Officially, he was Catholic, but his grandfather's Protestantism influenced him greatly. He learned little of the major philosophers of the day because they were not given attention at the French university of the time, but he would encounter them later when he was in his twenties. He passed his written examination for the agregation on his second try and fulfilled his military service from 1929 to 1931, doing so in the meteorological section. He then became professor of philosophy at the lycee in Le Havre and later taught at Laon. By then he had met his lifetime companion, Simone de Beauvoir. They never married, for marriage ran counter to their ideas of personal independence. Sartre's political views in the 1930s were radical, anticapitalist, antielitist, and proworker, and he was more of an anarchist than a revolutionary (Brosman 107).
Sartre's literary career began when he contributed to and acted in a student revue. He then wrote two novels, unpublished, a story published in 1923, an essay on the theory of the state in French thought (also published), and other pieces. He would continue to write during his military career. He wrote his first philosophical treatise -- L'Imagination (Imagination) -- in 1936, followed by the Transcendence of the Ego in 1937. His first novel, La Nausee (Nausea), was published in 1937 as well. His stories were published in 1939 under the title the Wall and were well-received (Brosman 8-9).
Walter Kaufmann notes that no philosopher in all of history has reached as large an audience in his lifetime as has Sartre, and he has also reached a wide audience as a novelist, playwright, and journalist (Kaufmann "Preface"). Sartre's existentialism was tremendously successful from its first appearance in contemporary thought, and in part Sartre benefited by finding a receptive audience in the days of World War II when most traditional values were treated with scorn (Lafarge 1). Sartre indeed was instrumental in bringing existentialism to such a wide audience that people with only a vague idea of his tenets understand that this is a modern philosophical approach that has infused much of modern thought and philosophical and artistic expression in the last 50 years or more.
Arland Ussher notes Sartre's position on fear, and especially on the fear of death, and finds fault with in part, writing,
Sartre, however, just for fear we should take him seriously, at once proceeds to cheapen and sensationalize his idea. Suppose, he says, I am doing something held to be discreditable -- say listening at a key-hole. Suddenly I become aware of an eye behind me, fixing me -- perhaps an accusing voice and outstretched finger. For the first time I experience, along with terror, shame; and Sartre will have it that all guilt-feelings originated in this way -- a very obvious cart-before-horse argument. In his massive analysis of Genet, the pederast and thief of genius (where the vision of the accusing finger is again called up), we find something like the ancient theory that it is the Law which brings Sin into the world, and not the other way; and it is suggested that the thief (who was not one until he was detected) does well to take up the challenge, and show that one Absolute of conduct is as good -- or bad -- as another. (Ussher 111) the primary critique of Sartre was Marxist, given that Sartre's philosophy of freedom was directly opposed to the Marxist doctrine of historical necessity: "He tried to make the two cohere in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) but ended up drowning in a sea of verbiage" (Holt para. 8).
Given that the human being creates and then re-creates himself, a high degree of self-awareness is necessary for the human being to function. A cardinal sin, therefore, would be self-deception, a falsehood that would shape the choices made and that would negate freedom. Sartre explored this idea in Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre saw the central feature of human existence in the capacity to choose in full awareness of one's own non-being, and therefore it has to be asked whether or not I will be true to myself in making choices:
Self-deception invariably involves an attempt to evade responsibility for myself. if, for example, I attribute undesirable thoughts and actions to the influence upon me of the subconscious or unconscious, I have made part of myself into an "other" that I then suppose to control the real me. Thus, using psychological theory to distinguish between a "good I" and a "bad me" only serves to perpetuate my evasion of responsibility...
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