J E A N -P A U L S A R T R E

Modern Literature Monographs

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Liselotte Richter

Translated by Fred D. Wieck

F red erick Ungar P u blishin g Co.

N ew York
Published by special arrangement with Colloquium Verlag,
Berlin, publishers of the original German

Copyright © 1970 by Frederick U ngar Publishing Co., Inc.

Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Number 68-31456
ISBN 0-8044-2732-1 (Cloth)
ISBN 0 -8 0 4 4 -6 7 2 8 -5 (Paper)
 W 1567733

Contents

1 A lien ation and, Ju stification :

R oots o f Creativity 1

2 T h e P rin cipal T h em es o f Sartre's T h ou g h t 23

3 R esistan ce: F reed om and R espon sibility 55

4 D ialogu e w ith F rien d and F o e 77

5 L iq u id a tio n o f the Past—

N ot a F aith fo r the F u tu re 105

C hronology 111

N otes 115
v
All dates given in the text, whether for
French originals or their English titles,
refer to the first French publication.
 7
Alienation
and Justification:
Roots o f Creativity
TJLt is characteristic of every philosophy of exist­
ence that in order to understand it we must pay close
attention to the specific circumstances in which its
author’s existence is inextricably involved. T his is
especially true of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre,
the author of existentialism in the strict sense of the
word. Let us look, then, at Sartre’s face, in a state
of intense mental concentration: the somewhat un­
happy and tormented expression, the furrowed fore­
head, the stubborn set of his mouth, his absent-
minded right eye straying outward behind its thick
lens. There is about it all an aura of exhaustion, of
homelessness and alienation—the alienation of a lost
or abandoned child who finds himself exposed to
nature and history and there left at the mercy of a
chaos to which he must now, all alone, give meaning
through superhuman work and concentration.
Alone and single-handedly he must create an abso­
lutely original design, a bold, unprecedented project
of his life as a person, as an artist, and as a thinker.
As such an individual sees life, every man finds
himself forever on a dreadful proscenium of free­
dom, the freedom to which all men are condemned.
Man is forever the absolutely free dramatist staging
the drama of his own life. Sartre himself described
it:

W c have our problems—the problems of ends and means, of

the just use of power, the consequences of our actions, the
relation of the individual to the community, the individual's
action within the historical context, and hundreds of other
questions. It seems to nic that the dramatist’s task is to make

2
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 3

his choice among life’s borderline situations and to choose

that one which best expresses his concern, and to present it
to the public as the question that is posed to freedom.

T h e profound inner discord that lies behind all

this—the unhappy sense of living a life of total
abandonment, in the enervating awareness of being
forever on stage, watched by a thousand eyes and
forever compelled to make decisions—this is the all-
too-clear-eyed vision of a solitary, forlorn conscience.
In Sartre’s view, all men are disinherited outcasts,
vile cowards, and traitors. Every conscience in the
world is, at this moment in history, abandoned to its
own solitude. Every man who is concerned with his
own freedom and the authenticity of his “project of
living” is not just acting like an overly scrupulous
philosophy professor. Think of the Negroes, the
Jews, the poor, the North Africans. T h eir desperate
situation reflects the tragic conflict in the life of
every man.
Sartre spoke of all men as “bastards and trai­
tors.” Bastards, because we all lead double lives—
one life legitimate, the other illegitimate—a collec­
tive community of oppressed and humiliated be­
ings who must forever justify their own existence.
Traitors, because we never make an absolutely free
decision, but arc slaves of the human condition
which casts us into a concrete situation, because
everything we are and do is always determined by
m auvaise fo i (bad faith), which poisons every sec­
ond of our lives. Every one of us is just like the
colored peoples who are caught between two cul-
4 Jcan-Paul Sartre

tures and thus must live in perpetual alien atio n -

aliens either to their own culture or to the culture
forced on them from outside. T h e situation of the
proletarians in the class struggle is analogous.
This consciousness of alienation, the con­
sciousness of being an outcast and (as Hegel had
said long ago about the proletarians) dehumanized
is not just a histrionic pose with Sartre or an ab­
struse problem for intellectuals. This consciousness
arises from the very roots of Sartre’s own life.
Sartre was born on Ju n e 21, 1905. Before
reaching the age of two, in 1907, he lost his father,
an officer in the French navy, who was killed far
from home, in the East. His widowed mother re­
turned to her parents’ home in La Rochelle. She
did not remarry until ten years later. T o all ap­
pearances, Jean-Paul was a happy child, the darling
of his grandfather who plied him early with diffi­
cult questions. T h e child would often answer them
in such original and startling ways that the old man
would exclaim: “ Voila un type ex traord in aire!”
Future events were to reveal just how extraordi­
nary an individual he was.
But Sartre’s grandfather, though revered by the
child as an authority, could not replace his father.
Looking back on his fatherless childhood, Sartre
spoke of himself as a fau x bdtard (a false bastard).
Despite the fact that he was of legitimate birth and
fully accepted by his family, he never thought of his
existence as justified in any way. T h e behavior of
all these grown-ups who admitted him to their
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 5

circle, spoiled him, and offered him explicit proof

that he had a rightful place in the world early im­
pressed the boy as forced, overdone—the poses of
playactors. “My grandfather,” he said, “was a great
playactor (a clergyman!), and so was I—all chil­
dren are, more or less. Everything seems just a play
which gradually dominates life more and more.”
Jean-Paul sensed that he occupied a privileged
place in a world that idolized him—sensed it so
clearly that his precocious mind could not fail to
know that he was, in fact, displaced. T h is is the rea­
son why he strove forever to "justify” his existence.
T h e revelation of his youth continues: “I
never came to know the feeling of property. Noth­
ing ever was my own, because first I lived with my
grandparents and then, after my mother’s remar­
riage, I could still less feel at home with my step­
father. It was always 'the others’ who gave me what
I needed.”
T h e feeling of being homeless and without
possessions—a feeling he shared with the poor and
with all those who lived on life’s dark side—was
thus a part of his earliest and most basic experi­
ences. T h is feeling, of being penniless, also moved
him to reject the generosity of Simone W eil, who
gave all her earnings to the poor. Such generosity,
he felt, was basically a feudalistic phenomenon, re­
flecting, as he said, “a freedom broken by feudal­
ism. Don’t talk to me about 'selflessness’ and 'sanc­
tity.’ She simply thought that the money did not
6 Jeati-Paul Sartre

belong to her, because she regarded the present

wage system as absurd/'
Sartre’s own literary generosity, of which he
gave ample proof, did not, however, stem from
resentment. “I owned nothing,” he said, ‘‘but I
never suffered from it.” What made him suffer was
not that he accepted gifts—he suffered because he
himself was too m uch accepted. Being excessively
accepted in the adult world threw him back, he
felt, upon his own totally unjustifiable existence.
‘‘W hat I have,” he said, ‘‘does basically not belong
to me—it is alien to me.” He did not want his gen­
erosity to be confused with the degrading form of
feudal or bourgeois generosity. T h e trauma of los­
ing his father was the true source of his persistent
feeling that he was a proletarian, someone who had
to justify his existence. Thus we are told by his
friend and fellow fighter Francis Jeanson.
We have seen, then, how the seemingly happy,
simple, and well-ordered life of his childhood soon
became enormously complicated and divided
against itself. His own existence, and everything
connected with it, appeared to him ambiguous and
questionable. Everything conspired to make him
regard the situation of the hom rne alietie—the
alienated man—as his own, most personal problem.
A passionate will to offer self-justification, and to
achieve a justice that would be measured by other
than average standards, developed early in him and
has stayed with him throughout his life. In this
light we must interpret a statement he made at a
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 7

press conference held on his return from a journey

to South America late in November, 19G0: “I
demand to be accused, just like my fellow fighters
who also signed the D eclaration o f the 121." Offi­
cial arraignment before a court was not to be with­
held from him, he declared.
In the bohemian surroundings of Madame de
Beauvoir’s studio, cluttered with books, toiletries,
South American folk art and samurai swords, the
participants in the press conference—most of them
seated on the floor—became involved in a debate
about Algiers. Sartre offered the following com­
ment. T h e D eclaration o f the 121 was not, he said,
a call to disobedience, but merely a declaration of
solidarity with those who had taken upon them­
selves the decision to disobey: “By taking the stand
we took, we give a possibility of free decision to the
young people who arc exposed to constant influ­
ences from all sides, and whose minds are being
raped today. T h e rape consists in this, that they are
being exposed to demoralization by a war which
includes torture and assassination in its very struc­
ture.”
W hat mattered to Sartre here was justice, and
also freedom—the freedom to make one’s own deci­
sions in life. Let us note, at the same time, that
Sartre thought of himself as being upon a large
stage, before the eyes of the great public. From
childhood up, Sartre had been conscious that life,
which his environment tried to offer him in such
abundance, was actually being withheld from him.
8 Jean-Paul Sartre

How could such a comedy, such mutual masquer­

ading, be justified? How can we penetrate to the
actual truth behind it? When he was barely eight or
nine years old, Sartre had written “novels” in the
attempt to answer this question for himself, by
means of stories still strongly influenced by the
children's books he was then reading. As early as
the age of four or five, impressed by La Fontaine’s
Fables, he had begun to write fables of his own. His
daily life, and his dealings with the adult world,
demanded to be supplemented by his imagination
which called for clearer, less ambiguous situations
than his questionable relations with the adult
world offered. His grandfather’s voice impressed
him as all-powerful—and yet, as a comedian’s voice
with its excess of cordial good nature. Grandfather,
the only man in the family, bore all the earmarks of
a playactor. This existence—was it not absurd?
And yet, was not this masquerade the one and only
way to hide that absurdity? Grandfather was a pro­
fessor, and wrote books. Accordingly, the little Jean-
Paul felt compelled to become a professor, so that
he, too, could write books. T h e situation parallels
that of young Kierkegaard living with his aged,
grandfatherly father. And curiously, Sartre asked
himself the same question—'"Am I A braham ?”—
which had assumed such central importance for
Kierkegaard, and had compelled him to sacrifice
what was dearest to him, his beloved fiancee.
Both Kierkegaard and Sartre resorted to litera­
ture in their effort to show the seriousness of exist-
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 9

ence more clearly than could be done in real life

that is steeped in hypocrisy. Both of them opposed
dishonest “seriousness” with the idea of the “game”
—though the rules of the game differed greatly. For
Kierkegaard, they were absolute transcendence; for
Sartre, absolute immanence. But for both, the im­
mediate, great justification of their existence lies in
the book that they must write. Kierkegaard would
write the eternal dialogue with the fianede whom
he had rejected, sacrificed to God’s call. (On the
day of his engagement, he wrote in his diary;
“. . . or; are the orders ‘F U R T H E R ’?”)
But Sartre, in contrast to Kierkegaard, did not
consider the realm of aesthetics as a paradigm of the
religious realm. He rejected, and indeed passion­
ately denied, all transcendence, perhaps in reaction
to the traumatic experience of his grandfather, a
comedian and pastor. His mind was firmly fixed on
man’s existence hopelessly lost within pure imma­
nence, and totally debarred from any justification
in a world beyond. As Roquentin, the hero of
Sartre’s book N ausea, expresses it:
A book. Naturally . . . it wouldn’t stop me from existing or
feeling that I exist. Rut the time would come when the book
would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think
that a little of its clarity would fall over my past. T hen, per­
haps, because of it, I could remember my life without repug­
nance. . . . And 1 might succeed—in the past, nothing but
the past—in accepting myself.1

T h e passage could almost have come from the

diaries of Kierkegaard—but how great a difference
10 Jean-Paul Sartre

there is in the conclusions Sartre draws! He gives a

justification of a homosexual; and he deliberately
stops on the level of aesthetics—the level which
Kierkegaard considered the lowest level which
must be overcome absolutely by a transcendence to
the religious level. Sartre knew only the total ab­
sence of transcendence—existence caught in the
absurdity of this world. Yet Sartre, too, employed
the word existen ce as a central concept, which he
owed to the religious impetus of Kierkegaard who,
like Sartre himself, had early come to consider the
dubious nature of bourgeois life an unbearable tor­
ment. We shall return to the matter later and trace
the causes that prompted Sartre’s radical break
with the original meaning of existence in tran­
scendence, and made him escape into pure, godless
immanence. (Heidegger still says that "to exist
means to transcend," though, in a sense, his mean­
ing is cpiite different from Kierkegaard’s.)

L iteratu re as a Substitute fo r R eligion

It is indicative of Sartre’s early background
that literature came to be for him equivalent to re­
ligion. T h e bourgeois setting of his youth had
served to exalt literature in his mind to the level of
a veritable priesthood. By such standards, the serv­
ant of the spirit rises above the accidents of life;
literature atones for the horrors of reality and frees
man from the boredom and nausea of existence,
while nature is hateful, shapeless, and vague, and
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 11

has to be tamed by art. Thus Sartre reports that his

generation discovered the cinema as a revolt against
the adult world: “We went to the movies,” he
writes, “against our families. T here I was struck by
the difference between the pictures on the screen
and actual landscapes. T h e ‘vagueness’ of actual
landscapes as compared with those on the screen
mirrored for me the vagueness of my life—consid­
ered, that is, apart from literary works.”
Sartre, then, overcame the nausea and surfeit
(ennui) of the aesthetic stage not by way of reli­
gion, but once again by capturing life in aesthetic
formulation—in literature. Literature was his sub­
stitute for religion because it subjugated the nause­
ating wildness and vagueness of reality. Here we
must seek the sources of his atheism:
T h ere was daily life which was absurd and forlorn. One
lived along any which way, merely trying to have the
largest possible number of experiences. And beside it, there
was the other life to which one could gain access by writing,
by creating a book. Literary acts possessed a metaphysical
value, they were inscribed in some sort of Absolute—but it
was a laicized Absolute, because the point was to make the
oilier world, the world beyond, enter into this world.

Or:
Literature was for me, first of all, the search for justification
in the future, the transposition of eternal life; one accepts an
accidental and vague existence, in the present, in order to be
recognized by human society after one's death. . . .

By the time he was eleven years old, Sartre had

ceased altogether to believe in God. (His grand-
12 Jcan-Paul Sartre

father was a Protestant, his mother Catholic.) But

even though God was dead, “theological things
went on." T o Sartre, “theological things” referred
to an absolute in order to provide a basis for what
was merely relative—in short, to render relative
matters serious.
W e may regard Sartre’s grandfather as the
“superannuated God” (insofar as he took the fa­
ther’s place in Sartre’s father complex). W e may also
regard him, the professor, as the priest of literature,
which was a sort of substitute religion; and in his
personal conduct, we may see him as the playactor.
From this complex basic experience of the father
principle, Sartre derived his authority to continue
in all three roles, in his own way, even though he
knew perfectly well that he had received no ex­
plicit mandate. “I work as if compelled by the
highest duty,” he said, “even though no one has
commanded me.”
Throughout, his fundamental theme has con­
tinued to be the Absolute. What he was searching
for in his work was not a mere escape into the
aesthetic realm; he was also striving for a morality
of salvation—a conversion, as it were, and an ad­
vance to a new level. His work, in turn, was to
affect life itself. Thus he strove for deliverance
from the contingent and vague character of life
through contact with Being—Being which is grasped
intuitively in work, and overcomes the eternal flux
and transiency of things. Ever since entering the
E cole N orm ale in 1924, Sartre had tried to find a
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 13

relation to Being in every phenomenon seized by

his mind—to find the presence of the Absolute in
what is merely relative. He was convinced that man
becomes truly man only by overcoming the relative
situation of human existence. It took him more
than fifteen years, until the time of N ausea, to con­
quer this “theological” need for transcendence
within himself. "I have searched a long time for the
Absolute,” he said. In fact, he never overcame that
need altogether. He merely transposed it more and
more into worldliness and immanence. He ab­
sorbed transcendence and eschatology into imma­
nence, so to speak—the tragic error of all programs
of universal happiness and all Utopias, an error
which is fruitful and frightful at the same time.
In the same area, we must seek the explanation
of the mysterious fact that even in the heat of the
class struggle, which repeatedly absorbed Sartre’s
energies, he could never quite subordinate litera­
ture to politics. All he could do was to place the
two in a dialectical relationship. He could make his
peace neither with a literature of political propa­
ganda nor with pure, uncommitted literature. Such
one-sided attitudes were to him a betrayal both of
literature and of the idea of revolution. "T h e art of
writing,” he wrote, “is not protected by the unal­
terable decrees of Providence; men make it, men
choose it, by choosing themselves. If this art were to
change into pure propaganda or into pure pleas­
ure, mankind would relapse into the mire of im­
mediacy. . . .” He called for a littdrature engage, a
14 Jean-Paid Sartre

“total literature,” the “total expression of the hu­

man situation.” Such a literature aims to show man
to himself as a totality that is responsible for every­
thing. “Every man is all men,” he expressed it,
“every human undertaking, however isolated it
may seem, involves ail mankind.” And again:
“Every suffering of whatever kind is always also the
totality of all suffering.”*
T his earnest will to achieve the Absolute
places Sartre very close to the pathos of the reli­
gious realm, even though he is an atheist. Again, we
must not allow him to mislead us. W e must under­
stand Sartre’s atheism in terms of its origin. T h e
will to the Absolute has remained. In 1945, Sartre
declared that the issue was not that of talking about
the existence of God, and that even if God did exist
nothing would be changed for man: “ It is necessary
for man to find himself, and to realize that nothing
can save him from himself.”
Sartre’s atheism, then, must be understood
dialectically; here, once again, we encounter the
paradox of a love-hate whose ambivalence will in­
cline now in this, now in the opposite, direction.
Nothing is ever final here. We must be prepared
for the most absurd leaps, and indeed, must be
ready to perform such leaps ourselves. Sartre denies
God, so to speak, only in the forefront of his con­
sciousness, as a m odus deficiens—as a privation, not
a negation. We must never lose sight of that orig-

• See also page 100.

Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 15

inal situation in Sartre’s life story from which his

attitude arose: he loved what he denied, because it
was what lie had missed most profoundly when he
was a child who had no father—a child who had
been made suspicious by the consolations of over-
zealous adults, and had turned into a subtle and
tricky disputant.
Even in his attitude toward the ultimate ques­
tions, Sartre, with his will to the Absolute, pro­
ceeded from a mandate that no one gave him. “It
was the result,” he said, "of my tradition hu m ain e
he said, “and I had to live in this contradiction
with myself.” Deeply within him, he admitted,
there was a certain ultimate, a “certain personal
evidence that could not be defied.” W e shall now
trace this last remark to its roots, by following the
development of his work.

Sophistic R evolt
By now we have learned a good deal of the
roots of Sartre’s convictions: his world without
transcendence, his concern with man alone, his
rejection of the cosmos. T h e great themes of man­
kind, such as they present themselves in the history
of philosophy, appear in Sartre’s work only sporad­
ically. T h e archaic cosmogony of awakening child­
hood is lacking altogether—indeed, he has no feel­
ing at all for children. They hardly ever play a part
in his novels, and if they do appear they are in fact
merely small adults. Sartre’s world is made up
16 Jean-Paul Sartre

wholly of adult problems; nature with its flowers,

animals, and landscapes does not interest him. His
total lack of understanding for animals is shown,
for instance, in the torturing of the cat in T h e A ge
o f R eason. He deals with his poor animals as
though they were evil adult human beings who
vent their malice without inhibitions. In a similar
vein, we read of the young fellow in T h e R ep riev e
(sometimes called Pablo, sometimes Pedro: “Little
Pedro looked at him earnestly . . . behind the
confused moods that glittered in his eyes, a small
and greedy awareness was lying in ambush . . .
‘And that tiling thinks!’ Mathicu said to himself.”
Sartre’s universe is ail rational consciousness,
as we meet it in man’s ego-consciousness phase dur­
ing the defiant period of puberty. If Sartre men­
tions landscape at all in his work, it is only as the
reflection or the object of his consciousness. He de­
clines to value nature as an independent being, in
the pan-psychic or mystical sense. This attitude,
too, constitutes one of the roots of his atheism. It is
impossible for him to speak of God, except as the
object of a fully aware adult modern consciousness.
And since such a consciousness cannot grasp and
define God, He does not exist for Sartre. T his lim i­
tation, which confines Sartre to the world of ma­
ture adults, is highlighted by a remark of his life­
long companion, Simone de Beauvoir, in the sec­
ond volume of her autobiography: “A child,” she
writes, “would not have tied the bond between us
any more closely . . . to bear children is to aug-
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 17

ment the number of children on earth vainly and

without justification. . . .”
Equally striking is Sartre’s almost exclusive in­
terest in the social and psychological aspects of life.
Simone de Beauvoir, telling of walking tours
through the Provence (she covered up to twenty
miles a day), does reveal an eye for the beauties of
the landscape—but she never says one word about
stopping for a rest, or of self-oblivion through be­
coming absorbed in nature.
T h e sophistic revolt of ego-consciousness in
the youthful phase—the conflict between subject
and object—was, on the other hand, something
that Sartre consciously seized upon as his own prob­
lem, a problem he has had to overcome by means of
the epistemological subject-object dialectics of his
mature w ork -in Phase 3, so to speak, in the evolu­
tion of mankind. " R econ cilin ' f o b jet et le su jet!”
he demanded—and thereby he turned the Marxist
interpretation of life into a relative matter. Here
again he himself personifies the paradox of the
sheltered son of a middle-class home, who is at the
same time convinced that he is disinherited, a pro­
letarian, and who is striving to justify his own exist­
ence: “a common human being, resembling every­
one and no one,” who did not feel “at home” (chez
soi) anywhere. T his is the voice of the precocious
revolt of puberty, the sophistry at odds with the ob­
ject. It is an echo of the words of Protagoras that
“man is the measure of all things—things in being
18 Jean-Paul Sartre

because they are, and things not in being because

they are not.”
In Heidegger's B ein g and T im e, the philo­
sophic center is the world of Being exclusively, all
else being merely things that are at hand and avail­
able, things that are tools. Sartre wanted to go still
further and eliminate the objective world alto­
gether. In the typical conflict between subject and
object, he consciously sided with the subject. He
did so even in his earliest works, Im agin ation and
T h e Psychology o f Im agination, and still more pro­
nouncedly in B eing and N othingness. Existence as
the human manner of being, the essential being,
was consciously opposed to the being of mere ob­
jects. Thus he wrote in A clioti, December 29, 1944:
Have you ever defined existentialism for your readers? It’s so
simple! In philosophical parlance, every object has essence
and existence. An essence (inherent nature) means a con­
stant whole of properties (un ensem ble constant de pro-
priJtt!j ); an existence (being) means a certain effective pres­
ence in the world. Many people believe that essence comes
first and existence later: for instance, that the young peas
grow and become round by corresponding to the idea of
young peas, and that cucumbers are cucumbers because they
share in the idea of cucumber. This notion has its origin in
religious thought. T ru e, anyone who wants to build a house
must first know exactly what kind of an object he wants to
make: essence comes before existence; and all those who be­
lieve that God made man must believe also that He did so by
referring to the idea He had of man. Hut those who do not
share this belief have nonetheless retained the traditional
view that the object has existence only in its agreement with
its essence . . . Existentialism, on the other hand, asserts
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 19

that in man—and in man alon c-cxisicn ce precedes essence.

This simply means that man first of all is, and only subse­
quently is this or that particular man. In a word, man must
create his own essence for himself; lie defines himself grad­
ually by casting himself into the world, by suffering and
struggling in the world; and the definition remains forever
open, . . . Accordingly, is existentialism fascist, conserva­
tive, communist, or democratic? T h e question is absurd. On
this level of generality, existentialism is nothing at all except
a certain way of approaching human problems which refuses
to assign to man a mode of being that is fixed forever.

W hat is basic here is the distinction Sartre

makes between a "serious” attitude and the free­
dom of play:
It is serious to begin with the svorld and to ascribe to the
world more reality than to oneself, and especially to ascribe
to oneself a reality in proportion as one belongs to the world.
. . . All serious thinking has achieved its density through
the world. It congeals; it is an abdication of human reality in
favor of the world. T h e serious man is "world,” and is no
longer sustained within himself; he does not even any longer
consider the possibility of leaving the world behind, because
he has given himself the type of existence of a rock—its con­
sistency, inertia, being-in-the-world. It goes without saying
that the serious man has buried the consciousness of his free­
dom in his own depths. He is insincere (de mauvaise foi) ,
and his insincerity aims at making him appear, in his own
eyes, as a conclusion: to him, everything is consequent, and
there is no principle ever; this is why he gives so much atten­
tion to the consequences of his actions. . . . Man is serious
when he takes himself for an object.-
20 Jean-Paul Sartre

Man in the Snbject-O bject Split

In the passage just cited, the essential motifs
are those of the opposition of object and subject, of
world and ego, and of flight into seriousness as a
flight from the freedom of one's own subjectivity.
T h e precedence of existence over essence here, too,
has its concrete basis. If essence—the Idea—were
primary, then man's existence would be merely the
consecjuence of a principle not of his own making.
T o give precedence to existence—to being—over
idea means that man, instead of relying upon laws
given in the nature of things, must begin his own
existence freely—as if it were a game—and must
himself establish the rules of the game from the
very start. In this way man himself is the source of
his own existence, and the creator and master of a
game he himself has invented. His existence is not
without law; it is not arbitrary. It follows a law
which he himself has established.
In addition, we have just come across an ex­
pression that will be basic to our further study of
Sartre’s thought—the expression “m auvaise fo i.”
W e add another passage to define its meaning more
fully: “As soon as man conceives himself as free and
wants to use his freedom, his activity is play, a
game, however great his anguish may be. He is in­
deed the first principle of that game. He himself
establishes the value and the rules of his actions,
and is ready to pay off only according to the rules
that he himself has set up and defined. . . .” 3
Alienation and Justification: Roots of Creativity 21

Man lives a split life and is not always aware of

his double life—perhaps because he does not want
to become aware of it. According to Sartre, man
wants freedom as the pure project of existence, but
his dread of this absolute freedom makes him flee
into the world of objects—a world he rejects be­
cause, basically, he is striving for the ideal of free­
dom. Sartre adopted Kierkegaard's famous defini­
tion “Dread is the vertigo of freedom” as it had
been adopted before him by the existential philos­
ophers who were to become his teachers; but Sartre
stripped it of its original religious meaning. This
process of secularization was itself perhaps a half­
unconscious m auvaisc foi. It may well be one of the
weak points that could be the starting point of a
careful critique of existentialism.
M auvaisc fo i is crucial to any understanding of
Sartre’s philosophy. It is the key not only to his
philosophical works but to his novels, stories, and
plays as well. Reading his novels, which torment us
with their crescendo of repulsive events and charac­
ters, we are forced to ask ourselves: W hat is the
purpose of this mysterious method and its destruc­
tive, depressing, negative ways? T h e answer is that
Sartre wants to exhibit the infinite variety of actual
man as the embodiment of m auvaisc fo i, of bad
faith and self-deception, in order to reveal to man
the roots of his own existence. By putting his finger
on the wound of “mauvaisc foi” he wants to help
modern man escape from his inner discord.
It was of the essence of human consciousness at
22 Jean-Paul Sartre

the dawn of mankind to take the cosmos seriously

and to feel secure in its keeping—in the sense of
the pre-Socratic sym patheia ton h o lo n , the sym-
p n oia panta, "all things breathing in one.” Even so,
the Stoics claimed that individual, sinful man had
fallen from this harmony and had to be healed ac­
cording to their guiding principle, hom ologou -
m cnos to physei zen—by living in keeping with the
logos, the divine law, the physis, the living and
growing cosmos!
But for Sartre, that original security no longer
exists. His sense of being illegitimate and living life
illegitimately became expanded in philosophical
and poetic terms into the experience of the absurd.
God the Creator was no longer a reality for Sartre.
In the same way, the awareness of a total “dis-crca-
tion” { d ic t a t io n ) took hold of his entire genera­
tion. Absurdities in nature and history; chaos,
dread, nothingness, and nausea; the splitting apart
of essence and existence, subject and object; con­
tempt for, and suppression of, the object as nauseat­
ing, in favor of the subject; the superman who
wants to be ens causa sui, that is, wants to be God:
all this led up to Sartre’s outcry: Man is a “useless
passion”—or, as he later on expressed it more
crudely: Man is a “common marmalade.” How he
came to coin this curious expression will be shown
briefly in the reflections that follow, when we come
to analyze his book B ein g and N othingness, from
which the foregoing passages have been quoted.
 2
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The Principal
Themes o f
Sartre’s Thought
 existing in free self-determination is, so
to speak, no more than an ideal, a model which
never occurs in reality. T h e men who do occur in
reality are a very specific mixture (a marmalade!)
of freedom and the lack of freedom, of being a sub­
ject and being an object. They are forever fleeing,
fleeing from the dread of freedom and into the
seriousness of the objective world. In the section of
B ein g and, N othingness explicitly entitled “Ethical
Implications,” Sartre wrote:

. . . the principal result of existential psychoanalysis must

he to make us repudiate the spirit of seriousness. . . . We
are already on the moral plane hut concurrently on that of
had faith (mnuvnise foi) . for it is an ethics which is ashamed
of itself and does not dare speak its name. It has obscured all
its goals, in order to free itself from anguish. Man pursues
being blindly by hiding from himself the free project which
is this pursuit. He makes himself such that he is waited for by
all the tasks placed along his way. Objects are mute demands,
and he is nothing in himself blit the passive obedience to
these demands.
Existential psychoanalysis is going to reveal to man the
real goal of his pursuit, which is being as a synthetic fusion of
the in-itself with the for-itself; existential psychoanalysis is
going to acquaint man with his passion.** 1

M auvaise foi, then, is the intermingling

within a single human existence of two different
value systems—the demands of the absolute ideal of
the project of existence as a pure game, and the
concrete existence which is always a flight into
seriousness and objectivity. T o express this split
and discord within man, Sartre employed two
24
The Principal Themes of Sartre’s Thought 25

Hegelian terms, “in-itself” and “for-itself,” whose

meaning in Sartre’s writings will be discussed in
the next chapter. Sartre’s essential point was that
this split makes evident once again the basic mean­
ing of the word “existence”—a word derived from
eC’Sistere, to step outside of oneself, out into being
in the world, and thus enter into a dichotomy, a
doubling of the self. T h is dichotomy of the “in-
itself” and “for-itself” is what he had in mind when
he spoke of that “synthetic fusion” for which man
is striving passionately. A further quotation will
make its fundamental meaning clear:

Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing

itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to consti­
tute the in-itsclf which escapes contingency by being its own
foundation, the ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus
the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man
loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the
idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain.
Man is a useless passion.2

T his (far from unique) reference to God as an

“absolute construction” reveals a curious inner
contradiction in Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre the athe­
ist, with his recurrent variations on the statement:
“T h e project of human reality is man projecting to
be God,” introduced the concept of God even
though Sartre the philosopher, .according to his
own philosophy, should manage strictly without it.
T h is fact—to which we could add others—permits
us the fundamental realization that Sartre himself
suffered from m auvaise fo i . Measured critically by
26 Jean-Paul Sartre

his own philosophical standards, Sartre is the em­

bodiment of that split in two (d ed o u b lem cn t) of
man which his philosophy seeks to overcome.
T h e impetus of Sartre’s philosophical en­
deavor to overcome rnauvaisc jo i stems from the
fact that he himself is greatly suffering from it. All
his accusations, all his attacks, all the shrill tones
that he favors in his philosophical as well as his
creative works are, in a way, the generalized, out­
ward projection of his own inner discord—the dram­
atization of his self-criticism. It must be admitted,
of course, that a man who has become conscious of
his rnauvaisc jo i is already a step ahead of those who
have not yet discovered that situation within them­
selves. Indeed, Sartre, one of the first modern
thinkers to understand these relations, had every
right to devote his life to an exposition of this in­
sight, in various didactic and purifying formula­
tions.
Nonetheless, it must be said here that the dis­
covery of rnauvaisc fo i is in itself by no means a
unique contribution of modern philosophy. T h e
idea had arisen before, at critical turning points in
the history of Western thought. At the end of an­
tiquity, for example, we encounter it in the Chris­
tian consciousness of St. Paul. In Chapter 7, "L e t­
ter to the Romans,” Paul revealed the rnauvaisc jo i
of his era by pointing to the spiritual law that man
wants to obey but cannot because he is also subject
to the law that courses in his blood. “For the good
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 27

that I would I do not; but the evil which I would

not, that I do." 3
Again, at the end of the Middle Ages, in the
transition to modern times, Luther, struggling in
his solitary cell, learned that our will is broken and
that we are incapable of the free facultas fa cien d i,
because even our facultas cogitandi is unfree; that
we cannot love God with pure and selfless love, be­
cause every action we perform through our own
strength is already motivated by selfishness.
More recently, in the dawning sense of crisis
that overcame European consciousness in the mid­
dle of the nineteenth century, we have Kierke­
gaard's view of human existence, the view that still
sustains all of modern existential philosophy: the
insight that if a man truly examines his conscience
with complete seriousness, and submits to the abso­
lute demand of the ideal, he can never live up to
the goal that is set for him: “Purity of heart is to
will one thing only!" T h e curse of our actual exist­
ence is that it is a scattering flight from ourselves—
that we are never capable of willing one thing only
but always will something else besides. In the tran­
sition era from antiquity to the Middle Ages, Au­
gustine, in a similar situation, saw that the human
will is never unequivocal, that every action springs
from a number of motives, like a tree rising from
many roots. And so thought Pascal, in the equally
important transition period of the 17th century.
It is clear, then, that Sartre is not unique in
the insight he achieved. But one thing distinguishes
28 Jcan-Paul Sartre

him fundamentally from all earlier thinkers—and

that is the laicization of religious motifs of thought,
motifs which formerly could become the source of
deliverance because they drew strength from a
transcendence behind them. This laicization is
characteristic of modern existential philosophy.
Sartre, by constantly stressing his atheism, empha­
sizes that he intends to stay within the sphere of
immanence. His m auvaisc fo i, at its deepest, is of an
altogether different kind. W hile it strives to find a
rational immanent clarification as a road to man’s
self-liberation, it conceals from itself the fact that,
in order to clarify its own goals, it has had to fall
back, and constantly has fallen back, upon tran­
scendence (Sartre’s “Absolute”).
This may explain why Sartre’s attacks on reli­
gious thought and the religious life are so vehe­
ment and vitriolic: His self-observation may have
made him feel the need to extirpate such motiva­
tions within himself. Thus in the scene in his play
T h e Flies, when a pietistical old woman is shouted
down as an “old slattern,” Sartre did not mean only
to denounce religious hypocrisy and the self-decep­
tion of conventional religious lip service. Not all
piety, after all, is hypocritical; there is such a thing
as authentic piety. Sartre meant to denounce h im ­
self. He was not altogether sure of himself. He was
aware of the fractured and disharmonious quality
of modern life, and wanted to use the most radical
means available to fight any illicit recourse to reli­
gious symbolism—which even he himself had to
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 29

use—in order to achieve the ideal he proclaimed, of

an entirely unequivocal philosophy of atheism.
Existentialism, the philosophy that is a cry for
existence, stems at bottom from the discovery that
we have lost existence within ourselves. This sim­
ple statement had found its philosophical formula­
tion in Hegel’s dictum that Minerva’s owl takes
wing only when night is falling. Only when we are
no longer sure of our existence, only then do we
feel the need to philosophize about it in order to
regain it. Christian existentialists since Paul have
known that this cannot be done by means of im­
manence alone, without recourse to transcendence.
Modern atheist existentialism subsists on the inter­
nal contradiction that, according to its demands,
man is to transcend himself by the means of his
finiteness.
Sartre’s m auvaise foi, as we have seen, consists
in this, that his philosophy feeds on the very thing
that it opposes. Accordingly, a special kind of dia­
lectic has developed in his work. W e notice a con­
tinuous twisting and turning, a constant partial re­
traction of his own formulations—something that
is hard to describe, because it is so elusive. He him­
self spoke of the m eth od e du ccrcle, a circular
method in which every assumption dissolves again
into its opposite. For example, the atheism that
is the goal has recourse to the ihcos. T h e man
who wants to confine himself to his own pure sub­
jectivity must be active in the world—that is, he
must be serious. Sartre’s conclusions often adopted
30 Jean-Paul Sartre

verbatim the formulations of the mystics, as in “I

am not my being, and my being is not I / ’ Such a
manner of thinking cannot be grasped rationally—
a genuine discussion using such formulations is not
possible. For Sartre can follow every thesis with a
counter-thesis that partially retracts and limits it.

