Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism is humanism. Being and Nothing
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was born in Paris to a naval officer, Jean-Baptiste Sartre (who died when his son was only two years old), and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. The future writer and philosopher grew up in the family of his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer (the famous humanist thinker Albert Schweitzer was his nephew), an academic teacher and author of textbooks in the spirit of Voltairean freethinking and hatred of any tyranny. His grandfather’s huge library nourished his grandson’s young mind and predisposed him to a variety of interests. The family lived in “bourgeois prosperity,” and the child was protected from all sorts of life’s hardships, being a “good boy,” confident in the well-being of the entire world, which he comprehended through books: “I began my life, as, in all likelihood, I will end it — among books” (4: 381). Since he did not believe in God, he found in the book “his religion” and “his temple” (4: 390, 479). This childish godlessness (“Childhood decides everything,” Sartre believed) resulted in the conscious atheism of the future philosopher, and the “Leibnizian optimism” of a happy child — when confronted with a harsh and painful reality — transformed into a sharp rejection of it, rebellion and cynicism.