SARTRE IN OUR TIME
Paz, Octavio
Mexico City, April 17, 1980 After the initial surprise this sort of news causes, I felt a resigned melancholy at the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. I was living in Paris during those years after...
...He maintained this position all his life...
...This trenchant moral judgment completely left out the specific differences—historical, social, and political—between the two systems...
...His Baudelaire is both penetrating and prejudiced...
...Nevertheless, Sartre's confession shows that he was unacquainted with one of the supreme moments of European culture, the Spanish theater of the 16th and 17th centuries...
...This despotic focus suits neither passions nor philosophies...
...He shook his head doubtfully...
...His negligence still amazes me, since one of the great themes of the Spanish theater, origin of some of the best works of Tirso de Molina, Mirademescua, and Calderon, is precisely what concerned him all his life—the conflict between grace and freedom...
...Unlike the Christian God, it is not humanized, nor is it the accomplice of our destiny...
...Our 424 models have been men who, like a Las Casas or a Rousseau, had the courage to reveal and denounce the horrors and injustices of their own societies...
...Dialectic has made us see evil as the necessary complement of good...
...Of course, I exclude the possibility of complicity or duplicity, as was true of the Aragons, the Nerudas, and so many others who were silent though they knew better...
...Why did he persist in not seeing and not hearing...
...More evangelical and radical, Sartre scorned art and literature with the furor of a Father of the Church...
...Yet, all the great themes that impassioned the thinkers of the Reformation appear in his work...
...Sartre excelled in two opposite forms: analysis and wit...
...Sartre joyfully greeted each revolutionary triumph (China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam), and then, always a little late, he had to admit that he had been wrong: these regimes were execrable...
...In another conversation he told me of his admiration for Mallarme...
...Why must the "absolute" be a youthful passion for a cross-eyed girl (why cross-eyed...
...What would be left of Sartre without Heidegger...
...He also knew how to listen, and went to the trouble of answering my questions and my timid objections...
...Our conversation ended abruptly...
...And what is worse, in the name of criticism we have justified tyrannies...
...Teresa these same words were spiritual and sensible realities, ideas made flesh...
...One of his qualities was to arouse both rejection and assent in his readers, with equal violence...
...But just to hear him was to forget his appearance...
...at the same time we are something that cannot be reduced to these conditions, however determinative they may be...
...423 During this conversation I made an uncomfortable discovery...
...The ghosts of Breton and Camus, whom he attacked viciously and unjustly, should be satisfied...
...He was a moralist rather than a philosopher...
...and why must Descartes' philosophy be relative, as opposed to this youthful passion (and Descartes' philosophy is not exactly the same as the Cartesianism to which Sartre contemptuously alludes...
...Sartre's work is yet another confirmation of the accuracy of that idea...
...Many times, in the course of my reading, I regretted not knowing him personally, so as to tell him of my doubts and disagreements...
...A curious assertion...
...He changed his mind often, and yet was faithful to himself in all those changes...
...We have corrupted criticism...
...Although the book on Genet errs at the opposite extreme—there are moments when it is a very Christian apology for abjection as the road to salvation— it has pages that are hard to forget...
...In it, with a self-assurance that some have found disconcerting and others simply deplorable, he declares that his pessimism was a tribute to the fashion of the times...
...His philosophy of the "situation"—Ortega's more precise expression was "circumstance"—seemed to Sartre not a negation of the absolute but the only way to understand and realize it...
...Commenting on the United Nations discussions of Russian concentration camps, he said, "The English and the French have no right to criticize the Russians for their camps, since they have their colonies...
...Hi3 language is insistent and repetitive—he pounds the plot into the ground...
...He, Khrushchev, should not have made the workers lose heart...
...We are our situation: our past, our moment...
...For St...
...In his introduction to the journal Les Temps Modernes he speaks of a total liberation of mankind, but a few lines further on he says that the danger is that "the whole man" should disappear, "swallowed up by class...
...Its influence on the intellectual consciousness of Europe has been deadly...
...Sartre was not insensitive to this line of reasoning, but he was hard to convince...
...From Christianity Sartre inherited not transcendence, the affirmation of another reality and another world, but the rejection of this world and abhorrence for our earthly reality...
...425 What is relative is Cartesianism, that itinerant philosophy that they parade from century to century...
...He thought that as long as oppression and exploitation existed in our countries, we bourgeois intellectuals had no moral right to criticize the vices of the Soviet system...
...To reconcile Communism with freedom...
...I was suprised that, guided only by verbalist logic, he neglected the very thing that formed the crux of his preoccupations and the foundation of his philosophical criticism—St...
