Sartre

by Iris Murdoch

  Sartre’s work is easily vulnerable to the attack which takes the form of questioning the status of his assertions. Sartre would have done better to admit and to open to investigation the sense in which all general descriptions of the mind must belong to la réflexion complice; that is, must involve hypostatisations. They are not for that reason misleading or pointless. Only Sartre’s theory has point in the way in which all metaphysical theories have point and not in a new way. (All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.) What seems new about it is its closeness to theories such as that of Freud which are called ‘psychological’. But the same problems of point and status arise about Freud’s theories if they are considered in any but a narrowly therapeutic sense. It is more instructive to call Freud’s work a sort of metaphysics than to call Sartre’s a sort of psychology. The latter remark kills reflexion, the former invites it. It is more profitable to criticise Sartre in the spirit of the first objection, taking it for granted that the line between metaphysics and psychology is not now a clear one.

  Sartre praises Kierkegaard for maintaining against Hegel that what I crave from the world is the recognition of my being as an individual, and not as an abstract truth. The essence of Sartre’s attempt to describe the mind is the recognition of our contingency in the psychic sphere, combined with the maintenance of the sovereignty of the individual consciousness. Consciousness is not to be reduced to knowledge or choice to rational causation. That is, Sartre abandons the idealist notion of mind as a self-determining complex of intelligible ideas, while retaining the notion of mind as the source of meaning. It is not a radiant source, however. He pictures it sluggish and dark, implicitly rather than explicitly self-aware, and yet, even in its unreflective times, the responsible creator of sense. No ‘meaning’ escapes the scope of consciousness, either in the world or in the psyche. The sense of all objects is a human sense, which I responsibly maintain; they are not labelled either by external Nature or by a Rational Self in me. There is no unconscious mind, nothing ‘in’ the consciousness of which the consciousness is not aware. Only, since we are contingent beings in situations which are ‘given’ to us, the meanings which we impose are not arbitrary but share that contingency. There is no human ‘nature’, but there is a human ‘situation’.

  To say that we are ‘responsible’ for the categories we use in the natural world seems bizarre, since these categories are so firm an inheritance and shift so slowly; though they do shift, for instance under the influence of science. (Consider how our concept of colour is gradually changing under the impact of popular physics.) ‘Responsibility’ for this shift moreover, as for the thousand meanings which are not shifting, would seem to be collective rather than individual. Sartre fails to emphasise the power of our inherited collective view of the world—save where it appears in the form of social prejudice and is labelled ‘bad faith’. (In effect he regards all unreflective social outlooks as in bad faith.) He is in the unavoidably uncomfortable position of the egocentric philosopher who professes no universal theory of the self. He neglects the sphere of objective publicly determined ‘meanings’ which scientifically minded Anglo-Saxon philosophers have too exclusively cultivated. He wishes to think of meaning as the deep rich subjective colours of the world, and yet to stay out of solipsism. It is the unique emotional vision which he wishes to characterise, not that of a scientist in pursuit of universally demonstrable sense. Once again, the dramatic colour of his theory comes from the easily grasped examples of personal conflict.

  Yet it is just here that Sartre’s solipsistic view of meaning raises difficulties of another kind. He does not fall into the error of which Kierkegaard accuses Hegel, but he does fall into a rather similar one. He isolates the self so that it treats others, not as objects of knowledge certainly, but as objects to be feared, manipulated and imagined about. Sartre’s is not a rational but an imaginative solipsism. He comments on the unsatisfactory circularity of our relations with other people. We can never sufficiently respect the liberty of the other: we cannot co-operate wholly in his freedom, or make him free, and yet short of that we constitute opaque obstacles in his world. This failure is the root cause of feelings of guilt and sin. Sartre analyses love as a particular case of this frustration. Love is one of the forms under which we pursue stability of being. Stability derives here from the steady adoring gaze of the lover, caught in which the beloved feels full, compact and justified. ‘Love is essentially the urge to make oneself loved.’ But the lover demands a similar returning gaze, and is free at any moment to withhold his own. If the beloved dominates the lover so as to fix and hold his admiration, this destroys the value of the regard which is only prized so far as it is freely given. If the beloved basks passively before the lover the latter remains unsatisfied. Reciprocal love is therefore precarious, if not impossible, and readily moves towards the satisfactions of sadism or masochism (varieties of domination or basking).

