, vice versa , are completely subjected in the second step. But human history is not a “totality”, but an unending “totalization”. Human history is always incomplete.

However, for Sartre, history can be defined as a unit, otherwise it would remain incomprehensible. Sartre understands history in totalization as a movement and as a unit. But how can we understand this story? “If dialectical reason exists, then from the ontological point of view it can only be the running totalization […]; and from the epistemological standpoint it can only be the permeability of this totalization to a knowledge whose procedures are in principle totalizing. [...] So dialectic is totalizing activity. ”Since human practice, be it that of an individual or a group, is intentional, it is understandable. Sartre calls as a further " explanation all temporal and dialectical evidences, insofar as they must be able to totalize all practical realities, and (limits) the term understanding to the totalizing comprehension of every practice, insofar as it is intentionally brought about by its or its author."

The Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason , in contrast to earlier, accords enormous importance to the group. In particular historical moments, the group is neither a random collection, a series, nor a group formation of powerless individuals, but a community that is totalized towards a goal. Individuals find their freedom again in a community in which they share their bondage with others. But such communities do not last long. You have to institutionalize yourself. The voluntary oath plays a role here. The oath cannot resolve a group's contradiction, but it is intended to prevent the group from disbanding. In the following (actually until the end of the book) Sartre glorifies violence as an important group-building factor. Unfortunately, he shows himself here as one of the many thinkers of the 20th century who regard violence as virtually inevitable or even as the motor of history. This so-called "later" Sartre is rejected by many today for precisely this reason, or at least viewed very critically.

In the questions of method , which were taken up as the first work in the French original of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, at the end of the conclusion on the “necessity” of “existential investigations” based on the doctrine of the Marxists: “As long as the doctrine does not become aware of its anemia as long as it will base its knowledge on a dogmatic metaphysics (dialectic of nature) instead of basing it on the understanding of living people, as long as it dismisses all ideologies under the name of irrationalism which - as Marx did - the being of knowledge and want to base human knowledge on human existence within the framework of anthropology, as long as existentialism will continue its investigations. "

Aspects of Existentialism

Ontological approach : The human being is the only being in which existence ( that he is) precedesthe essence ( what he is), but this is not to be understood as a temporal sequence. Reason:There are nobasic features that determine his essence ( what he should be so that he is actually human). Sartre assumes that there is no God who could have imposed values on people, and no binding ethics outside of people.

The situation of man is thus characterized by absolute freedom: "I am condemned to be free" or: "Man is the governor of nothing" (Heidegger). Man has to face this basic situation. Anything else would be a self-deception. "There is no human nature that defines the human being, rather the human being is what he makes himself."

From this follow some statements : “Man is completely responsible”, first of all for his individuality: With what he does he “draws his face”. At the same time, however, for all of humanity, because with his decisions he also shows what a person can be. To that extent he is always a legislator.

"Man is fear."

"Man is abandonment."

"Man is despair."

“There is only reality in fact”: Man discovers himself in his design, he transcends himself by designing on something. For Sartre, love exists only as a realized relationship, genius only as a realized genius.

Historical situation and human condition : “The historical situation is changing. What does not change is the need to be in the world, in it at work, in it to be in the midst of others and to be mortal. "

The meaning of the other : In order to experience any truth about myself, I have to be able to reflect myself in the other. The other is indispensable for the knowledge that I have of myself. The discovery of my inner being reveals to me at the same time the other as a freedom opposite to me. You choose in the face of others, and you choose yourself in the face of others. Sartre shows in an analysis of being looked at (“The Look” in: Being and Nothingness ) how I am subject to the judgment of the other: The other as the competing consciousness that regards me as in-itself, that of me in a certain Moment or in my role.

The existentialist morality : Sartre emphasizes the similarity with the act of artistic creation. You have to compare morality with the design of a work of art. Reasons: An artist is not guided by fixed rules. He doesn't have to take a specific picture either. The artist is involved in the design of his picture; and the picture to be taken is exactly the picture he will have taken. With our morality, we are in a comparable situation that demands creativity. The content is always concrete and therefore unpredictable; he is always made up. All that matters is knowing if the invention that is being made is being made in the name of freedom.

