by C. Elizabeth Grey

Created on: February 16, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

An article on Jean Paul Sartre

Here in America the people have the privilege of thinking what they like. Among many philosophies, ethics, and theologies, American culture has a tendency to consider their existence. An example of this may be media such as music, movies, and books. European thought has influenced this media as well as influenced existentialist thought in the Americas. During the Twentieth Century, it has been mainly the Europeans who have spoken of existentialism. America has, in this instance, been rather negligent in her philosophical duties.

One of the Twentieth Century thinkers who had an important weight in existentialist theories about why we exist was Jean-Paul Sartre. He was a Frenchman, born after the turn of the century in 1905. His mother raised him primarily in a family of adults after her husband had died in 1906. Sartre had no siblings. His mother reamarried in 1917 and the family moved to La Rochelle. At the age of nineteen, a young Sartre was sent to the Ecole Normale in Paris. This was a time in Sartre's life when his mind was first cultivated and he first began to think about life on his own. Sartre's principal existentialist theory at this young age was one contested by most of his friends.

Sartre believed that the only thing man really knew best was his inner soul, and that everything else was unreal and superficial. Everything was as he perceived it from his soul, his inner self. In that case, his friends argued, justice had nothing to do with the law, and man rested only upon his own judgment. Sartre insisted that this was exactly what life really was. He said that everything beyond the self was perceived by the self but not penetrated. If a man cannot know anything about the world but what his physical senses tell him, then all things are really shallow, shadowy objects. Sartre concluded that there was no such thing as meaning or significance.

Sartre's family were among the richer French citizens, and were not affected by the Depression at the time of Sartre's graduation from Ecole Normale in 1928. Sartre also attended the College de France and graduated from it, too. Sartre was a government employee while he wrote his first book, Nausea. The novel was read, not only by philosophers but by the general public as well. The book was written out of his real nausea, caused by his earlier existentialist theories.

Sartre had said earlier that human beings exist with no more justification than a stone. They were only there to live physically,

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