“ T h e Chips A re D ow n”
In this light, too, we must understand the
curious contradiction in Sartre’s doctrine of free­
dom. I freely choose only myself, he asserts, I alone
establish the rules of the game of my existence; but
in this choice I also want to choose all humanity
and to share in its determination—and all this de­
spite my explicit denial of the precedence of es­
sence, of the essential idea. Thus I may not, by vir­
tue of my choice, impose an essential idea on an­
other person; I must allow him the free decision to
establish his own rules. Here Sartre invokes Hegel’s
remark, “If all men are not free, no man is free.”
T h e same holds true of existential freedom which,
Sartre himself has had to admit, is not a complete
freedom from all situational ties. In this sense
Sartre has spoken explicitly of the paradox of free­
dom. “It is the paradox of freedom,” he wrote,
"that freedom exists only in the situation, and situ­
ation exists only in freedom.”
Sartre thus was unable to carry out his thesis
with that absolute univocity which he had postu­
lated. He encountered the dichotomy of m auvaise
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 31

fo i wherever he turned—and used it brilliantly by

making it the method of his philosophical and lit­
erary creativity. T his method accounts for the scin­
tillating magic of his sentences, and of his fictional
characters. Let us look at a concrete example. His
most accomplished, most lucid, and also simplest
piece of writing significantly has recourse to tran­
scendence. It deals with life after death. It is the
script for his film T h e Chips A re Down, unique
among film scripts for its philosophical depth and
splendor of intellectual content. T h e action of this
drama reveals that, in this life, man is never the
creator and free lawmaker of a pure game. Only in
death is man absolutely free to undertake the pure
project of his existence.
In the world of the dead, which, in Sartre’s
film, intrudes into this world though it remains in­
visible to the living, a young workingman meets
the young wife of a high official. Under the law of
the world of the dead, the two are allowed to return
to the world of the living because they were meant
for each other but did not meet in their first life.
They come back to this life; they now want to real­
ize the free project of their existence which they
had planned in the beyond. They want to live
their love. But they come into conflict with the sit­
uational laws of their erstwhile existence. They fall
into the inner discord of m auvaise foi, and lose out
in the struggle. T h e young workingman must pur­
sue the objectives of the labor movement to which
he belongs from his first life; the young woman,
32 Jean-Paul Sartre

trying to live the life of a workingman's wife, finds

herself left alone and is irresistibly drawn into the
conflicts of her erstwhile family when she tries to
save her sister from an unfaithful husband. T h e
conflict between free will and bondage to the out­
side world emerges with wonderful clarity. T h e
two leading characters, asked about the motives of
their actions, are unable to offer an intelligible
answer, because they may not refer to their life in
the beyond, which is pure freedom.
Man is a "useless passion," Sartre wrote, be­
cause he must will something that is not attainable
within immanence; and he can enter into tran­
scendence only through death. As soon as we enter
life we can no longer be ourselves, but live by
m auvaise foi. This realization gives a new and sur­
prising meaning to Goethe's remark that "our
whole trick is that we give up existence in order to
exist." Deliverance from m auvaise fo i, with its in­
evitable inner discord, docs not come through phi­
losophy, then, but through death. Freedom, in
Sartre's sense, means the obliteration of our con­
crete existence. T h e Chips A re Down shows clearly
that, in Sartre’s philosophy, man wants to live as
free as the dead, and in death wants to exist like a
living man. This inner contradiction constitutes
the greatness and the limitation of man's being.
T his concrete example will lend life and pal­
pability to our understanding of Sartre’s abstract
thought structure. We are beginning to understand
why nothingness and death are at the center of his
T he Principal Themes of Sartre’s Thought 33

philosophy. He developed it not as a mere disciple

of Heidegger’s B ein g and T im e, but in independ­
ent and original reflection. Anguish and despair
are, for him, the two basic attitudes of existence,
because philosophy, in Sartre’s sense, seeks absolute
freedom; and absolute freedom can be realized only
in man’s detachment from his situation in the
world—in his “annihilation” (n ian tisation ).

A H usserlian with a D ifferen ce

Starting from Sartre’s youthful trauma, his
feeling that he was a bastard, we have come to an
understanding of the roots and basic motives of
Sartre’s thinking, his urge to justify the sophistic
revolt of adult men—the main theme of his work.
Our first quick outline of his intellectual career has
thus run ahead of the events of his life, liut his
philosophy and his literary work mutually illumine
and explain each other. Accordingly, we must now
trace in chronological parallel the development of
his thinking both in his literary and his philosoph­
ical work. T h e details of his literary development
reveal important and original stages in his thought
(especially in regard to his contemporaries) and in
the ways in which he modified the teachings of the
great philosophers who influenced him.
From 1924 to 1928, Jean-Paul Sartre studied
at the E cole N orm alc, the teacher-training school at
the University of Paris, to earn the degree of agrege
in 1929. From October 1929 to January 1931, he
3*1 Jean-Paid Sartre

did military service, at Tours, in the meteorology

section. From February 1931 until 1933 he taught
at a ly cie in Le Havre; from 1933 to 1934 at the
Institut Frangais in Berlin; from 1934 to 1936
again in Lc Havre; from 1936 to 1937 in Laon;
from 1937 to 1939 at the L y c ie Pasteur, From 1939
until 1940 he served in the war. From Ju n e 21,
1940 to April 1, 1941, he was a prisoner of war in
Stalag X II in T rier.
His publications during these years were: in
1936, Im ag in ation ; in 1937, the novella T h e W all;
in 1938, his great novel N ausea, which first brought
him public recognition; in 1939, a collection T h e
W all and O ther Stories, including "T h e W all,”
"T h e Room ,” "Erostratus,” "Intim acy,” and "T h e
Childhood of a Leader.” In the same year appeared
the scholarly T h e E m otion s: O utline o f a T h eo ry ,
and in 1940 Psychology o f Im agination. Among the
journal articles of this period we note “L a T ran -
scendance d e le g o : Esquisse d ’une description p h i-
n o m in olog iqu e" 4 (in R ech erch es p h ilosop h iqu es,
VI, 1936/37) and “ U ne I d ie fon d am en tale de la
p h in o m in o lo g ie de H usserl: IT ntentionalitd” (in
N ou v elle R evu e Fran^aise, vol. 52, January, 1939).
He had also attended Husserl’s last seminar-
lectures as a student at Freiburg, and passionately
welcomed the new method of phenomenology as a
deliverance from “empirio-criticism.” Thus, in Im ­
agination, he explained that Husserl’s Ideas (1913)
had placed both psychology and philosophy upon
entirely new foundations, and rendered all earlier
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 35
W 1567733
literature obsolete. Schelling’s remark that philos­
ophy is a “beginning science par ex cellen ce” ap­
plies to Sartre as well. He felt that Husserl had
made a new beginning—he had made our intuition
of the “intentional directedness toward objects” ac­
cessible to subjective mental representation. A new
perspective was thus opened up on the subject-
object relationship. Imagination, the creator of
ideas, had moved into the center of our investiga­
tions. Consciousness was essentially this productive
and creative power, not a mere reservoir for the
storage of impressions. Consciousness was thus
wholly sui generis. It could not be understood by
analogy to the phenomena of natural science. T hat
traditional method would lead to a total misunder­
standing of consciousness, whose basic structure is
intentionality, the subject’s directedness toward
objects independently of their existence which, fol­
lowing Descartes’ suggestion, is “implied.”
W ith this discovery (which had been made
before, in scholasticism, and was noted by Bren-
tano, though in a different sense), Husserl had
given greater weight to the objects toward which
subjective representation is directed; he had en­
dowed them with the character of independent
essences. Husserl was less skeptical than Descartes,
whose doubt was itself not all-embracing. In his
phenomenological tlcpoch6" (epdehein = to ab­
stain), Husserl was content to place the world of
objects “in parentheses” as regards their real exist­
ence. In Husserl’s view, the world is “the world for
3G Jean-Paul Sartre

me," I do abstain, of course, from all judgments

concerning the world's reality, but at the same time
it is always there for me, and my attention is an act
directed toward it.
Sartre adopted Husserl’s concept of intention­
al ity with passionate enthusiasm—the idea that it is
in the nature of consciousness to be intentional,
that is, tending toward an object. “Consciousness is
always consciousness o f something,” as Husserl put
it. Thus Descartes’ ego cogilo is changed to ego
cogito cog itation : the object that is thought be­
comes at once a factum , a fact of subjective thought.
W hether my thinking is directed toward a present
or a future object, a real or potential, beloved or
hated object, it is always pointed at an object which
is not thinking itself but is conceived as being “out­
side.” Heidegger and Sartre, each in his own way,
turned this idea in totally different directions (and
in the process rendered essentialism and Platonism
still more radically obsolete). W hat they discov­
ered, as a result, was not consciousness and its in­
tended object, but—Nothingness.
W ith Sartre, the process went as follows: Hus­
serl’s dictum, that intentional consciousness is “the
turning of my actual glance at something,” im­
pressed itself deeply upon Sartre’s mind. Con­
sciousness, then, was no longer a vessel filled with
lifeless contents, but an act, the “turning toward”
something. With Husserl, the difference between
perception and imagination emerged as follows:
“T h e centaur itself is obviously nothing psychic; he
The Principal Themes of Sartre’s Thought 37

exists neither in the soul nor in consciousness nor

anywhere else; he is in fact ‘nothing’; he is all in the
imagination, or, more precisely; the experience of
the imagination is the imagining o f a centaur.” r>
Perception, on the other hand, is directed
toward something actually present, and clearly dif­
fers from turning one’s gaze, in imagination, at
something that is not there. But this is not what
concerned Sartre primarily; he was concerned with
imagination. In his book by that title, he wrote
about Husserl’s passage just quoted; ‘‘This is a key
passage. T h e nonexistence of the centaur or of the
chimera does not entitle us to reduce them to mere
psychic functions. . . . Husserl restored to the
centaur, in the very heart of its ‘unreality,’ its tran­
scendence.” 0 All of a sudden, the centaur has tran­
scendence, outside the subject, in ‘‘unreality,”
nothingness; transcendence meaning here ‘‘tran­
scendence of consciousness.” Husserl distinguishes
the phenomenological being of transcendent things
and the absolute being of immanent things.
For Sartre, the image is no longer content of
consciousness, it is no longer in consciousness. It
becomes an intentional structure of consciousness
that is directed toward a transcendent object. T ran ­
scendence means: outside of consciousness. But the
ego fares the same way: it no longer remains the
‘‘pure ego of consciousness” but is projected out­
side the self, apparently also as a transcendent ob­
ject toward which reflecting consciousness directs
itself. Sartre’s essay ” T h e T ran scen den ce o f the E go”
38 Jean-Paul Sartre

explains that consciousness does not include the

ego either formally or materially, but that the ego
is “d eh ors,” outside of consciousness, in the world
as a being of the world, just like the various egos of
other people. In Husserl the ego is conceived as one
of the structures of absolute, pure consciousness; it
is not more certain, only more intimate, than other
egos. W ith Sartre, the point is the self-revelation
and self-interpretation of man who is outside him­
self, his cc-sistere, his “stepping outside himself” as
existence. “Man is continuously outside of himself.”
In his consciousness, there is nothing but the void
and a movement to slip outside oneself: un glisse-
m ent hors de s o i. Man is fleeing from himself until
he is finally completely beside himself. Thus, in his
essay in the N ou v elle R evu e Frationise on inten­
tional ity as Husserl’s fundamental idea, Sartre
wrote: “If you will imagine that we are rejected
and abandoned by our own nature in an indiffer­
ent, hostile, and refractory world, you will have
grasped the profound meaning of Husserl’s dis­
covery.” 7
T o Sartre, intentional ity had assumed an ex­
plosive character; it had become dclater vers, an
outburst in the direction of something. T h is is his
own definition: “C onnaitre, c*est dclater vers. . . .”
Intentional ity had become charged with emotion,
it took the form of love or hate, it was now a way to
rediscover the world by means of sympathy or aver­
sion. “Husserl has restored their terror and their
charm to things,” Sartre wrote. Husserl, he felt,
The Principal Themes of Sartre’s Thought 39

had unlocked new doors of access to the world of

the prophets and artists; he had created a new
space, a new perspective for dealing with the pas­
sions. "Ultimately, everything is dehors, outside of
us, everything including ourselves, outside in world
among the others." All fruitless preoccupation with
one’s own inner life could thus be overcome.

Im agination and Literary C reation

Thus Sartre did, after all, pass through some­
thing like an archaic-magical epoch, philosophy’s
Phase I—the period concerned with the philosophy
of the imagination and invention—after he had
made Husserl’s thought his own. Indeed, his lit­
erary works dating from this period can be under­
stood only in juxtaposition with his philosophical
studies; and they, in turn, illuminate his philosoph­
ical views of the imagination and invention. In his
book on the psychology of the imagination, he pre­
sents the act of imagination as magical, an incanta­
tion:
It is an incantation destined to produce the object of one’s
thought, the thing one desires, in a manner that one can take
possession of it. In that act there is always something of the
imperious and the infantile, a refusal to take distance of diffi­
culties into account. Thus, the very young child acts upon
the world from his bed by orders and entreaties. T h e objects
obey these orders of consciousness: they appear.8

T his imaginative function, too, harbors a

means by which to escape from our banishment in
40 Jean-Paul Sartre

the midst of the world; and at the same time it is a

step forward in our striving for the Absolute. Imag­
inary objects are indeed purely our creations; they
are only what they are, only what we have made
them: they are absolute beings. They act, of course,
as an eternal “elsewhere,” a constant evasion. But
the escape to which they invite us is not just such
that it would let us get away from our momentary
conviction, our prejudices and little troubles; they
offer us an escape from every compulsion of the
world which seems to present itself as a negation of
“being-in-the-world,” as an anti-world.
T h e power of the imagination, the power of
the images, is always a denial of the world, but in a
very specific manner; to establish an image means
to construct an object at the edge of the totality of
what is real; and this, in turn, means to keep reality
at arm’s length, to free oneself of it—in a word: to
deny it. T h e act of imagination is an alteration of
conditions, and appears as “sublimation”: con­
sciousness, caught in the snares of this world, evap­
orates: “It is pure spirit taking revenge of nausea.”
No wonder, then, that this artistically produc­
tive view of the imagination dominates Sartre’s first
novel, N ausea. T h e hero of the book, disgusted
with small-town life and the petty details of his sur­
roundings, feels the estrangement, the absurdity,
the forlornness in all the nonsensical events that
stare him in the face. In this revulsion to the world
he discovers his own existence. Only in the world of
the imagination, which he opposes to the world
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 41

around him, docs lie feel “saved"—the word the

novel’s hero Roquentin exclaims when he hears a
singer’s voice on a recording. By such escape into
an imaginary world, the mind attempts to break
out of its captivity within the density of existence.
It sublimates itself somewhere else, outside of the
world or, rather, in that universe which can be dis­
cerned at a distance, on the other side of existence
—beyond the canvas of paintings: “W ith the doges
of Tintoretto, with Gozzoli’s Florentines, behind
the pages of books, with Fabrico del Dongo and
Ju licn Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with
the long dry laments of jazz.” 0
Thus N ausea ends, unexpectedly, with an im­
aginary success of Roquentin. Illumined by having
listened to a phonograph record, he feels “justi­
fied”! And the composer and the singer, too, are
“justified”! All of them have escaped existence,
have cleansed themselves of the sin of existing. And
Roquentin, the pederast, has found his way. He
will walk the road of art. W hat is it that art—for
instance, the recording of the Jupiter symphony—
represents? Obviously nothing except itself. Art
does not refer us somewhere else; it is its own ana­
logue. As is well known, Schopenhauer had com­
pared a melody with a Kantian “thing as such.”
Sartre wrote:

It does not exist. It is even an annoyance; if I were to get up

and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to
break it in two, I wouldn't reach it. It is beyond, always be­
yond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and
42 Jean-Paul Sartre

layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you
want to seize it. you find only existents, you butt against
existents devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don't even
hear it. I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It
does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the
rest which, in relation to it, is superfluous. It is.10

T h e melody is pure being, unencumbered by

any existing object cloaking it. It coincides with its
meaning; it has no existence. T his is why music
frees Roquentin of his nausea, why it is his salva­
tion. "A ntoine,” it says to him, "I shall teach you
fervor.” It resists falling into the brutal chaos of
existence. Music is the total victory over existence,
over the "viscous” slime. When we know of no
other way out any longer, when the world presses
us to act, we try to change it, to make it undergo a
metamorphosis. We try to live, not according to the
usual laws but in a magic way.
Sartre called emotion an attitude of incanta­
tion. "T h e compulsion of danger serves as the mo­
tive for this intention which brings about magic
behavior. I see a wild animal coming toward me.
My legs buckle beneath me, my heart beats more
feebly, I turn pale, I fall down and swoon. Nothing
seems less appropriate than this behavior which ex­
poses me to the danger defenselessly. And yet this
behavior is a flight. T h e swoon is a refuge. Nobody
believes that it is a refuge for me, that I am trying
to save myself by no longer seeing the wild animal.
But I, because I cannot avoid the danger in any
normal way, I have denied it, I have annihilated it
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 43

as far as was within my power. These are the limits

of my magical influence upon the world.” 11
But imagination isolates us because it belongs
to us alone, it contains only ourselves, its creators.
No one can follow us and share in it. T his is the
tragedy of the experiences of Antoine Roquentin,
and of Sartre’s story collection T h e W all. No one
can follow the dreamers in those stories—the para­
noiac cannot be called back out of his madness.
T here is a wall between men. T h e ancient sophists,
with their “man the measure” proposition, had the
same intuition: Assuming something existed, it
would not be knowable to all men—and if it were
knowable, it could not be communicated. Conse­
quently, there is only nothingness. Thus Gorgias
wrote in a fragment entitled “On Nature, or the
Nonexistent."
Sartre’s heroes, too, find themselves caught in
this atomization and isolation. In his most moving
story of this period, “T h e Room,” we are told of
the utter failure of a woman who attempts to join
her husband in his madness. “Her father says to
her: You want to live outside the limits of human
nature.” And she, moved by love, wants to leave
the world of normal people:

I must go bach. I never leave him alone so long. She would

have to open the door, then stand for a moment on the thresh­
old, trying to accustom her eyes to the shadow and the room
would push her hack with all its strength. Eve would have to
triumph over this resistance and center all the way into the
heart of the room. . . . Suddenly she thought with a sort of
44 Jean-Paul Sartre

pride that she had no place anywhere. N orm al people think I

belong with them. Hut / couldn't stay an hour am ong them. 1
need to live out there—on the other side of the wall.12

Eve has changed the significance of objects.