Can I make moral judgments about others? Once a person has recognized that he is setting values in abandonment - then he can only want one thing, namely freedom as the basis of all values. So in the name of the human condition as freedom I can make judgments about those who seek to hide the autonomy of their existence and their total freedom.

Transcendence is a constitutive characteristic of man, but not in the sense that a reference to God is established, which is no longer possible as a consequence of the lack of proof of God. Rather, for Sartre, transcendence is the transgression of the ego.

The Existentialism is a Humanism , "because we (the existentialists) to remind people that there is no other legislator than himself and that he will decide in the abandonment of himself; and because we show that man realizes himself not by turning back on himself, but by the constant search for a goal outside of himself - like this liberation or that specific achievement. "

Literary historical appreciation

Today, Sartre's place in literary history is primarily secured by his first novel La nausée (1938) , which contains many autobiographical elements, and the stories in the anthology Le Mur (1939). By orienting himself on the American montage novel (including Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos ), he ushered in a phase strongly influenced by American realism in the French language alongside Albert Camus , André Malraux , Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Blaise Cendrars . His theater, which was largely politically motivated, is now rated as less important. His most personal work, the philosophical autobiography The Words ( Les mots , 1964), reconstructs Sartre's childhood story. Many contemporary literary critics considered it decisive for the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Writings about artists

In addition to Sartre's philosophical and literary work, there is a third complex with his numerous writings on writers, poets, painters and sculptors, which is often only mentioned in passing: In these studies, for example on Charles Baudelaire , Jean Genet , Stéphane Mallarmé , Alexander Calder , Rene Leibowitz , André Masson , Alberto Giacometti , and especially about Gustave Flaubert (see The Idiot of the Family ), but also about Jacopo Tintoretto , he examined the relationship between these artists and their work. According to Sartre, the work of these artists demonstrates that freedom is an unconditional requirement of art. Despite their political differences, he agrees with Albert Camus' view in this regard .

The studies on artists: the connection between philosophy and literature

Sartre conceived the third complex of his work with the connection of art and philosophy: "I had the idea to combine literature and philosophy into a technique for a concrete statement - philosophy provides the method and the discipline, literature provides that Word. I wanted to unravel the strange and concrete relationships between people and things, and later those between people and themselves. " The strange and concrete Beziehunge Sartre studied in detail with his artist studies and thereby developed a method how to findings on the question of how an individual makes himself the artists can win.

The conventional separation of philosophy and literature in Sartre's work has to be relativized, as he himself underlines the special importance of his studies on writers and artists presented here: “... everything I have written is equally literary and philosophical, in the novel as in the criticism . Yes, there were two works with pure philosophy: Being and Nothing and The Critique of Dialectical Reason , but that's a bit outside of what I like to do. Jean Genet. Comedian and Martyr and The Idiot of the Family seem to be what I was looking for: it's about the event that is described in literary terms and that at the same time also gives a philosophical meaning. "

The project of an aesthetic

Sartre's studies of the artists allow the reconstruction of an aesthetic with which he examined the designs of the artists on the basis of the analysis of their works, whereby he focuses less on the biography of the artist than on the interpretation and effect of their works. His studies also always contain Sartre's reflections on the effect of his own works, such as Les Mots (1964) - the words, apart from their importance as an autobiography of his youth, with the two chapters of writing and reading , reflect the prerequisites for the profession of writer.

Originally, Sartre wanted to write an aesthetic that he never wrote. He would have liked to try "to describe both what a painter is and what a painting is in order to work out part of an ensemble that should become the aesthetic ."

