by Colin Wilson
The same can be said of nearly all the work of Thomas Mann. The central thesis of Mann’s novels is that the artist is somehow unfitted for life. This conviction gathered strength as he grew older. Finally, his feeling of the need for solidarity and balance led him to exalt the bourgeois as the salvation of the modern world, although the “unbalanced” artist continued to have a morbid fascination for him. But his tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, provides an important exception. In this book, Mann writes about the old hero, the “lucky” man. In Greek mythology, to be lucky meant to be favored by the gods. The same concept lies behind the stories of knights in the Middle Ages, and it is invisibly present in the Arabian Nights. Joseph, like Ulrich, is born with all the qualities for greatness; unlike Ulrich, he is not a modern hero, which means that there is no obstacle to prevent him from fulfilling his destiny. On this level, the story is simple and straightforward. Its main interest lies in the fact that Joseph is an authentic hero figure, an exception to the unheroic premise.
1 This is of particular interest. Faust is traditionally represented as an old (or elderly) man. Marlowe’s Faustus asks for the return of his youth as the first gift of Mephistopheles. Goethe obviously had no wish to load the dice against his hero: all Faust’s despair can then be concentrated on his self-division, his sense of internal defeat.
2 See “The Kipling Nobody Read” in Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow.
Part 4. The Fallacy of Insignificance
The statement that Ulrich and Moosbrugger feel a helpless rage at the oversimplifications upon which society bases its judgments summarizes the central preoccupation of existentialism. Existentialism is an attempt to map and explore human complexity; its chief bête noire is oversimplification (or abstraction).
The word was first used to describe a philosophical attitude by Søren Kierkegaard, who defined it in his assertion: “Truth is subjectivity.” The oversimplification that Kierkegaard rebelled against was German metaphysics, with its claims to “explain” history and the world. Since Kierkegaard, the label has been applied to a great many thinkers—Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre, and Camus are the best-known names. Of these, only the last two now accept the term “existentialist” as a description of their attitude. At one stage, Marcel called himself a “Christian existentialist,” but most existentialists would agree that the terms are self-contradictory (at least, if Christianity is defined as belief in redemption from Original Sin by Christ). Heidegger and Jaspers have shown themselves true to the spirit of existentialism by preferring to write about poets and artists rather than to discuss philosophy; Heidegger has written penetratingly on Hölderlin and Nietzsche, and Jaspers has also written about Nietzsche, as well as about Van Gogh and Rilke.
Existentialism has an immediate bearing upon the problem of the hero. Its concepts provide the tools with which the whole problem can be dissected. The present section will be devoted to an attempt to define these concepts, particularly as they appear in the work of Sartre and Camus.
A Philosophy of Inner-Direction
Sartre’s existentialism could be called a philosophy of inner-direction. Its aim is to emphasize man’s freedom and to explain the workings of that freedom.
In Hemingway’s short story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Macomber is a coward who has run away from a charging lion, leaving the white hunter to deal with it. His wife is so contemptuous of him that she is unfaithful with the white hunter and makes no attempt to conceal it. Later, as they are shooting buffalo, Macomber is carried away by his excitement and stands up to a charging buffalo. His wife also shoots at the buffalo and accidentally hits Macomber, killing him. Macomber’s “short happy life” was the time between regaining his courage and receiving a bullet in the brain. Sartre would say that during his “short happy life” Macomber existed authentically, and that during the period when he considered himself a coward he existed inauthentically. Man is free. This means he cannot be a coward in the same way, for instance, that a table is a table. He may be a coward on some particular occasion, but every new occasion that presents itself offers him a completely clean sheet, to be a coward again, or to be a hero. Observe that I used the phrase “be a coward again” rather than “continue to be a coward.” He may have acted like a coward on every occasion, yet it is still not true to say he is a coward. He is free. He can even decide “I am not a coward” when he has not yet proved he is not a coward, for in his essence he has no qualities. In his essence he is not even a man; he just is.