...In Sartre this intellectual sickness created a myopic view of history...
...Sartre often used criticism like a court of law that dispenses nothing but punishments and admonitions...
...On his lips the word "pleasure" has both a subversive and a voluptuous taste...
...He made valiant but partial contributions...
...Sartre's case is prototypical but not unique...
...it is a chastisement, a lesson, rather than a study...
...In the course of his conversation with his young disciple, Sartre shows a stoical and admirable resignation in the face of his approaching death...
...What I wanted to emphasize is that in this essay Sartre introduces into social and historical determinations an element of indeterminacy: the human being, mankind...
...It is true, at that time imperialism was exploiting the colonial population just as the Soviet state was exploiting the prisoners in the camps...
...Why was he once again deaf to the voice of his tradition...
...After the third or fourth meeting our relationship ended: too many things separated us, and I did not seek him out again...
...I do not think he was a good traveler...
...we have made it serve our hatred of ourselves and of our world...
...We can say the same of his plays...
...The thick lens of his spectacles lent him an air of distance...
...The first time the word "hope" appears explicitly on Sartre's lips is in the preceding interview, which first appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, a short time before his death...
...This, no doubt, is why he later maintained that the liberation of the individual must come about through collective liberation...
...Evil serves goodness...
...The whole interview is shot through with a vision of the world that is at times disillusioned, most of the time acutely pessimistic...
...In his essays there are many lively, dense pages, always a little overstated, powerful waves of words boiling with ideas, sarcasm, witticisms...
...It occurred to me that this article could take the form of a dialogue with Sartre...
...Sartre wrote philosophical treatises and political essays, books of criticism and novels, short stories and plays...
...In Les Mouches, one of his first works, there is a phrase that has been quoted many times, but is worth repeating: "Life begins on the other side of despair...
...In the same essay he said, The absolute is Descartes, the man who escaped from us because he died, who lived in his era and thought it, hour after hour, with the means he had to hand, who loved a cross-eyed girl when he was young...
...Pride...
...Later on, in a newspaper interview, he said that he had been inspired to write Le Diable et le bon Dieu by Cervantes' comedy El Rufian Dichoso (The Lucky Soundrel), although he added that he had only read a plot summary of the Spanish work...
...I call him a moralist not for his psychological penetration but because he had the courage all his life to ask himself the only questions that really matter: What reasons do we have for living...
...Not a moralist in the tradition of the Grand Siècle, interested in the de426 scription and analysis of the soul and its passions...
...Is it worthwhile to live as we do...
...Two Protestants rebelling against their Protestantism, their families, their class, and the moral values of their class...
...a round face with undefined features—as though the sculptor had not quite finished his task...
...to love others we must first love the other, our neighbor...
...In our century tyranny has worn the mask of revolution...
...By equating the colonialism of the West with the repressive system of the Soviets, Sartre was waving a magic wand over the one problem that could and should interest a left-wing intellectual like himself: what was the Soviet regime really like, socially and historically...
...Furthermore, we already had the philosophy of Marxism, which had totally extracted the meaning of the historical evolution of our time...
...What was his real purpose...
...By a curious philosophical transposition, Sartre replaced the predestination and freedom of Protestant theology with psychoanalysis and Marxism...
...It is illuminating to compare Sartre's shifts with the lucid and extremely coherent work of Cioran, a spirit apparently on the fringe of our era but who has lived it and thought it profoundly and therefore silently...
...And his philosophy...
...we remember the ideas of Les Mouches and Huis-Clos, not the ghosts who enunciate them...
...In the last canto of Paradise Lost he describes the slow, painful journey of Adam and Eve— and with them of all of us, their children —toward the realm of innocence: The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way...
...Although Sartre had made a short trip to Mexico, he hardly mentioned his experience there...
...I remember asking him if I was correct in supposing that the moral work he was promising to write—a project he conceived of as his great intellectual endeavor and did not succeed entirely in realizing—would ultimately have to be a philosophy of history...
...He had too many opinions...
...Teresa's subjectivity and her historical situation...
...The loss and reconquest of innocence was the theme of the poet John Milton, another great Protestant, also enmeshed in the struggles of his century, whom an excessive love of freedom caused to justify the tyrant Cromwell...
...I was living in Paris during those years after World War II when his glory and influence were at their height...
...Nietzsche said that the great contribution of Christianity to our knowledge of the soul was the invention of selfscrutiny and its corollary, remorse, which is at one and the same time self-punishment and an exercise in introspection...
...And it is this that distinguishes the mystical experience from all others: although the Devil is the non-Person by antonomasia and although strictly speaking God, too, is a nonperson, except in the mystery of the Incarnation, for the believer both are tangible presences, spirits in human form...
