Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

by Iris Murdoch

  The sense of this appears to be that to value something is to seek through it to achieve a certain stabilising of one’s own being. No absorption in contingent things can offer this stability nor can it be found in the shiftings of a reflective self-consciousness. That which is sought (valued) is the firmness of thing-like being (être-en-soi), combined with the transparency of consciousness (être-pour-soi): a state of complete lucidity and complete changelessness. But this combination is patently unattainable. The self which is excluded by the opaque absurdity of matter on one side, falls short on the other of this magnetic totality, which is unattainable because it is self-contradictory. Such a condition, that of being en-soi-pour-soi, Sartre later says (p.653) is the condition of being God: it is not a possible human condition. A sense of value then is a sense of lack, the lack of a certain completeness; and the reflective consciousness which reveals to us this lack (under the eye of which what we are shrivels, as it were, to nothing) is properly called a moral consciousness.

  ‘Man is the being who aspires to be God’, Sartre writes (p. 653), and at the close of L’Etre et le Néant he embroiders rhetorically upon this theme. The passion of man is the opposite of that of Christ. Man is to lose himself as a man in order that God shall be born; that is, man naturally aspires away from his unsatisfying human condition towards a state of conscious completeness. But since the idea of God is a contradiction the loss is vain. L’homme est une passion inutile. To understand this is to rid ourselves of the bad faith of the esprit de sérieux. If we imagine that ‘the valuable’ is a property of the world, or that our tasks are ‘written in the sky’ we are doomed to failure and despair. From this point of view, revient-il au même de s’enivrer solitairement ou de conduire les peuples (it’s all the same whether we get drunk by ourselves or lead the people) (p. 721). If all human activity is simply one form or another of a fruitless attempt to be ens causa sui then it matters very little which form we adopt.

  Sartre hesitates, however, to end his book unambiguously upon this note of stoical defiance. He has described to us how we free ourselves from unreflective sluggishness, aspire through the medium of our various human activities towards a secure condition of pure identity—and, inevitably, fail and fall back perhaps into a state of self-deception, masking our essential finitude by an unreflective identification of the valuable with some contingent thing. But what if we realise our error? What if we realise that value is a function of the movement or yearning of our consciousness? What if we trace everywhere, as Sartre does, the same pattern of frustrated endeavour? Is man condemned to the same fruitless pursuit, even in his very realisation of its fruitlessness? Is the discovery that all activity is the vain attempt to be God itself a form of this activity? Or can freedom, by its very transparency, put an end to ‘the reign of value’? Can the self-aware unillusioned consciousness take itself as a value, or must the valuable be always the transcendent something by which it is haunted? These interesting questions, Sartre tells us, will be answered ‘in our next’. This work (a work on ethics) did not appear. But Sartre gives, as we shall see, what is in effect an answer to his own questions in his pronouncements on literature and politics.

  VI

  METAPHYSICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL PRACTICE

  It seemed from L’Etre et le Néant that what Sartre meant by ‘freedom’ was the reflective, imaginative power of the mind, its mobility, its negating of the ‘given’, its capacity to rise out of muddy unreflective states, its tendency to return to an awareness of itself. For this sense of freedom, needless to say, stone walls make no prison; we are potentially free so long as we are conscious. It seemed, too, that what Sartre meant by ‘value’ was a notion of completeness which haunted the free consciousness and towards which it vainly aspired. This aspiration would, of course, take the form of some particular human project (getting drunk by oneself or leading the people). What Sartre is trying to analyse for us is the structure of all human consciousness and human endeavour. It might very appropriately take the form of the creation or enjoyment of a work of art.

  The reflective consciousness thought of as ‘imagining’ still runs the danger of falling into bad faith, that is of losing its tense mobility and degenerating into a ‘gluey’ unreflective condition. Imagination may be seen as a ‘break’ with the given world, which then continues into an imaginative state which has more or less of a self-prolonging inertia. This inertia may lead to a further empâtement or ‘fall’ of the consciousness into unreflective sluggishness. This move might correspond, presumably, to a change from tense creative imagining to vague day-dreaming. Sartre describes imagination as a spontanéité envoûtée. Aesthetic enjoyment then seems readily to connect with both the mobile or ‘free’ aspect of the consciousness and with its perilous aspiration towards the ‘valuable’.

