Sartre's Optimism

...it is only insofar as it relates to something outside...

...never before have his possibilities been so passionately challenged...

...indeed, we were thrilled by them...

...In his closing years, Sartre came to take a sad view of things...

...But I make it a point to resist...

...He explained only a month before his death last April 15: "With the ominous possibility of a third world war, with the miserable state of our planet, despair comes to tempt me again: the idea that there is no end to it all, no goal, only particular little aims for which each of us fights...

...Marxism, "that unsurpassable philosophy of our time," seemed to offer the solution...

...In order to generalize, to move away from the individual's alienation to the idea of a"group," capable in turn of giving an "end" to history, the analysis had to start from the bottom with the experience of the individual...

...We shall miss the great Ethics he had promised us...

...Allowed a little more than one word, I would choose that tenet of Husserl and the German school of phenomenology, "All consciousness is consciousness of something...

...How real, how concrete his " freedom" (that abstract notion of the old idealism) has become...

...And, like all "philosophies" in the classical sense, his was unified by an ontological vision—the same vision that had touched us first in our green time, almost without our knowledge...

...all of a sudden, we were left to ourselves, we were in charge...

...We know now that this essay so staggered Mauriac that he stopped writing fiction for five years...

...It was the time of Les Mots (Words, 1964...

...Now, as a famous existentialist slogan had it, "man is condemned to be free...

...William Faulkner gave Sartre the opportunity to define further the freedom of the existentialist hero, who gains power over the future by his sovereign handling of the present...

...Mauriac...

...His early thought had begged one question he never entirely succeeded in answering: How do we root the Sartri-an man in history, the theater where he is to turn his destiny into a project...

...At the same time, this criticism introduced many Frenchmen to modern American literature...

...Valery is a petit-bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about that...

...The single page devoted to him in our manual of philosophy included a photograph that so accentuated his strabismus as to make him look like a crab...

...Yet he did not succumb to despair...

...Sartre compared Faulkner's vision of the world to "that of a man who sits in a convertible car and looks rearward...

...True, he is "abandoned" under "an empty sky," as we had been told in school...

...how do we go from the particular to the general, from the irreducible " I" to "us...

...As I look back, I realize how he helped to "free" us, even then, from our sense of an omnipresent authority—from the professors, from the good priests, from the evening sermon...

...We accepted these judgments...

...Hence the enormous and unfinished attempt of the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, that frenzied, perilous exercise in permanent dialectic which reminds us of St...

...Augustine—not the Augustine of the Confessions but of the De Trinita-tis...

...His quest took him from Moscow to Havana to Peking to the Left Bank of Paris, and in time he developed the creeping suspicion that the very idea of an end carried within itself the beginning of still another Gulag...

...This of course is the quiet desperation of a man who knows he will die in that ugly, wicked world...

...But this was merely another way of saying that man is restored to the fullness of his powers, that the whole range of his abilities can be fully mobilized...

...The method had to be revised, and existentialism was going to do just that...

...Yet despite our complacent delight in what we were told of his "blackness," Sartre's optimism seeped through to us in unconscious ways...

...Beside it there was a short description of Sartre's view of the "hopeless, absurd life" of man, "that abandoned creature with an empty sky above his head...

...Allowed only one word to characterize it, I would choose "anti-idealism" —meaning not an absence of "ideals," of course, but a refutation of the belief held by centuries of "idealistic" philosophers that values pre-exist and descend upon man according to some abstract and eternal gravity...

...Man can only be defined by his positive interaction with the world (what Sartre called our "project...

...Sartre's dedication to individual man can also be seen in his literary criticism—those beautiful texts, perhaps less known in the U.S...

...What we have to do is found this hope...

...Traditional ontologies and their religious or moral extensions had pre-empted man's faculties...

...But Sartre's ethics are already there, they are the thread-mark and texture of those books where he is most himself: Saint Genet Comedian and Martyr, Words, the Critique, and above all perhaps the first nine volumes of his collected essays, Situations...

...the present is fugitive . . . essentially catastrophic...

...In a sense, Sartre was back to zero last month in Paris' Broussais hospital...

...The outline of the past is sharp, hard, unmoveable...