...He was proposing to insert the real, live human being into Marxism...
...For my taste the best of his writings is the most personal, the least "committed," those texts that are nearer confession than speculation, for instance, many pages of Les Mots, perhaps his best book: there words take shape, play games, return to childhood...
...This ignorance of Spanish literature is widespread and not unusual among Europeans and Americans...
...In his search for the man of flesh and blood, Sartre often ended up with a handful of abstractions...
...The publication in Les Temps Modernes of a fragment of the book on Jean Genet, which he was then writing, led us to speak about that writer and St...
...When the Hungarian revolution broke out, Sartre attributed the uprising in part to Khrushchev's imprudent revelations of Stalin's crimes...
...For him the sun of reality never shone...
...Nevertheless, he would welcome a stranger cordially, and one guessed that he was harder on himself than on others...
...He wrote admirable narratives but lacked the novelist's strength, the ability to create worlds, atmospheres, and characters...
...In those years, reading him both enraged and impassioned me...
...By which I mean essential for us, his contemporaries...
...Plenitude, happiness: two words that do not appear in his lexicon...
...It reappears among the Gnostics of the third and fourth centuries and in the millenary movements that have periodically affected the West, from the Middle Ages to the Reformation...
...I have touched upon our differences in parts of Alternating Current and The Philanthropic Ogre...
...He was a consciousness and a passion...
...When Sartre let himself be carried away by his gift for words, the result was surprising...
...We are its accomplices and it is realized in us...
...We also know how far this paradox of freedom as condemnation led Sartre...
...He was talking from hearsay...
...Perhaps he forgot that this first-person plural is a collective "you...
...This was a comparison much to his taste, since, he would say, both had effectively made the same choice: Consummate Evil for one...
...The philosophy of compromise melted away in public in contradictory gestures...
...As I remember our exchanges, Sartre's moral steadfastness, his constancy, surprised me...
...Why and to what end are we alive...
...Perhaps its very intensity was what made this reckless love so unperceptive...
...Far be it from me to renounce this tradition...
...he was no La Rochefoucauld...
...Deep down, inside Sartre's personality, lay an atavistic moral foundation shaped more by the Protestantism of his family heritage than by dialectic...
...He was an excellent critic and an inspired polemicist...
...These last two qualities were not contradictory: he had the agility of a heavyweight prizefighter...
...The difference lay in the fact that the colonies were not part of the bourgeois states' system of repression (no French workers were condemned to forced labor in Algeria, nor were British dissidents deported to India), whereas the Soviet people itself made up the population of the camps—peasants, workers, intellectuals, and whole strata of society (ethnic, religious, and professional...
...Sartre had not read St...
...Sartre's excesses are one more example of 427 the perverse use of the Hegelian dialectic in the 20th century...
...The dream of universal brotherhood— more emphatically, the enlightened certainty that this is the state to which all mankind is naturally and supernaturally predestined if we can recover our original innocence—appears in primitive Christianity...
...It was his last piece...
...And yet, for years he stubbornly defended the U.S.S.R...
...It is significant that when he wrote these pages he had not perceived in the liberation movements of the so-called Third World the germs of political corruption that have transformed these revolutions into dictatorships...
...And again, is it even conceivable that liberation movements— like those that have freed the former European colonies in Asia and Africa—could be born and could develop within the concentration camps of Russia, Cuba, or Vietnam...
...for the other, Consummate Good ("le Non-Etre de I'Etre et l'Etre du Non-Etre...
...If his prose is not memorable, what can we say about his novels and stories...
...Two immoral moralists...
...His gifts were not those of the artist...
...Worse than the polemicist's hatchet were the moralist's rod and the professor's pointer...
...It is cause for rejoicing that at the end of his life, without denying his atheism, resigned to his death, Sartre recovered the best and purest part of our religious tradition—the vision of a world of men and women reconciled, transparent one to another because there is no longer anything to hide nor to fear, naked once again as at the beginning...
...The interview-cum-dinner lasted over three hours, during which Sartre was extremely animated, speaking with intelligence, passion, and energy...
...Gide rebelled in the name of the senses and the imagination...
...All through his life, as though the spiritual practices of his Huguenot ancestors echoed within him, he subjected his conscience to scrupulous examination...
...We know the answers he gave to these questions: Man, surrounded by nothingness and non-sense, is of little consequence...
...And why use absolute, a word drenched in theology...
...Simone de Beauvoir arrived and rather impatiently made him down his coffee and leave...