In an interview with Michel Sicard, Sartre explained the relationship between his conception of human freedom and his intention to formulate an aesthetic: "The painter or writer, who is wholly underlying the work, begins to exist as the original intention of his freedom: on At this level I would have shown in my aesthetics how human freedom is the only way to paint or write. " For Sartre, the connection between freedom and art is a conditio sine qua non of artistic creation: "If you paint or write with your freedom, there is something special and unique in the work of art: the work of art is never a copy of nature (or of the natural object) but a production outside of it. This specifically human way - human because free - should have been investigated. " Sartre did not undertake this investigation in his announced aesthetics, but all of its components are present in his numerous interviews on the visual arts and in his portrait studies.

The more the work of art appeals to the viewer, challenges him to transcend it, to make something of it for himself and others, the greater the aesthetic value of the work of art. As the author, the artist is only indirectly involved in this process. This result of his writings on the fine arts corresponds with his reception aesthetics, with which he postulates the collaboration between author and reader, which is necessary for the creation of an intellectual work.

Works (selection)

Philosophical writings

L'imagination (1936) - Die Imagination, In: Die Transzendenz des Ego. Philosophical essays 1931–1939. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982.
La Transcendance de l'ego. Esquisse d'une description phénoménologique (1936/37) - The transcendence of the ego. Sketch of a phenomenological description, In: The Transcendence of the Ego. Philosophical essays 1931–1939. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982.
Esquisse d´une théorie des émotions (1938) - Sketch of a theory of emotions, In: The transcendence of the ego. Philosophical essays 1931–1939. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982.
Une idée fondamentale de la phenoménologie de Husserl: l'intentionnalité (1939) - A fundamental idea of the phenomenology of Husserl: The intentionality, In: The transcendence of the ego. Philosophical essays 1931–1939. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982.
L'Imaginaire (1940) - The imaginary. Phenomenological psychology of the imagination. With a contribution "Sartre on Sartre". Rowohlt, Reinbek 1971.
L'Être et le néant (1943) - The being and the nothing , rororo, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-13316-4 .
L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) 1945.
L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1945) - Is Existentialism a Humanism? Ullstein, Frankfurt 1989, ISBN 3-548-34500-X .
Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi (1947) - Consciousness and self-knowledge, rororo, Reinbek 1973, ISBN 3-499-11649-9 .
Réflexions sur la question juive (1954) - Reflections on the Jewish question, rororo, Reinbek 1994, ISBN 3-499-13149-8 .
Critique de la raison dialectique I: Théorie des ensembles pratiques (1960) - Critique of dialectical reason , Volume 1, Theory of social practice, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1967, ISBN 3-498-06058-9 .
Est-ce qu'il ya vie sur la lune? (1962) - Is there life on the moon?
Cahiers pour une morale (posthumous, publié en 1983) - Drafts for a moral philosophy , Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 3-498-06171-2 .
Critique de la raison dialectique II: L'intelligibilité de l'histoire (1985) - (not translated into German)
Qu'est-ce que la subjectivité. Préface de Michel Kail and Raoul Kirchmayr. Postface de Frederic Jameson (lecture from 1961, published by Les Prairies ordinaires, Paris 2013) - What is subjectivity, Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2015, ISBN 3-85132-770-5 .
Truth and existence

Writings on literature

Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947) - What is literature ?, rororo, Reinbek 1981, ISBN 3-499-14779-3 .
Baudelaire (1947) - Baudelaire. An essay, Reinbek: Rowohlt 1953, ISBN 3-499-14225-2 .
Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) - Saint Genet, comedian and martyr, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982, ISBN 3-498-06156-9 .
L'Idiot de la famille. La vie de Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1851 (1971–1972) - The idiot of the family . Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857 (1977–1979)
Myth and Reality of the Theater. Writings on theater and film 1931-1970
Black and white literature. Essays on literature 1946-1960

Novels

La Nausée (1938) - The disgust , rororo, Reinbek 1949.
Les Chemins de la liberté (1946–1949) - The Paths of Freedom (Consisting of four parts: Time of Maturity, The Procrastination, The Stake in the Flesh and The Last Chance )

stories

L'Enfance d'un chef (1938) - The childhood of a chef , rororo, Reinbek 1985, ISBN 3-499-15517-6 .
Le Mur (1939) - The Wall, rororo, Reinbek 1973.