Now, obviously, the statement “a man is free” is almost meaningless if it is taken to mean “he has no limitations.” In order to have meaning, his limitations must be stated, the boundaries within which he has freedom and choice.
To begin with, Sartre means that there are no laws of God which must be obeyed, for there is no God. His existentialism is atheistic. (Atheism, however, is not a necessary premise of existentialism.) This also applies to all so-called sacred books and revelations. The kind of premise laid down by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance—“The Bible is the only reliable source of truth”—would be dismissed instantly by any existentialist as the most fundamental kind of error. When a man begins to look outside himself for his freedom, he has already plunged into inauthentic living, and his thinking is unsound in its foundations. But there is another important way in which men surrender their freedom: in slavery to their own pasts. If a man assumes he is a coward, because he has committed a dozen acts of cowardice, or if he feels that he is a sinner who must repent, then he is imposing the strait jacket of his past upon his present freedom. In Sartre’s play, Les Mouches (The Flies), Orestes murders Clytemnestra and refuses to repent, even when it means being hunted for the rest of his life by the Furies. While he acknowledges the act, he has his freedom. Once he disowns the act, or tries to explain it away (as Zeus persuades Electra to disown her part in the crime by telling her she never really meant to murder), he has destroyed his own freedom, chained himself voluntarily. Zeus puts on a show which is reminiscent of the book of Job, pointing to the stars, the sea, the earth, trying to overawe Orestes, demanding: “Who created you?” Orestes replies: “You did. But you made one mistake. You created me free.”1
There is a third way in which a man can lose his freedom—through self-deception (mauvaise-foi). This is by far the most important way, and a huge proportion of Sartre’s work explores the varieties of self-deception. Portrait of an Anti-Semite, for instance, deals with the form of self-deception involved in anti-Semitism. One of his finest short stories, “Childhood of a Leader,” is a brilliant parable of mauvaise-foi. It deals with the childhood and youth of a boy, Lucien Fleurier, who possesses the sensitivity of the young Proust or Joyce (Sartre was greatly influenced by Joyce, as well as by Faulkner) and an intellectual subtlety that makes him wonder, at one point, whether there is any proof that he exists. He has a difficult adolescence, suffering from shyness, inability to express himself, and various complexes and worries. He reads Rimbaud and Freud and is deeply impressed by both.
Later he comes under the domination of a homosexual professor, who seduces him. This is the climax of his feeling of total lostness. He doesn’t know who he is, or what he wants out of life. He knows he is sensitive and intelligent, but these qualities lead nowhere. He has no conviction of any sort. He does not even know whether he is a homosexual, although the fact that he has had a homosexual experience inclines him to believe that he is. (Note here Sartre’s doctrine of inauthentic existence.) But he begins to mix with a violent set of right-wing young people, anti-Semites and devotees of L’Action Française, the right-wing newspaper. Their gaiety and lightly carried conviction enchant him. Soon he becomes the most passionate of anti-Semites and right-wingers. Even so, his anti-Semitism is in the nature of a tryout, like looking at oneself in a new hat in the mirrors of a hat shop. He has not yet identified himself with it. But an incident changes his attitude. He has two friends—a youth named Guigard and his attractive sister
Pierrette. Lucien suspects the sister of being a little in love with him, and the suspicion has a delightful effect on his vanity. They invite him to a party, at which there happens to be a Jewish friend of the Guigards. Guigard tries to introduce Lucien to the Jew; Lucien turns his back and walks out of the house. Immediately, he feels ashamed of himself, and overwhelmed with embarrassment and self-pity. He has thrown away two friends for the sake of a stupid principle. He is on the point of returning to apologize, but he feels even more shame at the thought of an apology. Finally, after a night of misery, he decides to apologize to the friend the next day. But when he sees Guigard at school, it is his friend who apologizes first, and congratulates Lucien on his strength of character. It becomes apparent that the admiration of Guigard’s sister has also been intensified by the incident. In a daze of well-being, he goes into a café and thinks about it. He is a person at last. He imagines a broad back marching away from a Jew, while Pierrette Guigard and her brother stare after it with astonishment and admiration, and thinks “That back is me, Lucien, the Jew-hater.” At last, he has a direction and a conviction. He can act; he has a purpose. He can become a leader of the right-wing movement eventually. Perhaps the dictator of France. He imagines the woman who will be his—a hero-worshiping child who belongs to him alone. When he walks out of the café, he can hardly walk straight for exaltation. He is. All doubts are behind him.
