ABSTRACT
The name of Jean-Paul Sartre is usually closely linked with ‘existentialist’, although the epithet was first applied by Gabriel Marcel and seized upon by French journalists as a convenient label. Sartre thought of himself as a phenomenologist, but had resigned himself to using the word by 1946. Walter Kaufmann, in his anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, admits that it is nothing more than a label ‘for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy’ and that the three basic writers–Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre–are not in agreement on essentials. Iris Murdoch, in her invaluable study of Sartre, points out that to understand Sartre is to understand something about the since he belongs to the three important movements of our time: the phenomenological, the existential, and the Marxist. The Second World War helped Sartre to crystallize a more positive response just after absurdity had been defined.