Scripts

Les jeux sont faits (1947) - The game is over , rororo, Reinbek 1952, ISBN 3-499-10059-2 .
In the gear train

Dramas

Bariona, ou Le fils du tonnerre (1940) - Bariona or The Son of Thunder, rororo, Reinbek 1983, ISBN 3-499-12942-6 .
Les mouches (1943) - The flies
Huis clos (1944) - Closed society
Morts sans sépulture (1946) - Dead without burial, rororo, Reinbek 1965, ISBN 3-499-10788-0 .
La Putain respectueuse (1946) - The respectful whore (former translation: The honorable whore), rororo, Reinbek 1965/1987, ISBN 3-499-15838-8 .
Les mains sales (1948) - The dirty hands (drama)
Le Diable et le bon dieu (1951) - The Devil and God
Nekrassov (1955) - Nekrassow, Rowohlt Theaterverlag
Les séquestrés d'Altona (1959) - The trapped, rororo, Reinbek 1962, ISBN 3-499-10551-9 .
The Trojans of Euripides (1965)

Autobiographical writings

Les mots (1964) - The Words ( No. 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list from June 2 to October 26, 1965 )
Sartre over Sartre. Essays and interviews 1940-1976
Diaries

Political Writings

We are all murderers: Colonialism is a system - articles, speeches, interviews 1947-1967
The intellectual as a revolutionary: disputes
May 68 and the consequences I. Speeches, interviews, essays
May 68 and the consequences II. Speeches, interviews, essays
War in Peace: speeches, polemics, statements 1952-1956
War in Peace: Articles, Appeals, Pamphlets 1948-1954
Paris under occupation. Articles, reports, essays 1944 - 1945

Letters

Letters to Simone de Beauvoir 1926-1939
Letters to Simone de Beauvoir and others 1940-1963

Others

Situations (1947-1965)
Jean-Paul Sartre & Benny Lévy, L'espoir maintenant : les entretiens de 1980, présentés et suivis du Mot de la fin par Benny Lévy, Publication, Verdier, Paris 1991.
Brotherhood and violence. : a conversation with Benny Lévy. With an afterword by Lothar Baier. From the Franz. Von Grete Osterwald, Wagenbachs Taschenbücherei, Wagenbach, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-8031-2219-8 .
La Reine Albemarle ou le dernier tourist. Fragments (posthumous, publié en 1991) - Queen Albemarle or The Last Tourist, 1994.