She has, in Husserl’s phrase, “intentioned” them to
crystalize in h er sense. She refuses to see them as
they arc, and even fears the memory of them:

When he set them down, Eve went and touched them in her
turn (she always felt somewhat ridiculous about i t ) . They
had become little bits of dead wood again hut something
vague and incomprehensible stayed in them, something like
understanding. T hese arc his things, she thought. T h ere is
nothing of mine in the room. She had had a few pieces of
furniture before; the m irror and the little inlaid dresser
handed down from her grandmother and which Pierre jok­
ingly called “your dresser." Pierre had carried them away
with him.13

Still, despite all good will, the objects resist

that new imagination which is functioning only
halfway. She nonetheless tries to persuade herself of
this partial success. “ Yet, she told herself with an­
guish, it isn't possible fo r m e to see them exactly
lik e him 13 She feels encrusted in the old world,
and her body holds her there: “Her body was stiff
and taut and hurt her; she felt it too alive, too de­
manding. I w ould lik e to be invisible an d stay h ere
seeing him w ithout his seein g m e. H e doesn't n eed
m e; I am useless in this room ." 13
In the paroxysm of her autosuggestion, Eve
fathoms the exhaustion caused by her failure. “Eve
felt exhausted: a gam e, she thought with remorse;
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 45

it was only a gam e. I did n ’t sincerely b eliev e it fo r

an instant. A nd all that tim e h e su ffered as if it
w ere real.” 14 Eve can never succeed in rejoining
Pierre: “T here is a wall between you and me, but
you are on the other side."
T h is isolating power of the imagination is
nonetheless indissolubly joined with consciousness.
It is just as absurd to try to conceive of a conscious­
ness that does not imagine as to try to conceive of a
consciousness that cannot perform the cogito.n
And even if the dream is as inadequate for con­
sciousness itself as is this consciousness for him who
numbly exists, it yet does not cease to project itself
into reality, creeping into transcendence, and de­
termining the significance of things. W ithout imag­
ination there is no transcendence of consciousness.
Things are never truly what they are, the
spirit roves among them, but it is a spirit which has
come down from the world of the imagination and
brought his phantasma along with him. And we
interpret and poetize the world accordingly. Every­
one adds his own nature to nature, everyone tries to
possess the world by wholly personal means, such as
through drunkenness or lechery, as in Sartre’s later
novels. Everyone “crystalizes” his world for him­
self. Thus, to the young man in love, the world, a
landscape, music are different when he is near his
beloved; she is the necessary medium through
which he seizes the world, she is the sun “without
whom things are not what they are.” W ithout her
he wants to see his world destroyed, or better still,
46 Jean-Paid Sartre

see it reduced to its simple statistical meaning.

When the beloved goes away, the universe crum­
bles into chaos, as we are shown in N ausea. T o
transcend, to understand, to crystalize—this is what
gives meaning to the feeling of existence.
Roquentin, hero of Nausea, in a famous pas­
sage set in a public park, de-crystalizes the world,
that is, refuses a crystalization which to the mass of
mankind is normal, a habit: the banal world. One
crystalizes truly, he says, only by making oneself
singular; separate, solitary, gaining a perspective
on the world that, by its peculiarity, makes the
world unstable. Later, in B ein g and Nothingness,™
Sartre describes such a crystal ization of a smoker’s
world. Things were of value to him only if he could
encounter them while smoking. An effort was
needed to cut this symbolic tie. “I persuaded myself
that I was not taking anything away from the play
at the theater, from the landscape, from the book
which I was reading, if I considered them without
my pipe.”
But here, too, as in the case of transcendence,
we rid ourselves of one perspective of the world
only to discover instantly another. Man cannot
exist in the world without changing it; there is in
its depth a necessary lie—the lie of being. Every
man is capable of living in the world only by his
imagination; every one is the artist making his own
world. For the artist, there is a still more intense
interpretation of this intentionality of the imagina­
tion—a fundamental, transforming intention. T h e
T he Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 47

painter "labors at his necessary lie”—he selects it,

polishes it, educates it, purifies it, perfects it. He
wraps up the universe in a dream. As Baudelaire
(to whom Sartre devoted an essay later on) had
said: "Above all, the artist must not cease to lie.”
It is of interest in this connection to read in
Simone de Beauvoir, his life companion, that the
two had use for painting and sculpture only insofar
as they could associate ideas with them—ideas be­
ing th eir points of crystalization. In the Prado,
only Murillo and lesser painters deserve mention
(but not Velasquez, El Greco, or Goya), and Sartre
mentions only Guido Reni(!). Later, however,
Sartre inspires Simone with enthusiasm for Griine-
wald’s Issenheim altarpeice. T his is simply their
wholly individual and personal way of placing the
accents of their imagination upon the objects.

W riter and P h ilosop h er

W e observe, then, that Sartre the thinker and
Sartre the literary man work hand in hand, that the
philosophical insights gained by the former at once
become independent and take literary form, and
that, in turn, the philosophical abstractions of Sar­
tre’s teachers are at once transformed by Sartre’s
artistic intentions, "trans-crystalized” in Sartre’s
sense. Since we are dealing here with the basic ele­
ments, the beginnings of all his later philosophy
and literary work, we shall summarize the main
points of his radically new theory of the imagina­
48 Jean-Paul Sartre

tion from the perspectives that are most significant

for the philosophy of existence. Like Husserl, Sar­
tre hopes to arrive at an elemental vision—an
eidetic reduction, and associates the power of imag­
ination with the central concept of the image.
Among the central properties of the image are:
1. T h e image is a form of intentional con­
sciousness: I have to gaze at something (viser).
2. It cannot be the direct observation of an
object but must be quasi-observation, and must
contain nothing except what consciousness has in­
troduced.
3. In general, it may not be prompted or de­
termined by objects, but must have sprung out of
spontaneous, free consciousness.
4. It must characterize its object not as pres­
ent, but as absent, nonexistent.
Husserl, in the phenomenological ep och s,
merely refrained from making a judgment con­
cerning the reality of the object. Sartre underlines
the object’s nonexistent character, and presents the
act of imagination under four forms: (1) as non­
existent, or (2) as absent, or (3) as existing else­
where, or (4) as neutral in respect of the judgment
about its existence. According to him, these four
acts include in different degrees the whole category
of negation.
Here Sartre is consciously at odds with all the
analyses, so far, of the phenomenologists who, he
believes, had misunderstood the intentional struc­
ture of the image, and had derived the image too
The Principal Themes of Sartre’s Thought 49

much from perception. But the image-forming act

of imagination is a productive process of sponta­
neous consciousness, and not a thing that resides
within another thing, in consciousness. According
to him, consciousness has to be conceived as empty
of all images coming from outside. He lays much
stress on the unreality and nonexistence of the ob­
jects of the imagination. T h e image of his friend
Pierre (an existing man) and of a centaur (non­
existent) are merely two aspects of nothingness.
What is imagined exists only in the imagination,
and nowhere else. This view is specifically Sartre’s
own. T h e second part of T h e Psychology o f Im ag­
ination stresses the synthesis in the act of imagina­
tion of intellectual and emotive elements. “If the
image presents itself as the lower limit toward
which knowledge tends when it becomes debased,
then it also presents itself as the upper limit toward
which affectivity tends when it seeks to know it­
self.” 17
T h e emotions in the act of imagination trans­
port man back to the magical stage, and produce
the image by means of incantation. Our attitude
toward such an object diners radically from that
toward an existing object. In the face of images,
love and hate turn into quasi-love and quasi-hate,
and our observation of them is mere quasi-observa-
tion. T h e imagined object is, so to speak, between
dream and reality.
50 Jean-Paul Sartre

Inversion o f A ll P receden t
Thus the traditional view is inverted. Now,
perception and consciousness, world and art are
dominated by the imagination, and not the other
way around. Imagination becomes the primary
function of consciousness, its typical expression by
which it now is analyzed as freedom (spontaneity)
and negation. T h e object is not a stimulus pro­
ducing a reaction (Kant’s “being affected’’), because
the object, being nonexistent, has become a
thought. Consciousness, thus, is not part of a causal
relation; rather, it opens up a relation of meaning.
Being free, it rests upon the possibility of with­
drawing (rcculer) from reality and positing the
object as nonexistent. “T o posit the world and to
negate it is one and the same act.” T h e world is
transmuted into the unreal and imaginary, the
world situation in which I do so is negated, and this
product of the imagination, according to Sartre, in
turn presents itself at every moment as the meaning
of what is real.
Many of these views have found their way into
modern drama and into surrealism, into sculpture
and poetry. This definition of Sartre changes the
work of art, too, into something unreal. “T h e real
is never beautiful, beauty is a value that can be ap­
plied only to the mental image, and this means the
negation of the world in its essential structure.”
Now, nausea in the face of the experience of un-
aesthetic reality becomes the basic experience of
The Principal Thanes of Sartre's Thought 51

existing man. Sartre thus provides the basis for the

imaginary world view of ec-sisting man, of man
who is beside, outside himself, who has stepped out­
side his own, voided consciousness, out into noth­
ingness. T h e novel N ausea thus is an expression of
the world view of the period between the wars, just
as Goethe's W erlh er was an expression of the
period of sensibility. T his nausea becomes the basic
experience of existence in the famous description
of Roquentin in the Jard in P ublic. Roquentin is
trying, in all kinds of ways, to justify his existence.
T h e book's essential idea is: nothing justifies exist­
ence. U en n u i, surfeit, boredom covers everything
like a crust.
So I was in the park just now. T h e roots of the chestnut tree
were sunk into the ground just under my bench. 1 couldn’t
remember it was a root any more. T h e words had vanished
and with them the significance of things, their methods of
use, and the feeble points of reference which men have
traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head
bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely
beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision.
It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days,
had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' . . . usually
existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you
can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never
touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, 1 must
believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or
there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.’ . . . I
was thinking of belonging, 1 was telling myself that the sea
belonged to the class of green objects. . . . If anyone had
asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good
faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was
52 Jean-Paul Sartre

added to external things without changing anything in their

nature. And then, all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day:
existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harm­
less look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of
things, this root was kneaded into existence.18

T h e character of the absurd is inseparably in­

herent in existence. An absolute senselessness stares
at us from all sides, like the muzzles of pistols.
T h e word “absurdity” is coming to life under my pen; a little
while ago, in the garden, I couldn’t find it, but neither was I
looking for it, I didn’t need it: I thought without words, on
things, with things. . . . And without formulating anything
clearly, 1 understood that I had found the key to Existence,
the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could
grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. Ab­
surdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I
touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character
of this absurdity here. A movement, an event in the tiny
coloured world of men is only relatively absurd: by relation
to the accompanying circumstances. . . . But a little while
ago 1 made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd.
This root—there was nothing in relation to which it was
absurd. Oh, how can I put it in words? Absurd: in relation to
the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the
sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing—not
even a profound, secret upheaval of nature—could explain it.
Evidently I did not know everything, 1 had not seen the seeds
sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled
paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was im portant: the
world of explanations and reasons is not the world of ex­
istence.11*

“T h e absurd,” says Roquentin, “cannot be de­

rived, it is irreducible.” T h e statement, “My exist­
The Principal Themes of Sartre's Thought 53

ence is absurd,” simply means that my existence has

no logical basis. "Sir, you are superfluous, nothing
justifies you.” T h e proof is this: “T h e world exist­
ed before you were born, and went on through his­
tory, and it will go on in the same way after you are
dead.” T h e rejoinder of the person in question,
that his family needed him, is refuted with the
question: “But is there any justification for the
existence of your family?” Here is again the old
core question that has tormented Sartre since his
early childhood: How can our existence, and that
of others, be ju stified? And here again is the same
answer: II n’est pas ju stifiable.20 In the play T h e
Victors, one of the dying men says: “ I am not miss­
ing any place, I don’t leave a gap. T h e subways are
overcrowded. So are the restaurants. T h e heads are
stuffed to the bursting point with petty worries. I
have slipped out of the world, and it has stayed full.
Like an egg.”
But then our existence is accidental and not
necessary, not an eternal verity. Thus we read in
N ausea:
T h e essential thing is contingency. 1 mean that one cannot
define existence as necessity. T o exist is simply to be th ere;
those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can
never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people
who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this
contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no
necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a
delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the ab­
solute, consequently, the perfect free gift.21
54 Jean-Paul Sartre

Frustration, we would say, pointlessness, superflu­

ousness; thus it becomes understandable when he
continues:
Ail is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize
that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins
to float, as the other evening . . . : here is Nausea; here
there is what those bastards . . . try to hide from themselves
with their idea of their rights. But what a poor lie: no one
has any rights; they are entirely free, like other men, they
cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves,
secretly, they are superfluous, that is to say, amorphous,
vague, and sad.22

Here, even in this early stage of Sartre’s thinking,

the characteristics of existence are indicated: con­
tingency, absurdity, anguish, nausea, pointlessness,
superfluousness, impossible to justify, sad, vague,
amorphous. But there emerges at the same time the
paradox, as we shall see in the sequel, that Sartre
associates with this existence which he has found so
negative: the absolute values of infinite responsi­
bility and freedom.
 3
Resistance:
Freedom
and Responsibility
w. and occupation served to bring the fun­
damental modern experience of existence—nausea,
nothingness, absurdity—to the forefront of Sartre’s
awareness and to dominance in his philosophy, and
at the same time added the paradoxical counter-
ideas of absolute freedom and responsibility.
But first, a few more facts of Sartre’s life and
work during this period: After military service and
his captivity as prisoner of Avar, he Avas, on April 1,
1940, exchanged for civilian laborers, and resumed
his teaching post at the L y c ie Pasteur; from 1942 to
1944, he Avas professor at the L y cee C ondorcet, and
at the same time active as a Avriter in the resistance.
Beginning in 1945, on an indefinite leave from his
teaching post, he made his first visit to the United
States, as a journalist; he subsequently traveled
Avidely from his Paris residence, especially in the
United States, Africa, Scandinavia, and the Soviet
Union.
His Avritings Avere: B ein g and N othingness,
1943; the three-volume Avork L es Chcrnins de la
liberte, consisting of T h e Age o f R eason , T h e R e ­
prieve, and T ro u b led Sleep, 1945; Existentialism ,
A nti-Sem ite and Jew , and Descartes, 1946; Situa­
tions I, W hat Is L iteratu re ? and B au d elaire, 1947;
Situations 11, 1948, Situations III, 1949; Saint
Gen&t, A ctor and Martyr, 1952; in August of that
same year, his R eply to A lbert Cam us; and Cri­
tiqu e de la raison d ialectiqu e, I960. Plays: T h e
Flies, 1943; N o Exit, 1944; T h e R esp ectfu l Prosti­
tute, 1946; Dirty H ands, 1948; T h e D evil and the
56
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 57

Good, L o rd , 1951; K ean (adapted from Dumas),

1954, N ekrassov, 1956; and T h e C on dem n ed o f
A ltona, 1960. Film scripts: T h e Chips A re Down,
1947; and In the M esh, 1948.
T h e development of Sartre's basic concepts
and insights can be understood only against the
background of the resistance movement, which was
to become the great test of Sartre’s existential proj­
ect. Thus Sartre in 1944 wrote in L ettres fran-
gaises, under the heading “ Republic of Silence”:

