Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
Page 1
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Also by Iris Murdoch
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
I. The Discovery of Things
II. The Labyrinth of Freedom
III. The Sickness of the Language
IV. Introspection and Imperfect Sympathy
V. Value and the Desire to be God
VI. Metaphysical Theory and Political Practice
VII. The Romance of Rationalism
VIII. Picturing Consciousness
IX. The Impossibility of Incarnation
X. Linguistic Acts and Linguistic Objects
Bibliography
Translations into English
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then in 1948 she returned to Oxford, where she became a Fellow of St Anne’s College. Until her death in February 1999, she lived with her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley, in Oxford. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature.
Iris Murdoch made her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net, and went on to write twenty-six novels, including the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978). Other literary awards include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa Book Award) for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and Existentialists and Mystics (1997) She wrote several plays including The Italian Girl (with James Saunders) and The Black Prince, adapted from her novels of the same name.
OTHER WORKS BY IRIS MURDOCH
Fiction
Under the Net
Flight from the Enchanter
The Sandcastle
The Bell
A Severed Head
An Unofficial Rose
The Unicorn
The Italian Girl
The Red and the Green
The Time of the Angels
The Nice and the Good
Bruno’s Dream
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
An Accidental Man
The Black Prince
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
A Word Child
Henry and Cato
The Sea, The Sea
Nuns and Soldiers
The Philosopher’s Pupil
The Good Apprentice
The Book and the Brotherhood
The Message to the Planet
The Green Knight
Jackson’s Dilemma
Non-fiction
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Existentialists and Mystics
SARTRE
Romantic Rationalist
Iris Murdoch
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Copyright © Iris Murdoch 1953
Introduction copyright © Iris Murdoch 1987
Iris Murdoch has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 1953 by Bowes & Bowes
Publishers Ltd, in the series ‘Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought’
Published with a new introduction in 1987
by Chatto & Windus
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To
IRENE AND HUGHES MURDOCH
INTRODUCTION
Philosophers are not often popular idols, and works of philosophy rarely become guide-books to living, during the philosopher’s lifetime. In the twenty years after the war Sartre was probably the best-known metaphysician in Europe, best-known that is not just among professional thinkers (many of whom ignored him) but among young and youngish people who, for once, found in philosophy, in his philosophy, the clear and inspiring explanation of the world which philosophers are generally supposed to provide. The fundamental and attractive idea was freedom. It had long been known that God was dead and that man was self-created. Sartre produced a fresh and apt picture of this self-chosen being. The metaphysical imagery of L’Être et le Néant, Being and Nothingness, was, for popular purposes, easily grasped. The pour-soi, for-itself, a spontaneous free consciousness, was contrasted with the en-soi, in itself, inert, fixed, unfree. The en-soi was the world experienced as alien, senselessly contingent or unreflectively deformed. The heroic consciousness, the individual self, inalienably and ineluctably free, challengingly confronted the ‘given’, in the form of existing society, history, tradition, other people. The war was over, Europe was in ruins, we had emerged from a long captivity, all was to be remade. Sartre’s philosophy was an inspiration to many who felt that they must, and could, make out of all that misery and chaos a better world, for it had now been revealed that anything was possible. Existentialism was the new religion, the new salvation. This was the atmosphere in Brussels in 1945 where I first read L’Être et le Néant and where I briefly (and on this occasion only) met Sartre. His presence in the city was like that of a pop star. Chico Marx, who was there at about the same time, was less rapturously received. The only other occasion when I saw a philosopher being hailed as a prophet was in California in 1984 when I attended a lecture by Jacques Derrida (Un autre temps, toujours la même France).
