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French existentialist philosopher, novelist and playwright. He was educated in Paris and Berlin, taught for a period and after war service embarked on a career as a writer, atheist philosopher and Marxist political activist. His atheism was characterized by an awareness of the importance of ‘God’ to much of humanity, and although uninterested in traditional arguments for the existence of God, much of his work engages with the Christian concept of God, which he learned and rejected in his youth. Existentialism and Humanism (1946, trans. 1948) contains echoes of Husserl and the existential theologian Martin Heidegger. Being and Nothingness (1943, trans. 1956), presents his philosophy of phenomenological ontology, in which he distinguishes between two modes of being: ‘In-Itself and ‘For-Itself. The fusion of the two modes represents ‘God’ – but such a fusion is nonexistent and impossible: humanity itself is understood as the For-Itself (the condition of consciousness) seeking fulfilment in the In-Itself, a complete state of pure being described by Sartre as ‘never anything but what it is’. Man's ‘passion’ for this fulfilment is, however, doomed from the outset, and the refusal to accept the authentic ‘absurd’ is an expression of ‘bad faith’ which reduces human freedom. These terms find their richest popular expression in his novels and plays, notably Nausea (1938, trans. 1949), ... log in or subscribe to read full text