“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
IN HIS SARTRE biography, which recently appeared in France—the only one to date that truly merits the designation biography—the author, Francis Jeanson, calls his hero the “greatest philosopher of this century.” One must be careful with such judgments. For nearly three decades I myself shared Jeanson’s view: for me Jean-Paul Sartre was always the primus inter pares. Until this day I have not essentially revised my opinion. But in the course of the years, and especially the last five, it has become evident to me that Sartre’s greatness did not exclude his failure, indeed that it perhaps consists in this very failure.
Two facts made me clearly aware of this: for one, Sartre’s public declaration that also on the second ballot of the year in the French presidential election he would not vote for Mitterand, the candidate of the united French Left, since the entire election was a bourgeois fraud that an authentic revolutionary could only ignore; and second, there was my reading of the third volume of Sartre’s work on Flaubert, a book that shows the now seventy-year-old philosopher in full command of his penetrating intelligence and visionary power. On the one hand, then, almost childishly spiteful political airs that are positively blind to reality, and, on the other hand, unimpaired genius. Greatness and failure. But was not this man destined to fail from the very beginning? Was not this failure an integral part of his philosophical thinking? Was he not condemned to failure by his concept of “dépassement,” constant inner self-transcendence, permanent intellectual revolution against his own self? Was he not sentenced not only to freedom, as he often explained, but also to self-destruction? And it should be noted that the idea of “sentencing” already contains the unfreedom that Sartre always wanted to escape, at the price of what one commonly calls a “fulfilled and well-rounded life.” Is the existence that must antecede essence, “ex-sistere” in the true sense of the word, as an emerging and an emerging from one’s self, by definition not already self-destruction and thus failure?
With incomparable consistency, Sartre chose himself, discovered himself ever anew throughout his entire life. Perhaps this is demonstrated most strikingly in his autobiographical book The Words, in which he conjured up his childhood and mercilessly liquidated it at the same time. Where others dreamily search with their soul for the wonderland of childhood, Sartre viewed this land with the keen, rational eyes of a man without illusions. This permanent revolt lasted until the moment in which, for the sake of an entirely new political-moral rigorism, Sartre so to speak nihilated the alleged “political realism” that marked his activities from about 1953 to 1968 and found its expression in his more or less friendly attitude toward France’s Communist Party.
Sartre became well known after the liberation of France in the year 1944–45. Although his great narrative Nausea had already appeared before the war and he had succeeded in having his drama The Flies performed during the war, it was only after the darkness of the German occupation had been lifted that he became the person he was to remain for many years. As though it were yesterday, I still see him before me as he was when I attended one of his lectures in Brussels in 1945: In those days the very small man appeared strong, even burly; reading from his book What is Literature? he made an overwhelming impression on all of us. And what he said—well, it was exactly what the hour demanded. And this brings me to the striking phenomenon of Sartre’s fascination, of his astonishing success, which even had a popular dimension, and finally to the Sartre vogue. What was behind all that?
One can provide an answer and comprehend it only if one tries to picture the historical situation in the Western European countries that were occupied during the war and liberated in 1945. Fascism, so it seemed and so people wished to believe, was defeated. The old world, the one that had given birth to the economic crisis and fascism, was destroyed. Not only in Germany but also in the neighboring countries to the west, people thoroughly felt themselves to be children of “hour zero.” A new day, a new start, a new order seemed to be called for. With an enthusiasm that was accompanied by the background music of rediscovered American jazz, poor but conscious of their triumph, people believed that the millennium was dawning. They made a clean slate of the past. Only the future mattered anymore. The middle class, which in dread of the Bolsheviks had gambled politically on Pétain and intellectually on the most wretched traditionalism, had become ridiculous in the consciousness of the nation. Even de Gaulle, on returning from exile, asked this middle class on the occasion of a meeting with big businessmen: “Where were you, gentlemen, while we were fighting?”
