Jean-Paul Sartre — "If I didn't try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utt…"
If I didn't try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.
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More from Jean-Paul Sartre
"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."
"There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no love which is not a product of love."
"A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost."
"The only way to escape the absurdity of existence is to create meaning."
"The first principle of existentialism is that man is nothing else but what he makes of himself."
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.