Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

by Iris Murdoch

  In L’Etre et le Néant (the chapter called Quality as Revealing Being) Sartre discusses the fascination of the viscous. He describes it as ‘an existential category, immediate and concrete’. It is one of the fundamental keys or images in terms of which we understand our whole mode of being, and its sexual character is merely one of its possible determinations. It fascinates us from the start, because it serves as an image of our consciousness, of the very form of our appropriation of the world. The metaphors which compare the mind to gluey manifestations of the sensible are not mere figures of adult fancy, they represent categories which we have used from earliest childhood. Sticky substances alarm and fascinate us, and we enjoy discovering and filling cavities, not originally for the reasons the Freudians offer, but because we grasp these as even more general categories of being: the consciousness that seeks to rise freely towards completeness and stability is continually sucked back into its past and the messy stuff of its moment-to-moment experience.

  Roquentin reveals the human situation in a simplified mythological way. His aspiration follows the schematic pattern which Sartre has analysed in L’Etre et le Néant as the ground plan of all endeavour. It has not clothed itself in any form of normal human project, sexual, political, or religious. The aesthetic determination which is adopted at the very end is simply a sketch of a solution, the most abstract possible, which leaves the pattern unchanged. For Roquentin all value lies in the unattainable world of intelligible completeness which he represents to himself in simple intellectual terms; he is not (until the end) duped into imagining that any form of human endeavour is adequate to his yearning to rejoin that totality. ‘Evil’, says Sartre in What is Literature?, ‘is the irreducibility of man and the world of Thought.’ This indeed is Roquentin’s evil, the only one which he recognises—as intelligible being is the only good which he recognises. La Nausée represents the naked pattern of human existence, illuminated by a degree of philosophical self-consciousness that reveals the fruitlessness which the particular determinations of our projects usually obscure.

  How does Sartre intend us to understand his myth? He is patently uninterested in the aesthetic solution. Nor, although Roquentin indulges in a certain amount of political analysis, does he seriously consider a political solution. He observes with disgust the ossified rigidity of bourgeois convention—but the pure radiant life with which the little melody is endowed never appears to him capable of assuming the form of a political end. The anti-rationalist, anti-essentialist teachings of the book, though they sometimes provide negative arguments against capitalism, or, more generally, institutionalism and bureaucracy, never take on a more positive ideological character.

  Fully to understand La Nausée we must look elsewhere in Sartre’s work; the questions which it raises are all to receive their answers later. Elsewhere a more positive note is struck, and we are shown, not the bare abstract pattern of the human situation in general, but a situation which bears the colour of Sartre’s own projects. In La Nausée, however, we are still at the abstract level. La Nausée is the instructive overture to Sartre’s work. To what extent it offers us an adequate picture of human consciousness I shall discuss later. What it certainly does give us is a powerful presentation of Sartre’s own fundamental metaphysical image.

  * * *

  1 Translated first into English under the title The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, and later as Nausea.

  II

  THE LABYRINTH OF FREEDOM

  Les Chemins de la Liberté consists of four novels, L’Age de Raison (The Age of Reason), Le Sursis (The Reprieve), La Mort dans l’Ame (Iron in the Soul) and La Derniére Chance. The first three have appeared in English under the titles given in parentheses. The promised fourth, La Dernière Chance, was not completed, but an important fragment of it appeared in Sartre’s review Les Temps Modernes for November and December 1949. L’Age de Raison chiefly concerns the search of the hero Mathieu for the price of an abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. The events described take place in 1938. Le Sursis is about the Munich crisis, and La Mort dans l’Ame about the fall of France. The story, which portrays the same group of characters throughout, follows straight on through the three books.

  Les Chemins is a study of the various ways in which people assert or deny their freedom in that pursuit of stable fullness of being, or self-coincidence, which Sartre has said in L’Etre et le Néant to be characteristic of human consciousness and which he portrayed in La Nausée. Only whereas in La Nausée we are shown abstractly the empty form of the human project, Les Chemins attempts to show us concretely a variety of the ways in which different people try to realise it. Sartre studies at length what he considers to be three main types of consciousness, that of the ineffective intellectual (Mathieu), the pervert (Daniel), and the Communist (Brunet)—and introduces a host of minor characters who are also analysed and ‘placed’.