“De la Résistance à la Révolution” was not only the motto of the daily paper Combat, which had been edited by Camus during the underground period and was now appearing openly; it was the motto of the nation. Or so it seemed. For already the forces of yesterday were assembling. They pretended modesty, but they were aspiring tenaciously after their renascence. However, they kept out of sight, and it was the men and women of the start into the future who lifted their voices. The epoch was ripe for a new teaching. And what could accord better with the spirit of those days than Sartre’s message of existence, of being sentenced to freedom, of anguish and its overcoming through man’s active self-design—a message that was written and proclaimed with great suggestive power? He pointed this philosophy in two directions, above all toward the future, which for Sartre was always the true human dimension and has remained so until today. To this extent, his philosophy was in keeping with the dawn that people believed was in sight. But it also pointed to the past, although not that of the Third Republic. Rather it philosophically justified the Résistance post eventum. For it was in resistance that man had constantly been faced with choice and the risk of freedom—in this case a deadly one—that is inherent in it.
Only in the light of this duality—the pointing into the future and clarifying the situation of the immediate past—can the unprecedented success of Sartre’s philosophy be understood. But one must ask oneself whether the politically aware French of this time were all philosophers. Were they able to read Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s exceedingly difficult major work, which had already appeared during the war and demanded considerably specialized background knowledge and utmost concentration? Naturally not. Nor had they read it. The overwhelming majority of Sartre followers know his philosophy only from popularizing magazine articles, or at best from the lecture “Existentialism,” which appeared in pamphlet form. Not to speak of the countless wildly dressed young people whom the burghers called “les éxistentialistes” and who populated the bars and cellar spots of Saint-Germaine-des-Prés; they were hardly concerned with Sartre’s philosophy—had at most read Nausea, whose overall nihilistic tone gave them a pleasantly creepy feeling. What was regarded in Paris between the years 1945 and 1947 as existentialism was not least a phenomenon of fashion, a shortlived “craze,” as the Americans term such mass moods. But existentialism was there in any case and spread from France into the world. Its spokesman, Jean-Paul Sartre, became an object of interest not only for the intellectuals but also for the crowd that delights in gossip. Sartre himself—who led not exactly a monastic life but, above all, one of hard work that often reached furious intensity—had nothing to do with the manifestations of fashion. Who was he? Only few knew at that time. Today we are better informed. The course of his life and thought lies clearly drawn before us. We need only to follow its lines.
“Part burgher-scare, part scared burgher”: the description that Robert Neumann had once applied parodistically to Erich Kästner in Germany can to a degree certainly be applied to Sartre. Burgher-scare: that he is even today as an old man, when he becomes involved with the tiny and noisy Left at the farthest end of the radical scale. And a scared burgher, that applies too. For the aging and ailing Sartre, who is presently completing his Flaubert and is thus a scholar, has by no means been able to overcome entirely the middle-class mentality of his origins. This has always frightened him. He has suffered considerably from it and even his Flaubert, which contains hidden autobiographical elements, is a reckoning with his own middle-classness.
We know his early childhood from the book The Words, one of the very few works by Sartre that is available to us in an excellent German translation (thanks to Hans Mayer). There was his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer: larger than life, a Jupiter figure, related to the famous Albert and the later World Bank president, Pierre. He was an Alsatian of pronounced French patriotic convictions, a Germanist and German-hater, truly a figure from a novel. He cast his shadow on every member of the family: on his daughter, Anne-Marie, Sartre’s mother, who had become a widow shortly after the boy’s birth; on his wife, who was ever lost in her fantasies; on the child, whom he wished to form after his own image. The boy himself was obedient to the point of total submissiveness, precocious in an apparently quite charming manner, the pet of his early widowed mother, who already saw the man in the little fellow. When, decades later, Anne-Marie Mancy, née Schweitzer, the widowed Madame Sartre, outfitted a studio in her apartment for her already world-famous son, she said, according to Simone de Beauvoir: “I have the feeling as if this were my third marriage.” For just when the boy was standing on the threshold of puberty, the young woman, whom early photos show to be very pretty, had the chance to marry a second time. The little naval officer Sartre, whose bride she had become as a mere child and who had died in a hurry, was forgotten. A new husband appeared, and for Jean-Paul, the little “poulou,” as he was called, a stepfather.
