Jean-Paul Sartre
1905-1980

Sartre questions the radical determinism and materialism of the nineteenth century. Emerging from the World Wars in Europe, Sartre wonders what is wrong with the world. Looking for an alternative to determinism, Sartre will not hearken back to Christian metaphysics, but take Husserl’s intentionality and Heidegger’s concern for Being. Sartre is an atheistic existential writer that is concern with freedom and responsibility. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 but refused it because it appeared to him as a petty bourgeois honor.
Most of the characteristics we associate with Existentialism are from Sartre. His analysis of human nature congealed during the years in France of the German occupation. He found the French collaboration and their refusal to take responsibility for wrongdoing abysmal and to join “The Resistance.” Their excuses included: appeals to innocence: “I didn’t start the war;” appeals to impotence: “What could I as one person do;” appeals to the “herd” mentality: Everyone else did it;” appeals to self-preservation: “I was looking out for myself; appeals to emotions: “I was afraid.” Yet these excuses seemed hollow and hypocritical. Thus, his philosophy can be best summarized as “no excuses!” He famously said harshly, “We always get the war we deserve.” In another way, we always get the life we deserve.
Against all such excuses, Sartre argued that we are never determined, that we are “absolutely free.” This is not to argue in the absurd sense that we can do anything like lift mountains, but it is to say that we always have a choice, and that we always do make a choice, even when they are not always self-evident. It is not the freedom to accomplish whatever we choose, but the freedom to attempt to deal with the world. Much of the physical world is given, birth, background, upbringing, peer