Lagura: For him, ‘Hell is Other People’

Fr. Flor Lagura SVD

Jean-Paul Sartre

(1905 – 1980)

HAVING lost his father early in his life, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, the Paris born Jean-Paul Sartre depended to a great extent on his mother, Anne Marie Schweitzer, first cousin to Albert Schweitzer, the famed theologian, Nobel Prize winner and medical missionary to Africa.

Gifted with a fine mind the young lad finished his studies at the Ecole Normale Superieure and University of Paris. Subsequently he turned to writing books, plays and novels, such as Being and Nothingness, The Words, Truth and Existence where he presented his ideas mainly on existentialism -- a combination of Marxism, Camus’ Absurdism, and Husserl’s phenomenology.

In his plays, notably “The Flies” and “No exit” he manifested his disdain for people -- the Church included -- who, he considered obstacles to man’s yearning for absolute freedom, saying (in)famously “Hell is other people.” Sartre also coined the term “bad faith.” All through most of his life Sartre combated the Church by declaring himself an atheist and a communist.

The Catholic Church in France responded its strong disagreement affirming the doctrine of “communion of saints” saying, “Heaven is other people!”

Jean-Paul Sartre’s personal life was no heaven either. Although he had two children, he was never married to either romantic partners, Simone de Beauvoir -- also a philosopher -- and later on to Simone’s own student -- Olga Kosakiewicz.

Sadly, towards the end of his life, a virus infection left him blind. He also suffered from lung problems.

At this point in life, he quoted Plato, saying “the one aim in doing philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.” Phaedo 64a.

His tone changed when he no longer maintained that absolute freedom consists in opposing the Other, for “to die is to exist only through the Other...” And shortly before death he admitted:

“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”

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