Sartre remained strangely discreet about the period he spent in La Rochelle, where Monsieur Mancy held a high position with the port authority and thus was one of those notables whom Sartre later referred to as “salauds.” Simone de Beauvoir, too, has told us nothing about this epoch. Even Francis Jeanson, his loyal pupil and biographer, communicates little of substance to us. Thus one has a certain right to speculate. It must have been a very difficult time for the boy, who until then had been married, as it were, to his youthful mother. Traces of this intermezzo can be found in Sartre’s Baudelaire study and no doubt also in his masterful novelistic phenomenology of fascism, The Childhood of a Leader. Beyond that, however, one is left to conjecture about this decisive period in Sartre’s life. As far as one can gather from the scant information, the engineer Mancy, a typical burgher, had no understanding for the boy’s literary inclinations, which were already evident at that time. Nor could he have been indulgent toward a stepchild and tolerated the fact that the obedient and quite conformist little fellow that Sartre had been in his grandfather’s house was turning into a little wild animal. His mother, always the wife, and this time the wife of a real husband, subordinated herself to the latter, and Poulou was made to feel it. I am firmly convinced that the origin of Sartre’s furious hate for the bourgeoisie lies in just this period, of which we know so little. “The end is the truth of the beginning,” he once wrote. And if we regard his late political behavior, which strayed more and more into eccentricity, as the end, then it is the truth of his beginning in La Rochelle.
Soon the tension dissolved, at least outwardly. Sartre first went to the lyceum in Paris as a resident pupil. After successful conclusion of middle school, he entered the famous Ecole Normale Supérieure. In the photos from this time we see a little gentleman with serious eyes, carefully parted hair, and a well-sitting necktie held by a tiepin. Simone de Beauvoir, who was just getting to know him at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, describes him differently in Alexander Astruc’s Sartre film. He caught her attention, she said, for he was “neglected, dirty, and, in addition to all that, constantly after the girls.” I would add that this last-mentioned characteristic is an extremely likable one. And Sartre does not disavow it even today. In this film we hear from his own mouth that he prefers the company of women to that of men. And, of course, these women ought to be pretty.
Thus, from early on Sartre was neither the stay-at-home he has been described as here and there, nor the model pupil, nor, naturally, a daydreaming loner. On the contrary, he was constantly surrounded by friends. One of them was Raymond Aron, later his most “intimate enemy,” if it may be put that way, a philosopher who subsequently converted to a resolute conservatism and yet continues to define himself in relation to Sartre. Another was the writer Paul Nizan, a Communist Party member who after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact quit the party and was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. And above all there was Simone de Beauvoir, with whom the young Sartre was already then beginning his lifelong adventure. I mean by that the sheer daredevil and, in this case, singularly successful attempt at a full partnership with the total freedom of both individuals. We must picture the life of the highly gifted philosophy student and later professor of philosophy at the lyceums of Laon and Le Havre as an extremely rich life, rich in intellectual as well as sensual matters. We can discover only one area where it was almost woefully lacking: the area of politics. Yes, practically until the start of the war, Sartre was an essentially nonpolitical person. His later political activity, which swept him into the machinery of society and drew him into contradictions and finally absurdities, is comprehensible only in the light of the young Sartre’s nonpolitical attitude—for which the mature man never forgave himself. In later periods of his life, he wanted, at a furious pace, to make up for what he had neglected as a young man, at an age when political consciousness is normally formed. His vague sympathies for the French Popular Front of 1936 did not manifest themselves decisively, or, as the later Sartre put it so often that the word already sounds quite worn today, they did not became engagement.
Most striking in this regard is the almost incomprehensible indifference of the young Sartre, who in 1934 lived for a time in Berlin as a scholar of the Institut Français. Just try to imagine: Here was a young man who had set out to discover Germany, but what he found were not the bestial deeds of fascism that already then were becoming fully evident, not the persecution of liberal politicians and Jews, not the rotten vapors of Nazi pseudo-intellect, but rather: Husserl and Heidegger. These experiences were important enough. But for Sartre, they did not exist in a political context at all. The Sartre who did not see ordinary and absolutely clear-cut fascism and that other Sartre, who today sees fascism everywhere and wants to tear the mask of bourgeois democracy from its face, complement one another. The latter is inexplicable without the knowledge of the former; the former already anticipated the latter.
