Jean-Paul Sartre — "The word 'existentialism' has been so much abused and so much misunderstood that…"
The word 'existentialism' has been so much abused and so much misunderstood that I will try to explain what it means.
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More from Jean-Paul Sartre
"What is life but a series of choices?"
"The world is full of things that have no explanation."
"Hell is other people."
"There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no love which is not a product of love."
"I am alone, I am with no one; I am nothing."
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.