  The goal of art, Sartre writes in What is Literature? (p. 41) is ‘to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human ‘freedom’. The work of art, depending as it does upon the reader or spectator for its existence, is an appeal, a demand. The reader too must be the creator of the novel; his continuing to read it ‘properly’, that is to enter into it seriously, to ‘lend’ it his emotions and so on, involves him in a sustained act of faith in the work itself. The imagination must be enchanted, but, I think Sartre would agree, not too enchanted. An excessive detachment or suspicion will fail to create the work at all; an excessive self-forgetfulness will break down its objective contours and blend it with private fantasy and dream. In the latter case novel-reading becomes a drug. (It is characteristic of the art of the cinema to encourage, by its very form, this extreme of self-forgetting.) Our delight in a work of art is our sense of the imaginative activity involved in creating it and maintaining it, as it were, just at the right distance from ourselves. The novel is, in this sense, ‘a task set to freedom’. The seeing of the world as if it originated in human freedom does not mean of course any remoulding of it closer to the heart’s desire, for we still see it ‘as it is’. But in the formal ‘necessity’ of the artist’s vision, and of ours when we see with his eyes, we get a taste of the Godlike power of intellectual intuition. Aesthetic joy involves ‘an image-making consciousness of the world in its totality both as being and having to be’ (What is Literature? p. 43). Thus far what Sartre is saying would seem to be a restatement in his own terminology of a piece of traditional post-Kantian aesthetics. Aesthetic enjoyment is an active reflective awareness which seeks to apprehend through the material presented to it some autonomous totality of experience in whose internally related completeness it may achieve the repose of a perfect equilibrium. This movement, which so clearly follows the form which Sartre attributes to all human striving, cannot however (if we are to credit L’Etre et le Néant) afford any lasting satisfaction.

  ‘The real is never beautiful’, Sartre wrote in L’Imaginaire (p. 254). ‘Beauty is a value which can apply only to the imaginary and whose essential structure involves the nullification (néantisation) of the world. This is why it is foolish to confuse ethics and aesthetics. The values of the Good presuppose being-in-the-world, they are concerned with behaviour in real contexts and are subject from the start to the essential absurdity of existence.’ Yet it would seem that in What is Literature? what Sartre is finally concerned with is precisely behaviour in real contexts. He is connecting the value of prose literature with its proper function and appearing to deduce the latter from the metaphysical view of consciousness outlined above. Since describing or naming is revelation, the writer can never be a neutral observer. Is there perhaps something in the nature of his calling which indicates how he should describe the world? Sartre thinks that there is. Since the novel is an appeal to freedom, since it presupposes as reader a free man, there would be a sort of contradiction involved in using the novel to advocate enslavement. ‘The writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject—freedom.’

  The good novelist then, the one who is not the dupe of his subject-m
atter, who has transformed his emotions into free emotions, cannot but in the process of this discipline have learnt the importance and value of freedom. For him, ‘to show the world is to disclose it in the perspectives of a possible change’. His reader, moreover, in responding to the writer’s demand, ‘strips himself in some way of his empirical personality and escapes from his resentments, his fears, and his lusts in order to put himself at the peak of his freedom. This freedom takes the literary work and, through it, mankind, for absolute ends’ (p. 200). In this way the reader joins himself to a sort of Kingdom of Ends wherein the good wills of all his fellow readers are united. In his response to the writer he is exercising, with a peculiar purity, a kind of respect for the free play of human personality, he is rising to an ability to respond unselfishly to the vision of the writer which in so far as it is a ‘free’ vision, not ruled by private passion or fantasy, both constitutes good art and commands an absolute moral respect.