So Sartre did not discover the Nazis in Berlin but instead Husserl and Heidegger. That meant practically nothing in the political field, but it had tremendous importance intellectually. For Sartre had been schooled in Cartesianism and sanctified “raison,” and had read neither Hegel nor Marx thoroughly; for him Kierkegaard was merely a name that was connected to obscure reference points of a purely philosophical-historical character. And now he encountered something that was completely new to him: Husserl’s transcendental subject and Heidegger’s concept of existence. During this time, Sartre developed the trains of thought that he set down in his first major work, Being and Nothingness which appeared in France in 1943. But here I would like to jump ahead in time. How can one compress into a few sentences what was both essential and essentially new in this voluminous and extremely difficult book? The undertaking—or, better, venture—is more than bold; but I cannot back off from it.
What Sartre is aiming at in Being and Nothingness and what he really succeeded in achieving—to the extent that one can speak at all of attainments and truths in the humanities—is the ontological substantiation of the subject in its struggle with the world of objects and with the others. The subject as the “for-itself” aspires to become the “in-itself,” that is, to become object. Man must resist this aspiration or temptation if he is to be himself. As “he-himself,” he may never be essence, however; rather he must always be existence, trusting that he is able to “make,” to form himself and, by means of his inborn chance for freedom, to “nihilate” his essence as soon as it threatens to petrify into being, “être.” And those things are “nihilated” by the free subject that cause the nightmare of being that is so grippingly described in the narrative Nausea. Here an ontologist was at work who was still indebted to subjective idealism, and the Marxists were not completely wrong when they later reproached the early Sartre for his philosophical idealism. For the loathing of being is nothing but the aversion to all that is thing, to the nature that is the object of scientific investigation. Toward it man affirms his subjectivity, which is his sole personal possession and which he must nonetheless destroy in permanent revolt.
However, this subject, which sovereignly experiences itself, is constantly threatened by the Other, the fellow man and his look. Sartre’s pronouncement in No Exit has been quoted all too often and mostly in false context: “Hell—that is the others”—as though in his subjectivism the philosopher were also a solipsist. He is not one, as we shall see. But his phenomenology discovered a truth of living being that no one can escape because everyone has experienced it. The Other thwarts my design through his subjectivity. His freedom opposes mine. His look turns my absolute subject into object: I can be seen, as though I were a thing among things. The mere fact that the consciousness of the Other exists as his subjectivity, that I have no access to it, that it must forever be radically alien to me, plunges me from my for-itself into the inertia of the in-itself. Under the look of the Other I am made from an existence into an object, into being, into essence. Sartre calls the process of the thwarting of the subjectively active design “la chute originelle,” the “ur-plunge” or “ur-fall.”
This splendid phenomenology is still valid today, since it can be confirmed through experience at any time; but it ignores society. The Sartre who wrote Being and Nothingness knew nothing about social conditionalities. Only much later, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, did he attempt to complete his phenomenology by means of social criticism. Colette Andry, one of the best Sartre scholars, was therefore correct in writing that while Being and Nothingness does precede Critique of Dialectical Reason chronologically, from a logical point of view the latter must be placed before the early work. For the subject will be able to live and unfold its subjectivity only under conditions of a free, nonalienating society.
It is a biographical fact that Sartre experienced society first as a soldier and then as a prisoner of war. The third volume of the novel cycle The Roads to Freedom, which has unfortunately remained incomplete, tells us how the “demi-hero” of the work, Mathieu Delarue, in the midst of his comrades, who are being transported in a cattle car from defeated France to Germany, suddenly experiences himself as an integral part of a community. From the time of his war imprisonment, from which, by the way, he was already released in 1941, Sartre’s existence has been a social existence and, no matter how rigorously he would deny it if someone said it to him, also a national existence.
