Jean-Paul Sartre — "Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature-…"
Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].
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More from Jean-Paul Sartre
"Our noble souls are racist."
"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it."
"The only way to escape the absurdity of existence is to create meaning."
"Human reality is a being such that in its being its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself."
"The essential thing is to be free, free, free. To be free for life and for death."
About Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
French existentialist philosopher (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and Nobel literature laureate (refused, 1964) who shaped postwar French intellectual culture. Closely associated with Simone de Beauvoir (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (phenomenologist contemporary and Les Temps Modernes co-editor). For an intellectual contrast, see Albert Camus, Algerian-French novelist and philosopher — Once Sartre's closest collaborator, Camus broke with him publicly in 1952 over Soviet communism; Camus's moral-resistance liberalism and Sartre's revolutionary commitment became the two postwar French Left poles. The Sartre-Camus break is the canonical postwar French intellectual rupture — they argued whether revolutionary violence is ever justified, and never reconciled.
The standard scholarly entry points to Jean-Paul Sartre's work: Annie Cohen-Solal (French biographer, NYU) — Sartre: A Life (1985); Ronald Aronson (Wayne State University, philosophy) — Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship (2004); Bernard-Henri Lévy (French public philosopher) — Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (2003). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Jean-Paul Sartre.