JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Sartre in the world5radical Herbert Marcuse, who was so much more influential than Sartre inthe événements of May ’68. 5Who was Sartre?He was born Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre on 21st June 1905, in Paris.His naval officer father died of a tropical disease the following year and soSartre was brought up by his doting mother and rather austere maternalgrandparents. His grandfather, Charles Schweitzer (who was the uncle ofAlbert Schweitzer the famous Protestant theologian) dominated thehousehold. Paradoxically, he treated Sartre as an adult and Sartre’s motheras a child.Sartre was allowed no friends of his own age so he sought thecompanionship of the books in his grandfather’s large library. Educated athome by Charles until he was eleven, Sartre attended a string of Lycéesuntil intellectual and personal liberation came in the form of admittance tothe École Normale Supérieure in 1924.It was at the École Normale that Sartre met his lifelong companion andlover Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). She was to become the brilliant feministexistentialist author of Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), (1948) manyphilosophical novels, and the most significant work of existentialist ethics:Pour Une Morale de L’Ambiguité (For a Morality of Ambiguity) (1944). Themutual influence of de Beauvoir and Sartre is immense. They tested theirideas against each other. Their relationship seems to have allowed of afrankness extremely rare between two human beings. 6It was usually in the company of de Beauvoir that Sartre travelled abroad.At first just for holidays, later at the invitation of political leaders, Sartrevisited between the 1930s and 1980s Spain, England, Germany, Austria,Czechoslovakia, Swizterland, Greece, Morocco, Algeria, Norway, Iceland,Scotland, Ireland, China, Italy, Yugoslavia, Cuba, the USA, Russia, Braziland Japan. Some countries he visited more than once. He met Tito inYugoslavia, Breznef in Russia and Castro in Cuba, as well as the Chinesecommunist leadership.Sartre’s literary and philosophical output is immense. What enabled himto write so much was a combination of a naturally strong physical constitution,high motivation, an extremely efficient writing routine, and the intermittentabuse of amphetamine tablets which increased his production, if not hiscoherence.Sartre suffered problems with his eyes. In 1909 he caught a cold whichled to a leucoma in his right eye and strabism. Henceforth, he had hardlyany vision left in that eye and was left with the distinctive squint which would