Today one can hardly picture the dreariness of the German-occupied Paris to which Sartre returned in order to resume a position as lyceum teacher. Collaborators, morally inferior types—some of whom may also have been gifted writers, such as Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle, and Céline—dominated the scene, along with black marketeers. The ruling class was wallowing in a resignation that was both masochistic and, since it was finally freed of the nightmare of communism, not particularly burdensome. It was also lightened by the knowledge that they, the ruling class, would always have enough to eat. The misera plebs didn’t count any longer, and the occupiers had put an end to the tricks of the corruptive Jews. For a man like Sartre and his companion, Simone de Beauvoir, the call to resistance was irrefusable.
And with this we rudely touch the great man’s Achilles’ heel. Naturally, he was ready to resist. But basically it all remained latent. The founding of an illegal group, “Freedom and Socialism,” was an abortive undertaking that became little more than an intellectual debating club. Sartre didn’t find the right connections. A visit to André Malraux came to nothing because the famous author maintained a politely reserved distance. No doubt, the former fighter pilot in the Spanish Republican air force and later “Colonel Berger” of the Maquis didn’t put much stock in the military abilities of his undersized intellectual caller. During the occupation Sartre had a few certainly not unhazardous contacts, especially toward the end of the war when he belonged to the illegal national writers committee. But he was no partisan, no saboteur, not even a regularly active distributor of revolutionary fliers. Here, too, there are obvious links to the present-day Sartre. What he neglected back then, he wished to realize later. Revolutionary counterforce, which he had no chance dramatically to practice in the decisive years, later became his philosophy of violence. It is detectable today in his revolutionary stand, which does not shirk from excess and is leading him into the proximity of Maoist grouplets that real-politically don’t stand a chance.
I wish neither to criticize nor to belittle the most estimable intellectual radicalism with which he is destroying his own prestige for the sake of the cause that he deems to be good and necessary. I am attempting to explain him psychologically, and I believe that my explication is not far off the mark. To recapitulate: We are dealing with a man who awakened to political consciousness rather late. Before the war his aversion to the bourgeoisie had manifested itself only in his provocation of the outward form of bourgeois life. Late political awakening and hatred for the bourgeoisie that finally discovered its ideological superstructure and its analytical justification, in the end produced the Sartre we know today: a writer who, in accordance with his philosophy, not only ceaselessly transcends himself and his social station, but beyond that passionately demolishes them pure and simple. Therein lies his greatness. Therein lies his failure. For politics is and remains the art of the possible; and that “extension of the field of possibilities” that Sartre so urgently demanded during the fateful French May of 1968 is limited by reality. Today, incidentally, he says of himself that he is no longer a realist. Had he ever been one? At least he attempted to be one. And with this we return to his political development.
As we have seen, Jean-Paul Sartre was the man of a resistance that did not fully attain to manifestation; later he became the philosophical defender of the Résistance. His play The Flies is part of what he understood to be his Résistance activity. It is perhaps his most noteworthy play and was performed in Paris during the occupation. To be sure, this performance had a somewhat ambiguous character. Certainly: Orestes, who appears on the scene as a self-willed avenger and murders Aegisthus, can be seen as a resistance fighter; one can interpret his deed as an act of resistance and a summons. Nonetheless, we cannot entirely ignore Malraux’s later reproach, when he was already de Gaulle’s minister, that during the occupation and without challenging the Germans directly, Sartre permitted a play to be performed at all. Would not total abstinence have been more appropriate at that time? I don’t know and cannot presume a judgment. There are good arguments for both stands: for the one that consisted in shunning the entire cultural enterprise, which was ultimately dependent on the occupiers; and for the other, which maintained that one had to utilize every opportunity for public activity in order to serve the cause. This much is certain: When France was liberated and the revolution that people were longing for as the natural continuation of the Résistance appeared to be the order of the day, Sartre was not entirely in agreement with his past.
