Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 CE–1980 CE) was a French philosopher, novelist, dramatist, and public intellectual whose existential phenomenology developed an account of consciousness, freedom, bad faith, responsibility, and intersubjectivity centred on the distinction between being-in-itself (en-soi) and being-for-itself (pour-soi). His principal philosophical treatise, L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943 CE), develops consciousness as intentional negativity rather than as a substantial mental entity, arguing that the for-itself continually transcends its present facticity through projects and possibilities while remaining unable to achieve the completed self-identity characteristic of the in-itself. Sartre's analysis of bad faith (mauvaise foi) describes the attempt to evade the anguish of freedom by treating oneself either as a fixed object determined by circumstance or as a pure transcendence detached from facticity; his account therefore rejects both strict determinism and the conception of freedom as unconstrained choice. His theory of the Other is developed through the phenomenon of the gaze, in which another consciousness transforms the subject's relation to itself by making it experience itself as an object within another's field of consciousness, generating conflicts over recognition and objectification. Sartre subsequently rendered these themes accessible in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946 CE), while his literary works, including La Nausée (Nausea, 1938 CE), the Les Chemins de la liberté trilogy (The Roads to Freedom, 1945–1949 CE), and Huis Clos (No Exit, 1944 CE), translated philosophical problems into narrative and dramatic form. He co-founded and co-edited Les Temps modernes from 1945 CE and increasingly connected existential freedom with political commitment and historical praxis; in 1964 CE he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but declined the distinction.

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