...By accusing his class and his world, Sartre is accusing himself with the violence of a penitent...
...A cruel paradox: he despised literature and was above all a man of letters...
...And so, at the root of his analyses, protests, and insults of bourgeois society, the old vindictive voice of Christianity sounds again...
...He made his real voyages around himself, in the solitude of his room...
...Beginning with the singular "I," his works move out to embrace the plural "us...
...At the center of his thought was the complementary opposition between the situation (predestination) and freedom...
...Moreover, during those years the colonies won their independence, while the system of the concentration camps has spread, like an infection, throughout all the countries dominated by Communist regimes...
...But Sartre's Situation is a divinity that has no face, because it has all faces: it is an abstract divinity...
...He failed, but his failure is the failure of three generations of left-wing intellectuals...
...It is remarkable that the two French writers who during the 20th century have had the deepest influence—on moral thought, not on literature—have been Andre Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre...
...Time and again he supported the tyrannies of our century because he thought that the despotism of the revolutionary caesars was only freedom's mask...
...The concentration camps—that is, repression— were (and are) an integral part of the Soviet system...
...We have built with it nothing but prisons of concepts...
...This was his profound mistake, if such an intellectual and moral flaw can be so called...
...Sartre bore his fame simply and with good humor...
...The polemicist harmed the critic: his analyses often became accusations, as in his books on Baudelaire and Flaubert, or in his preposterous criticisms of surrealism...
...He tires his reader without convincing him...
...He accepted, and a few days later the three of us ate together in the Pont-Royal bar...
...Sartre lived the ideas, struggles, and tragedies of our era with the intensity with which others live their private dramas...
...A crazy hope that one day things would change...
...We were brought up in the dual heritage of Christianity and the Enlightenment...
...q Translated by RACHEL PHILLIPS BELASH 429...
...But this is an insignificant cavil...
...And so he was as much opposed to the ideology that reduces individuals to mere functions of class as to the ideology that conceives of classes as functions of the nation...
...Edmund Wilson took pride in having read neither Cervantes, Calderon, nor Lope de Vega...
...The penitential Christianity of a man who has stopped believing in God but not in sin...
...Except that 428 what lies on the other side of despair is not life but the old Christian virtue we call hope...
...The expression "philosophy of history" struck him as suspect, spurious, as if for him philosophy were one thing and history another...
...I mean that he was conscious of the passage of time and of men...
...If everything is in motion, evil is only a momentary state of goodness, momentary but necessary, and essentially good...
...As I reread these pages, 1 thought once more about the man that inspired them...
...But how can they change if no one dares denounce them, or if "in order not to play into the hands of imperialism" the denunciation is conditional and filled with reservations and exculpatory phrases...
...A terrible phrase because other people are our horizon, the world of men...
...It would be ungenerous to go on with the catalogue of his obfuscations...
...without it our societies would no longer be the internal dialogue that is the essence of true civilization, and would be transformed into the barbarous, monotonous monologue of power...
...Time and again he had to confess that he had been wrong: what had looked like masks were the stone faces of the Fuhrers...
...In his last years he made almost complete amends, and joined his former adversary, Raymond Aron, in the campaign to charter a ship to transport refugees from the Communist tyranny of Vietnam...
...For Genet, Satan and God are words signifying nebulous realities, suprasensible entities—myths or ideas...
...Criticism allowed Kant and Hume, Voltaire and Diderot to lay the foundations of our modern world...
...He also protested against the invasion of Afghanistan, and his is one of the names heading the manifesto of French intellectuals, asking their government to join the boycott against the Moscow Olympics...
...It is a cruel sun, but also, at certain moments, a sun of plenitude and happiness...
...In spite of what his philosophy preaches, Sartre preferred shadow to substance...
...We moderns need to rediscover the singular "you...
...Sartre's naturalness, frankness, and integrity impressed me as much as the agility of his thought and the solidity of his convictions...
...The same themes and problems that inspired him in his youth engaged him in his maturity and his old age...
...For the religious conscience of Protestantism, to know the world is to judge it, and to judge is to condemn...
...Judaism is a closed fraternity...
...In a moment of desperation he said, "Hell is other people...
...My friend never wrote the article, but that first encounter gave me the chance to see Sartre again in the same bar...
...We got in touch with him through some common friends and proposed the idea...
...If he was severe in his criticism of American intervention in Vietnam and of French policy in Algeria, he was not blind to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Cambodia...
...and its satellites because he believed that, despite everything, these regimes embodied a socialist design, though in a corrupt form...
...Gide was a moralist but also an aesthete, and in his work moral criticism went hand in hand with the cult of the beautiful...
