Philosopher Profiles

Sartre was born with glasses on his nose and a pipe in his mouth in 1905, having already (according to his brilliantly modest autobiography) read every book in his parents' library by the 14th week of his mother's pregnancy.

It seems natural, therefore, that he would become one of the earliest and possibly loudest proponents of French existentialism in the 20th century, effectively claiming that most philosophy before him was simply wrong (in line with many of his compatriots - see articles on Foucault, Derrida, ...). Existence, he argued, preceded essence, so that the bench over there isn't actually a bench (duh!), but instead a propertyless lump of matter to which we attach attributes and qualities through our experience. Non-content with loosely plagiarising Humean projectivism, he extended this view to sentient beings, claiming our essence was the product of our acts and nothing else, in that therefore we were absolutely free. All that was important was that we not act a bad faith, a maxim Sartre did not (arguably) stick to very well, under a certain interpretation of the term ‘faith’, as his rocky relationship with feminist Simone de Beauvoir was anything but faithful (on the part of both parties).

Notably, Sartre believed philosophy was best experienced, not taught as a bunch of maxims or clear-cut and cogent arguments. He advanced many of his views through the medium of plays and novels, delighting generations of French school children with the uplifting prospect of finding suicide-inducing morbid reflections on the human condition in their high-school French literature curriculum. Supporters of this approach to philosophical writing are often heard claiming “It sure beats twenty line proofs in 2nd order modal logic”.

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