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
"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."
"Man is a being who wills himself to be what he is not and wills not to be what he is."
"Authenticity consists in the free and lucid assumption of the situation."
"We are our choices."
"The goal of life is to live it, and the goal of art is to show it."
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.