Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French philosopher, playwright and novelist, and a leading figure of 20th-century existentialism and Marxism. Being and Nothingness (1943) is his central philosophical work; Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) is the more accessible statement of the same position — that existence precedes essence, so a person is not born with a fixed nature but has to choose and make themselves through action, "condemned to be free." He wrote fiction and drama alongside the philosophy (Nausea, No Exit, The Roads to Freedom) and turned to a Marxist reworking of his own existentialism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He declined the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. His lifelong partner was Simone de Beauvoir. Source: Wikipedia (T2, tertiary).
Sartre and Stoicism
post-modern-stoics-thecollector (TheCollector, T4) records that Sartre's reading of Stoicism changed direction over his career. Early on he found it sympathetic — a resource, despite its "abstract" conception of freedom, for living authentically. Later he rejected most of it as an ideology of disengagement, passivity and bad faith: assenting inwardly to what one cannot change, which is close to the bad-faith move he names elsewhere in his own work — pretending a fact about the world settles a question that is really a choice. His specific philosophical objection to the Stoics is that their line between what is and isn't within our control is too clean; something that looks outside our control can still call for our engagement, and Stoic detachment lets a person off that hook.
In the conversation
Sartre gives the spoke's Stoic corner its sharpest modern critic, arguing from the same existentialist ground — radical freedom and responsibility — that also drives his break with the Stoics' acceptance of necessity. He and Foucault appear together in the 1971 photo the source describes (an anti-racism protest), a link the article draws to illustrate that engagement with Stoicism could run toward political resistance as easily as away from it — the opposite reading Sartre himself later gave it.
Sartre and Camus
sartre-camus-thecollector (TheCollector, T4) traces Sartre's parallel, more famous rivalry with Camus — a friendship (from 1943) that broke in public over The Rebel (1951) and Camus's rejection of revolutionary violence, and widened further over the Algerian War, where Sartre backed the FLN's use of violence and Camus did not. The two shared existentialism's atheism and its relational view of the self even while disputing its politics: Sartre fused it with Marxism through praxis, holding that freedom is real only when action changes material conditions and that revolutionary violence is a necessary tool for liberating workers — the position Camus's absurdism, built on non-violence and the present rather than a utopian future, rejected outright. See albert-camus for the full account of the 1952 letters and the rift.
Related
stoicism · michel-foucault · gilles-deleuze · post-modern-stoics-thecollector · albert-camus · sartre-camus-thecollector