...his prologue to Fanon's book [The Wretched of the Earth] is a fierce, impressive exercise in denigration, which is at the same time self-expiation...
...He lacked grace, but compensated for it with a hearty, direct style...
...Stubbornness...
...His criticism of the West was implacable, and exudes hatred of his world and of himself...
...Moreover, many of his mistakes were ours, the mistakes of our age...
...The real name of his criticism is remorse...
...this was also the theme of the Calvinists, and it was the main point of their debate with the Jesuits...
...A friend, who had been sent to Paris by our Univeristy [of Mexico] to complete his studies in philosophy, told me he was in danger of losing his scholarship unless he produced in the near future a work on some philosophical theme...
...The topics of these conversations were those of the time: existentialism and its relationship to literature and politics...
...Man is not man, he is potential man...
...I have digressed...
...Whether he is dealing with American politics or with Flaubert's attitudes, the intellectual and moral pattern of his criticism is that of the Christian searching his conscience: it starts with an awakening, a tearing away of veils and masks, a search not for nakedness but for the hidden wound, and it ends, inexorably, in a judgment...
...Teresa...
...Profusion is not excellence...
...A disjointed, moving text...
...Communism disappointed him because he saw that it replaced the prison of Christian morality with a more total, more concrete prison...
...I am not convinced that these peremptory formulas resist even a slightly persistent analysis...
...he often gets lost in useless digressions and amplifications...
...Despite the fact that the sanctimoniousness of many of his admirers—especially the Latin Americans, as always avid for "up-to-date" philosophies—was at once irritating and comic, his truly philosophic simplicity disarmed even the most reticent...
...This lack of affectation was an affectation in itself, and could shift from frankness to abruptness...
...On the other hand, I was surprised by his saying that Judaism, the least universal of the three monotheisms, is the origin and foundation of this hope...
...How can we forget that they were born of his love of freedom...
...A sort of moralizing masochism, born of impeccable principles, has for over 30 years paralyzed many intellectuals of the West and of Latin America...
...Our last conversation was almost entirely about politics...
...This attitude is the more courageous because it stands out against a black background: Sartre confesses that his work is left unfinished, that his political efforts were defeated, and that the world he is leaving behind is gloomier than the world he was born into...
...He was stocky and a little clumsy...
...Sartre's ideas and attitudes justified the opposite of what he proposed: the unembarrassed and generalized irresponsibility of the left-wing intellectuals (Latin Americans above all) who for the past 20 years, in the name of revolutionary compromise, tactics, dialectics, and other nonsense have praised and covered up tyrants and butchers...
...Teresa...
...both streams of thought, the religious and the secular, at their best produced great moral critics...
...he wanted to free the passions chained up inside men rather than men themselves...
...Despite its diversity, much of what he said, even when he was wrong, seems to me essential...
...Their criticism was creative, as was that of their heirs in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries...
...There are passions that seek the absolute and there are philosophies of the absolute, but there are no absolute passions nor philosophies...
...And so in 1947 he had already begun his long and unfortunate dialogue with Marxism and the Marxists...
...Sartre thought and wrote profusely and on many subjects...
...Not even God is lacking: the Situation (History) takes on His functions if not His features and His essence...
...Then I felt the temptation to paraphrase him—itself an act of homage and recognition—by writing in his memory: freedom is other people...
...The actualizing agent is choice: we are condemned to choose, and our pain is called freedom...
...Though when he spoke of men he reduced them to concepts, ideas, and theses, he could turn words into living beings...
...Happenstance gave me that opportunity...
...Years later, reading what he had written on that poet, I realized that once again the object of his admiration was not the poetry that Mallarme had in fact written, but his plan for an absolute poetry, the Book he never wrote...
...The colonies are really the concentration camps of the bourgeoisie...
...This is why his quiet hope truly impressed me: despite the disasters of our era, some day men will reconquer fraternity (or will conquer it for the first time...
...Sartre preached the responsibility of the writer and yet, during the years when he exercised a sort of moral dominion over the whole world (except for Communist countries), his successive and contradictory "engagements" were an example of hastiness and incoherence, if not irresponsibility...
...His work is not a beginning but a continuation of and sometimes a commentary on the work of others...
...By not getting at the root of the matter, he was indirectly aiding and abetting those who wished to perpetuate the lies behind which the Soviet reality had until then been hiding...
...A strange thing: though Sartre wrote pages of great subtlety on the meaning of visual communication, his conversation had the opposite effect—it annulled the power of vision...
...In other words, the real person who was the Spanish nun, and the intellectual and affective horizon of her life, the religiosity of 16th-century Spain...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
