It146;s all existential

Sartre studied at the Ecole Normale Superieur from 1924 to 1929, and became a professor of philosophy at Le Havre in 1931. In 1934 he studied the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in Berlin, before returning to Le Havre, and then moving to the Lycee Pasteur, where he taught from 1937 to 1939. Captured in the war, he was released in 1941, and fought in the resistance.

Sartre had achieved a measure of fame as writer and philosopher before war broke out, but he really achieved renown after 1945, when his version of existentialist philosophy became an inspirational source for modern literature and politics. Being and Nothingness and the Roads to Freedom trilogy, and Saint Genet were the start of a huge outpouring of writing. But by the mid-fifties, Sartre8217;s involvement in public life had taken precedence over his writing. He protested against the Algerian war for which he was almost assassinated, the US in Vietnam, and supported the 1968 student uprising. If there was an anti-western cause, Sartre was its most visible face. Never a member of the communist party, he was a fellow traveler. To the end, he tried to reconcile communism and existentialism. He supported Mao8217;s regime Castro, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, he condemned Soviet suppression of democracy in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Sartre had a penchant not just for supporting the unpopular, but also the unsupportable. If he supported the USSR, it was because of US criticism of that country. The essence of the criticism did not matter, but the fact that it was coming from the Americans was reason enough to ignore it. He publicly supported the Badder-Meinhof group in their terrorist attacks against the Germans. For Sartre, violence was not the resort after the last resort had been exhausted, but the first.