What was the philosophy of jean paul sartre?

Sartre's philosophy is concerned entirely with the nature of human life, and the structures of consciousness. As a result it gains expression in his novels and plays as well as in more orthodox academic treatises. Its immediate ancestor is the phenomenological tradition of his teachers, and Sartre can most simply be seen as concerned to rebut the charge of idealism as it is laid at the door of phenomenology. The agent is not a spectator of the world, but, like everything in the world, constituted by acts of intentionality and consciousness. The self thus constituted is historically situated, but as an agent whose own mode of locating itself in the world makes for responsibility and emotion. Responsibility is, however, a burden that we frequently cannot bear, and bad faith arises when we deny our own authorship of our actions, seeing them instead as forced responses to situations not of our own making. Sartre thus locates the essential nature of human existence in the capacity for choice, although choice, being equally incompatible with determinism and with the existence of a Kantian moral law, implies a synthesis of consciousness (being for-itself) and the objective (being in-itself) that is forever unstable. The unstable and constantly disintegrating nature of free will generates anguish. Sartre's 鈥榦ntological鈥?works, including L鈥櫭妕re et le n茅ant, attempt to work out the implications of his views for the nature of consciousness and judgement. For Sartre our capacity to make negative judgements is one of the fundamental puzzles of consciousness. Like Heidegger he took the 鈥榦ntological鈥?approach of relating this to the nature of non-being, a move that decisively differentiates him from the Anglo-American tradition of modern logic (see being, nothing, quantifier, variable). Sartre's work on other minds illustrates by contrast a strength of the psychological approach, as he explores in detail such experiences as being in the gaze of another person, and connects them with the choices that then result. Sartre's work is notoriously difficult, but emotionally there is no question that he spoke powerfully to the sombre post-war years, when questions of responsibility and its denial held centre-stage in the political life of France.





http://www.answers.com/topic/jean-paul-s鈥?/a>|||Existentialism. Read the play No Exit.|||Try the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.





He was an existentialist, one of the first along with Soren Kierkegaard (sp). Believed that people have the freedom to make their own choices, did not believe in fate, viewed that as an excuse.