literature

Denis Bertholet: Sartre. Perrin, 2004. (French)
Thomas Blech: Education as an event of the foreign. Freedom and historicity with Jean-Paul Sartre. Dissertation . Tectum, Marburg 2001, ISBN 3-8031-2219-8 .
Brigitta Coenen-Mennemeier: Adventure Existence . Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2001, ISBN 3-631-37731-2 .
Annie Cohen-Solal: Sartre 1905–1980 . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002.
Arthur C. Danto : Jean Paul Sartre. Steidl, Göttingen 1992.
Jean Firges : Sartre: The look. Sartre's theory of the "other". (= Exemplary series Literature and Philosophy. 1). Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2000, ISBN 3-933264-02-2 .
Thomas R. Flynn, Peter Kampits, Erik M. Vogt (Eds.): About Sartre. Turia + Kant, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-85132-439-0 .
Thomas R. Flynn: Sartre: a philosophical biography , Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-521-82640-2
Ingrid Galster : Le Théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre devant ses premiers critiques. “Les Mouches” and “Huis clos”. L'Harmattan, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-7475-0715-7 .
Ingrid Galster: Sartre, Vichy et les intellectuels . L'Harmattan, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-7475-0479-4 .
Ingrid Galster (Ed.): La naissance du “phénomène Sartre”. Raisons d'un succès (1938-1945). Seuil, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-02-047998-2 .
Ingrid Galster (Ed.): Sartre devant la presse d'Occupation. The dossier critique des “Mouches” et de “Huis clos”. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes 2005, ISBN 2-7535-0103-3 .
Ingrid Galster (Ed.): Sartre et les juifs . Actes du colloque de juin 2003 à la Maison Heinrich Heine, Cité universitaire. La Découverte, Paris 2005, ISBN 2-7071-4615-3 .
Steffen Großkopf: The fiction of identity. Educational theoretical aspects of the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. IKS Garamond, Jena 2011, ISBN 978-3-941854-41-3 .
Christa Hackenesch: Jean-Paul Sartre . Rowohlt TB, Reinbek 2001, ISBN 3-499-50629-7 .
Klaus Hartmann: Sartre's social philosophy. A study on the "Critique de la raison dialectique", 1. Berlin 1966.
Peter Kampits : Jean Paul Sartre. CH Beck, Munich 2004.
Jürgen Klein , Venetian Moments . Shoebox House Verlag, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-941120-16-7 .
Jürgen Klein, news from my library. Outsiders of modernity. Hamburg 2020: Shoebox House Verlag, ISBN 978-3-941120-39-6 .
Peter Knopp, Vincent von Wroblewsky (ed.): Existentialismus today . Philo, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-8257-0125-5 .
Peter Knopp, Vincent von Wroblewsky (ed.): Jean-Paul Sartre. Carnets 2000 . Philo, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-8257-0196-4 .
Peter Knopp, Vincent von Wroblewsky (ed.): Carnets Jean-Paul Sartre. The freedom of no. Philo, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-8257-0271-5 .
Peter Knopp, Vincent von Wroblewsky (ed.): Carnets Jean-Paul Sartre. The course of evil . Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-631-55050-2 .
Peter Knopp, Vincent von Wroblewsky (ed.): Carnets Jean-Paul Sartre. A moral in a situation . Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-56902-3 .
Peter Knopp, Vincent von Wroblewsky (ed.): Carnets Jean-Paul Sartre. Passengers without a ticket . Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2012, ISBN 978-3-631-63872-9 .
Traugott König (Ed.): Sartre reading book. Inventing people . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1986.
Traugott König (ed.): Sartre on Sartre. Articles and interviews 1940–1976 . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1977.
Till R. Kuhnle: “Roman de situation” between engagement and agnosticism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Simon . In: Wolfram Essbach (Ed.): What Modernity? Intellectual discourses between France and Germany in the field of tension between national and European identity images. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag Spitz, Berlin 2000, pp. 341–364.
Benny Lévy : Le Nom de l'homme. Dialogue with Sartre. Verdier, Lagrasse 1984.
Bernard-Henri Lévy : Sartre. The philosopher of the 20th century . Hanser, Munich 2002.
Mechthild Rahner: "Tout est neuf ici, tout est à recommencer." The reception of French existentialism in the cultural field of West Germany 1945–1949. (= Epistemata Philosophy. 142). Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 1993 (available in google books )
Alain Renaut: Sartre, le dernier philosophe. Grasset, Paris 1993.
Walter van Rossum: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2001.
Hazel Rowley: Tête à tête - life and love of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre . Parthas, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86601-667-5 .
Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann : Sartre. Philosophy as a way of life. CH Beck, Munich 2005.
Tatjana Schönwälder-Kuntze: Authentic freedom. To justify an ethic according to Sartre. Campus, Frankfurt 2001.
Jean-François Sirinelli: Sartre et Aron . Deux intellectuels dans le siècle. Fayard, Paris 1995.
Peter Sloterdijk (Ed.): Sartre . Selected and presented by Thomas H. Macho. (= Philosophy now!). Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag Munich 1998.
Hartmut Sommer: Disgust for existence: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Rive Gauche of Paris. In: Revolte und Waldgang. The poet philosophers of the 20th century. Lambert Schneider, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-650-22170-4 .
Martin Suhr: Sartre for an introduction. 4th edition. Junius, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-88506-394-0 .
Erik Michael Vogt: Sartre's repetition. Passages, Vienna 1995.
Erik Michael Vogt: Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. Anti-racism - anti-colonialism - politics of emancipation. Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-85132-694-9 .
Rainer Wannicke: Sartre's Flaubert. On the misanthropy of the imagination . Reimer, Berlin 1990.
Robert Wilcocks: Jean-Paul Sartre. A bibliography of international criticism. University of Alberta Press, 1975, ISBN 0-88864-012-9 .
Michel Winock: Sartre, s'est-il toujours trompé? (PDF file; 82 kB) In: L'Histoire. n ° 295, février 2005: Article critique sur les engagements politiques du philosophe.
Heiner Wittmann : L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels . Translated from German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar. (= ouverture philosophique). L'Harmattan, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-7475-0849-8 .
Heiner Wittmann: Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics. The Challenge of Freedom. Edited by Dirk Hoeges . Dialoghi / Dialogues. (= Literature and culture of Italy and France. 13). Frankfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8 .
Heiner Wittmann: Sartre and art. The portrait studies from Tintoretto to Flaubert . Gunter Narr, Tübingen 1996, ISBN 3-8233-5167-2 .
Vincent von Wroblewsky: Jean-Paul Sartre. Theory and practice of an engagement . Marxist sheets , Frankfurt 1977 (criticism from an orthodox-Marxist point of view)
Vincent von Wroblewsky (dir.): Pourquoi Sartre? Le bord de l'eau. Latresne 2005.
Vincent von Wroblewsky, Ed .: Lebendiger Sartre. 115 encounters. Basisdruck, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86163-133-0 .