One of the charms of the Sartrian philosophy at that moment was that it readily carried a political message. The enemy was the past, the old bourgeois world with its clumsy mechanism and its illusions and its fatal mistakes. It was and must be the end of an era. Fascism had been destroyed, left-wing governments would come to power everywhere, and in England one promptly did. It is interesting, and indeed touching, that so much optimism arose out of the vaguest understanding of Sartre’s doctrine, which also carried the melancholy message that since the pour-soi can never be united with the en-soi, man is une passion inutile, a useless, futile, passion. The darker message of the doctrine was unnoticed, or became itself a source of energy, perhaps because, as in the case of other so-called pessimists such as Hume or Schopenhauer, the cordial and self-satisfied discourse of the thinker conveys a cheering vitality quite at odds with his theory. The en-soi, an alien object of fascination, of fear, even of hate, in Sartre’s ob
sessive and hypnotic world picture, appears in his philosophical novel La Nausée as contingent matter, our surroundings, things, experienced as senseless and awful. In L’Être et le Néant and also in the novel sequence Les Chemins de la Liberté, the en-soi appears, in contrast to free reflection, as inert conventional opinions, dead traditions, illusions. In the drama Huis Clos, which was received with enthusiasm and is still played, the alien being is another person, whose freedom contradicts one’s own, and whose unassimilable Medusa gaze turns one’s pour-soi into an en-soi. This imagery returns us to the realisation that the ‘hero’ of Sartre’s early philosophy is, like the Cartesian subject, alone.
In his elegant account of his childhood, Les Mots, Sartre, brought up, he tells us, by two women and an old man, was early aware of himself as an actor, uncertainly enacting his role as a child prodigy, unable to find and coincide with his real self. This, already, was expressive of the inutile metaphysical passion which fills and inspires his work, longing to devour the world and make it his own, together with a tormenting and invigorating consciousness of the impossibility of success. The model which seems to prove that such a total philosophical synthesis can be, very nearly, achieved is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and it has been the dream of more than one metaphysically minded thinker, after and including Marx, to rewrite this book and get it right. Sartre attempted it twice. L’Être et le Néant was a huge non-historical revision of the subject-object dialectic, in which the prime value, and motive force, replacing Hegel’s Geist, was freedom (individual project), and wherein the insights of Heidegger (whose mythology Sartre secularised), Husserl, Freud and Marx were all to be accommodated. Sartre here portrayed the dialectic psychologically as the human soul; later he portrayed it socio-politically as human history. His later work remains, for all its obvious divergence and new tone, significantly close, his critics would say too close, to the first fine careless rapture of the early synthesis.
Sartre is, in himself, as philosopher, novelist, playwright, literary critic, biographer, essayist, journalist, a remarkable instance of the universal omnivorous writer. La Nausée, Sartre’s celebration of the horror of the contingent, is one of the very few unadulterated and successful members of the genre ‘philosophical novel’. It is unique in Sartre’s work, and I think in literature generally, a young man’s tour de force. The unfinished sequence Les Chemins de la Liberté are by contrast traditional novels, crammed with characters, events, story, various people, various moral judgements. Sartre evidently had, at this stage, no difficulty in telling a story, a feat which later on writers (and perhaps he) felt to be more difficult and problematic. These novels have a huge subject, passionately grasped and felt, the outbreak of war and the occupation of France, and they retain their power as works of literature. There are fairly inconspicuous moments of philosophical reflection, but these are not in any formidable or purposive sense ‘existentialist novels’, and their hero, Mathieu, is not a didactically existentialist hero. Indeed he appears, in comparison with more extreme and bizarre pictures of the human person conjured up elsewhere in Sartre’s philosophical and literary writings, and in spite of being periodically exhausted by the futile vagueness of his thoughts, a pillar of sobriety and decency, possessing quite ordinary qualities including a traditional moral sense. Short stories, in the collection Le Mur, explore a Sartrian existentialist idea, evident in Sartre’s followers and indeed in late romantic literature generally, that authentic being is attained in extreme situations, and in revolt against society. Here the figures who fascinate Sartre are often violent, even criminal. Hatred of existing (Western) society, often identified as ‘bourgeois society’ and contrasted with some imagined alternative, has of course been a long-standing (and often fruitful) source of literary inspiration. Sartre later indulged and explained his admiration for stylish and talented criminals in his long book about Jean Genet. He continued his literary career not as a storyteller but as a, successful, writer of plays. The plays were propaganda as well as art, and could be seen as supplementary to the battling articles in Temps Modernes. But perhaps in the long run the play satisfied the literary Sartre because of its compulsory formal brevity. The metaphysician who could not say anything unless he said everything was compelled in the theatre to give his message briefly; and as Sartre unfortunately could not do everything, as opposed to thinking everything, he found the theatre, where he had undoubted talent, a sympathetic place to drop into.
