Jean-Paul Sartre: The Theatre of Situations

Abstract

Seven years Brecht’s junior, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris, into a well-established bourgeois family—his maternal grandfather, who helped to raise him, was a high school teacher of German literature and a relative of Albert Schweitzer. Living in a relatively stable liberal democratic state, which valued human rights and the rule of law, the young Sartre had the opportunity to dedicate himself to education and to the development of a personal scholarly agenda. At the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, he was drawn to the study of philosophy, especially to the phenomenological writings of Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. From 1933 to 1935, he was a research student at the Institute Francais in Berlin and at Freiburg University, where he further immersed himself in the writings of Husserl. On his return to France, he taught philosophy at a secondary school in Le Havre. While Sartre abandoned teaching after World War II for a life as an independent scholar and intellectual, he remained since his twenties a member of the French intellectual elite. From the outset, Sartre was above all a philosopher of consciousness and a theorist of subjectivity. ¹ He was drawn to both abstract metaphysical speculation and literature as vehicles of philosophical reflection. The publication of the novel Nausea in 1938, and of the short story collection The Wall in 1939, established him as an artist-philosopher of high esteem.