Web links

Commons : Jean-Paul Sartre - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Wikiquote: Jean-Paul Sartre - Quotes

Literature by and about Jean-Paul Sartre in the catalog of the German National Library
Works by and about Jean-Paul Sartre in the German Digital Library
Newspaper article about Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Jürgen Hengelbrock: Article “Sarte, Jean-Paul” in the UTB online dictionary philosophy
Thomas Flynn: Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Christian J. Onof: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): Existentialism. In: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Storm Heter: Sartre's Political Philosophy. In: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Jean-Paul Sartre in the Internet Movie Database (English)
References in "Name, title and dates of the French. Literature " (main source for the biography)
Jean-Paul Sartre Archive at marxists.org
Groupe d'études sartriennes , Paris
The German Sartre Society , Berlin
www.sartre.ch with biography, bibliography, résumés, detailed articles and many links

Individual evidence

^ E. Zenz: Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 1988. Verein Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch e. V., Trier 1988, p. 195 ff.

↑ in the opinion of the critics and in Quick, online p. 3, (PDF; 52 kB) his own statements also a piece against the Algerian war and the French torture there, relocated back to the Nazi era by Sartre for fear of censorship.

↑ See for example: David Drake: Sartre. Haus Publishing, 2005, p. 111.

↑ See information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1964 award ceremony to Jean-Paul Sartre (English).

↑ Christian Linder: In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature. In: 'Calendar sheet' of October 22, 2004, Deutschlandfunk . Retrieved September 18, 2013.

↑ See Peter Maxwill, Spiegel Online of October 22, 2014 , in contrast to Thomas Seinfeld, Süddeutsche Zeitung Online of January 5, 2015, speaking of a rumor spread by Lars Gyllensten .

↑ Günter Riederer: 1974: Visit of the old man. In: Friday . December 10, 2014.

↑ Pascale Hugues : It was forbidden to forbid. In: Die Zeit from January 25, 2020, p. 53.

^ Jean-Paul Sartre: Brotherhood and Violence: A Conversation with Benny Lévy . With an afterword by Lothar Baier. From the Franz. Von Grete Osterwald, Wagenbach's pocket library; Wagenbach, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-8031-2219-8 .

↑ Cf. Reinhard Olschanski: The Self and the Others ; Article on the 20th anniversary of Sartre's death in: Friday 16.

↑ The Transcendence of the Ego, in: The Transcendence of the Ego: Philosophical Essays 1931–1939 ; Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1982, p. 91 u. 92.

^ Erik Michael Vogt: Sartre's repetition ; Passagen Verlag, Vienna 1995, p. 40 f.