It often remains a mystery, in spite of hard work done on the subject by spectators including Sartre himself, why artists suddenly stop doing something they are good at and do nothing, or something else, which of course they may be good at too. Sartre might have gone on to write a huge novel full of thoughts and people. He did not, instead he wrote a book about Baudelaire, a long book about Jean Genet, and an extremely long book about Flaubert. These works come, strictly speaking, under the head of existential psychoanalysis, a procedure outlined in L’Être et le Néant, not under that of literary criticism. Les Mots, presumably an instance of existential self-analysis, is calm, even cold in tone. The other books, more passionate, in attempting to show in detail how the persons in question came to choose themselves to be as they were, also reveal Sartre’s own identification with, and sense of similarity to, his chosen subjects, and his intent desire to re-create himself inside them. On the other hand he appears, especially in the book on Flaubert, L’Idiot de la Famille, as a meticulous historian. The role of historian is one which he more positively assumes in his later philosophical synthesis. Of the book on Genet, it may be said that it expresses not only Sartre’s particular hatred of society, but his hatred of religion, one might say his religious hatred of religion. He says in Les Mots that atheism is a cruel long-term business. L’Etre et le Néant was attacked by critics who found it not only Godless but immoral, recognising no value except a Luciferian private will which in effect exalted unprincipled ‘sincerity’, bizarre originality, and irresponsible courage. The conclusion of Huis Clos, and one message of L’Etre et le Néant, is that l’enfer c’est les autres, hell is other people, all men are enemies, an expression of desperate or insolent solipsism which left no place for love or duty or the complex network of ordinary morals. Such metaphysical simplification also, by a shift to a political perspective, made room for the sinister message that in an oppressive society only violence is honest.
Sartre pursued his demonic ‘other’ in his studies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert: Baudelaire, le poéte maudit, social rebel, feminine temperament, masochist, caught in his own master and slave dialectic of revolt and submission, Genet, foundling, criminal, artist, feminine homosexual, boldly taking his own will as his conscience while accepting the moral judgements of society, Flaubert, also poised between rebellion and obedience, atheism and faith, another feminine temperament who actually became a woman in the person of his famous heroine. Both Baudelaire and Flaubert have a bourgeois background from which they escape by a déclassement symbolique, by electing themselves, as artists, into an imaginary elite academy or spiritual nobility; Genet is without, at least these, illusions. L’Être et le Néant was published in 1943, the book on Baudelaire in 1946, the book on Genet in 1952, the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Sartre’s second synthesis, in 1960, L’Idiot de la Famille, three volumes on Flaubert, nearly 4000 pages, in 1971–72. The remarkable study of Genet, the ‘diabolical saint’, (Saint Genet: Comédien et Martyr) is an exercise in Sartre’s own déclassement, his escape from ‘bourgeois morality’ and the benign Kantian perspectives of Existentialism and Humanism. It is thus a doorway into the later Marxist–Existentialist phase of his thought. He compares Genet with Bukharin, Genet is ‘a bourgeois Bukharin’; Bukharin confesses his guilt, judging himself upon Marxist principles which, against himself, he humbly affirms, so committing ‘moral suicide’. Genet also confesses, in accordance with the bourgeois values which brand him as wicked, as a murderer and a thief; but since, while doing so, he refuses to deny himself as a free sel
