Jean-Paul Sartre — "The world is absurd, and we are condemned to make sense of it."
The world is absurd, and we are condemned to make sense of it.
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More from Jean-Paul Sartre
"Man is responsible for his own choices, even if he chooses not to choose."
"Life has no meaning a priori. It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing other than the meaning you choose."
"We were never so free as under the German occupation."
"Every man must invent his own way."
"To be ashamed is to be aware of the fact that I am myself the being by whom the world is revealed."
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.