Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

Abstract

Sartre is probably more famous as a writer than as a philosopher. Everyone knows novels such as La nausée (1938) or Les chemins de la liberté (1945–1949), as well as the short stories collected in Le mur (1939); his contributions to theater are also important and titles such as Huis clos and Le diable et le bon Dieu are really well-known even today. Even if the films are now relatively forgotten, we can also mention Sartre’s screenplays such as Les jeux sont faits (1947) and Les sorcières de Salem (1957). But many think that Sartre was first of all a philosopher who was deeply influenced by phenomenology, particularly by edmund husserl and martin heidegger, and who wrote an essay on phenomenological ontology, L’être et le néant (1943). His aesthetics is therefore the product of a philosopher who is at the same time a writer. He not only knows what he is talking about, but he has the intellectual tools to understand it. And his aesthetic thought does not only concern literature. He also wrote also about music (he was quite found of music and played the piano remarkably well), about painting and painters like Tintoretto, Lapoujade, and Masson; and about sculpture and sculptors like Giacometti, as well as about theater and poetry, even though he never wrote poetry himself.