↑ Being and Nothing Attempt a phenomenological ontology ; Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1991, p. 40.

↑ Being and Nothing, 1991, p. 176.

↑ Being and Nothing ; 1991, p. 289.

↑ Cf. Being and Nothing ; 1991, Part Two: Being for oneself . Second chapter: “Temporality, III. Original temporality and psychological temporality: The reflection ”, especially pp. 299–301.

↑ Being and Nothing, 1991, p. 213.

↑ See Bernard-Henri Lévy, Sartre, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich Vienna 2002, p. 324 f.

↑ The disgust ; Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1982, pp. 97-99.

↑ Being and Nothing ; 1991, p. 845 f.

↑ Is existentialism a humanism? In: Three essays. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1960.

↑ Annie Cohen-Solal: Sartre. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1991, p. 444.

^ Bernard-Henri Lévy: Sartre ; Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich Vienna 2002, p. 228 u. 230

↑ Reflections on the Jewish question ; Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994, pp. 89-91.

^ Sartre on Sartre ; Interview with Perry Anderson , Ronald Fraser and Quintin Hoare, in: Sartre on Sartre: Essays and Interviews 1940–1976 ; Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1977, pp. 144–145.

↑ Translation: "Strictly speaking, we are on a level where there is essentially being." Martin Heidegger: About humanism ; Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 26.

↑ Traugott König: On the new translation. In: Sartre: Being and Nothing Attempt a phenomenological ontology ; Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1991, pp. 1087-1088.

^ For the history of the publication of Questions de la méthode see: Questions of the method ; Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999, p. 195 and: Critique of dialectical reason , 1st volume: Theory of social practice ; Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1980, pp. 867-870.

↑ Critique of Dialectical Reason , Volume 1: Theory of Social Practice ; Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1980, p. 868.

↑ Questions of the method , Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999, p. 28.

↑ Questions of the method 1999, p. 27.

↑ Questions of the method 1999, p. 35.

↑ The conclusion of the article Questions of Method was only published when the text was included in the French publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . The German publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason took place in agreement with the author without questioning the method .

↑ questions of method ; 1999, p. 182.

↑ Critique of Dialectical Reason ; 1980, p. 48.

↑ ^a ^b Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1980, p. 79.

^ Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1980, pp. 382–597.

^ Critique of dialectical reason, 1980, pp. 598–866.

↑ Questions of the method, 1999, p. 193.

^ Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism is a humanism . In: Existentialism is a humanism and further philosophical essays 1943–1948 . 9th edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2018, p. 176 .

↑ J.-P. Sartre, Thinking Art. Conversations with Michel Sicard , in: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Search for the Absolute. Texts on the fine arts , trans. v. V. v. Wroblewsky, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1999, p. 132. ISBN 3-499-22636-7

↑ Sartre, Le séquestré de Venise, in: Situations, IV , Paris: Gallimard 1964, pp. 291–346, German: Sartre, The included of Venice, in: Sartre, portraits and perspectives , trans. v. A. Christaller, Reinbek near Hamburg 1971, pp. 233-276; ders., Saint Georges et le dragon, in: Situations, IX , Paris: Gallimard 1972, pp. 202-226; ders., Saint Marc et son double. Le Séquestré de Venise. Inédit, in: Obliques 24/25, Sartre et les arts, ed. v. Michel Sicard, Nyons 1981, pp. 171-202, ders., Les produits finis du Tintoret, in: Magazine littéraire , No. 176, Figures de Sartre, Paris 1981, pp. 28-30. The only complete edition of Sartre's studies on Tintoretto: Sartre, Tintoretto o il sequestrato di Venezia , ed. u. trans. v. Fabrizio Scanzio, foreword and introduction by Michel Sicard, Milan: Christian Marinotti Edizioni 2005 ISBN 88-8273-061-1 . There is a film about Sartre's Tintpretto studies: D. Baussy, The Yellow Rift. Jean-Paul Sartre on Tintoretto , German editing: RE Moritz, editing: J. Hausmann. Joint production: Antenne 2, Paris and Bayerischer Rundfunk 1984. Newly published on DVD, by Gallimard, Paris 2005. Cf. H. Wittmann , Sartre and Art. The portrait studies from Tinoretto to Flaubert , Tübingen 1996, pp. 137–164. ISBN 3-8233-5167-2 .