  The simplest of the three main cases is that of Daniel. Daniel, like Roquentin, is tormented by the elusiveness of his own existence. He is obsessed with a desire to change the not-being of his consciousness into a stable thing-like being. A tendency which, if Sartre’s description is the appropriate one, we all share, is found in Daniel as a constant and self-conscious preoccupation. Daniel is like Roquentin and unlike the other characters in Les Chemins in that he sees his life not as a pursuit of a variety of ordinary human ends, but as a single project whose content may change but whose form never varies. Reflexion strips his life to an awareness of a certain persistent structure. Yet whereas Roquentin, amid the raw material of metaphysical discovery, maintains a colourless philosophical detachment, the same discovery made by Daniel appears as a neurosis. Daniel is Roquentin, with the metaphysical thirst changed into an obsession, and the philosophical detachment into a flair for psychoanalysis. Daniel’s story reads more like a Freudian case history than like a metaphysical essay.

  Daniel wishes ‘to be a pederast, as an oaktree is an oaktree’. Yet he is never able to experience a pure coincidence with his vice; he remains detached from it, an observer, a possibility. His attempts to achieve coincidence take the form of self-punishment. By this means he hopes to gain an intense identification of the tormentor and the tormented within himself. This sort of partial suicide will be, at the same time, a manifestation of freedom. To do the opposite of what one wants—that, he tells himself and Mathieu, is freedom. It is also self-coincidence, the striking down, even for a moment, of the winged elusive consciousness. Thus, paradoxically, one could will one’s transmutation into a thing, and be just one quivering moment of pain. Daniel finds freedom in its opposite.

  Yet his attempts at self-torment disappoint him. He cannot bring himself to drown his cats. He marries Marcelle, whom he detests, and finds the marriage intolerably bearable. In search of a witness before whom he may experience the pleasant shame of being seen as a contemptible object he makes confessions to Mathieu. But Mathieu is too reasonable and tolerant to be a suitable witness. Daniel finds a better solution in religious experience. He is suddenly pierced by the certainty that God sees him. Here at last is a witness before whom all his vices exist really, solidified into things by the accusing gaze; but this too is evidently only one more phase in his endless quest. In Volume III (at the fall of Paris) he encounters what appears to be the perfect partner, the self-tormenting boy Philippe, who is drawn closely from Sartre’s conception of Baudelaire—a conception which he has set out at length in his ‘existential psychoanalytical’ study of the poet. Daniel ‘captures’ the youth and prepares them both for collaboration.

  These studies are accurate and powerful. Sartre is undoubtedly a connoisseur of the abnormal; yet his interest therein is not necessarily a morbid one. Sartre, like Freud, finds in the abnormal the exaggerated forms of normality. His more lurid characters are to show us, either by direct analysis (Daniel) or half-symbolically (Charles), something of the malaise of the human spirit in face of its freedom. Like Freud too, Sartre uses a mythology or picture of the mind in terms of which th
e individual case may be described. But as a psychoanalyst he remains impenitently Cartesian. In his early Essay on the Emotions Sartre writes: ‘The deep contradiction in all psychoanalysis is to present at once a relation of causality and a relation of comprehension between the phenomena it studies.’ What occurs in the consciousness, he says, can receive its explanation only from the consciousness. Psychological abnormality must be understood in terms of the subject’s own choice of a ‘mode’ of appropriating the world, and the subject’s own purposefully sustained symbolism.

