A search for justification and the impossibility of justification are recurrent motifs in the philosophy of Sartre. His philosophy is one of the incarnations of problematism and of the ambiguity of contemporary thought (for Man does seem, to the contemporary mind, to be ambiguous).
jean-paul Sartrequotes
1905 - 1980
20th Century French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), was a playwright and novelist of outstanding talent, who took his philosophy to the streets stating, “Commitment is an act, not a word,” as he participated in left-wing political movements.
In his autobiography, The Words, Sartre recalls roaming the parks of Paris with his mother seeking playmates. Being small and cross-eyed, his never found acceptance. Sartre wrote poetically that in the refuge of his sixth-story apartment “where dreams dwell”, “the words” saved him.
In his day, Sartre broke societal expectations of sexual norms and the bourgeois lifestyle with his partner Simone de Beauvoir. They were interested in true authentic living. Sartre had attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and taught philosophy at Le Havre before being drafted into the military. Afterward, he lived as an independent writer.
His work in defense of human dignity and freedom, Being and Nothingness, was his masterpiece. It’s a tragic and hopeful book discussing the futility of human endeavor, while praising consciousness as non-matter and free of determinism.
Sartre turned down the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1964 because he denounced literature as being bourgeois. His plays and novels remain an inspiration for modern literature all the same. Creator of a sort of Sartrean Socialism (Search for a Method), reveals an admiration of the Soviet Union, adherence to Marxism as the only philosophy for modernity, but the admittance that the latter died within the former’s system.
Sartre died from a lung tumor in 1980. An incredible 25,000 people came to pay their respects.
In the second place, could we not conceive of a philosophy of existence linked, not solely to experiences of separation, forlornness, and profound melancholy, but also to feelings of hope and confidence?
confidence / existence / Hope
I am so happy when a Negress sings: what summits would I not reach if my own life made the subject of the melody.
I scraped my heel against this black claw: I wanted to peel off some of the bark. For no reason at all, out of defiance, to make the bare pink appear absurd on the tanned leather: to play with the absurdity of the world. But, when I drew my heel back, I saw that the bark was still black.
One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are – your life, and nothing else.
The root was not black, there was no black on this piece of wood — there was . . . something else: black, like the circle, did not exist.
Suddenly they existed, then suddenly they existed no longer: existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing — not even a memory. Existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence — which is limited only by existence.
There is something I longed for more than all the rest – without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was… anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality.
Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: ‘A book never does any harm if it is well written.’ While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: ‘But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them!’ This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.
And every man ought to say to himself, “Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?”