The story is an overwhelmingly ironical comment on the times. (It is more ironical when one realizes that the war followed, and the ultimate defeat of French reaction.) Lucien has become a “person” by selling his freedom in the subtlest way: to a stupid purpose. It is obvious that Sartre sees him as only one degree removed from the opium addict, and two degrees from the habitual drunkard. The reader who knows his Hemingway will here be reminded of “The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio”: “Religion is the opium of the people, economics is the opium of the people," and so on with sex, patriotism, politics, the radio, and so forth. But Hemingway’s cripple is a complete nihilist; he rejects all values. In Sartre’s story, Lucien’s politics is an opium, a self-deception, but this does not mean that all politics, all beliefs, are self-deception. But where does the boundary lie? Why is Lucien’s fascism self-deception when Sartre’s socialism is, presumably, not? Partly because Lucien uses it deliberately as an ego booster (after all, he had shown double weakness after the party: weakness of repenting what he has just done, and weakness of being too ashamed to try and undo it). But apart from this, Sartre never explains with any precision how he makes the leap from his view of fascism as self-deception to the socialism he has embraced. (Neither did Anatole France, for that matter, although he died a communist, after spending a lifetime ridiculing fanaticism.) This is one of the major flaws in Sartre’s attitude to his work.
Existential Psychology
But what is most interesting in Sartre is his psychology—or, as he prefers to call it, his psychoanalysis. This is certainly his major contribution to contemporary thought. He calls this “existential psychoanalysis,” and occasionally speaks as if Freud is an impostor and a late-comer to the field.
The basis of Sartre’s psychology is his statement, in the one-act play, Huis Clos (No Exit), “Hell is other people.” The play is the story of three people who wake up in hell, which turns out to be a large drawing room. There are no torments. But the three people seem to have been carefully chosen to get on one another’s nerves. They are condemned to spend eternity in each other’s company, never sleeping, never even being allowed to close their eyes. It is torture by triviality and boredom. Hell is an eternity of triviality. (There are echoes of Shaw’s hell here.) One of the three is a man who enjoys meditation, but he will never be allowed to meditate, for he is in the company of a beautiful woman who craves his attention and a lesbian who is jealous of him. No general conclusions are stated, but they are clearly implied: man’s greatest moments are moments of intense subjectivity, self-certainty, concentration. His greatest enemy is pointlessness, lack of purpose. Other people are the main problem. (“Increasingly, other people are the problem,” David Riesman wrote of the other-directed character.) A man who is robbed of his subjectivity has nothing left.
In L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness), Sartre’s longest philosophical work, this problem is analyzed at great length. Sartre begins with the rather puzzling statement, “Man knows his consciousness as a nothingness.” (One of the chief faults of Sartre’s philosophical writing is a tendency to state things more abstractly than is strictly necessary.) And yet its meaning is simple enough. A man is very seldom aware of himself as a person; what he is mainly aware of, when he thinks of himself, is what other people think of him. I know that I change my character like a chameleon according to the person to whom I am talking. If I am talking to a pretty and very feminine girl, I feel positive and masculine. If I am speaking to some oppressively masculine man, I tend to feel negative and feminine. If I am talking to some old and famous author, who is pulling his age on me, I feel young and rebellious. If I am speaking to some very young and inexperienced writer, I am inclined to feel as if I am ninety-nine, with a life’s work behind me. Although I know that none of these is the real Colin Wilson, that all are mirages called into existence by the character of the person I am speaking to, I cannot dismiss them and feel differently. (Eugene O’Neill deals with this theme in The Great God Brown, in which the characters put on different masks to signify their changes in character.)
