Founder of atheist existentialism in Being and Nothingness who sought to join it with Marxism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason
A lycée philosophy teacher who studied Husserl's phenomenology in Berlin, he published Being and Nothingness in 1943. In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) he argued that existence precedes essence and that, since God does not exist, humans must create their own values, becoming the face of an existentialism that worked out through Heidegger's phenomenology the question Nietzsche had posed of a world without God. He founded Les Temps modernes in 1945; never a party member, he was a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party from 1952 until the invasion of Hungary in 1956, and in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he tried to join existentialism and Marxism. He broke with Camus over The Rebel in 1951, refused the Nobel Prize in 1964 and in 1970 became director of a Maoist paper.
Also known as: Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre
Activities and affiliations
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1931–1945
France state institutionsPhilosophy teacher at state lycées
Education -
1945–1980
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1929Graduated from the ENS; agrégation in philosophy
- 1931–1945Philosophy teacher at lycées in Le Havre, Laon and Paris
- 1933–1934Studied Husserl at the Institut français in Berlin
- 1938Nausea
- 1940–1941Prisoner of war
- 1943Being and Nothingness
- 1945Founded Les Temps modernes
- 1946Existentialism Is a Humanism
- 1952–1956Fellow traveller of the French Communist Party
- 1960Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1
- 1964Refused the Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1967Russell Tribunal
- 1970Director of the Maoist paper La Cause du peuple