Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, 59, felt alone. According to a Gallup poll, 67% of the U.S. population supports the air strikes on North Viet Nam. Sartre is 100% against them. "When contradictory opinions have hardened, dialogue is no longer possible," he announced in Paris, canceling a three-week U.S. tour during which he was scheduled to lecture on "Ethics and History" at Cornell and at Manhattan's Y.M.H.A. Professor Jean-Jacques Demorest, Sartre's stood-up host at Cornell, was regretful but philosophical. "Sartre," said he, "is drawing more and more into abstract idealism. What he wants...
Ever since they met as students at the Sorbonne, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, 59, and Novelist Simone de Beauvoir, 57, have been constant companions, though they deliberately refrained from becoming enmeshed in the bourgeois snare of matrimony. But now a little one is on the way-sort of. Sartre is adopting a daughter-Algerian-born Arlette Elkaim, 28, a movie critic on his magazine, Les Temps Modernes. Simone remains his good amie, but unless he leaves a will to the contrary, Arlette will be his legal heir. And while he spurned $53,000 worth of 1964 Nobel Prize money...
Like many another existentialist-type thinker, Fowles combines a cosmic pessimism with a reformer's drive to improve the world. Less interesting and less moving on such topics as cybernetics and birth control, he is nonetheless eminently sensible, and his strictures aimed against all dogmatic camps are shrewd: "A Christian says, 'If all were good, all would be happy.' A socialist says, 'If all were happy, all would be good.' A mystic says, 'If all were like me, happiness and goodness would not matter.' A humanist says, 'Happiness and goodness need more...
...seems rather outdated today. It is essentially a conjuring trick-a preachment of faith without belief, of free will to no purpose. "Atheism is a cruel and long-range affair," Sartre has said. Always faithful in this affair, never publicly flirting with hope or grace (as did his fellow existentialist and fellow Nobel winner Albert Camus), Sartre takes atheism to its grim limits. Man as he sees him is alone in an absurd and meaningless universe...
Jean-Paul Sartre is afraid of compromising himself. In the light of fame it is becoming difficult for him to play the part of the troubled existentialist--the outcast the poor little French orphan with no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing to say. Ever since the first publication of La Nausee (1938) Sartre has subjected himself to a rigorous and naked self-examination and society to a penetrating cross-examination. He values nothing but life itself which at best seems to be nothing more than the meaningless least common denominator of the world around him. What meaning...