W c were never more free than under the German occupa­

tion. W e had lost all rights, starting with the right to express
our opinions. W e were daily insulted to our faces, and had to
accept the insults in silence. W e were being deported en
masse as laborers, Jews, or political prisoners. Everywhere—
in the newspapers, on the walls, in the cinemas—we had to
look at the dirty and monotonous image of ourselves that our
oppressors were trying to impress upon us. And in conse­
quence of all this wc were free. Because the Nazi poison infil­
trated our very thoughts, every independent thought repre­
sented a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to
force us to keep our mouths shut, ever)' single word achieved
the value of a proclamation of principle. Because wc were
chased like dogs, every gesture of ours assumed the signifi­
cance of a desperate wager. T h e often horrible circumstances
of our struggle made it possible for us to live that fragmented
and unbearable existence which is known as the human con­
dition. . . . A single word was enough to provoke ten or
even a hundred arrests. This total responsibility in total soli­
tude, does it not truly unveil the nature of our freedom ?
. . . Thus, in darkness and blood, was founded the strongest
of all republics. Every one of its citizens knew what he owed
to all, and that nonetheless he could rely only on himself.
Every one of them played a historic role in utter solitude.
58 Jean-Paul Sartre

Every one of them undertook, in resisting the aggressors, to be

freely and irrevocably himself. And by choosing himself in
his freedom, he chose freedom itself.1

This exemplary experience of life under the occu­

pation became the lasting model of existence in
general. All the characteristics of existence were
henceforth illustrated by means of that model. Soli­
tude, silence, and darkness are in the nature of our
existence at the present moment in history. By
choosing ourselves in the face of torture, concentra­
tion camp, and executioner we have made our
choice in total responsibility that reveals the nature
of our freedom.
Sartre elaborated this idea in Existentialism ,
using as his example a student who had to choose
between two value systems: T h e formalism of
Kant’s moral law places us, under the radical re­
sponsibility of our own concrete choice, between
two alternatives of equal value—a free choice by
which we not only make a decision concerning our­
selves, but simultaneously also make a decision for
all mankind. This causes and at the same time rein­
forces the profound anguish of our existence in a
constant extreme borderline situation, which Sar­
tre sees ineluctably bound up with existence. He
does not want it to be understood as merely an ex­
ceptional situation: it belongs to the absurdity and
historicity of our existence, as he emphasized in de­
tail in W hat Is Literature? T h e writer today no
longer writes summer fiction for people on vaca­
tion; for us, vacations are over:
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 59

O ur public was composed of people of our own kind, who

like us lived in expectation of war and death. For these read­
ers without leisure, incessantly occupied with one single
worry, only one single subject could be sufficient: what we
had to write about was their war, their death. After we had,
in a brutal fashion, become one with history, we were com­
pelled to produce a literature of historicity. But the peculiar­
ity of our position, I believe, lies in this, that war and occu­
pation have thrown us into the melting pot of the world, and
led us to rediscover the Absolute in the midst of the relative.2

Once again, the absolute and at the same time

absurd character of our existence breaks through
the stigma of torture. T here follows an interesting
discussion of Kafka, and of how far he has prepared
and encouraged that absurdity: his “Seek the unat­
tainable transcendence, the world of grace, when
grace fails to com e/’ Probably, Sartre considers
concentration camp and torture chamber as typical
of the existential situation for this reason, too, that
he himself and all individual things and ultimately
the entire universe have originated by accident, not
of necessity, because they are in vain and super­
fluous. Since their existence cannot be justified by
anything, their fate, too, must be of the same kind.
Here, too, his entire thinking bears the mark of the
deep trauma of his youth, when he could not justify
his existence, when he was like a poor bdlard, an
illegitimate child. Our “historicity” consists in be­
ing knocked about by fate from one extreme to an­
other.
During the time of the resistance he also
learned of a poet, Jean Genet, or Saint Genet, who
60 Jean-Paid Sartre

was in jail for repeated burglary and theft. Sartre

immediately identified himself with that poet.
Saint Genet's existence was no more illegitimate
than is ours, the idea of law is a pretext, at bottom
our existence is just as €tin justifiable^* as Saint Ge­
net’s. But the poet is more authentic than we, and
simply wanted to safeguard the free project of his
existence without regard to conventions. Thus,
Sartre dedicated to him his book Saint G en et, A c­
tor and Martyr. T h e poet is always outside the pale
of bourgeois society and its hypocritical “m auvaise
fo i,” its mistaken respect of the community. Saint
Genet meant to shape his whole life, not just his
poetry, in accordance with his free imagination,
out of his own innermost responsibility. Sartre’s es­
capades, too, must always be understood in this
light. T h e ossified legal conventions of the bour­
geois world appear to him ^ ^ ju s tifia b le ” and un-
authentic.

B ein g and N othingness

T h e "N o !” with which the resistance had to

oppose the oppressors led to an awareness of noth­
ingness-one of the major themes of Sartre’s prin­
cipal work, B ein g and N othingness, which was
written during this period. There is a cartoon
showing Sartre as Hamlet, with a skull in his hand,
speaking the famous " T o be or not to be.” Is that
what "nothingness” means here? For Sartre, non-
being derives from the experience of saying N o:
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 61

T h e not, as an abrupt intuitive discovery, appears as con­

sciousness (of b ein g), consciousness of the not. In a word, if
being is everywhere, it is not only Nothingness which, as
Bergson maintains, is inconceivable; for negation will never
be derived from being. T h e necessary condition for our say­
ing not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and
outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.3

Here we clearly discern Sartre’s advance from

Husserl to Heidegger, whose important role in the
rediscovery of nothingness was expressed in his
analysis of being in B ein g and T im e, and centrally
in his Freiburg inaugural address "W hat Is Meta­
physics?" T h e essential connection between an­
guish and nothingness also comes to the fore. T h at
of which anguish is in dread is nothingness, and at
the same time being-in-the-world as a whole. Noth­
ingness is constitutive of being in a very specific
way:
Only on the basis of nothingness’s original manifestness can
man's existence approach and concern itself with particular
beings. But since being is by its nature referred to particular
beings which it is not and which are itself, it does as such
itself derive from manifest nothingness. T o exist means: to
be held into nothingness. By holding itself into nothingness,
existence already surpasses beings as a whole. This surpass­
ing of particular beings is what we call transcendence. If
existence did not fundamentally transcend, which now
means, if it did not from the start hold itself out into noth­
ingness, then it could never relate to particular beings, and
thus to itself. W ithout the original manifestness of nothing­
ness, there is no selfhood and no freedom.4

Here again, Sartre gives to Heidegger’s noth­

ingness a new and original interpretation. In H ei­
62 Jcan-Paul Sartre

degger, the word “existence” is applied exclusively

to human being; similarly, Sartre’s discovery of
things in existence starts from all particular beings
(ourselves included), and only secondarily from
human existence which alone is of interest to Sar­
tre; for man, and only man, can escape from the
prison of being an object, by means of the imagina­
tion acting in the free project of his existence and
in artistic creation. Analogously, Sartre also rein­
terprets Heidegger’s thoughts about nothingness.
Heidegger himself, we recall, had taken up Hegel’s
statement (which Sartre, too, studied closely as par­
ticularly important):

"Pure being and pure nothingness is, thus, the same.”

(Science of Logic I, W W III, 74). This statement of Hegel is
correct. Being and nothingness belong together, but not be­
cause they, seen in terms of Hegel’s concept of thinking,
agree in their indeterminacy and immediacy, but because Be­
ing itself is in its essential nature finite, and manifests itself
only in the transcendence of existence held out into nothing­
ness.5

Sartre interprets nothingness in terms of his

ontology of existence. In his Psychology o f Im ag­
ination, he had already commented with regard to
his central concept that “to posit an image is to
construct an object on the fringe of the whole of
reality, which means therefore to hold the real at a
distance, to free oneself from it, in a word, to deny
it.” On the next page, he illustrates the primary
role of nothingness in the imagination by the com­
parison with an impressionist painter who places
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 63

himself at a convenient distance from the picture

in order to recognize the multitude of small brush
strokes as a forest. “T h e possibility of constructing
a whole is given as the primary structure of the act
of taking perspective. . . . Thus to posit the world
as a world or to ‘negate’ it is one and the same
thing.” So far, this could be an illustration of H ei­
degger’s thought. But already the accent is differ­
ent, and it becomes more pronounced if we recall
what Sartre, in T h d o rie dcs em otion s, says about
the fear at the encounter with a wild animal: “By
swooning, I can annihilate the animal as an object
of my consciousness, by extinguishing my entire
consciousness in swooning.” In this way, according
to Sartre, existing man reacts to the encounter with
the raw existence of other existences, whether
things or men, with a continuous movement of
flight.
Our existence is a constant evasion, filled with
profound horror and nausea, before the absurdity
of the naked, brute existence of objects. This flight
is a taking of distance, a leap into nothingness,
which frees us in that we negate the naked, raw,
brute reality which stares at us senselessly from
every side, and assures us of our freedom to project
our own existence, to be independent of the essence-
scheme of the objects through freedom of the imag­
ination; finally, it is the freedom of choosing our­
selves in this or that extreme act flying in the face
of the seriousness of objects and respectable society.
64 Jean-Paul Sartre

T his is how Saint Genet is a hero of freedom, the

poet and martyr of his own existence.
Here, fundamentally, we have the large and
richly varied theme of Sartre’s encompassing lit­
erary work during these years. Existing as tran­
scending into nothingness has been translated from
the most seriously intended but nonetheless aca­
demic presentation of its discoverer Heidegger,
into the inescapable shrillness of our historicity—
our typical historical situation as the victims of the
concentration camps confronting the executioners,
the red tape of officialdom, conventional moral-
izers, and the traditional “churchy” Christians. But
it began with the nauseated awakening of Roquen-
tin in the Jard in P u blic, face to face with the ab­
surd tree root and stones; with existen ce bru te of
all the things that have contingent existence, the
existence which to Sartre is unjustifiable, which
tortures us and wants to take us captive. T his exist-
ant brut, as Sartre calls any existing being, la chose,
a thing (including our fellow men who can become
i,chosiste,>—thinglike—when they prescribe essen­
tials to us, and who are attacked in plays such as N o
Exit and T h e Victors); tout ce qu i est statistique,
massif, invariantf plein , all “that agrees with itself,”
Sartre called " cn -soi” the in-itself, which confronts
the open, unaccomplished, nonrigid, free project of
authentic existence, of my subjective being, the
“pour-soi,” the for-itself:
Finally . . . heing-in-itsclf is. This means that being can
neither he derived from the possible nor reduced to the nec­
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 65

essary. Necessity concerns the connection between ideal prop­

ositions but not that of existents. An existing phenomenon
can never be derived from another existent qua existent.
This is what we shall call the contingency of being-in-itself.
But neither can being-in-itself be derived from a possibility.
T h e possible is a structure of the for-itsclj; that is, it belongs
to the other region of being. Being-in-itself is never either
possible or impossible. It is. This is what consciousness ex­
presses in anthropomorphic terms by saying that being is
superfluous (de trop)—that is, that consciousness absolutely
cannot derive being from anything, either from another be­
ing, or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Uncreated,
without reason for being, without any connection with an­
other being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity.7

Sartre’s great discovery is the “look of the

other.” Ju st as men turned into stone under the
gaze of the Medusa, just so the being-for-itself of
man congeals, under the gaze of the other, into
being-in-itself. Man becomes an object (for in­
stance, an object of appraisal) of the other. True,
he now knows what he, taken objectively, is—but
he pays rather dearly for this knowledge, because
he now is “taken,” unfree, an object with which he
can do nothing since he has lost his freedom of ac­
tion. T his situation changes only when he in turn
“looks at” the other and makes him an object. Now
he is free once more, and must depend on himself
alone. Everything human is discussed by Sartre
from this point of view: God and world, freedom
and slavery, employer and laborer, I and We, love
and hate. Sexual desire and caresses provide the
starting point for extensive revelations concerning
human nature and man’s relation to his fellows.
66 Jean-Paul Sartre

In-itself and For-itself

T h e human presence of subjects (that which
alone is allied existence by Heidegger) now has
different characteristics from being-in-itself, the be­
ing of objects. Human existence is variable, fragile,
capricious, does not agree with itself, changes from
moment to moment, is the artist of its own meta­
morphoses, can destroy and re-create itself, carries
within it the germ of nothingness, is “v id e au
m ilieu ”—empty in the middle—like an empty
flower vase, and can give itself the lie. T his human
existence, following Pascal, thinks, in existing, that
it exists; it is a for-itself, pour-soi in contrast with
the in-itself, the en-soi of the being of objects. It
appears as the necessary condition of nothingness,
its fragility is nothing else than a possibility of non-
being. T his distinction between the en-soi of the
lifeless object and the pour-soi of living human ex­
istence became the butt of critical jokes by various
philosophers such as Alquid or Gabriel Marcel: My
day yesterday, being closed and finished, is an en-
soi. Is tomorrow, then, a pour-soi? Or: I have the
grippe—is that an en-soi or a pour-soi? W hat is de­
cisive is that Sartre intended to bring out sharply
this contrast: free man (pour-soi) on the one hand,
unfree things on the other. Things that are com­
pleted, closed, finished (essence) on the one hand;
and on the other hand, man who gives a meaning to
these things and who is free to deal with that mean­
ing. And this distinction must always be under­
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 67

stood against the richly varied background of B ein g

an d N othingness, Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis.
Nothingness alone opens the possibility to
contrast existing man's for-itself from the in-itself
of finished objects. Man, inasmuch as he is still liv­
ing, secretes nothingness, so to speak; his conscious­
ness of himself prevents him from agreeing with
himself; he feels the inner void that is peculiar to
him. When life ends, this nothingness vanishes: the
dead man becomes a fullness of being (plen itu de
d ’etre), a rigid in-itself. T o Sartre, this process is
definitive and irreversible. Thus he writes in his
novel T h e R ep riev e, published about the same
time as B ein g and N othingness, which describes the
delay, the “phony war” preceding World W ar II:
Dead. His life was there and everywhere, impalpable, com­
plete, as full and hard as an egg, so compact that all the
forces in the world could not have introduced an atom into
it . . . a vast, motionless, vociferous country fair: shouts,
laughter, the whistle of the locomotives, and the shrapnel-
burst on May 6, 1917, the savage buzzing in his head when lie
fell between two trenches . . . his life was a thing adrift,
enclosing agonies now motionless . . . and all its intercostal
agony, with imperishable little jewels. . . .s
Things are outside; human consciousness is
the void in the middle, which is formed by its own
nothingness. Freedom is the peculiarity of human
consciousness in that it secretes its own nothing­
ness, eliminates it; consciousness wraps itself up
wholly in this void, it exiles itself and makes itself a
prisoner within its freedom, it gains a distance that
separates us forever from the universe outside:
68 Jcan-Paul Sartre

Outside. Everything is outside: the trees on the quay, the two

houses by the bridge. . . . Inside, nothing, not even a puff of
smoke, there is no inside, there is nothing. Myself: nothing. I
am free, he said to himself, and his mouth was dry. . . . I am
nothing; 1 possess nothing. As inseparable from the world as
light, and yet exiled, gliding like light over the surface of
stones and water, but nothing can ever grasp me or absorb
me. Outside the world, outside the past, outside myself: free­
dom is exile, and 1 am condemned to be free.11

In ever-new narrative and dramatic situations,

Sartre elaborates this tormenting consciousness of
being empty. T h e matter is related to the dread of
freedom, which had in essence already been dis­
covered by Kierkegaard with his “concept of an­
guish”: being “suspended above a depth of 70,000
fathoms”; the possibility of sinning, which is in the
very nature of freedom; dread and anguish as the
“vertigo of freedom” in which freedom collapses
and man commits sin because, in falling, he grasps
at the nearest possibility. For Sartre, the issue was
no longer sin; sin, m auvaisc foi, would be for him
precisely the renunciation of the free project of ex­
istence, and thus seriousness with one of the stand­
ard labels of traditional morality; for Sartre, the
point is this feeling of being outside everything we
encounter, be it objects and other human beings.
Sartre and Kierkegaard hold this in common,
that, in anguish, freedom puts itself in question.
Sartre’s man strives and yearns for the eternal
peaceful fullness of things, lie hopes for an abso­
lute, but that hope is vain. Transcendence is, to
Sartre, only the transcendence of consciousness, but
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 69

even it is possible only in the act of the imagina­

tion, otherwise we are walled up within an exist­
ence that knows no transcendence. No escape from
the prison is possible, neither upward to the divine
nor sideways to the things around us:
Halfway across the Pont-Neuf he stopped and began to
laugh: liberty—I sought it far away; it was so near that I
couldn’t touch it, that 1 can’t touch it; it is, in fact, myself. I
am my own freedom. He had hoped that one day he would
be filled with joy, transfixed by a lightning-flash. But there
was neither lightning-flash nor joy: only a sense of desola­
tion, a void blurred by its own aspect, an anguish so trans­
parent as to be utterly unseeable.10

Man's D ou ble C haracter

Man, existing in the world ns being-for-itself,
has a double character, however: he exists also as a
material object. He has in himself a structure bru-
tale that is at once his expression and his limit; his
own body is an “outside.” His body is of the inner­
most concern to him, yet it remains a stranger to
him. It can be looked at, touched, just like a tree or
a statue, and yet we cannot grasp its essential na­
ture. Even with Kierkegaard, man’s deep shock of
anguish sprang from the paradox that in the sexual
act man is at the same time the most exalted spirit
and the most brutal body. Sartre uses these areas as
the model case for a merciless analysis revealing the
double character of human existence—and does so
without the least inhibitions, in a manner often
profoundly shocking to our sensibilities. In the
70 Jean-Paul Sartre

sexual act, man experiences himself both as noth­

ingness in his freedom, and simultaneously as mat­
ter in his facticity, which indeed always places him
in a firm and unalterable situation that limits and
in part totally suspends his freedom: man flutters
back and forth between the two extremes, nothing­
ness-freedom and matter-facticity-bondage. This
unsteadiness constitutes his viscosity, the sliminess
of human existence.
I am never altogether pure consciousness, says
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre's intellectual kinsman, whose
books (Stir la P erception and Systdme du com-
portem en t) develop certain of Husserl’s ideas
and deal afresh with man’s subject-object relation.
According to Sartre, man is perpetually in a half­
way state between solid and liquid. Sartre describes
him with words like figer (coagulate), em pdter
(turn into crust), consciousness s’en glu e (gets
stuck on birdlime), freedom s’en lise (sinks into
quicksand); applies to him such adjectives as poi-
sieitx (smeary), suerd (sugar-sticky); and calls him
"soft caramel” or "curdling cream.” Sartre becomes
the philosopher and poet of man’s viscosity, his
oscillation between in-itself and for-itself. He wants
to bridge the chasm between the in-itself and the
for-itself, between reality and consciousness, but at
the same time to maintain their complete dualism,
as the actual characters do in Sartre’s novels and
plays.
At one time, the in-itself is the intentional ob­
ject of the for-itself of freedom; at another time,
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 71

