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| Jean-Paul Sartre |
The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease that has affected millions of people around the world.
The Grandma is affected with this situation that has shown how fragile is the human condition against the nature.
When a tragedy like this occurs it is normal to think in life from a point of view of existentialism. Why have some people suffered this terrible disease and not me? How is life a lottery? How much pain is suffering my neighbours in silence? How can we help people who have suffered this disease and have got terrible consequences or how can we help those people who have lost someone?
It is very sad when you realize how only great tragedies pay the attention of the great part of the population, especially, if they are affected. Individualism is a terrible thing in our society but not now, it is a constant in our history.
The Grandma has been thinking about all these things and she has rereading L'Être et le Néant, in English Being and Nothingness, a masterpiece written by Jean-Paul Sartre that talks about existentialism and phenomenology. It is a good way to think about the past, the present, and the future of our societies and a wonderful way to homage this French philosopher who was born on a day like today in 1905.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905-15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic.
He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.
His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.
Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir.
Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought.
The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity and an authentic way of being"became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le Néant, 1943. Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946 originally presented as a lecture.
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| Jean-Paul Sartre |
He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honours and that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie (Schweitzer). His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, whose father Louis Théophile was the younger brother of Anne-Marie's father.
When Sartre was two years old, his father died of an illness, which he most likely contracted in Indochina. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon, where she raised Sartre with help from her father Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age.
When he was twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied, in part due to the wandering of his blind right eye, sensory exotropia.
In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist. He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux, and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war -in Nancy and finally in Stalag XIII-D, Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas.
More information: BBC
It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology. Because of poor health, he claimed that his poor eyesight and exotropia affected his balance, Sartre was released in April 1941. According to other sources, he escaped after a medical visit to the ophthalmologist.
After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students.
In his essay Paris under the Occupation, Sartre wrote that the correct behaviour of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the occupation, accepting what was unnatural as natural.
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| Jean-Paul Sartre |
The
first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by L'Être et le
Néant (1943), gave way to a second period -when the world was perceived
as split into communist and capitalist blocs- of highly publicized
political involvement.
Sartre tended to glorify
the Resistance after the war as the uncompromising expression of
morality in action, and recalled that the résistants were a band of
brothers who had enjoyed real freedom in a way that did not exist
before nor after the war.
For a time in the late 1940s, Sartre described French nationalism as provincial and in a 1949 essay called for a United States of Europe.
As an anti-colonialist, Sartre took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria, and the use of torture and concentration camps by the French in Algeria. He became an eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatories of the Manifeste des 121.
More information: Your Story
In 1964 Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les Mots. The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide, who had provided the model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation. Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world.
In October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it.
Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work and the use of amphetamine he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert, both of which remained unfinished.
He suffered from hypertension, and became almost completely blind in 1973. Sartre was a notorious chain smoker, which could also have contributed to the deterioration of his health.
Sartre died on 15 April 1980 in Paris from edema of the lung.
More information: Quartz
Man is condemned to be free;
because once thrown into the world,
he is
responsible for everything he does.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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