I have been reading about Jean-Paul Sartre lately, and he is turning out to be quite an iconic character for me. Sartre was a French philosopher, writer & a political activist.

As I am not writing an academic paper, I feel free to refer to Wikipedia for some initial insight. (By the way, sometimes I can spend a full day on Wikipedia, jumping from person to person, to event and so on. I love those days!) Anyways,

Sartre’s philosophy lent itself to his being a public intellectual. He envisaged culture as a very fluid concept; neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished; instead, in true existential fashion, “culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention”. This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as a pragmatist, willing to move and shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause other than the belief in human freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist’s objectivity.

It is this over-arching theme of freedom that means his work “subverts the bases for distinctions among the disciplines”. Therefore, he was able to hold knowledge across a vast array of subjects: “the international world order, the political and economic organization of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks that regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that control and disseminate information. Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about what he saw as inequalities and injustices in the world”.

Most valuable thing I learned from this read is the term “public intellectual”. I think I just found a calling.