^ H. Wittmann , Sartre and the art. The portrait studies from Tinoretto to Flaubert , Tübingen 1996, pp. 27–40, pp. 181–184.

^ H. Wittmann , Aesthetics in Sartre and Camus. The Challenge of Freedom , Translated by C. Atkinson, Dialoghi / dialogues series. Literature and culture of Italy and France. Edited by Dirk Hoeges , vol. 13, Frankfurt, Berlin, Bern a. a., 2009. Hardcover, pp. 141-151. ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8

↑ Sartre, Nous devons créer nos propres valeurs, in: Magazine littéraire No. 55/56, 1974, p. 10: "Je conçus l'idée d'unir la littérature et la philosophie en une technique d'expression concrète - la philosophie fournissant la méthode et la discipline, la littérature fournissant le mot. Ce qui m'intéressait était de démêler les relations étranges et concrètes des hommes aux choses et plus tard, des hommes à eux-mêmes. " Trans. V. H. Wittmann.

↑ J.-P. Sartre and M. Sicard, Entretien. L'écriture et la publication, in: Obliques , N ° 18/19, Nyons 1979, p. 29: “… tout ce que j'ai écrit est à la fois littérarie et philosophique, also bieen dans les romans que dans la critique .Si, il ya eu deux oeuvres de philosophie pure: L'Être et le néant et Critique de la raison dialectique , mais c'est un peu en dehors de ce que j'aime faire. Le Saint Genet et L'Idiot de la famille me paraissent tout à fait ce que j'ai cherché: c'est l'événement qui doit être écrit littérairement et qui, en même temps, doit donner un sens philosophique. "Transl . H. Wittmann reprinted in: Michel Sicard, Essais sur Sartre. Enretiens avec Sartre (1975-1976) , Paris 1989, p. 231 ISBN 2-7186-0346-1

↑ J.-P. Sartre, Thinking Art. Conversations with Michel Sicard , in: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Search for the Absolute. Texts on the fine arts , trans. v. V. v. Wroblewsky, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1999, p. 132.

↑ J.-P. Sartre, Thinking Art. Conversations with Michel Sicard , in: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Search for the Absolute. Texts on the fine arts , trans. v. V. v. Wroblewsky, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1999, p. 136.

↑ See: Michel Sicard, Sartre et l'esthétique . In addition: Jean-Paul Sartre. Michel Sicard et ses entretiens avec Heiner Wittmann 2011–2016.

↑ Heiner Wittmann, Sartre and Art. The portrait studies from Tintoretto to Flaubert , Tübingen 1996, p. 183: "The degree of inspiration that these artists can convey with their works becomes the yardstick of their aesthetic content."

↑ See Jean-Paul Sartre, What is literature? trans. vT König, Reinbek b. Hamburg, p. 29: "The joint effort of author and reader will reveal that concrete and imaginary object that is the work of the spirit."

personal data
SURNAME	Sartre, Jean-Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Sartre, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French philosopher and founder of French existentialism
DATE OF BIRTH	June 21, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris
DATE OF DEATH	April 15, 1980
Place of death	Paris

[1] E. Zenz: Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 1988. Verein Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch e. V., Trier 1988, p. 195 ff.

[2] the opinion of the critics and in Quick, online p. 3, (PDF; 52 kB) his own statements also a piece against the Algerian war and the French torture there, relocated back to the Nazi era by Sartre for fear of censorship.

[3] See for example: David Drake: Sartre. Haus Publishing, 2005, p. 111.

[4] See information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1964 award ceremony to Jean-Paul Sartre (English).

[5] Christian Linder: In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature. In: 'Calendar sheet' of October 22, 2004, Deutschlandfunk . Retrieved September 18, 2013.