Sartre sees the for-itself as body, as facticity, as

man's being cast into a situation, as dependent on
the in-itself. His monumental 700-page work, B e ­
ing and N othin gness, is a gigantic, Sisyphus-like
labor to present the futility of human existence be­
tween freedom and objectness—its viscosity; and in
his novels and plays he tries to portray man flutter­
ing back and forth between these two extremes.
Man, being “brutal structure,” is a body which
concerns him directly and at the same time remains
strange to him. Man can look at his own body as if
it were a statue, can touch it without grasping its
essential nature. Sartre depicts the experience in
T h e R ep riev e:
He reached out his hands and slid them slowly over the stone
parapet, it was wrinkled and furrowed, like a petrified
sponge, and still warm from the afternoon sun. T h ere it lay,
vast and massive, enclosing in itself the crushed silence, the
compressed shadows that arc the insides of objects. There it
lay: a plenitude. He longed to clutch to that stone and melt
into it, to fill himself with its opaqueness and repose. But it
could not help him: it was outside, and forever. T h ere lay his
hands on the white parapet: bronze hands, they seemed, as
he looked at them. But just because he could look at them,
they were no longer his, they were the hands of another, they
were outside, like the trees, like the reflections shimmering in
the Seine—severed hands. He closed his eyes, and they be­
came his own again. . . .!1

From this Sartrean ontology there follows an

altogether distinctive theory of values, not to say
ethics. It could be superscribed with the general
72 Jcan-Paul Sartre

guiding motto: Value is the anti-viscous. It yields

the following insights.
1. Nausea is the plunge from pure conscious­
ness into the feeling of bodily existence, the con­
glutination of the for-itsclf with the in-itself. Con­
sciousness begins to slip and, so to speak, slides into
sleep, its tribute to the body, a passing rigor m ortis;
sleep is the dread which the living body feels of the
future corpse.
2. Under the “look of the other" that turns
man into a rigid object, the intimidated individual
feels his freedom becoming pasty. T h e other is like
the head of Medusa (“H ell—that is the others!”):
he turns us to stone. T h e individual, in turn, at­
tempts to petrify the other, by looking back at him;
the result is a fluttering back and forth between
freedom-subject and thing-object, a continuous
change of state.
3. In the face of love’s failure to fuse two free­
doms into one, sexual desire appears like the swal­
lowing up of consciousness in the quicksand of the
body, the triumph of facts (facticity) over freedom,
of the in-itself over the for-itself.
4. Fortunately, we can escape the vertigo of
this constant fall by a flight into the imagination.
(Kierkegaard, too, felt reflection and fantasy to be
a liberation from the factual world of actual life!)
Art resolutely opposes our hardening in the brute
world of things.
5. But there is a real life in which we must
become engaged; this means that we are prompted
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 73

to act freely. Usually, man avoids his freedom,

which withdraws before him like running water.
T h e philistine indeed wants to be an object and
craves the repose of the stone (seriousness), but
does not therefore cease to be free. Freedom curdles
like cream. T h e philistine conglutinates, petrifies
into the completed thing, becomes slimy. This is
his m auvaise /oi—his bad conscience.
6. T ru e, genuine existence would be, then, to
accept ones freedom despite its evanescent charac­
ter. W e must maintain our freedom within our­
selves (this nothingness as a “hole in being”),
without getting caught in things. Only such an
existence is “authentic,” it is the ineluctable pre­
condition of all genuine morality. Thus Sartre’s
heroes act grossly immoral in the eyes of the phil-
istines—because of their genuine morality. Saint
Genet, the poet-burglar, is the true man who dares
to live the free project of his existence. This is a
man as man ought to be.
Sartre, of course, also describes men as they are:
viscous-slimy, fluttering back and forth between
freedom and situation, existence and thing—but
insofar as they are authentic, they are as nauseated
by this existence as is Roquentin and the other
heroes of Sartre’s novels and plays; Electra, in T h e
F lies, is all viscosity, while Orestes is all hope, free­
ing himself and opposing the sticky sliminess of
Jupiter. Orestes, who shakes himself loose from the
birdlime of an alien morality and spreads his wings
in a new project of existence, appears as Sartre’s
74 Jean-Paul Sartre

first moral, authentic character. T h e people in T h e

R ep riev e seem to be waiting for the outbreak of
war’s horrors as if they were waiting for a liberation
—the war that will place them into extreme border­
line situations and thus make visible the nature of
existence: a bcing-outsidc-oneself, an existence re­
leased from the unfreedom of objects into nothing­
ness, into freedom. Existence here is challenged once
again to choose itself in free commitment. In N o
Exit we are shown the condition of men who live
simultaneously in the en-soi and the pou r-soi: they
are dead consciousnesses.
Thus the development of the central ideas of
B ein g an d N othingness provides a key to the un­
derstanding of Sartre’s novels and plays, while these,
conversely, present existence by existence, as Plato
intended to do in his dialogues, and Kierkegaard in
his existential novels by which he overcame ’’Para­
graph 17 of the System.” Here, too, we see Sartre's
double character, his bastard nature: he needed the
two simultaneously, the ‘‘Paragraph 17 of the Sys­
tem” and his creative works, in order to provide a
concrete analysis of existence by means of their mu­
tual illumination. T h e originality of his philos­
ophy resides in his unique concretion, reaching the
boundlessness of his description of nauseating mat­
ter, from which he draws the most abstract conclu­
sions. And the other way around: T h e originality
of his literary activity resides in the philosophical
penetration of his characters and situations, which,
charged with unprecedented symbolic power, con­
Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility 75

cretize, by means of extreme situations, matters such

as it had not been possible to present before Sartre.
Philosophy and literature, in this typically French
synthesis, cannot be understood the one without
the other.
 4
<3*3KXX><>

Dialogue
with Friend
and Foe
H o w e v e r ready we may be to follow Sartre’s
extraordinary lines of thought, it cannot be denied
that he frequently loses himself in absolutely un­
tenable regions, images, and scenes. Even the most
generous appraisal must admit that Sartre goes too
far in using every possible occasion to illustrate
philosophical situations by means of the most re­
volting sexual descriptions whose necessity often
remains completely incomprehensible. W e cannot
rid ourselves of the suspicion, then, that Sartre is in
this respect psychopathologically burdened, so that
his thought is virtually blocked.
T h is trend has become more pronounced
through the years. His book Saijit G en et, A ctor and
M artyr obviously represents a unique high point in
this direction. Earlier books had often repelled
even the reader willing to make ample concessions,
by their needless crescendo of repulsive excesses.
“Existential psychoanalysis” does not, after all, en­
joy special license to wallow in Neronian scatology,
such as, for example, the sickish sexual experiences
of cripples in T h e R ep riev e. But when it comes to
Saint GenSt, his pornographic descriptions of
homosexual excesses, of the most revolting viola­
tions of the law, and of an anarchic lack of convic­
tion that leaves Stirner’s anarchism far behind—all
this is beyond discussion. Indeed, there is hardly a
book of Sartre’s without passages that are bound to
provoke the strongest revulsion and objections,
totally lacking in all breeding and good taste,
whether we think of sexual scenes or other matters.
78
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 79

No wonder, then, that Sartre has many oppo­

nents. It is not always easy here to do justice to both
sides. T h e later his pronouncements, the more bla­
tant are their negative aspects and the more violent
the reactions to them. W e need to look carefully in
order to discern what still remains in some measure
justifiable, and what must be ascribed to psycho-
pathological aberrations.
Even Sartre’s political pronouncements cannot
be excepted from such scrutiny. At bottom, every­
thing traces back to the bastardization trauma of
his childhood: the hateful reaction of the child as­
suming himself to be illegitimate, of the precocious
solitary youth who liked to see himself in the dream
role of the fau x batard. Wherever Sartre encounters
illegitimacy—in sexual, economic, aesthetic, scien­
tific, or philosophical matters—he exacerbates and
elaborates the situation to its extremes with a
veritable passion, and draws far-reaching philo­
sophical conclusions by means of deriving every­
thing from masochism and sadism. Let us look once
again at the situation of the pou r-soi/ en-soi, the
for-itself confronting others, since for Sartre every
opposition reveals a traumatic situation:
T hey sec m e—no, not even that: it sees me. He was the object
of looking. A look that searched him to the depths, pierced
him like a knife-thrust, and was not his own look, the embod­
iment of night . . . condemning him to be himself, coward,
hypocrite, pederast, for all eternity. Himself, quivering be­
neath that look, and defying it. T h at look! T h e nigluI As if
night was the look. I am seen. Transparent, transparent,
80 Jean-Paul Sartre

transfixed. But by whom? *7 am not alone/" said Daniel

aloud.1

Is the other not merely an object, a for-itself to

me? Is that body which I see at work anything more
to me than a body? What distinguishes the other
person from a bodily object is his glance. T h is
glance tells me that the other, too, is a for-itself.
Each, we see each other, and the other is just as free
as I. “I understand immediately that I am vulner­
able, that I take up space and that I can in no case
escape from the space where I am defenseless. In
short: I am seen,” Sartre writes in B ein g an d N o th -
ingness. When the other looks at me I tend to feel
that I am mere object, “existent bru t” ; I cease to
feel free, I am turned to stone. T h e other is the
Gorgo Medusa—in a certain sense I feel myself
dying under his look, I have been stolen from my­
self, my present state has been made eternal, I have
assumed the eternal repose of objects, and am set
free of my freedom. “Thou lookest at me, and all
hope departs; I am weary of my efforts to escape
myself. But I know that, beneath thine eye, I can
no longer escape myself.”
I and the other, we are two freedoms which
meet, and flee and paralyze each other. W e begin to
flutter in our existence back and forth between the
object-ego and the subject-ego, between ego-object
and ego-freedom. T h e other serves me to grasp my­
self, otherwise I would be only flight. T h e other's
petrifying spectacles keep me imprisoned between
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 81

object-ego and subject-ego. T his is the reason why

the other is always my executioner, and I am the
executioner of the other, at once both masochist
and sadist, fluttering back and forth in the ambiva­
lence of our hate-love. Here we have the basic
model of human relations as Sartre sees them.
T h is constant vacillation between being a sub­
ject and being an object, the oscillation between
pour~soi and cti-soi, occurs, according to Sartre,
throughout nearly all the attempts to solve the sub­
ject-object relation that we encounter in the history
of philosophy. In personal terms, it is a wavering
between shame and mnuvnise foi, between my body
as an en-soi and my betrayed freedom as subject in
m auvaise foi. Hence my viscosity, my sliminess, be­
cause I have no center, I have been made headless
and do not know what I am about and what I want.
Even if we (the other and myself) mutually respect
our freedom, we yet cast each other into a world of
tolerance and indifference, by mutually condemn­
ing each other to freedom and yet remaining inca­
pable of making use of freedom. This is absolute
hell, between sadism and masochism (see numer­
ous passages in B ein g and N othingness and in T h e
R eprieve). Thus, Aegisthus exclaims in T h e Flies: I

I want that every one of my subjects carry my image within

him, and that even in his solitude he feel my severe eye bear­
ing down on his most secret thought. But I am their first
victim. I see myself any longer only as they seem me, I bend
over the open well of their souls, and there is my image, deep
down at the bottom. It repels me and fascinates me. Al-
82 Jean-Paul Sartre

mighty God, who am I other than the fear that the others feel
of m e ?2

This is the way things look if Hegel’s speculation

is to be realized, that my “being for others” is a
necessary transition stage in the dialectical develop­
ment of my “being for myself.” (Cf. Kierkegaard’s
image of Nero.)
Put into practice, Hegel’s master-and-slave
scheme poisons all human I-and-thou relations and
turns them into an I-it bondage. Sartre has now
achieved the total perversion of all that is natural.
We are no more than mutual enemies in a sexual-
pathological battle in which either we or the other
must be debased to a thing (chosislc). Freedom
means either to be subjugated or to subjugate
others. Love docs not rule, for the sexual craving
reveals everything as being ultimately hatred. T o
be sure, the aberrations of this final phase of our
civilization bear Sartre out in many ways. But we
only accelerate the rise of the concentration-camp
universe if we present this sick distortion of every
deviation as the norm, and as ineluctable. Is man
indeed so little master of the situation that, with
the handwriting on the wall before him, he cannot
prevent the inversion of all positive values by mak­
ing a moral decision—at least in his intention? In
Sartre’s eyes, apparently, man is not. But then, why
this gigantic apparatus of analyses and the asser­
tion: “Existentialism is a humanism”? If I say:
Contingency is the Absolute, and resign myself to
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 83

that, I am no more than a dry leaf in the wind, and

all that is human is long since dead—just as God is
dead.

T h e D em olition o f Christianity
It was predictable that Sartre would respond
to the justified objections of his partners in the dia­
logue 3 with that same topsy-turvy dialectic that he
has demonstrated in philosophy and literature in
ever new variations. T here is, first, the objection of
Christianity, to which Sartre replied by the pecul­
iar position he took, and then again failed to take,
with regard to the problem of God. Just as all order
is reversed into its opposite, so the original source
of order, God, must be radically demolished, and
all ethical precepts along with Him. Sartre would
rather be debased into an object, by a man, than
come to terms with the idea of a supreme cause or
an ens a sc. According to him, man is exclusively an
absolute urge for freedom which, however, as we
have seen, is nothing else than spontanditd ndanti-
sante (annihilating spontaneity), directed against
himself and the other. T h e true synthesis between
the for-itself and the in-itsclf could only be God.
Thus the real goal of Sartre's man is to become
God: “T o be man means to reach toward being
God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the
desire to be God. . . . Human reality is the pure
effort to become God, without there being any
84 Jean-Paul Sartre

given substratum for that effort, without there be­

ing anything which so endeavors." 4
But that is a "uselcs passion"—“V hom m e est
line passion in u tile ” T h e man who wants to be
God for himself and others becomes in practice
nothing but an executioner, for the others and also,
fundamentally, for himself. Closely related is Sar­
tre’s argument that man himself has chosen his own
suffering, his own enslavement, and his own execu­
tioners. If I merely ponder the question whether it
might not be better to commit suicide, I have al­
ready chosen this life and all that it implies.
According to Sartre, it is in the nature of
human consciousness always to be the natural
author of everything. In place of moral responsibil­
ity there is now "natural responsibility," just as the
place of God is taken by a "humanistic atheism"
which regards its freedom the ultimate cause of
everything that happens. Nothing that happens can
therefore be subhuman; we ourselves have willed it
so in the free struggle for existence. In every single
engagement, we dispose not only of ourselves, but
also of all humanity and the whole universe. T his
view leads to the total atomization of knowledge,
values, human society; it leads to chaos, Hobbes’
war of all against all, just as the teachings of the
sophists would have done; they would have meant
the end of philosophy and of human society, had
there not been a Socrates to stake his life on a uni­
versally valid truth which every man can find in his
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 85

own heart. Here the genuinely existential thought

of Socrates opposes Sartre's existentialism.

Christian O pposition
Thus it is worth our while to listen when the
views of Christian thinkers who, after Socrates,
were the first existentialist thinkers—men like St.
Paul, Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard—are
presented in opposition to Sartre. T h e Christian
existentialist Gabriel Marcel in part gives expres­
sion to this thinking. T o the mere for-itself and in-
itself he opposes the attitude of the genuine I-Thou
relation whose arch-model is the relation of man to
God, in prayer; in the place of the n ot, he puts the
affirmation that knows its source to be God, and
that against a background of unbelief posits faith;
against a background of hate, love; against a back­
ground of treason, loyalty, the readiness for onto­
logical permanence.
T h e negative aspects must be taken seriously
for the sake of the positive ones, just as the serious
choice of life can be made only against the back­
ground of the temptation to commit suicide. But
Marcel points out that Sartre merely "describes,”
that he is concerned solely with things, "chosiste^
(a thing-like It), and thus gets stranded in agnosti­
cism. Sartre’s forever uncompleted man is funda­
mentally envious of the in-itsclf of things, and
identifies himself with it. He is a constant lack of
86 Jeatt-Paul Sartre

content defining himself as nothingness, Marcel

says. Thus Sartre would practically have come close
to the position of purely materialistic philosophers
like Felix Le Dantcc, for whom consciousness is
merely a physiological epiphenomenon. For them,
too, Marcel goes on, consciousness is a useless chem­
ical emanation. Sartre, by mixing freedom into
everything, devalues it and makes it the object of a
pre-established hierarchy. A freedom “to which I
am condemned” is not freedom but its distorted
counterpart: This necessity to choose (“free to
choose, but not free not to choose“) is merely a
form of contingency, Sartre’s con dition hu m ain e is
a false freedom, not freedom in its essential nature.
His inter-human relations are nothing else but
rivalries and battles, “transcended transcendences.”
It would seem to us that, against Sartre, it must be
pointed out further that freedom lies in the free
decision concerning our relation to divine tran­
scendence.
In his Existentialism , his dialogue with his op­
ponents, Sartre merely ridiculed the Christian ob­
jections, and brushed them aside with dialectical
trickery. But fundamentally, he plays fast and loose
only with his own atheism, as is illustrated in his
play, T h e D evil and the G ood L ord . On the occa­
sion of that play’s first performance, he said to Pro­
fessor Jean Guitlon in an interview:
In my opinion, the ideologies confronting each other today
put in question our whole image of man and our transcend­
ence. I believe that the Reformation thesis—which we cn-
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 87

counter among almost all of Luther's opponents no less than

in Luther himself—according to which every man is a
prophet, is far more enlightening than the thesis of the
French Revolution, according to which all men arc horn
equal. This thesis of an absolute religious value that every
man has for all men prompted me to prefer the Reforma­
tion, and especially the peasant prophets of those days, to all
other historical situations and figures. . . . Univcrsalist athe­
ism is not time-bound, it is the purely abstract and unhislor-
icnl assertion that God is not. T h e mistake of that ideology is
not that it denies God's existence, but that it fails to notice
that we today still belong to a religious form of culture in
which the vast majority of people are believers, or at least
half-believers. This is why I invoke Nietzsche’s "God is
dead." We arc still under the influence of Christianity. W e
still have to absorb a number of things which, incidentally,
we encounter also in Marxist thought. W hat shall I say about
Marxism? It is uuhistorical, hence unfruitful ( ! ) . As unfruit­
ful as would be the position of an internationalist who—
desirous to be a citizen of the world—failed to note that we
arc moving toward an exacerbation of national feelings.
Atheism has to be re-examined.

