being and nothingness by jean paul sartre

From the start the two were inseparable and throughout their lives they continued a romantic relationship, though one that was self-consciously anti-monogamous. In 1929 at the École Normale, Sartre met fellow student Simone de Beauvoir, who later became a noted thinker, writer, and feminist. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, particularly the ideas of the great German philosophers Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. He studied in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure. As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at an early age. When he was 15 months old, his father died of a fever. Sartre was born in Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, cousin of Albert Schweitzer. In 1964 Sartre won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he declined the award stating that he did not align himself with institutions. Throughout his life Sartre was very politically active, and although he never officially joined the Communist Party, he espoused Marxist ideas.

It is through accepting responsibility for our freedom, and the anguish that accompanies it, that we can become authentic human beings. Sartre links consciousness and our experience of anguish to freedom. Only through our consciousness of them do things take on value, which means that it is we who create meaning. For Sartre this meant that all existing things in the material universe are in themselves meaningless. As with other philosophers of existence, Sartre held that ‘existence precedes essence’.

Being and nothingness by jean paul sartre