Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre
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Sartre was born in Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, cousin of Albert Schweitzer. When he was 15 months old, his father died of a fever and 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.
As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergsons Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He studied in Paris at the elite Ăâ˘cole Normale SupĂšrieure, an institution of higher education which has served as the alma mater for multiple prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger.
In 1929 at the Ăâ˘cole Normale, he met fellow student Simone de Beauvoir, later to become a noted thinker, writer, and feminist. The two, it is documented, became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though one that was not monogamous.
Together, Sartre and Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually-destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, âbad faithâ) and an âauthenticâ state of âbeingâ became the dominant theme of Sartres work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work LĂĹĄtre et le NĂšant (Being and Nothingness) (1944).
Sartres best-known introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture. In this work, he defends existentialism against its detractors, which ultimately results in a somewhat incomplete description of his ideas. The work has been considered a popular, if over-simplifying, point of entry for those seeking to learn more about Sartres ideas but lacking the background in philosophy necessary to fully absorb his longer work Being and Nothingness. One should not take the expression of his ideas contained here as authoritative; in 1965, Sartre told Francis Jeanson that its publication had been âune erreur.â
He graduated from the Ăâ˘cole Normale SupĂšrieure in 1929 with