ABSTRACT
The incalculable trauma would prompt Jean-Paul Sartre, then a young philosopher and soldier in the meteorological corps, to tell his longtime friend, the American philosophy professor John Gerassi, in the early 1970s that: the Germans ruined it all. Up until his entry into the army Jean-Paul Sartre had lived the classic life of a caf intellectual. Sartre's sense of just being another regular 'hairy' soldier is apparent in a letter to de Beauvoir when he notes spotting another 'caf intellectual' indeed another patron of the Caf de Floreamong the soldiers in his camp. Note how Sartre ties the daily life of sociability to French nationalism and the sense of 'being in the world that results'. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Sartre's focus on political engagement after the war would prevent the completion of his ethics, a project he promised at the end of Being and Nothingness.
