He explains his reason for refusing the award as follows: “I have received enough awards while creating my work. A Nobel Prize doesn't add to that, on the contrary, it brings me down. The Nobel Prize is good for amateurs seeking recognition. I am old and have enjoyed enough.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) is a philosopher who lived as an intellectual sensitive to the problems of human reality and the political and moral questions of his time and tried to reconstruct the link between his thought and his life at every moment.
His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was a naval officer. His father and mother married in 1904; One year later, Jean-Paul is born. However, Jean-Paul Sartre will never know his father, because when he was 15 months old, his father died of fever. Sartre will grow up in this house under the supervision and education of his grandfather until the age of 12.
In 1928, he took the exam for graduation at the École Normale Superieure. Sartre comes last in the exam. While waiting for the next exam, he meets Simone de Beauvoir and they prepare together. Sartre passes the exam with the first place, and Simone de Beauvoir with the second place. Beauvoir is Sartre's life partner, whom he will not part with for the rest of his life. Neither of them believes in marriage, which is a bourgeois institution, and vows not to live their lives like a bourgeois. As it is known, both will never be monogamous. Although they share lovers with each other from time to time, they do not share the same house until health problems arise. On the other hand, they never hide their relationship from each other. On the contrary, an open relationship becomes the magic word of their relationship.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology).
Sartre starts teaching after 18 months of military service in the French army. He taught with his own pedagogical approach, challenging all habits. In 1933, he will write The Transcendence of the Ego, for which he will lay the foundation of the philosophy of existentialism. Existentialism is a philosophy that is based on human freedom and says that one is free in all situations. Because man has no static essence, and no attributes attributed to him. He determines his own actions and has to take responsibility for them.
In Nausea, Sartre's most widely read diary novel, published in 1938, he expresses the pain of confronting the existence and freedom of his anti-hero Antoine Requentin. First of all, man finds himself in the face of a meaningless existence and a futile life. Because this being was not created, and since it cannot be based on any reason, it is unnecessary, redundant, and absurd. Confronting this situation creates a state of startle and disgust in people. Sartre calls this nausea. According to Sartre, if a person is alive, he has the burden of existence. The person is crushed under the weight of existence, and this crush brings nausea. Nausea begins and does not end with the individual becoming aware of his existence. Because since a person cannot get rid of responsibility throughout his life, he cannot get rid of nausea. The individual will try to escape the nausea by taking action in an effort to create himself. However, as the individual's effort to create himself increases, so will nausea. The individual will not be able to get rid of this vicious circle.
Published in 1939, The Wall contains 5 short stories. In the story of the same name, Pablo is a revolutionary who fights for the freedom of Spain against Franco's phalangists. He is caught and sentenced to death. Pablo is ready to give his life for this cause, but when the cold face of death reveals itself, even the most important case loses its importance.
Sartre is recruited into the French army as a meteorologist at the start of the Second World War. When France was invaded in 1940, he was captured by Nazi soldiers. Sartre's captivity ends after nine months, and he regains his freedom in 1941. In Sartre's work called Being and Nothingness, which was published in 1943 and left its mark on the first period of his philosophical thought, there is no other fact than the fact of existence. Sartre advocates an understanding of absolute freedom in Being and Nothingness. It says that a person is either completely free or not at all. In his famous saying, which seems paradoxical at first glance, but is extremely meaningful when we think about it in terms of its own terms, man is doomed to freedom. Because freedom is not an attribute of man, it is him.
He aims to synthesize Existentialism and Marxism in his work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, published in 1960, which has an important place in Sartre's second-period philosophy. He says that the only valid interpretation of human history is Marxism or Dialectical Materialism. At least for our time, he says, Marxism is insurmountable. Sartre's fundamental endorsement of Marxism includes his discovery of some of the shortcomings inherent in Marxism. With the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he opens a path that prompts us to consider the link between morality and politics. During this period, in one of the interviews, Sartre said, “In order to be able to talk about morality in a world dominated by exploitation and oppression, it is necessary to think and act on the establishment of a just world first.” says.
He published his biography, Words, in 1964. In Words, he conveys all his life and thoughts about his childhood. Sartre reflects all the tides of his childhood in a literary language.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 but declined the award. He explains his reason as follows: “I have received enough awards while creating my work. A Nobel Prize doesn't add to that, on the contrary, it brings me down. The Nobel Prize is good for amateurs seeking recognition. I'm old and I've had enough fun. I loved everything I did. That was the biggest reward anyway. I don't want any other reward. Because there is nothing more beautiful than the award I have received.”
Although Sartre did not refrain from supporting violence in the name of freedom, some of the courageous stances he took in the political arena include his opposition to French colonialism in Algeria and for Algeria's independence, his rejection of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, his opposition to the Vietnam War and even Bertrand. The fact that he, together with Russell and other intellectuals, established a court that tried the crimes committed by America in Vietnam, and that he was on the side of the students in the 1968 events in France…
After Sartre died on April 15, 1980, Simone de Beauvoir lives another 6 years. Today, Beauvoir and Sartre are buried side by side.