T o this day, Sartre has failed to give us that re­

examination, as well as that “ethics” which he
promised toward the end of this interview; consid­
ering his dialectical presuppositions, he would
seem unable to make those promises good.

T h e Q uarrel with Camus

Matters are similar when we come to his con­
frontation with true humanism, as personified by
the poet Camus: from the start, and even after the
occupation had ended, the two were comrades in
88 Jean-Paul Sartre

arms. Sartre was, at that time, leader of a political

group, R assem blem en l D em ocratiqtie R&puhli-
caine, which intended to reach across all parties
and be an fl;?/*-revolutionary movement. It cham­
pioned the concrete freedom of the individual, es­
pecially the workingman, which, so the movement
claimed, had been surrendered even by the com­
munists! Sartre and Camus also had in common a
number of slogans and technical terms, such as the
concept of the absurd, and their restriction to im­
manence without any transcendental perspective.
But it is only at first glance that many points of the
two views appear to coincide.
How radically the atheism and even the hu­
manism of Camus differ from those of Sartre can be
seen in the famous QjiereUe Sartre-Camus, which
in August of 1952 terminated the friendship of the
two men. According to Camus, there is no such
thing as a free project of existence, but rather free­
dom itself is what is absurd. In the two thought
systems of these two thinkers, the absurd is re­
fracted by totally different media. They represent
radically different types of mind. Sartre is all intel­
lect, and proposes the extreme perversion of all
that has so far been thought valid. Camus is poeti­
cally and intuitively more profound, more delib­
erate; he destroys nothing merely for the sake of
destruction, and grants to others their freedom, as a
true humanist. After making due allowances, it
may be said that Sartre stands to Camus as Des­
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 89

cartes stands to St. Augustine, who saw man in his

totality as an integral being.
Camus’ position with regard to God, to history
and metahistory, and to the values of humanism,
was infinitely more profound, more tentative, and
more responsible than Sartre’s. Fundamentally, he
even took the absurd far more serious than Sartre,
because he took the double character of human
existence, between immanence and transcendence,
more seriously; the tensions in Camus’ thought
were far more fruitful and far greater. In his bril­
liantly polished farewell letter (in T em ps M o-
den ies of August, 1952, a reply to Camus’ complaint
about a negative review of his Man in R evolt), Sar­
tre attacked Camus: Where did Camus get his hu­
manistic values, when every ethic was to be re­
jected? Camus was asocial, since he asserted that all
the revolts since 1789 had done nothing but put
man in God’s place! Camus was not a champion
and helper of the oppressed, he did not want to
commit himself in action, he always wanted to keep
his hands clean!
Camus, however, took the absurd seriously;
thus he could not run after the prophets of his day,
large and small, as Sartre did again and again in a
wild criss-cross chase, only to regret it later. Sartre,
too, says in Situations: N ous parlous dans le desert
—we are speaking in the wilderness, and at bottom
he knows that no party satisfies him. T o Sartre’s
accusation that Camus did not totally surrender to
facticity and historism, Camus replied that man
90 Jean-Paul Sartre

could not, to be sure, live without history, but that

he must not idolize it panlogistically in Hegel’s
sense and must not become submerged in pan-his-
torism; man must, at the same time, take a metahis-
torical position and realize that nature and history
merely serve to illustrate man’s situation in the ten­
sion of the absurd. Camus stated his viewpoint with
precision in M an in R ev o lt:
This book does not deny history, blit on the contrary pro­
poses to show that pure anti-historisin, at least today, is just
as destructive as pure hislorism. For those who know how to
read my work 1 have written here that people who believe in
history only are on their way toward terror, while those who
do not believe in history at all authorize that terror.

Sartre, Camus asserted, had “called one thou­

sand advocates into the field, but not one brother.”
Sartre, he went on, and his likes sit in their well-
heated editorial offices and by their total silence
condemn to death the most miserable victims of to­
day’s revolutionary terror, because these people arc
in their way politically. T h e misery of those op­
pressed by the Marxist revolution, Camus claimed,
could possibly be justified with a view to a future
good. But if, as Sartre held, even man makes no
sense, how could he ascribe any sense and meaning
to history—a sense and meaning discernible even
now? T h e existentialist would be threatened at his
very foundations if he were to admit that history
had any foreseeable meaning. But if he did not
want to make that admission, Camus continued,
then his attitude was merely frivolous and cruel.
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 91

He robbed man of every reason to fight for mean­

ingful objectives, in order to throw him into a
party. Boundless freedom becomes boundless slav­
ery. Sartre's existentialism was itself a denial of the
sole consolation of the victims of revolution: that
they were being sacrificed to some future happi­
ness. Ultimately, Camus concluded, Sartre’s posi­
tion was pure nihilism. “One cannot move about in
history if one does not believe in values!” And to
Sartre’s headlong plunge from nihilism into com­
munism, Camus opposed this insight: “We shall
not do battle against the shameless masters of our
era by making fine distinctions among their slaves!”

N eo-M arxism , or the “Bastard** Seeks a H om e

T h is brings us to the point where we must give
closer attention to Sartre's curious attitude toward
communism. We earlier noted his remark that
“Marxism is unhistorical, hence unfruitful,” and
his complaint that he was living in a desert. None­
theless it seems that his executioner-victim-gas*
chamber psychology has left Sartre with masochis­
tically perverted tendencies that prompt him to
steer a curious zig-zag course. (We think here of the
Vienna Peace Congress, the protest about Hungary,
etc.) T h e number of accusations that the Com­
munist Party has raised against Sartre is legion, and
if he had been a member he would hardly have re­
mained in the party for a year before being ex­
cluded because of deviations. These .are some ex-
92 Jean-Paul Sartre

amplcs of Marxist criticism: Sartre is “a writer who

has made the wrong commitment” or a "philoso­
pher of the fear of revolution,” a being who is im­
prisoned in capitalist contradictions, a putrefied
intellectual and Johnny-come-lately of bourgeois
decadence, the typical leader who is a failure in
contemporary society; his work deals only with ob­
solete problems that lack all interest, they are "an
attempt that is doomed to failure.” H.Mougin wrote
a whole book, modeled on M arx’s "H oly Family,”
under the title L a sainte fa m ille cxistcntialiste,
which convicted Sartre of every mistake he had by
then committed. Many of the accusations coincide
almost verbatim with those of the other side: sub­
jectivist, individualist, conscientialist, irrationalist,
nihilist, anarchist. Sartre, they claim, is torn be­
tween the desire for absolute freedom and a deci-
sionistic decision-making for the sake of commit­
ment alone.
T h e youthful trauma of his fear of bastardiza­
tion, his lack of property, his flirtation with the
sudden discovery that he, as an illegitimate child,
was one of the disinherited, inclined him early
toward proletarian sympathies. T h e position of the
" salauds* (slobs) who take shelter behind their al­
leged "right”—a pretense that allows the execu­
tioners to torture their victims—all the elements of
a puberty revolt of the protected young bourgeois
from a good family: all this predisposed Sartre to
that inconsistency with which he again and again
deserted his position of absolute freedom, only to
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 93

withdraw again, disappointed, into his “desert,’'

the desert of totally unprincipled anarchism, un­
bridled sexuality, and the exaltation of crime and
torture. It is not quite comprehensible why Sartre
took part in the resistance, since he considered the
“univers concertIrationaire” normal for our age. In
any event, he might look up what, Lukacz, for ex­
ample, in his D em olition o f R eason , had to say
about him and his philosophy as the product of the
decay of bourgeois-capitalist decadence in its final
stage.
Sartre's scientific position with regard to dia­
lectical materialism shows a highly personal dia­
lectic peculiar to him alone, which we must trace
here in greater detail. In the first part of his essay
“Materialism and Revolution,’’ where he constant­
ly pits one Marxist thinker against another (for
instance, Engels against Marx), Sartre does away
completely with the scientific validity of the Marx­
ist idea of matter. He attacks the Marxist concept of
causality: “T h e materialists’ cause can find no sup­
port in science, nor am it get any comfort from
dialectics; it remains a crude and purely practical
concept, a symptom of the constant effort of mate­
rialism to distort the one in the direction of the
other, and to join by force two methods which ex­
clude each other. It is the archetype of the false syn­
thesis, and the use that is being made of it is dis­
honest.”
In a like manner, the dialectic of dialectical
94 Jean-Haul Sartre

materialism is a secret borrowing from idealism:

“It must indeed be recognized that materialism, by
pretending to be dialectical, 'leads over’ into ideal­
ism. T h e Marxists claim to be positivists, and de­
stroy their positivism by the use they make, im­
plicitly, of metaphysics; they proclaim their ration­
alism and in the same breath demolish it by their
view of the genesis of thinking: and in the same
fashion they deny their own principle—which is
materialism—at the very moment when they estab­
lish it, by a secret recourse to idealism.” A con­
sciousness that precedes being (which is the very
opposite of materialism) is the only dialectical con­
sciousness, Sartre holds.
T h e Hegelian consciousness did not need to establish a dia­
lectical hypothesis. It is not merely an objective witness who
stands by on the outside when ideas are being procreated: it
is itself dialectical, it procreates itself according to the laws of
synthetic progression; there is no need for it to assume neces­
sity within relations—it is this necessity, lives it. And it has
this certainty not by virtue of sonic evidence which is more
or less subject to criticism, but by virtue of the progressive
identification of the dialectic of consciousness with the con­
sciousness of dialectic. If, on the contrary, dialectic repre­
sents the manner in which the material world evolves; if con­
sciousness, far from being wholly identified with dialectic, is
merely a “mirror image of being," a partial product, a
moment of synthetic progression; if consciousness, instead of
sharing from within in its own creation, is merely assailed
from outside by feelings and ideologies which arc rooted out­
side consciousness and which consciousness must suffer with­
out creating them: if that is so, then consciousness is merely a
link in a chain whose beginning and end lie very far apart;
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 95

and then, since it is not the whole chain, can it make any
definite statement about the chain? 5

But Sartre is not ready to make the sacrificium

in t e ll e c t s to materialism.0
"G et down on your knees, and you will believe," says Pascal.
T h e materialist's undertaking comes very close to that. If the
issue were that I alone must get down on my knees in order
to assure the happiness of mankind, there is no doubt that I
would agree. But the issue is to renounce everybody’s right to
free criticism, to evidence, and ultimately to truth. I have
been told that all these will be given back to us later; but I
have no proof: and how can I believe in a promise made in
the name of principles that are self-destructive? I only know
one thing: that today I must not cut oil my thinking. Have 1
landed in the unacceptable dilemma, that I must betray the
cause of the proletariate in the name of truth, or betray truth
in order to serve the proletariate? 7

Still, Sartre is prepared to let Marxism stand as

a faith, a myth of action—though not as a science.
And now, in the second part of his essay, he looks
on the whole matter again in terms of the subject-
object-dilemma of in-itself and for-itself:
It can no doubt be said that the result of materialism is to
lure the master into the trap, and make him into a thing just
like the slave. But the man in command knows nothing
about it, and does not care: he lives in the lap of his ideolo­
gies, his rights, and his culture. Only to the slaves’ subjectiv­
ity does he appear as a thing. Therefore, it is infinitely more
right and useful to let the slave discover, through his labor,
his freedom to change the world and thus his own condition,
than it is to strain all our powers in order to show the slave
that the master is a thing—which means to conceal his own
true power from the slave. And if it is true that materialism,
96 Jean-Paul Sartre

the explanation of the higher in terms of the lower, is indeed

a fitting picture of the present structure of our society, then it
is all the more obvious that materialism is a mere myth, in
the Platonic sense of the word. For the revolutionary has no
use for a symbolic explanation of the present situation; what
he needs is an idea that allows him to forge the future. T h e
materialist myth, however, is bound to lose all meaning in a
classless society in which there will no longer be any higher
and lower men.8

And although Sartre endorses the tHan of revo­

lution, he feels compelled to doubt its theoretical
foundation, and closes with this exclamation;
For the communists arc stuck, caught between the fact that
the materialistic myth has become decrepit, and the fear of a
split or at least indecision in their ranks if they adopt a new
ideology. T h e best minds among them remain silent; the
silence is filled with the chatter of their dolts. . . . One
cannot with impunity shape an entire generation by teaching
them successful errors. What will happen on that day when
materialism chokes the revolutionary project?

A K ant o f M arxist Philosophy?

In Sartre’s C ritiqu e d e la raison d ia lectiq u e
(1960), there are similar instances of a self-willed
criticism deviating from the party line that are all
the more noteworthy because Sartre had tried
again and .again to adapt himself to the concrete
expressions of revolutionary theory. Here, too, he
starts with the assumption that consciousness is
something primary, internal, spiritual, and not a
mere emanation of being, of matter, of man’s bio­
logical and social structure. In the introduction he
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 97

admits his conviction that historical materialism

furnishes the only valid interpretation of history,
and at the same time that existentialism represents
the only concrete approximation to reality. W ith
this "at the sam e lim e," which he himself empha­
sizes, he indicates the profound dilemma in which
he has found himself caught for the last fifteen
years: convinced that his own starting point was the
only one scientifically possible; convinced at the
same time, however, that communism with its revo­
lutionary interpretation of history was the only
right approach for revolutionary practice; and un­
able at the same time to admit the theoretical valid­
ity of the starting point of dialectical materialism.
In the introductory chapter, “Search fora Method,”
he states outright that communist thought has be­
come “sclerotic” in its present phase, calcified with­
in a compulsive doctrine, and has forgotten to dust
off its own sources. “After communism had trans­
formed us, and had eliminated for us the categories
of bourgeois thought, it failed to satisfy our need to
understand in that special position into which we
had been placed. It had no longer anything new to
teach us because it had stopped dead.”
But Sartre continues to b eliev e that this polit­
ical direction is the only effective way in history. Its
truth, however, is practical-em pirical. But its phil­
osophical foundations are shaky. He asks: Why arc
we not Marxists? And he answers: Because the as­
sertions of Engels and others are mere guidelines
for practical undertakings but do not offer concrete
98 Jean-Paul Sartre

truths. Marxism does not make mistakes in action,

but its philosophy has stopped developing further.
Sartre, accordingly, would wish to make a sugges­
tion concerning the self-criticism that is necessary.
So far, Marxist philosophy had been held captive
within dogmatism.
Sartre’s C ritiqu e de la raison d ia lectiq u e
[Critique of Dialectical Reason] is an attempt to
provide the further development needed. W hat
Kant had done for epistemology (Sartre accepts,
for instance, Kant’s categorical imperative), Sartre
would do for Marxist philosophy. T h e thinking of
dialectical materialism is an empirical anthropol­
ogy. Sartre would have it absorb the disciplines
which until now had remained outside it. These
disciplines include essentially a phenomenology of
the structures of existence, dealing primarily with
the facts of consciousness, not the social facts.
Thus, in a manner of speaking, Sartre again
turns Marxism upside down. Being does not de­
termine consciousness; consciousness determines
being. He rejects the biological and social starting
point of Marxism, and starts from the individual,
from consciousness, even though the individual in
its present social position is almost extinguished:
“We refuse absolutely to mistake suppressed man
for an object, and to mistake his alienation for the
physical laws that rule contingency. We assert the
special nature of human action, which breaks out
of the social milieu even though that milieu re­
mains wholly determined in the process. . . 10
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 99