  Sartre says of the mental image that it is unsatisfying because it is the slave of consciousness. Unlike the inexhaustible object of perception it is poor and non-resistant, it contains nothing but what I put into it. Sartre presents love, even at its most vigorous, as a dilemma of the imagination. He follows here very closely the account of the enslavement of one consciousness by another which is given by Hegel in the ‘Master and Slave’ section of the Phenomenology. Only Sartre has subjectivised the picture, leaving out the references to work, the ‘real’ aspect of the enslavement—and incidentally, in Hegel’s version, the pointer towards the liberation of the slave. Sartre’s lovers are each engaged in perpetual speculation about the attitude of the other. Their project is appropriative, their torment of the imagination. Proust says that what I receive in the presence of the beloved object is a negative which I develop later. This gives the essence of the situation, though Sartre imagines the battle as more directly engaged than this image suggests. There is much psychological acuteness in this account. But as a definition of love it is curiously abstract. If this is what Sartre means by the ‘recognition of my being as an individual’, then it seems to differ in no essential from that recognition of me as an abstract truth for which he censures Hegel. What each one seems to crave, according to Sartre, is that he should be imaginatively contemplated by the other—a craving which is frustrated because of the reciprocal nature of the demand and because of the loneliness and essential poverty of the imagination. Sartre’s lovers are out of the world, their struggle is not an incarnate struggle. There is no suggestion in Sartre’s account that love is connected with action and day to day living; that it is other than a battle between two hypnotists in a closed room.

  For Sartre imagination—which in effect he identifies with consciousness, it is the ‘essential characteristic’ of consciousness—is both liberation and enslavement. It is the power to set things at a distance. It is also the tendency towards self-enchantment, the inertia of the consciousness. This view of imagination is at the root of Sartre’s misunderstanding both of contemplation and of action. Any imaginative movement which is not the scattering of a given complex is a piece of self-deception, a self-protective dodge of the consciousness. Sartre sees emotion as a dodge of this kind; he does not consider the problems raised by either ‘justified’ real emotions or ‘purged’ aesthetic emotions. He isolates emotion from the world; it is an imperious infantile gesture, a check to freedom, a comédie.

  This view impoverishes in advance his theory of art. At the close of L’Imaginaire, where he touches on the matter, Sartre writes: ‘aesthetic contemplation is a provoked dream’. This exercise of the imagination too initially appears as a fall out of freedom, a degradation and fascination of the consciousness. In the light of the Essay on the Emotions it is already plain that the artist must appear, if he is unreflective as a futile escapist (Roquentin when he was writing the life of the Marquis de Rollebon), or if he is reflective as engaged upon some dubious metaphysical project (Roquentin in his final phase). Emotion as a real creativ
e power, or as part of a new experience, Sartre does not recognise.

  Language is treated by Sartre as a fundamental aspect of being-for-others. As soon as there is another, one who observes me and interprets the utterances of my behaviour, there is language (L’Etre et le Néant, p. 440). Language is that aspect of me which, in laying me open to interpretation, gives me away—le fait même de l’expression est un vol de pensêe1—and which may also constitute my defence. In such circumstances the primitive tendency of language will be towards command or seduction. When Sartre comes to elaborate his aesthetic theory in What is Literature? he modifies his view, but not fundamentally, and adds a clearer pragmatic corollary. Language (and presumably emotion) may now constitute a structure to be contemplated (poetry); or else both language and emotion will drive us back, after a reflective moment, into the world of tasks (prose). In the latter case any pleasure which the language affords us will be connected with our apprehension of the practical ‘engaged’ character of the writing.

  Sartre has isolated both contemplation and action. Contemplation is the self-enchantment of the imagination. (Contemplative uses of language will tend to be lies.) Action is the unreflective world of tasks. In between them there is only the uneasy flickering of the reflective moment. Sartre’s lovers are saved neither by their involvement in a communal world of action, nor by a purging of their imagination; their imaginings are conceived as a selfish inertia. (Contrast the fidélité créatrice in terms of which a philosopher such as Marcel conceives the loving imagination.) But now, for the sake of his theory of art and politics, Sartre needs to regenerate the imagining spirit and join it to the world of action.