Although all men know they exist (or take it for granted), they very seldom feel a solid kernel in themselves which they know to be the “real” Smith or Jones. What they know as “themselves” is this changing mirage caused by other people. One could go further and say that man usually experiences himself as a vacuum in his social environment. Hence Sartre’s use of the word “nothingness” (vacuity).
But there are certain moments in which man knows himself as a positive reality; Francis Macomber knew it as he faced a charging buffalo without fear. In such moments of insight, a man knows he exists, he has an experience of freedom. But the moment does not bring the freedom into existence. It brings to the man awareness of a permanently present factor, just as a man only occasionally becomes aware of his own breathing, although his breathing never stops.
The result of this recognition is a knowledge of the dual nature of freedom. Man is free all the time, but he confronts his freedom only at long intervals. Between these occasions, he is free, but does not know it. To be free without knowing it is not to be free. In order to become a reality which authenticates existence, freedom must be grasped intuitively.
The chief obstacle to intuitive apprehension is self-division, for the self-divided man is aware of himself as an intellect, a personality, rather than as an urge to live. Even on the simplest level, modern man is bound to be self-divided, for in his life he must be involved in a large amount of repetitious routine. While he is automatically performing these routine operations, his thoughts and feelings will tend to pursue their own course. Hence, on the simplest level, he is self-divided. (The disciplines of Taoism and Zen regard this as an evil, and demand that the adept should concentrate his whole being on everything he does.) Under these conditions, freedom is anything that will unite the whole being in one apprehension. In his long novel, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), Sartre makes his hero reflect: “Freedom is terror.” But Yeats and Rupert Brooke had approached the same insight when they spoke of the liberating effect of the urge to flight, Brooke in the sonnet “Now God be thanked…” and Yeats in “Under Ben Bulben”:
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Freedom is not merely terror; it is any intense emotion that restores a man’s subjectivity. The enemy is repetition, for it makes for self-d
ivision. The central character of Les Chemins de la Liberté is a university professor named Mathieu, a man whose deepest urge is towards freedom, or “salvation” as Sartre expresses it in the first volume (L’ge de Raison). In pursuance of this aim, he has spent his life avoiding responsibilities. When his mistress is about to have a baby, he refuses to marry her, although they have been lovers for several years and she is, to all intents and purposes, his wife. This desire for freedom has not made an extraordinary man of him; on the contrary, he feels unreal, empty, purposeless. When he compares himself with his communist friend, Brunet, he feels only half-alive; Brunet has conviction, idealism, purpose. The situation repeats the elements of Notes from Underground: Mathieu subtle yet negative, Brunet stupid yet positive. Sartre makes no important advances on Dostoevsky’s conclusions, and the over-all effect of the novel is as depressing as Dos Passos’ U.S.A. (by which it seems to have been influenced in technique).
I am writing of Sartre at some length because he is the dramatist of “insignificance.” In his novels, plays, and philosophical works, he analyzes every possible aspect of man’s uncertainty. La Nausée is about a man who feels so insignificant that even objects overwhelm him. In L’Être et le Néant he speaks of those moments when a man is robbed of every shred of his subjectivity and exists completely as an object for other people. (The example Sartre gives is of a man being caught looking through a keyhole: in his feeling of guilt, he sees himself entirely as the other person sees him, and does not “exist for himself” in any way.) A man can be robbed of his reality in a thousand different ways—even a wet Monday morning causes a slump of the feelings that starts the self-division—and Sartre’s analysis touches on most of them.