Man, however, is not simply the result of his being

materially determined. Man is the project (p rojet)
of an action—men are projects that in their con­
sciousness carry out an individual or a group within
this determined setting.
Once again, we encounter Sartre's theory of
freedom and responsibility. Hegel’s progression of
history which, as Hegel grew old, ossified into a
closed dialectic in Prussian officialdom, had been
loosened up again and changed into an open dia­
lectic by Marx and Engels, who turned Hegel's
thought “inside out.'' Sartre, in his turn, believes
that he must now loosen up the ossified closed dia­
lectic of aging Marxism by his critical objections
and his dialectic of consciousness; he must start with
the individual, because we come into the world as
individuals and leave it again as individuals who
have been profoundly shaken and shocked by the
forced collectivism of the concentration-camp era
that is the present.
Sartre here attempts a synthesis of his own
Marxist philosophy, but he must start with the
living experience of the individual. In this critique
of dialectical reason, Marxist dialectic ceases to be a
social mechanism, “so that it may be lived by the in­
dividual.’’ Naturally, it will not be lived in individ­
ualistic solitude. Sartre had demonstrated earlier
that every individual, despite all his freedom and
autonomy, is imbedded in a situation which deter­
mines him, but which the individual may either ac­
cept, or transform, or breach. His aim in the Cri­
100 Jcan-Paul Sartre

tiqu e d e la raison d ia lectiq u e to show that living in­

dividual experience is not merely a reflex of social
conditions (as it is in dialectical materialism), but
the living, concrete aspect of the statistical facts. T h e
statistical, amorphous object-character, to which
Sartre had earlier objected so passionately, is erased
only by the concrete life of the individual conscious­
ness, through which the subject turns from an in-
itself into a for-itself. T h e problem of synthesizing
these two modes of thought Sartre calls “totalisa­
tion ” :11 it is the transition from the individual to
the collective, from individual consciousness to his­
tory. W hat is the process by which the individual
experiences “totalize” themselves into the collec­
tive phenomenon of Marxism? “For us, the prob­
lem is one of connecting the two. If there are in­
dividuals, xoho totalizes w hat?” Sartre, in order to
find the answer, transfers the “dialectical move­
ment” from the group to the individual (that is, in
the direction opposite to that of Marxism). He con­
siders consciousness the source of the collective, not
the other way around. T h e individual is the one to
experience social reality, to react, to develop dia­
lectically, and thus to create the social dialectic.
“All historical dialectic rests upon individual prac­
tice, in that this individual practice is itself already
dialectical.” T h e movement of history thus issues
from the individuals, not in any magical or statis­
tical manner but because the individuals them­
selves, in the normal dialectic of their lives, show
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 101

the need of totalization which produces collective

phenomena.
Sartre now sets out to study the movement
that leads to history, beginning with the dawn of
consciousness in the individual. T h e work's first
Large section thus is entitled “From Individual Prac­
tice to the Practical-Inert," meaning economic prac­
tice as the basis of Marxism—“Inert" because it is
not yet historic action. T h is transition is shown in
the second main part, “From the Group of His­
tory." A second volume has been promised to com­
plete the picture of C ritiqu e de la raison dialec-
tiqu e. Freedom and necessity are to be united.
(Marx: “Freedom is the insight into necessity.") In
every stage of his development, the individual pro­
duces a social totalization, which assumes historical
meaning in the confrontation of freedom and neces­
sity by transcending its situation. “Freedom and
necessity are only one. . . . It is an individual con­
struction whose single factors are the individual
human beings as free activities.” Thus Sartre thinks
to supply Marxism with a foundation of human
freedom. Could this be, fundamentally, also the
explication of his theory that everything, even the
most frightful horrors, are freely willed by man:
“There is no such thing as inhuman situation"?
His boundless yearning for freedom, with which
he started in 1938, led Sartre to the void that
frightened him and that he wanted to fill with re­
sponsibility; and from individual responsibility he
has now progressed to social and from there to his­
102 Jean-Paul Sartre

torical responsibility, the historical responsibility

of his headstrong neo-Marxism (yet Sartre does not,
at bottom, believe in progress 12) which it is highly
doubtful will ever receive official approval. All this
he did precisely because he started at the opposite
end, with the individual, mind, consciousness (and
that in the sense of existential psychoanalysis!). Can
there be any other answer than that which Garaudy,
one of the official philosophers of French Marxism,
gave to Sartre as early as 1046: “Sartre rejects ma­
terialism and claims nonetheless that he avoids
idealism. Here stands the revealed the nullity of
this impossible ‘T hird Party’ . . .”? Is Sartre not
bound to reap bitter experiences from this zig-zag
way of his? Just as no man can maintain himself
in a radical skepticism, which must of necessity turn
into blind fideism, just so Sartre will have to make
a turnabout from the absolute freedom of nothing­
ness into a blind subjection to a firm, massive doc­
trine. Thus he even says that his philosophy is noth­
ing else than an enclave within Marxism, even
though his argumentation is totally un-Marxist
since his starting point is the individual, the unique
personality and his consciousness. Even if we can­
not share his viewpoint, we would remind those
who blame Sartre for having such political inclina­
tions at all that political inclinations, too, must be
left to the free decision of an individual thinker
who strives so hard and at such length to find
grounds for his position—and this even if again and
again he makes presuppositions that seem emotion­
Dialogue with Friend and Foe 103

al rather than rational. We will have to wait before

we can know whether the homeless, estranged exis­
tentialist finds a home for his philosophy in the
“rich earth of Marxism,” as he put it, or whether
he arrives at the same conclusion as did his aban­
doned, now dead, friend Camus: “T h e revolution,
even that and especially that which claims to be
the materialistic revolution, is nothing but an un­
bridled metaphysical crusade.”
 5
Liquidation
o f the Past—
Not a Faith
fo r the Future
I n closing, we might ask ourselves what view we
should take of Sartre, as a thinker and a creative
writer. The answer lies perhaps in what Jaspers
once said about thinkers such as Nietzsche: They
are liquidators of the past—but their truth becomes
inverted into its total opposite if we succumb to
their fascination and accept as regulative what can
be valid only as a corrective. W hat Jaspers urges on
the readers of Nietzsche holds equally true for
Sartre’s readers:

This thinking calls for a high degree of freedom in man, but

not an empty freedom which has merely cast off everything,
but a fulfilled freedom which, incomprehensible to man,
comes to his encounter out of man’s historic depth. Whoever
allows himself to be seduced by Nietzsche into the sophistry
of mere propositions, the sheer semblance of understanding
gained, intoxication with the extreme, the capriciousness of
instinct—such a reader is accursed by Nietzsche from the
outset.1

Sartre is an original thinker, literary creator,

and poetic craftsman when it comes to showing up
and clarifying the symptoms of stagnation in our
time. T o carry out this function, the unhappy dis­
position with which his youthful trauma of bastard­
ization left him was no doubt necessary and mean­
ingful, because by exacerbating the phenomena he
managed to arouse his contemporaries. As a train­
ing academy in the acrobatics of a life-related dia­
lectic, too, he may serve as a stimulating and in­
vigorating transition stage. But if we want to stop
with him, and allow ourselves to be dazzled by his
106
Liquidation of the Past—Not a Faith for the Future 107

fascination, then all the good that he could do us

turns into the exact opposite. Sartre is the liqui­
dator of all false stagnation—but the attempt to pro­
vide positive solutions must be made by the reader
himself; just as the reader is left to his own devices
to decide how much of Sartre is mere sophistical
revolt and how much genuine philosophizing, or
what is no more than a psycho-pathological preju­
dice of the puberty spite of ep a ler le bou rgeois, and
what the true presentation of a problem. T h e atti­
tude with which we must approach Sartre is—
Socratic irony.
Thus our detour through the most extreme
existentialism leads us back to the genuinely ex­
istentialist thinkers, whose substance has been bor­
rowed by all the schools of modern philosophy of
existence: Socrates, St. Paul, Augustine, Luther,
Pascal, Kierkegaard. Sartre, by contrast, represents
a retrogression to the lowest level of the aesthetic
stage of existence, which wins its struggle for mean­
ing and fulfillment only in the ethical stage, and in
fact only in the “religiousness B ” of the religious
stage; a personal and authentic religiosity in the
original experience of the tensions which are pro­
duced by the paradox that earthly immanence and
divine transcendence are present simultaneously in
man’s individual existence. Sartre presents only the
most extreme consequences of an existence w ithout
all transcendence, an existence that was shipwrecked
upon the clifTs of the aesthetic stage, despair 2, while
the existential thinkers discard justification on the
108 Jean-Paul Sartre

strength of our own intellectual powers, and set in

its place genuine justification of our existence
through transcendence.
Sartre can at best muster a premature, half
skeptical-dialectical “ faith" in this world stripped of
all transcendence, a faith which is ever anew disap­
pointed; and thus he lacks precisely the one cate­
gory that can spring only from the paradox of
a genuine faith (faith as an opening of one’s own
spirit toward the unknown future); he lacks the
category which Kierkegaard called the single most
important one for modern man—the “rep etition as
a memory pointing forward." Even Camus, poet of
alienation and the absurd, still found it possible to
allow this category in his M yth o f Sisyphus. Thus
there is only one thing left of Sartre’s philosophical
and literary work: a merciless dialectic—with ever
new dramatic, epic, and philosophical facets, highly
polished and yet always charged with emotion—
which, though (perhaps pathologically) distorted,
serves to disrupt and destroy structures of every
kind that have grown rigid in convention, and are
thereby inescapably pointed toward the past.3
Up to this point we have discovered that .Sar­
tre is capable of shattering things in the most di­
verse and imaginative ways; but what structures will
arise in future in the dismantled spaces is for the
time being an entirely open question. W ith his
secularization (laicization) of the absolute, and with
the transformation of eschatological, eternal goals
into the purely immanent worldlincss of earthly
Liquidation of the Past—Not a Faith for the Future 109

goals, Sartre may have permanently blocked his

own way to the openness of faith toward an un­
known future. But it must be regarded as a positive
result that Sartre—like the other great liquidators
of the past—has carried through a new project of
existence toward the future. He may have done no
more than show, once and for all, that this project
is an error; but there is now no longer an escape
back into a conformist past: from now on we must
think our way through Sartre toward the new that
is to come.
 Chronology
W hen a French title has been translated into English, the title
of the English edition is given within parentheses following
the original title.

1905: Born Ju n e 21 in Paris.

1907: Death of father: return to home of paternal grand­
father, Charles Schweitzer, in Alsace.
1916: Remarriage of mother; move to La Rochelle.
1924: Graduated from Lycde Henri IV in Paris.
1924-28: Studied at Ecole Nonnalc Supdrieure.
1928: Beginning of friendship with Simone dc Beauvoir.
1929: W on first place in competitive examination for the
Agrdgation de Philosophic, having failed the previous
year.
1931-33: T aught philosophy in the lycde at Le Havre.
1933- 34: Studied with Husserl and Heidegger in Berlin.
1934- 39: Taught philosophy in lycdcs at Le Havre, Laon,
and Paris.
1936: Published La Transcendance de I'dgo (T h e T ra n ­
scendence of the Ego) and L ‘Imagination.
1938: Published La Nausde (N ausea).
1939: Published L e M u r (The W all) and Esquisse d’une
thdoric des drnotions (T he Em otion: Outline of a
T h e o ry ). Mobilized at outbreak of World W ar II.

Ill
112 Chronology

1940: Published LTm aginairc, psychologic phdnomdnolo-

gique de Vimagination (Psychology of Im agin ation ).
Taken prisoner by the Germans.
1941: Released from prisoner-of-war camp.
1941-45: Taught in Paris.
1942: Met Albert Camus in Paris.
1943: Published L ’Etrc et le n ifant (Being and Nothing­
ness) , Lcs M ouches (T he Flies) Explication de
Vetranger (collected in Situations I) .
1943-44: Active in French resistance.
1944: Published H uis Clos (No E x i t ) .
1945: Founded periodical Lcs T em ps M odernes. Published
Les Chemins de la liberty I: L ’A ge de raison (Age of
R easo n ), II: L e Sursis (T h e R ep riev e). Made trip to
U.S.A.
I94G: Published Morts sans sepulture, (T he Victors) La
Putain respectueuse (T he Respectful P rostitu te),
L ’Existentialisme est un hum anism e, and Reflexions
sur la question juive.
1947: Published Baudelaire, Situations I (early critical ar­
ticles) , Les Je u x sont fails (The Chips Are Down)
and Qu'est-ce que la litera tu re (W hat Is Literature)
(in Situations I I ) .
1948: Published Les Mains sales (Dirty H ands), L ’Engre-
nage (In the M esh), and Situations II. Founded with
David Roussct, Gerard Rosenthal and others the
non-Communist leftist political party Le Rassemble-
ment Dtfmocratique Rtfvolutionnairc, disbanded late
in 1949.
1949: Published Lcs Chemins de la liberte, III: La M ori
dans Vdme (Troubled Sleep) and Situations III
(articles on French resistance, U.S.A., literary and art
criticism).
1951: Published L e Diable et le bon Dicu (T he Devil and
the Good L o rd ).
1952: Published Saint G enet, com edien et martyr. (Saint
Chronology 113

Genet, Actor and M arty r). Broke with Camus over

latter’s L T Io m m e rtvolti. Published Les Com m u­
nities et la paix (in Situations VI) indicating close
collaboration with Communist Party.
1953: Published (with others) L'Afjaire H en ri M artin, de­
fending sailor arrested for opposition to Indo-Chinese
war.
1954: Published Kean (adapted from D um as).
1950: Published Nekrassov. Broke with Communists over
Stalinist repression in Hungary. Published L e Fan-
tome de Staline (in Situations VII) .
1957: Published Questions de mdthode.
I960: Published Critique de la raison dialectique and Les
S^questr^s d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona) .
Was first to sign "Declaration des 121." manifesto
against atrocities in Algeria. Visited Cuba.
1961: Second visit to Cuba. His favorable reactions pub­
lished here as Sartre on Cuba.
1963: Published Les Mots.
1961: Published Situations IV. Portraits. Situations V.
Colonialistne et XJo-Colonialismc. Situations VI.
Problemcs du M arxism e, 1. Was awarded Nobel Prize
for Literature, but rejected it.
1965: Published: Les Troyennes (adapted from Aeschylus);
Situations VII. Problemes du M arxisme, 2. Que pent
la UttJrature? (with oth ers).
1966: Published Flaubert in Les Tem ps M odernes.
1967: Participated in International W ar Crimes Tribunal in
Stockholm and Copenhagen. W rote L e Genocide,
section of final report condemning American policy
in Vietnam.
1968: Publicly condemned Russian invasion of Czechoslo­
vakia.
1969: Publicly condemned purported American atrocities
at My Lai and Songmy in Vietnam.
 Notes

1 Alienation arid Justification: Roots of Creativity

1. Nausea, tr. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New

Directions, 1949), p. 238.
2. Article in Action, December 29, 1944.
3. Article in Action, December 29, 1944.

2 T he Principal Themes of Sartre’s Thought

1. B eing and N othingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New

York: Philosophical Library, 195G), p. G2G.
2. B eing and N othingness, p. G15.
3. Rom. 7:19.
4. T h e T ranscendence of the Ego, tr. Forrest Williams
and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press,
1957).
5. Ideas, para. 23.
6. Im agination, tr. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: U ni­
versity of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 134.

115
116 Notes

7. Vol. 52, January, 1939.

8. T h e Psychology of Imagination (New York: Philo­
sophical Library, 1948), p. 177.
9. Nausea, p. 234.
10. Nausea, p. 233.
11. T heoric des emotions, p. 35.
12. In T h e Wall and O ther Stories, tr. Lloyd Alexander
(New York: New Directions, 1948), p. 63.
13. In T h e Wall and Other Stories, pp. 67-68.
14. In T h e Wall and O ther Stories, p. 77.
15. T h e Psychology of Imagination, p. 214.
16. Pp. 596-97.
17. T h e Psychology of Imagination, p. 103.
18. Nausea, pp. 170-71.
19. Nausea, pp. 173-74.
20. T h e old Lutheran problem of justification by faith
has here been unexpectedly resurrected, wholly secu­
larized, in pure immanence. Is this Sartre’s uncon­
scious inheritance from his theological forebears?
This totally secularized renewal of a central reli­
gious theme originally intended as transcendental
holds the root of Sartre’s genuine concern, but also
of the basically tragic aberrations of his existential
analysis of existence. Similar suggestions can be
found in Heidegger—but there they end up in the
mystique of Being of his last phase. (L.R .)
21. Nausea, p. 176.
22. Nausea, pp. 176-77.

3 Resistance: Freedom and Responsibility

1. "Republic of Silence" in Leltres fran$aises, 1944.

2. "R epublic of Silence.”
3. B eing and Nothingness, p. II.
4. Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics?
Notes 117

5. What Is Metaphysics? pp. 39-40.

6. T h e Psychology of Imagination, p. 266.
7. B eing and N othingness, p. Ixviii.
8. T h e R eprieve, tr. Eric Sutton (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1951), p. 62.
9. T h e R epriev e, pp. 362-63.
10. T h e R eprieve, pp. 362-63.
11. T h e R eprieve, p. 363.

7 Dialogue with Friend and Foe

1. T h e R eprieve, pp. 135-36.

2. T h e Flies. From the French, by translator.
3. W e lack the space here to deal with the numerous
polemics of the various schools of philosophical
thought in France, such as that of the Cartesians
(Alquil) and others. (L .R .)
4. B eing and N othingness, pp. 566 and 576.
5. “Materialism and Revolution.” From the French,
by translator.
6. Both his Existentialism and his “Materialism and
Revolution” show that Sartre never ceased arguing
these questions seriously with the official represen­
tatives of the French Communist Party—though un­
successfully! (L.R .)
7. “ Materialism and Revolution." From the French,
by translator.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Critique de la raison dialectique. From the French,
by translator.
11. Sec Critique de la raison dialectique, and see also
Sartre’s What Is LiteratureI, tr. Bernard Frechtman
(New York, Philosophical Library, 1949).
12. “ It is true that we do not believe in progress; prog-
118 Notes

rcss is an improvement; man is always the same in

the face of a situation which changes, and his choice
always remains a choice within a situation."

5 L iq u id a tio n o f th e Past—N o t a F a ith fo r th e F u t u r e

1. Nietzsche and Christianity, 1952, p. 70.

2. Kierkegaard, in his Sickness Unto Death, has shown
that this despair is a necessary transitional stage for
modern man.
3. Compare Koquentin's remark: "I might succeed—in
the past, nothing but the past—in accepting myself.”
(Nausea, p. 238)