Jean-Paul Sartre
He was small, cross-eyed, and half-blind, and he built a philosophy out of what that meant. He argued we are condemned to be free, that bad faith is the most natural response to that sentence, and that hell is other people. He refused the Nobel Prize. Fifty thousand people followed his coffin through the streets of Paris.
Jean-Paul Sartre was small, cross-eyed, and partially blind in one eye. He knew it. He wrote about it. He made it part of his philosophy. For Sartre, the body is not incidental to existence -- it is the place where existence happens, the site of our facticity, the weight of what we are thrown into before we begin to choose. His own body, with its asymmetric eyes and his full awareness of being, by conventional standards, unattractive, was where his philosophy of freedom began: in the gap between what you are given and what you do with it.
He was born in Paris in 1905. His father died of fever when Sartre was fifteen months old. He was raised in the household of his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a domineering German teacher who ran the household like a school. His mother Anne-Marie -- a first cousin of Albert Schweitzer -- was effectively a daughter in her father’s house, not a mother in her own. The young Sartre was precocious, solitary, and encouraged to perform his intelligence for the adults around him. He described this later as a kind of corruption: the child who learns that words are a way of earning love becomes addicted to producing them.
He was brilliant enough to get into the École Normale Supérieure, the most selective educational institution in France. In 1929 he sat the agrégation, the competitive examination for philosophy teachers. He passed at the top of his class. The person who placed second, at the youngest age in the examination’s history, was Simone de Beauvoir. They met in the corridor afterward, more or less. They would be together for fifty-one years.
The arrangement they formed was unlike any conventional relationship of the time, or of most times. They called their love essential -- primary, foundational. They would each have other loves, which they called contingent. They would tell each other everything. They would not marry. They would not live together permanently. They would not let their relationship become a comfortable institution that deadened the freedom of either of them.
The asymmetry in practice was significant. Sartre’s contingent affairs were numerous. De Beauvoir’s were fewer. Sartre was often conducting affairs with women he had introduced to de Beauvoir. The letters published after both their deaths were more revealing than either had been in public. De Beauvoir had protected the arrangement, and him, for decades. The posthumous publication raised questions she could no longer answer.
But the intellectual partnership was genuine and profound. De Beauvoir was Sartre’s first reader. She pushed back. She challenged. When he showed her the manuscript of Being and Nothingness, she told him what worked and what did not. When she showed him the early draft of The Second Sex, his response shaped the final book. They were not a couple who performed collaboration. They actually collaborated.
In 1933, Sartre won a fellowship to study in Berlin. He went to the French Institute and discovered phenomenology. He read Husserl. He read Heidegger. There is a famous story: Raymond Aron, his friend from the ENS, came to visit him in Paris before Sartre left for Berlin. They sat in a bar. Aron pointed at his glass of beer and said, more or less: if you’re a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and it’s philosophy. You can talk about things themselves, not just concepts. Sartre went pale with excitement. He went to Berlin and read everything.
Husserl gave him the method: start with experience, describe it rigorously, describe it before theoretical interpretation. Heidegger gave him something else: the existential framework, the analysis of being-in-the-world, of thrownness, of anxiety, of authenticity. Sartre took both and did something they had not done: he pushed freedom to the center. Where Heidegger had spoken of Dasein as thrown into a world it had not chosen, Sartre said: yes, but even in that thrownness, we are free. There are no excuses.
He published Being and Nothingness in 1943, under the German occupation of Paris. It is one of the most demanding works of twentieth-century philosophy: seven hundred pages on consciousness, freedom, the look of the other, bad faith, and the impossibility of simply being what you are. The fundamental distinction is between the en-soi, being-in-itself -- the mode of being of things, which simply are what they are -- and the pour-soi, being-for-itself -- the mode of being of consciousness, which is always what it is not and is not what it is. Consciousness is characterized by nothingness. It cannot be fixed. It cannot be pinned down. It is always projecting itself beyond what it currently is. This is why we are free. And this is why freedom is anguishing.