He was at the height of his fame when his quarrel with the communists began; it had many turning points and lasted for years. At first, in the days, months, and years of the period between 1944 and 1947, the fronts were clearly drawn. Above all, it was the communists who drew them. They saw a danger in Sartre and his success. The party ideologues polemicized against him as a “petty-bourgeois, idealistic” divider of the proletariat. At a congress of intellectuals in Wroclaw, arranged by the communists, the Soviet author Fedayev called Sartre a “writing hyena.” For his part, our philosopher had seen through the dogmatism and Stalinist barbarity. He, the existentialist and proclaimer of subjective freedom, could not accept what he termed still long afterward in Critique of Dialectical Reason the “inhuman anthropology” of Soviet-oriented communism. The communists let fly at him, and he was not one to take their blows lying down. He polemicized against the Stalinists, and not only in the monthly Les Temps Modernes, which he created and which is still under his patronage. As late as 1948 he wrote the play Dirty Hands, which is most critical of communism. And he went even a step further. In 1948, together with a number of unaffiliated leftists, among them especially David Rousset, the author of one of the few concentration-camp books that does justice to its appalling subject, he founded the RDR (“Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionaire”), which intended to be an assembly of all leftist-revolutionary forces, free of Stalinist dogmatism. The undertaking had to fail, not only because the few intellectuals who had designed it found no contact with the people, but above all because at this time the Cold War broke out in all its fury and clearly allowed only the alternative of siding with the USA as the leading power of a world that called itself the “free” world, or to do battle for communism in domestic and foreign politics in the shadow of the Soviet Union. Sartre chose his stand at the side of the CPF—but that only became clear in the early fifties.
In the meantime, he had read Marx thoroughly and was intellectually equipped. Not that he would have become an outright Marxist like the representatives of the DIAMAT; he did not give up his existentialism, or let us perhaps better say: the subject. We can term the stand that he was to assume thenceforth for a long time, and that he has basically maintained, existential Marxism. What also did not come into question for him was membership in the party. He always valued too highly his independence, his freedom from all institutionalism, if you wish, his consciously chosen position as an outsider that later caused him to refuse even the Nobel Prize. His deliberations, which he had set down theoretically in the essay “The Communists and Peace” (1953), were approximately these: Democratic-revolutionary movements with no backing among the workers are hopeless and ahistorical. Whether one likes it or not, the Communist Party of France is the representative of the proletariat, which is in turn the rising class, with a future in history. To make enemies of the communists would have meant for him at that time foregoing the realization of his engagement, and he wanted by all means to revise his youth as a “nonpolitical man” and to achieve effect with his writing.
Today he calls the time of his marching-in-step with the communists his “realism,” from which he wishes to disassociate himself for the sake of a more decisive, morally rigorous position that he sees best embodied in the young French Mao followers—although he is not really a Maoist himself. The communists, in their realism or their Realpolitik—and in French one uses the German word “la Realpolitik” when one means opportunism—became in his eyes a reformist party, part of the system that was to be overcome, an “opposition respecteuse,” as he likes to call it, in allusion to his play The Respectable Prostitute.
One must not imagine Sartre’s association with the communists as a cozy family idyl. On the contrary, it was a quite agitated household in which he was living, constantly stirring with quarrel and vexation. There was no lack of crises. His numerous journeys to the Soviet Union were not pleasure trips. On one of them, Khrushchev, influenced by the then French CP secretary, Maurice Thorez, treated Sartre with a coldness that exceeded all reasonable limits. Sartre never believed blindly. Quite the opposite, with open eyes and without illusions he wanted to experience the reality of communism and still not revoke his treaty of friendship with it. His motto was: “Do not allow yourself to be cut off from the communists under the influence of global Cold War trends inspired by America.” He recalled all too well the collapse of the “Rassemblement Démocratique Révolution-aire,” which his coworker in the movement, David Rousset, had wanted to bring into the American camp. Later he found his way out of the situation, which he already felt to be a dilemma at that time. But it is clear enough today that it was a way that led nowhere. For with his turn to Maoism, or to the New Left, which was playing at anarchism, Sartre rejected not only “la Realpolitik” but political reality altogether.
