The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description

Jean-Paul Charles Emard Sartre (21 June 1905 Paris – 15 April 1980 Paris) was a French philosopher, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, literary critic and political activist. He started his working life as a teacher. He studied philosophy in Germany during World War II. When Nazi Germany occupied France, Sartre joined the underground French resistance. Sartre was known and famous for being a prolific writer and for his literary works and his philosophy called Existentialism, and secondly his political affiliation with the extreme left. Sartre was a constant companion of the philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, whom her political enemies called the "Great Sartre." Although their philosophy is close, he does not like to confuse them. The two writers have influenced each other. Sartre's literary works are rich in themes and philosophical texts of unequal sizes such as Being and Nothingness (1943), the Existential Brief Humanism (1945) or the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and also literary texts in the collection of short stories such as The Wall or his novels such as Nausea (1938) and the trilogy Freedom Roads (1945). Sartre also wrote in theater such as The Flies (1943), The Closed Room (1944), The Virtuous Whore (1946), The Devil and the Good God (1951) and The Prisoners of Altona (1959) and these works were a large part of his literary output. Late in his life, in 1964, Sartre published a book dealing with the first eleven years of his life entitled The Words, in addition to a large study on Gustave Flaubert in a book entitled The Fool of the Family (1971-1972). He has also published biographies of many writers such as Tintoretto, Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, and Jean Genet. Sartre has always refused to be honored because of his devotion to himself and his ideas, and it is worth noting that he refused to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, but only accepted the title of Doctor honoris causa from the University of Jerusalem in 1976.