Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, literary critic and political activist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and a leading figure in existentialism.
Quote of the day: “War, when all is said and done, is a concrete idea which contains within itself its own destruction and which achieves this by an equally concrete dialectic… The essence of war will be concretely realized on the day when war becomes impossible.”
This quote is from The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre: Notebooks of a Fake War, 1939-1940, which was originally published in French, Carnets de la drôle de guerre. It appears in his philosophical reflections written during mobilization during the first months of World War II.
What did Sartre mean by this quote? How did he see the war?
Jean-Paul Sartre saw war as a profound expression of social despair and rejected the notion that it was “heroic” as a false narrative that covered up the exploitation of the poor who die for the benefit of the rich.
He understood war not only as physical violence, but as an abstract phenomenon whose true “essence” is revealed through its own contradictions.
In his view, war carries with it the possibility of its own negation: while it strives for total realization, it also points to a future in which war becomes structurally or fundamentally impossible. Only in such a future will it be possible to truly understand the full meaning of war.
Sartre refused the Nobel Prize – why?
In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for a work that was rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the search for truth”, but he turned it down, becoming the first person to voluntarily refuse the prize.
He argued that accepting official honors would make the writer “an institution” and threaten his independence; a writer should only use the written word as a weapon.
The main works of Sartre
He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met future collaborators such as Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
His major philosophical work is Being and Nothingness (1943), a dense phenomenological ontology exploring these themes. A more accessible introduction is his 1945 lecture Existentialism is Humanism.
Among his famous books are Being and Nothingness, Existentialism is Humanism, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Iron in the Soul, Dirty Hands.
He remained active in the student uprisings in France in 1968 and continued his political involvement despite failing health until his death on 15 April 1980 in Paris.