Bad faith is the central psychological concept. It is the self-deception by which we deny our freedom. The waiter who plays the role of waiter so completely that he forgets he chose this job and could quit. The person who says I can’t help it, that’s just how I am, as if their character were a fixed object rather than a set of choices they keep making. The man who tells himself he had no choice, when he did. Bad faith is not a character flaw. It is a permanent temptation built into the structure of being free: freedom is anguishing, and the most natural thing in the world is to pretend it does not exist.
The year 1945 was the turning point. The Liberation of Paris had made Sartre and de Beauvoir central figures in a city intoxicated by survival. In October, Sartre delivered a lecture at the Club Maintenant: Existentialism Is a Humanism. He had never wanted to give the lecture. The room was packed to the walls. People fainted. He argued, in accessible language, the core claims of his philosophy. Existence precedes essence: there is no fixed human nature, no blueprint, no God who designed us for a purpose. We exist first, then define ourselves through our choices. We are condemned to be free.
The lecture was transcribed and published and read across the world. Existentialism became a cultural phenomenon. Sartre became, for a decade or two, genuinely the most famous philosopher alive.
In that same year he co-founded Les Temps Modernes, the intellectual journal that would shape the French left for the next three decades.
In 1952 came the rupture with Camus. It was conducted in public, in print, and it was brutal. The political disagreement was real: Sartre believed the Soviet Union, despite its crimes, was a genuine alternative to capitalist imperialism. Camus believed this required ignoring the Gulag. Camus’s book The Rebel argued that every revolutionary ideology justified present murder in the name of a future utopia, and that this was philosophically incoherent. Sartre took it as an attack on the Left in a moment when he believed solidarity with the Left was paramount.
The exchange of letters, published in Les Temps Modernes, was the most public philosophical quarrel in postwar French history. Sartre was right about some things: Camus could be too quick to condemn without proposing alternatives. Camus was right about the larger thing: Sartre defended the indefensible for too long, and knew it too late.
When Camus died in January 1960, in a car accident at forty-six, Sartre wrote a tribute that acknowledged the permanence of what had been lost. He said that Camus represented something indispensable in the world, a stubborn humanism, narrow and pure and sensual and obscure, against the colossal and deformed construction of history. He said the silence between them had become unbearable. And now it was absolute.
In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He refused it. He was the first person to voluntarily decline the prize. He said he did not want to be institutionalized, that a writer who accepts such honors becomes an institution, and that institutions are dangerous. He also said he could not, in good conscience, accept an honor from a Western institution when similarly situated writers behind the Iron Curtain could not. There was Cold War politics in the decision. There was genuine principle. There was also, perhaps, the pride of a man who needed to distinguish himself even from the highest distinction available.
He reportedly regretted it later, particularly when his finances became difficult in the 1970s. He never said so publicly.
His eyesight deteriorated progressively across the last decade of his life. By the mid-1970s he was nearly blind. He dictated rather than wrote. In his final years he worked with a young Maoist named Benny Lévy, who became his secretary and collaborator. The conversations between them, published as The Hope Now in 1980, revealed a Sartre who seemed to be moving toward something like Jewish messianism, a turn that deeply disturbed de Beauvoir, who believed the nearly blind, increasingly frail Sartre was being intellectually manipulated by a younger man with his own agenda.
He died on April 15, 1980, of pulmonary edema. He was seventy-four years old.
Fifty thousand people followed his coffin through the streets of Paris. No official ceremony. No state funeral. He would not have wanted either. They walked from the hospital to Montparnasse, through the Latin Quarter, through the Saint-Germain neighborhoods he had made famous. People climbed onto cars and walls to see the procession. It was the largest spontaneous public gathering for a writer in the history of the city.
He is buried at Montparnasse Cemetery. Simone de Beauvoir, who outlived him by six years and died in 1986, is buried with him.
They had agreed, half a century earlier, not to let what they had become comfortable. Not to let it become an institution. In the end it became something larger than an institution: a fact, as permanent as any fact about the century. They had chosen each other, repeatedly and freely, for fifty-one years. For Sartre, that was the only kind of commitment that counted.