The first crisis between Sartre and his communist friend-foes broke out in 1956, when Soviet tanks were putting a quick end to the Hungarian uprising. It could be resolved, because at that time it was actually possible for a man of the Left to tell himself that without the Soviet intervention in Hungary, not the social democracy of a Nagy would have triumphed but rather the White terror. The total break did not occur until twelve years later. Prague, August 1968, signaled the end of an association that at bottom had always been intellectually perverse. But we still haven’t reached that point. We are concerned with the Sartre who in the fifties did not want to break with the communists, whom he saw as the legitimate spokesmen of the proletariat and therewith as the bearers of the future. But one must also consider this: If in political practice, in his battle against France’s Indo-China war, his “no” to American claims to world hegemony, his decisive “yes” to the national revolution of the Algerians, Sartre sided with the communists, he nevertheless accomplished a task in the theoretical field that was entirely fit to deal orthodox communism of the Moscow stamp a mortal blow. He was writing his second major work, Critique of Dialectical Reason, which was intended as a paraphrase on the theme of Marxism but in truth outlined a wholly new and, as I believe, trans-Marxist anthropology. The work appeared in French in 1960. Until today, apart from Raymond Aron’s extensive exposition, it has not been received in France as it deserves (not to speak of Germany, where it appeared in 1967). No doubt, it will take years before this work—along with Sartre’s Flaubert—finds its readers and then perhaps confirms what Francis Jeanson has said in his biography of his teacher: that this man was the greatest philosopher of the century.
A word about the man Sartre may perhaps be appropriate at just this point. For in 1960 he had become fifty-five years old. That is more than the “âge de raison” he described in The Roads to Freedom. Rather, it is already plain “l’âge,” in any case, the beginning of aging. I have already alluded to the adventure of togetherness-in-freedom that he had begun as a young man with Simone de Beauvoir and that he is still living in an exemplary manner today. It is not necessary to discuss his affairs and hers, which never endangered the accord of two free spirits. That would be grossly indiscreet and moreover would add no new facets to our picture of Sartre.
The matter is different with the worker Sartre, whose image is obscured by fame and whose voice is drowned out by the fuss over his political acts. For here we have the rare example of a man who is possessed by work and at the same time, in the full sense of the innocent-sounding and yet so momentous verb, also lives. Sartre has almost never ceased working daily at his desk; except that his desk was not always a desk but frequently an improvised working space in some uncomfortable hotel room. For he worked tirelessly also on his numerous trips: to North Africa, Latin America, China, Central Europe, to the Soviet Union and its vassal states, and again and again to Italy—where until recently he spent his summers in Rome. On these trips he has always engaged in public events, in lectures and interviews, and in discussions that mostly lasted until late into the night. His way of life was and remained tremendously strenuous, the more so as there was always an inordinate amount of smoking and heavy drinking on these occasions. If he was exhausted, he swallowed up to twenty pep pills a day. Moreover—but this is a subject that requires a separate study—he had to struggle for years with the neuroses about which he wrote, as concealed autobiography, in his work on Flaubert and already earlier in Saint Genet.
In such circumstances of overexertion and a physical condition that was growing ever more precarious, Sartre wrote his Critique of Dialectical Reason, which unfortunately can be discussed here only briefly (as was also true of Being and Nothingness) . The book is concerned with a new foundation for Marxism, a new anthropology to be integrated into Marxism. If I were compelled to distill the essence of the work into a single sentence, I would say that in it Sartre reintroduced the subject into Marxism, or better: introduced it for the first time. To be sure, however, the individual here is no longer the same one who creates a self-design free of societal conditions. For Sartre this individual had been a bourgeois mystification. The burgher—in this instance, the burgher Sartre—had mistaken his particular middle-classness as universal. In Critique of Dialectical Reason the subject, which is socially atomized or serialized, as Sartre puts it, now realizes itself in the revolutionary group. It was a revolutionary group that captured the Bastille, and in it the individual no longer recognized the enemy in the Other but rather in himself.
In the group the subject no longer suffocates but, on the contrary, finally attains its potential. In the revolutionary act of the group the person’s freedom is rescued from seriality, which is a new definition of alienation. In opposition to what Sartre calls the “inhuman anthropology” of Stalinism, an anthropology is drawn here in which the subject discovers itself and by the same act creates itself.