  So where a Freudian might say that Daniel’s guilt feelings at his homosexuality cause him to punish himself, Sartre puts the matter in terms of Daniel’s semi-deliberate project, his chosen mode of life. That it is chosen is something which Daniel realises, and the realisation is a characteristic part of his torment. The subject is the final arbiter, Sartre argues, and this the practising psychoanalyst well knows, although he tends to forget it when he enters his study to theorise. Sartre thus rejects the idea of the unconscious mind, but has his own substitute for it in the notion of the half-conscious, unreflective self-deception which he calls ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi). As metaphysician, as moralist and as psychoanalyst Sartre works with the same tools; a single picture of the mind serves him in all his fields. Since freedom is fundamental there is no clash between psychoanalysis and morality; since metaphysics studies the structure of our experience of the world we need not be surprised to find a case history figuring as part of a philosophical argument.

  A second meaning-problem is, presented in the character of Brunet, the Communist. Whereas Daniel, with neurotic self-consciousness, pursues a form of achievement whose content is never constant, Brunet unreflectively identifies himself with a single concrete project. Throughout the first two volumes, and most of the third one, Brunet is the simple dogmatic Party member. The universe solidly and reassuringly is as the Marxist analysis says it is. He himself is an instrument of the Party whose function has been determined by History. Brunet reflects no more about these things; he acts. He does not even pause to rehearse or question his own motives for being in the Party. ‘I’m a Communist because I’m a Communist, that’s all.’ Brunet, whose later development is so important, remains throughout the earlier part of Les Chemins a rather stick-like character, though one who is clearly liked and respected by his author.

  The pivot of the first three volumes, the central image of the triptych, is Mathieu, the most expansively introspective of the psychoanalytical observers through whom the story is told, and no doubt a portrait of Sartre himself. Mathieu stands between the deliberately fallen and perverted nature of Daniel and the naively but innocently engaged nature of Brunet. Both these characters ‘tempt’ Mathieu in typical ways—Daniel with the prospect of an acte gratuit, Brunet with that of a secure engagement. When Daniel suggests to Mathieu that he (Mathieu) should marry Marcelle, he is not only attempting sadistically to harm his friend, he is offering a programme of salvation of a kind which he has just tried to carry out himself (the attempt to drown his cats) and which he subsequently does carry out (by his own marriage to Marcelle). ‘It must be very amusing deliberately to do the opposite of what one wants. One feels oneself becoming another person.’ Brunet also has a programme to offer Mathieu: join the Communist Party. ‘You have renounced everything to be free. Take one more step, renounce your liberty itself: and everything will be given back to you.’

  Mathieu, however, follows the advice of neither. He is paralysed by his excessive lucidity; there is no reason why he should go to Spain, or marry Marcelle, or join the C.P. For him to be able to decide he would have to change ‘to the marrow of his bones’. As it is, he is an empty thought, reflecting on itself. Nowhere in his too rational life is there an irrevocable decision; ‘the consequences of my actions are stolen from me.’ When he does act it is Hamlet-like, on the spur of the moment, without any marshalling of reasons. He plants the knife in his hand to please Ivich. He opens his mouth to say ‘I love you’ to Marcelle, and says ‘I don’t love you.’ He tells Pinette that resistance is senseless, and then takes a rifle.

  The climax of Mathieu’s story is told in Volume III. Mathieu is a private in the defeated French Army which, deserted by its officers, awaits capture by the Germans. The description of this queer interval, where guilt and innocence are found unexpectedly together, achieves a sort of poetry which is not apparent elsewhere in Les Chemins. A strange profundity and gentleness attend the soldiers as they stroll about, smiling to one another. Mathieu thinks, this is the paradise of despair—and he wonders, as some stranger gently salutes him, ‘must men have lost everything, even hope, for one to be able to read in their eyes that man could conquer?’ Here the philosophy is completely fused with the image constituted by the story. Mathieu’s musings no longer seem like interludes. A real emotion binds the tale together, and the self-consciousness of its hero no longer has a chilling and detaching effect.