...Some even thought it appropriate to "attempt" dramatic suicides over an open page of Sartre's...

...Nevertheless, this "corruptor of the young" captured the imagination of at least two generations of French adolescents...

...it would give Marxism the foundations it cried for...

...We make tiny revolutions, but there is nothing like an end for humanity, nothing that truly concerns man—only little disorders...

...ciples for action...

...How strangely moving the dignity he has gained in the process...

...Judging from Nausea, and from thepaceof Being and Nothingness, the discovery of what was to form the bedrock underlying the multiple levels of Sartre's later work had the quality of an intuition, the force of an illumination...

...God is not an artist," Sartre wrote, and "neither is Mr...

...These two sentences sum up the fundamental heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism," Sartre wrote in Questions de M?thode...

...But every petit-bourgeois intellectual is not Valery...

...In trying to explain the prime energy and simplicity of his vision, one risks being branded a popularizer...

...Like countless other 15-year-old students of philosophy in those well-to-do Catholic boarding schools, whose courtyards are planted with the very chestnut trees that "nausea"-ted his Roquentin, we had been told and told again that Jean-Paul Sartre's was a "viscous" world, a "sordid," "slimy" universe permeated by "Evil...

...Born in this century of "specialized knowledge," when the human sciences have divided themselves into ever smaller sub-disciplines, Sartre's thought was complete: In the end, its subject was always the totality of human experience...

...To be sure, we had no idea of the scope and rigor of his philosophy—the real thinkers were Kant, Spinoza, Bergson...

...If consciousness does not exist in itself, per se, there is no such thing as an "essence" that in any way precedes "existence," and no such thing as a "nature" of man upon which we can base some overhanging ethics or prinFrancois Sauzey, a new contributor to The New Leader, is the editor of Trialogue, the quarterly journal published by the Trilateral Commission...

...At every instant, shapeless shadows surge left and right . . . becoming trees, men, cars only a little later...

...For the characters of Faulkner's A bsalom, Absalom!, by contrast, "the ordinance of the past is the ordinance of the heart...

...Though perhaps primarily a moralist, Sartre also provided an epis-temology and a psychology, a theory of emotions and a theory of history, even a full esthetics...

...To this day, even many who are otherwise very well-read associate him with a vague sense of life as an endless hangover, labeled "existentialism...

...Sartre's life was the story of a search for this elusive "end" that could sustain our hope—he would find one, then discard it, find another one and discard that too...

...How awesome the extentension of his responsibility...

...It was his belief in man's inalienable individuality and freedom that made Sartre's long relationship with Marxism so difficult—and so seminal...

...But Sartre's fierce individual could never accept an "end" sent from above, could never submit to being explained or pluralized in the "monstrously mechanical" fallacies of dialectical materialism—or in the abstract concepts and absolute universals superimposed by Marx's followers and interpreters, starting with Engels...

...I know that I will die in a state of hope...

...There he stands, alone...

...we felt like adults...

...Sartre adored John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos, the latter most of all because he preserved the "opacity" of things, because he wanted facts and gestures to remain simply that and no more, and because he was concerned with rendering the "singularity, the uniqueness of a life...

...The Cyclopean, versatile oeuvre was left unfinished...

...than in Europe, that have molded so much of our literary sensibiliity since 1938...

...Sartre stumbled upon this while a student in Berlin in the early '30s and wrenched it from its original purpose to serve his great revolution: Consciousness does not pre-exist...

...And in a landmark essay, Sartre accused the great Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac of depriving his characters of their freedom, of manipulating their consciousness, of taking "the point of view of God...

...We reduced his "empty sky" to the scale of our small, enclosed juvenile world, and there, fleetingly...

...When the lights were turned out, we read them under our blankets with those tiny portable electric lamps that would send a faint halo of light through our bedcovers...

...The irreducible individual who redefines himself from one situation to another is at the center of all Sartre's works—from the plays to the novels, from the philosophical treatises to the mammoth biographies and the biting day-to-day exercises of the polemicist...

...nothing binds him a priori, except the outside world and what he chooses to do, or not to do, with it in every given "situation...

...Sartre's original vision, never entirely sacrificed to circumstances or theories, remains intact...