Published in 1960, Critique of Dialectical Reason was less noticed than all of Sartre’s earlier works, partly because of its great difficulties, partly because at that time structuralism was celebrating its triumphs as philosophy and intellectual vogue. But then a historic event occurred that lent this book an unforeseen relevance: the May-June revolt of 1968, which missed becoming a revolution by a hair and in which the “groupe en fusion,” seen by Sartre with visionary power, had manifested itself in revolutionary violence. The year 1968 was the great turning point for Jean-Paul Sartre. For it was not only the events in France that determined it. In August of that year the USSR, with its “tank communism,” had overrun Czechoslovakia.
The break with communism that followed this event was both a negative and a positive occurrence in the life of the philosopher Sartre. It was positive inasmuch as he recognized at this time that the Soviet Union and the Western communist parties influenced by it had renounced the proletarian revolution and were simply practicing classical power politics; that is, a realism was asserting itself that looked very much like despairing opportunistic Realpolitik. It was negative in the sense that Sartre henceforth remained emotionally bound to the events of May and their undeniably grandiose atmosphere of revolutionary awakening, whose nature could almost be regarded as esthetic. But he not only disavowed communist Realpolitik, but—while in the process of writing his Flaubert, a highly elite book that is beyond the grasp of any worker—he allied himself ever closer with the extreme Left of Maoist persuasion, a Left that was situated in a political vacuum. He now surrounds himself with young people who address him familiarly with “tu,” while he disconcertingly sticks to the formal “vous” in the company of old friends and even his mate, Simone de Beauvoir. He lends his voice and his prestige, or what has remained of it, to a few agitated young people who have no support in France, least of all among the workers. The antibourgeois disposition that he had dragged along from his early youth effected a grand accomplishment. I mean the philosophically momentous Critique of Dialectical Reason. But in the last few years, he has developed a senile obstinacy whose armor is impenetrable. And for all those who for a quarter-century saw in Sartre their teacher, it is a deeply disturbing and sad spectacle the way this man clings to notions of absolute revolution that can no longer be socially legitimized. He, whose most tremendous accomplishment was self-transcendence, thinking against himself, was unfaithful to himself for years as editor, until recently, of a wretched little paper that called itself Liberation and was consciously written in a miserable style; for everyone knows that refined language is one of the bourgeoisie’s means of repression.
And yet the old Sartre is still with us. I am speaking of the author who, with the energy left him, is completing his Flaubert, a titanic project that attempts to join theoretically phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism; a work in which the neurosis that induced Flaubert’s attacks of pseudo-epilepsy is related by the author to his own self and experienced by him, and at the same time is interpreted by the Marxist as the socially conditioned spiritual illness of the nineteenth-century bourgeois writer. This gigantic, autobiographi-cally informed philosophical work of literary art is Sartre’s greatest—of this I have no doubt.
The tragedy is only that Sartre is writing this book with a bad conscience. In interviews with French Maoists that have just appeared in book form, he said it himself: As the author of Flaubert he is the “classical intellectual” of bourgeois provenance who stands in contradiction to what he actually wished to be, the “new intellectual,” who merges wholly with the people. The failure of Sartre’s greatness does not lie in the fact that he has squandered his prestige as the intellectual representative of the nation; he wanted to relinquish it, he always scorned it, as he did the Academie Française, as he did the Nobel Prize. Sartre’s shipwreck—and I venture this metaphor—is his alienation from reality, which has been growing ever more clear since 1968; it is his false consciousness in the true sense of the word.
Just as I was completing this essay I received word that Jean-Paul Sartre has petitioned the German judicial authorities for permission to discuss problems of revolution with Andreas Baader, the imprisoned member of the Baader-Meinhof group. The normal intellectual wonders, not without consternation, what in the world Sartre hopes to learn from Baader. How revolutions are not made, cannot be made in a country whose democracy is still functioning after all? Here, too, false consciousness. But at the same time, impressive consistency. Tout compte fait: greatness and failure.
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“Sartre: Grösse und Scheitern,” Merkur XXVIII (December 1974), 1123-37.
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