f-willing subject whose will is his own rightness and justice, he is able to receive with proud satisfaction the judgement of society which makes of him an object, a criminal, a non-person, a prisoner without a future. Thus Genet (almost) achieves the impossible, of being object and subject, être et néant, all at once. In the course of the book Sartre manages to transform a (simplified) psychological analysis into a (simplified) political message. He examines the various dialectical ‘ploys’ of the Genet personality. Genet’s relations with others take (for instance) the form of wanting to be the other, but since he can only achieve this as fantasy, the other that he wills to be turns out to be a mere appearance; he finds there only ‘empty shells, dead bodies, abandoned houses’, and is returned to his, equally absent, self, an object, a solitary, beneath a relentless light (lux perpetua?), unable to escape the judgement of others, but unable to encounter them either. Sartre finally offers us Genet as personifying the futility of the bourgeois subject who is condemned to maintain values which he (really) knows to be empty and vanishing. Genet is redeemed, is saint, martyr, edifying exemplar, and hero of our time, because he lives this condition with full awareness to both extremes, both as subject and object, accepting (like Saint Teresa as Sartre points out) all accusations against him as having some substance. But he is better than Saint Teresa because she is supported by ‘general esteem’ and he is not. (To put it, absurdly, in Kierkegaardian terms, Saint Teresa is a tragic hero while Genet is a true Knight of Faith.) Genet is worthy of our attention, Sartre argues, because he is sincerely and openly and extremely what we, bourgeois, are secretly, timidly and hypocritically. He suffers, while we evade suffering. Genet is also of course (and for some of us more obviously) redeemed by becoming an artist. He is, again like Baudelaire, a dandy, a feminine soul, he is ‘metamorphosed into a lover, that is into a woman’. He becomes an aesthete, progresses to writing poetry, at last becomes a talented writer. Sartre said in the book on Baudelaire that he was not offering literary criticism. At the same time, most explicitly in the Flaubert book, he wishes to discover how just this man (so like many others in general respects) becomes this artist. But such a discovery, in so far as it can be made at all, should emerge from critical study of the artist’s work. Sartre even when he does talk about the work, is more concerned with expounding it as a continuous and unitary manifestation of Genet’s psychology. In order to present Genet (ultimately) as political propaganda, Sartre oversimplifies his picture of this extraordinary man, obscuring another Genet who has developed other virtues, to some extent shared by the bourgeois, those of the good artist, industry, patience, humility, truthfulness. To suggest that, partly through success, Genet may in later life have become, as we ordinarily say, ‘a better man’, would be alien to Sartre’s purpose. At the end of the book, where Sartre attributes to his hero the virtue of generosity, he has to explain that this is simply an expression of freedom, and that in any case generosity is alienated by its context in bourgeois property relations. The original metaphysical distinction between être et néant, mauvaise foi and freedom, increasingly appears as the contrast between corrupt collapsing bourgeois society and some ideal, as yet unclarified, which under present conditions can only sincerely express itself as revolt. Indeed, if we are sincere, Sartre suggests, we have a choice between the humility of Bukharin, deliberate surrender of freedom and moral suicide, and the pride of Genet, who asserts the value of his own free will, while inconsistently recognising the values which condemn him. Our present age, Sartre tells us in an impressively pessimistic and eloquent passage, ‘has a guilty conscience about history’. In the past, equally criminal societies did not care about posterity, while others made their history with a clear conscience, confident that they were creating a secure future, at ease with the succession of generations. But now, ‘revolutions are impossible’, we are threatened by annihilating war, propertied classes have no confidence in their rights, and the working class no confidence in its power. We are more aware of injustice, without the will and the power to remove it. The progress of science makes future centuries ‘an obsessive presence’. The future is here, we feel judged by masked successors. Our age, which is already dead, already a thing, though we still have to live through it, is alone in history. What way is open to us, Sartre asks, and replies that he can see one which he will discuss elsewhere. This way is presumably that of the marriage of existentialism and Marxism which he allows us to glimpse through the closing doors.