Sartre and the Problem of Morality/Jean Paul Sartre:
Walsh, Joseph L
Exploding bourgeois consciousness SARTRE AND THE PROBLEM OF MORALITY Francis Jeanson Translated by Robert Stone, Jr. Indiana University Press, $27.50,384 pp. JEAN PAUL SARTRE PHILOSOPHY IN THE...
...Joseph L. Walsh THE DEATH of Jean Paul Sartre in the same year that Polish workers rose up and challenged their government while enjoying active support from much of the Communist party's rank and file is noteworthy and even fitting...
...Jeanson argues that Sartre is above all a moral thinker who views human consciousness as the freely chosen acceptance of the identity imposed on it from outside by society, others, and the body itself...
...Aronson argues convincingly that the major preoccupation of Sartre's fiction, drama, and criticism is the lone individual consciousness confronting the prob- lem of how to relate to the social world...
...Jeanson and Sartre both seem to believe, however, that the affirmation of the ubiquitous possibility of authentic human freedom is a self-evident moral value in a world where human acquiescence in passivity is the chief evidence of moral nihilism...
...Post College, is welcome and helpful...
...Here Francis Jeanson's Sartre and the Problem of Morality (Le Problem Morale et la pensee de Sartre, Paris 1947), superbly translated and annotated by Robert Stone of C.W...
...It is of course possible for reasonable people to disagree about the desirability, even the possibility, of an explosive break of this kind within bourgeois society...
...First, where consciousness chooses spontaneously or naturally to accept this imposed identity, and second, authentic freedom, where consciousness affirms or rejects this movement of natural or spontaneous freedom...
...In Flaubert, Sartre wishes bourgeois society as a whole to see its patterns of dishonesty and evasion mirrored in this mid-nineteenth-century writer who so powerfully expressed the newly emerging bourgeois social order...
...In the light of Aronson's own framework, moreover, it is possible to see continuity between this work on Flaubert and the view enunciated by Sartre in What Is Literature...
...But whatever may be the future of bourgeois society's consciousness in this regard, the recent events in Poland indicate that the capacity for such a break still exists somewhere among individuals and even whole societies in the modern world...
...Furthermore, the serious student will want to go to Mark Poster's Existential Marxism in Post-War France for a fuller account of Sartre's relationship to French Marxism and for a richer interpretation of the Critique of Dialectical Reason...
...1947): literature is a critical mirror in which the reader is led to recognize patterns of "dishonesty and evasion" which, upon reading, one can no longer hide from oneself...
...Aronson's formulation of this view is important nonetheless for the thoroughness with which he articulates it, particularly in his study of Sartre's literary as well as his social and political works...
...Jeanson, whose book was acclaimed by Sartre himself at the time of its publication as having grasped the centrality of his thought, argues that there are two senses of freedom in Sartre...
...cise of authentic freedom is the moral imperative in Sartre which, if chosen by the individual, carries the potential for an' "explosion or rupture" or a "rent in being" with one's past and current existence...
...Aronson fails nonetheless to grasp the full power of Sartre's existentialist view of freedom and its political significance...
...For Sartre, the work on Flaubert is political insofar as it leads the bourgeois consciousness of its readers in disgust to an "explosion and rupture" with its former self...
...Sartre himself described it as a political work despite its inaccessibility, as a work of bourgeois scholarship, to potentially revolutionary masses...
...Aronson, a professor at Wayne State Univer-sity and trained in Brandeis University's History of Ideas program, has written a book with a familiar theme-viz., that as a Marxist, Sartre was hampered in articulating a positive view of society and political revolution by the lingering Cartesian individualism out of which he had fashioned his existentialism...
...This is a view which is belied, however, by Aronson's own description of Sartre's continuing written and public productivity during this same period...
...Sartre's first systematic attempt to integrate existentialism and Marxism, Search for a Method, was written in 1957 at the invitation of Polish Marxist intellectuals...
...For Aronson this marked a retreat by Sartre from his post-1968 politics of engagement...
...For Jeanson, this exerAuthentic freedom is the moral imperative that carries the potential for an "explosion or rupture" or a "rent in being" with one's past and current existence...
...His popularity in Poland among rank-and-file party members contributed, along with other diverse influences including a vibrant Catholic intellectualism, to shaping there a humanist Marxist more able to hear and accommodate a movement like Solidarity than is the case elsewhere in Eastern Europe...
...But, Aronson's book makes a real contribution in persuasively demonstrating the real continuity between Sartre's literary and political writing which others have simply hypothesized...
...The publication of Francis Jeanson's Sartre and the Problem of Morality, and Ronald Aronson's Jean Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World serves to remind us, in their very different ways, of the depth and power of that view of human freedom in Sartre and his tenacious affirmation of it over so many years and in diverse historical circumstances...
...Sartre capped his long career with a massive three-volume study of Gustave Flaubert entitled, L 'Idiot de la famille...
...Sartre's work and life-long commitments stand as his own powerful testament to his belief in that enduring hope and possibility...
...Jeanson has been criticized for an uncritical exposition of Sartre and there is indeed something limp in his simple acceptance of Sartre's view that authentic freedom, the source of "explosion and rupture," is its own justification-"it rests on nothing," "nothing justifies it from without...
...Aronson's argument is strained at times, even going so far as to invent a crippling crisis in Sartre in the mid-1960s between his engaged (political) and alienated (existential/literary) selves...
...JEAN PAUL SARTRE PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORLD Ronald Aronson New Left Books, London (Schocken, N. Y.) $19.50, $9.95 (paper), 354 pp...
...It is not necessary to attempt any overall assessment of Sartre's influence in Poland, however, in order to have the events there remind us of what is arguably Sartre's major achievement-a view of human consciousness as able to rebel and reject its own personal and social past...
...For Aronson this is the literary correlative of Sartre's inability ever to see society as based on cooperation and communication and thus capable of an authentic socialist politics...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 11