  This respect for freedom, this taking of mankind as an absolute end, cannot however remain within the bounds demanded for the appreciation of a work of literature. This fire, once kindled, will spread itself. The good will asks to be historicised. Who wills the Kingdom of Ends is not far from willing the open society. Both writer and reader cannot consistently enjoy the free creative activity of the making and appreciating of literature, and yet consent that this shall take place in a society which is in other respects ruled by blind passion, prejudice or other arbitrary confinements of the spirit. It is an inevitable part of the task of the novelist, not only to exemplify this liberating creativity of art, but (since he cannot, from the nature of his subject-matter, avoid commenting on society) to advocate a community of free beings. This he will in fact do, with more or less self-consciousness, if he is writing well. A part of his public consumes its good will in personal relationships, while another part is simply concerned to better its material SARTRE lot. The novelist will teach to both the connexion between the pure liberating pleasures of the spirit, and the protection and promotion of a certain disposition of society. (See What is Literature? pp. 204-205.)

  This is a rather breath-taking argument. That the novel comments on society is on the whole true. It is also easy to see why prose literature in general and the novel in particular are most suited to ‘commitment’ (engagement), the transforming of the appeal to ‘freedom’ which is made by all art into a more specific kind of social recommendation. What is surprising, particularly after the introduction to Sartre’s thought afforded by L’Etre et le Néant, is this. By ‘value’, Sartre appeared to mean a vain aspiration towards a state of personal equilibrium, of which art might indeed be one form, while solitary inebriation might be another. From the point of view of L’Etre et le Néant, any art (‘good’ or ‘bad’) might give form to this aspiration. In La Nausée Roquentin receives the idea of the perfection he craves from an indifferent piece of music. In What is Literature?, however, a certain discrimination has been made. The writer who has purged himself of narrowing personal lusts and fantasies, who has ‘converted his emotions into free emotions’, is singled out as having achieved a value which is denied to one who has eschewed this discipline. This purging is clearly regarded by Sartre as being somehow proper to the human spirit, morally valuable, and also productive of good art. Both the moral and aesthetic value here in question seem to be ‘values’ in something much closer to the ordinary sense of that word than to the use it receives in L’Etre et le Néant; and the ‘freedom’ which Sartre still speaks of as being the characteristic élan of the consciousness is no longer a fruitless drive towards stability which anything might appear to satisfy, but a particular disciplined activity which is contrasted with other less admirable ones.

  A clue to the change which has taken place is given by Sartre’s use of the term ‘Kingdom of Ends’. L’Etre et le Néant claimed to be a work of a descriptive type. ‘Phenomenological ontology’ was what Sartre said that it was, and not ‘metaphysics’. Sartre expressly denied, that is, that he was offering a metaphysical theory of human nature in that book. The content of human endeavour was, from the point of view of L’Etre et le Néant, personal and accidental. The model presented was of the form or structure of that endeavour, and it went beyond ‘the facts’ of human behaviour in a way comparable to that in which the Freudian mythology goes beyond the facts. The concepts of être-en-soi, être-pour-autrui, and the rest may be thought of as playing a hypothetical explanatory role similar to that played by Freud’s egos, ids, and censors: equally illuminating and equally in danger of misleading their author if not carefully handled.