  Between Mathieu’s coup de tête in joining the suicide squad of resisters and the final climax in the bell tower, the hero has time to ask himself one more question, as he looks down towards the cellar where his unheroic comrades lie drunk. Ought he not to be down there, not up here? ‘Have I the right to drop my friends? Have I the right to die for nothing?’ He has one final moment of illumination as he fires from the tower. ‘He approached the parapet and began to shoot, standing up. It was an immense retribution; each bullet revenged him for a former scruple . . . he fired on man, on Virtue, on the World: Liberty is Terror.’ There is no doubt that here the author is speaking. Into this symbolic irresponsible ‘breaking of the plates’ Sartre throws himself with an equal zest, as he hurls his hero to a senseless destruction.

  While Mathieu is on a tower, Brunet is in a cellar. Mathieu was in perpetual doubt and casts himself away without a reason. Brunet is never in doubt, and nurees himself for future tasks. In the prison camp he appears as almost a caricature of the hard party bureaucrat—until he is warmed into life by Schneider. This mysterious person, gentle, humane and sceptical, is the critic both of Brunet’s practical attitude to his fellows and of his confident rendering of the Party line. Volume IV opens with the unmasking of Schneider as a distrusted ex-Party member, and the discrediting of Bruneis interpretation of Party policy. But now he is full of doubts; for the first time he begins to have thoughts which do not belong to the Party, he begins to see the Party from the outside. Supposing U.S.S.R. fights and is beaten? Supposing the Party is wrong? ‘If the Party is right, I am more lonely than a madman; if the Party is wrong, all men are alone and the world is done for.’ Finally Brunet attempts an escape with Schneider. They are discovered and Schneider is shot. ‘No human victory can efface this absolute of suffering: the Party has killed him, even if U.S.S.R. wins, men are alone.’

  The book is an argument, proceeding by an alternate use of pointed symbolism and explicit analysis. It opens with Mathieu’s encounter with the drunken beggar who intended to go to Spain but never got there. Mathieu remembers him at the close of Volume I. Mathieu too had intended to go to Spain, to join the Communist Party, to marry Marcelle. The sort of act which Mathieu can perform is typified in his planting the knife in his hand, which he remembers later when he is on the bell tower. The typo’s leap to death from the railway wagon (also killed by the Party) prefigures the death of Schneider, and gives Brunet his first taste of the irrevocable. Analysis is more important, however. Most of what Sartre has to say to us is, we feel, packed into the lengthy passages of introspective musing. The characters (particularly Daniel and Mathieu) become transparent to us; their cool intellectual probings both interest us and check our emotion. Like Marcelle, we begin to long for un petit coin d’ombre. Too much of the story is predigested for us in the consciousness of the main characters—and we too soon begin to know what to expect from each. Their reflexions, instead of deepening our sense of their concreteness and complexity, strip them to the bare structure of the particular problem which they embody.

>   In the relations of the characters to each other there seems to be no middle point between the insight of the analyst and being completely at a loss. Mathieu and Daniel observe each other with a professional shrewdness; in his relations with Marcelle, and even more with Ivich, Mathieu is totally confused. For all the subtlety of the analyses of our consciousness of others which Sartre offered us in L’Etre et le Néant, the ‘other’ appears in Les Chemins either as a case or as a secret. Boris and Ivich, the faintly sinister and clam-like brother and sister, represent a value before which the protagonists (and their author) hesitate, but which they do not engage with or explore.

  Ivich is a living reproach to Mathieu, yet one which he (and, one feels, his author) fails to understand. The value which Ivich represents is that of the secret, the inward, the momentary, the irrational—in the presence of which Mathieu can only feel embarrassment. In the absence of any real communication the other person is metamorphosed into an alarming enigma, even a Medusa. But Mathieu’s isolation, the drama of which we may accept in his relations with Ivich, appears, where his relations with Marcelle are concerned, as a sort of casualness or carelessness on the part of the author. Mathieu is seen as alternating between a dogged absorption in events and glimpses of his ‘freedom’, which he pictures as a sort of grace, a sort of crime, and which bids him simply to drop Marcelle. Sartre has not troubled to see the relation between Mathieu and his mistress. What interests him, and Mathieu, is not Marcelle’s plight at all, but an abstractly conceived problem of which her plight is the occasion.