Donald D. Palmer - Sartre for Beginners

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Text Copyright: 1995 Donald D. Palmer
Illustration Copyright: 1995 Donald D. Palmer
Cover & Book Design: Terrie Dunkelberger

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A For Beginners Documentary Comic Book
Originally published by Writers and Readers, Inc.
Copyright 1997

Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-1-939994-21-9

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v3.1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

e was one of the most famous philosophers of his century, as well as an influential novelist, playwright and political activist; yet he was never satisfied with his own intellectual views.

A thorn in the side of the French government, he was so popular that, at his death, 50,000 people followed his funeral cortege through the streets of Paris.

ean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. His mothers family was from Alsace-Lorraine, the section of eastern France whose natives speak both French and German, and over whose borders France and Germany had been quarreling for years.

Jean-Pauls mother was a first cousin of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the German theologian, missionary, and musicologist.

Jean-Pauls father died when Sartre was only a year old. His mother sought solace in her little son and concentrated all her attention on him. She moved back to her parents home, where Jean-Pauls grandfather became a stern influence on him. When he was twelve years old his mother remarried. The spoiled Poulou, as she had nicknamed him, experienced her marriage as a loss and a betrayal.

mmediately afterward he decided that God did not existthough his grandfather and his stepfather definitely did exist. (Sartre spent the next 63 years rebelling against them.)

Unfortunately he was not a very good-looking kid. He was pimply, had a strabismus (a wandering eye) due to an illness when he was four years old,

he was short5 feet 3 inches tall. (Nevertheless, that made him a half-inch taller than his father had been.)

t seventeen, Jean-Paul received his baccalaureate (an elite high school diploma) and began a six-year study at the Sorbonne for his agrgation, the exam that would be a ticket to an academic career in philosophy.

Luckily, this delay in his academic career resulted in his meeting a young philosophy student named Simone de Beauvoir, who was smart, beautiful, nice to Sarter, and (important!) not taller than he.

They fell in love and developed a companionship that would last until he diedeven though they never married, preferred not to live together, had other lovers, and addressed each other with the formal vous throughout their lives. They philosophized together and deeply influenced each others work. Scholars are still sorting out who was the more original thinker. Today their ashes are buried next to each other in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Jean-Paul and Simone studied together for the agrgation. In the evenings they would go together to see cowboy films. Sartre got first place in the exam; de Beauvoir got second place.

n 1929, Sartre began eighteen months of obligatory military service. When he was discharged, he was offered a teaching job at a lyce (a type of state-run prep school for students selected to continue on to university) in Le Havre on the northwest coast of France. De Beauvoir took a teaching job at a lyce in Marseilles on the southern coast. They managed to meet each other whenever they could.

At one of these meetings in Paris, Jean-Paul and Simone were drinking beer at a bistro with their friend, Raymond Aron, who had been studying the philosophy of phenomenology in Germany, when Aron turned to Sartre, saying, You see, my little friend, if youre a phenomenologist, you can talk about this drink and thats philosophy.

artre got very excited about the idea of being able to philosophize about his glass of beer, so in September of 1933 he went to Berlin to study the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. (Well talk about this philosophy shortly.) He returned to his teaching job the next year and began incorporating his newly-discovered phenomenological insights into his own writings. (In fact, in his novel Nausea, published in 1938, there is a phenomenological analysis of a glass of beer.)