  We now find Sartre using the notion of a kingdom of harmonising ends wherein human wills are to be united. That human ends in fact harmonise is clearly empirically false. This notion has no descriptive role. It is apparently being used by Sartre in a way similar to the way it was used by Kant, as a regulative idea. Sartre seems now to be saying that if we make a proper exercise of our freedom, which will involve our taking mankind as an absolute end, we shall tend towards a harmony in willing. In Sartre’s popular pamphlet L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme we find the same notion put forward even more simply and boldly and used as a political weapon. In this work Sartre presents in dramatic and polemical form his view of the ‘non-existence’ of value prior to action. There is no essence or nature of Man (in an Aristotelian or any other sense) to act as a given objective ideal. I create value by my choices—as I might create a work of art—according to no pre-existing model. This means, Sartre adds, that I am responsible for the image of man in general which my behaviour suggests. ‘I am responsible for myself and for everyone, and I create a certain image of man which I choose; in choosing myself I choose man.’ Further, once it is clear to me that freedom is the basis of all value I cannot but will freedom, in some concrete manifestation or other, as a desirable end. (This Sartre frankly offers as ‘a moral judgment’, p. 82. He hesitates to say though that I ought to will freedom; he says that if I understand the situation I ‘can only’ will it.) ‘The ultimate meaning of the actions of men of good faith is the pursuit of freedom as such . . . I cannot take my own freedom as an end without also taking the freedom of others as an end.’

  It seems a long way from the heroic solipsism of L’Etre et le Néant to this Kantian argument with its implicit social conclusions. Sartre now appears to be deducing from his view of human consciousness that a particular condition of society is the most natural and proper one for creatures so framed. Sartre is of course not the first to deduce political imperatives from the nature of man. Kant and Rousseau, whom he here closely follows, connected the notion of freedom as the characteristic of consciousness with the nature of the ideal society. There is however a certain obscurity, or even lack of frankness, in the way Sartre has moved on from description to recommendation. Sartre connects in an equation freedom as a general attribute of consciousness, freedom as the openness of our response to a work of art, and freedom in the sense it has acquired in the politics of contemporary social democracy. He is able to make this explosive juxtaposition with the help of the Kingdom of Ends concept, and by means of a stupefying ambiguity in the use of the word ‘freedom’.

  ‘Freedom’ in the sense in which Sartre originally defined it is the character of any human awareness of anything: its tendency to ‘flicker’, to shift towards a reflective state; its lack of equilibrium. Sartre speaks of it in L’Etre et le Néant as if it were a sort of scar in the wholeness of the consciousness; a sort of fault in the universe. It is a néant. The second sense of ‘freedom’ is one which would need to be defined much more closely than Sartre defines it in What is Literature?, but which in any case is not the same as the first since it is not a characteristic of any consciousness. It seems more like a sort of spiritual discipline; it is a purging of the emotions, a setting aside of selfish considerations, a respect for the autonomy of another’s (the writer’s) creative power, which leads on to a respect for the autonomy of all other men (the ‘taking of
mankind as an absolute end’). To be ‘at the peak of one’s freedom’ is clearly, as Sartre uses the phrase, both difficult and morally admirable. This sense of ‘freedom’ seems closely allied to the rational will of Kant and Rousseau. That Sartre hesitates between thinking of freedom as a fever and as a discipline is already apparent in the novels if we look more closely. In La Nausée freedom is both the absurd emptiness or quaking gelatinous texture which Roquentin apprehends in his own consciousness—and the reflective power which enables him to see through the pretensions of the salauds. It is both the instability of the momentary consciousness and the disciplined avoidance of the settled illusion. And in Les Chemins, when Mathieu is thinking about Marcelle, his ‘freedom’, which bids him desert her, seems to him ‘like a crime, like a grace’—like random blundering, like spiritual liberation.

  ‘Freedom’ in the third sense is that which it is self-contradictory for a writer to traduce, that which I must effectively will for others as well as myself if I am exercising my consciousness as a human being ‘properly’. This freedom is an ideal state of society, the willing of which imposes practical commands of an anti-totalitarian nature upon its adherents. In this sense (the sense particularly in which it is used in L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme), the word readily picks up the flavour of that vague but powerful liberté in the name of which we fought fascism. It becomes a weapon to use against the soul-destroying ossifications of both capitalism and communism. Freedom in the first sense can easily be shown to be the characteristic par excellence of human awareness. This sense is connected with sense two by the dual meaning of ‘reflexion’ as a destructive reflexive flicker and as a disciplined restraint. Sense two then merges, with the help of the Kingdom of Ends concept, into sense three, and the conclusion is that human nature demands a modified form of socialism.