“Sartre in 90 Minutes” by Paul Strathern is a introduction to philosophy and thought of French philosopher, novelist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre.
The main content ‘Sartre’s Life and Works’ describes Sartre’s biography with his thought and philosophy. The biographical description describes from his complex private background, glorious school life, the experience of the World War Ⅰ, the unusual relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, to a great success and vogue of his existentialism after ruin of Europe and the world by the World War Ⅱ, to his sympathy with and commitment to communism and Marxism, and his political actions. (Although he couldn’t desert a particular bourgeois life style and an intellectualism by elitism.)
Sartre’s life was large quantities of drinking, smoking, caffeine, romances and writing. Strathern mentions Sartre’s brutal and excessive life style as the “chemical life”. He led a decadent life from his teenage. On the other hand he had an excellent philosophical insight and genius. In his writings, he emphasized human reason, right and freedom, but his private life was absurd and terrible. In a sense he was a very selfish “humane” person…
Strathern explains Sartre’s philosophy by important works “Being and Nothingness”, “Nausea” and “Existentialism and Humanism”, but commentaries to Sartre’s complicated philosophy in this book is short and brief. Thus Strathern make a excellent quotation below. ‘Another key concept of Sartre’s existentialism is that existence precedes essence. “This means that a human being first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and only defines himself afterwards,” according to Sartre. “There is no such thing as human nature, because there is no all-seeing God to have a conception of it… A human being is nothing else but what he makes of himself; he exists only as much as he realizes himself. He is thus nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”’
Strathern allots much of philosophical commentaries for explanations of Sartre’s philosophical background such as the concept of “contingent” by Immanuel Kant, phenomenology by Edmund Husserl, existentialism by Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger.
This book is only a short interesting biography of Sartre. You can read this as short interesting biography and introduction of Sartre.
Sartre in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)
Paul Strathern
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1 June 1998
93 pages $9.95
ISBN: 978-1-56663-192-1
Contents:
Introduction
Sartre’s Life and Works
From Sartre’s Writings
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Chronology of Sartre’s Life
Recommended Reading
Index