  It might seem clear in any case that the only way to regenerate the imagining spirit is to join it to the world of action. Love is not futile, not because we live it more imaginatively but because we live it more externally. When Marx said that he wanted not to explain the world but to change it he was not rejecting theory but stating the essence of his own theory. The question is, can a Knight of Faith really go on looking like a tax collector?2 In L’Etre et le Néant Sartre seemed to think so. Like Kierkegaard, Sartre is both anti-totalitarian and anti-bourgeois. Sartre’s man moves through a society which he finds unreal and alien, but without the consolation of a rational universe. His action seems not to lie in this social world; his freedom is a mysterious point which he is never sure of having reached. His virtue lies in understanding his own contingency in order to assume it, not the contingency of the world in order to alter it. It seems as if what ‘justifies’ him is just this precarious honesty, haunted as it is by a sense of the absolute. Sartre sees our dividedness and yearning sometimes as a flaw and a lack, sometimes as a rather dry mystery, not a rich one like Marcel’s, or a vivid one like Berdyaev’s. The outside point of view upon the mind, the point of view of history or science, is the point of view of bad faith. The mind must be understood from within, and in a world where objectivity has disappeared with the eye of God, it would seem that each of us can only do this for ourselves. The scene would appear to be set for what George Lukacs in a charming phrase calls the carnaval permanent de l’intériorité fétichisée of the western intellectual.8

  Sartre does suggest in L’Etre et le Néant that the way out of the spiritual dilemma which he has depicted is not through art or theology, but by a ‘return to existence’ which will renew its value. But he does not display this return as any real reintegration of his hero into social life. It savours rather of a ‘return’ organised from the psychoanalyst’s couch, and not pursued into the daily life that lies beyond the case book. Sartre’s man is still at the stage of thinking perpetually of himself. He is clear however that his salvation lies in action; and for Sartre action means politics. It is from politics, and not from love, that he learns about the union of the flesh and the spirit. Sartre comes to politics from two points of view. Partly he approaches it as a philosophical solution to a solipsistic dilemma. Partly he meets it as the practical concern of a Western democrat. Sartre has in himself both the intense egocentric conception of personal life and the pragmatic utilitarian view of politics which most western people keep as two separate notions in their head; only since he is a metaphysician Sartre wishes to join the two by a theory of action.

  He joins them clumsily, as we have seen. His theory of mind is inspired by a mistrust of the idealist deification of reason and knowledge. La réflexion purifiante is not a form of knowledge but a continual movement of the spirit which becomes insincere if it is ever still. The reason in which Sartre believes is non-utilitarian and mysterious. What is real in man is this continual upsurge. But on the other hand, Sartre is much too concerned about the historical scene to allow finally that freedom is a matter of conviction or truth a personal élan. He has very definite views about political freedom. He needs to reintroduce an objective viewpoint. He does this by a piece of Kantian ethics which enables him to move on into utilitarianism. His view (expressed in L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme4) that if I will freedom for myself I necessarily will it in the same sense for others goes even beyond Kant. Kant did not specify precisely what the categorical demand or reason would be in any particular case of treating a man as an end.

  Sartre’s philosophy already implies a sort of pragmatism; our being is what we do, our world is a world of tasks. It is in connexion with politics alone that he is able to conceive a universal value for this ‘doing’, which otherwise remains caught in the privacy of the individual project. It is at this point alone—the point at which the individual is touched by the ideal of liberating mankind from oppression—that Sartre can conceive of a value which will give sense to our activities and bind them together. But he has not provided for this picture the metaphysical background needed to integrate it into his philosophy. He does not believe in a Kantian self which is precisely the same in each of us; the self-stabilising project which he does take to be the essence of the psyche need not (if we follow L’Etre et le Néant) become concrete in the form of universal libertarianism. Nor does he have the clear conception of historical causality or of human good needed to make of his theory a utilitarianism similar to that of the Marxist. The action which Sartre advocates to heal the spiritual breach is neither a renewed conception of our daily tasks (such a spiritualisation of work he would deem to be impossible in a bourgeois society) nor is it a confident programme of revolutionary activity. Sartre’s world is without a historical perspective, and very deliberately so. The future which seems to him real is the warm living future of the individual project. Reality is not an intelligible object of universal knowledge which can be operated on scientifically so as to bring about a common good. He remains therefore an uneasy utilitarian, hovering on the verge of an irresponsible pragmatism, which has its affinities with the romantic nineteenth-century cult of ‘experience’.

  Sartre rejects his own society with its inheritance of meanings; he demands a reflective revolt against it. But he knows, as any intellectual knows, that undisciplined reflexion may rot. He has grasped too the idea that thought is to be purged and justified by its integration with a routine of living. But since he rejects not only society but religion, there is no way of living which offers to him the possibility of the yearned for marriage of action and spirit. There is only the uneasy marginal pursuit of the idea of freedom which seems inevitably to fall into corruption as soon as it takes on the form of a political achievement. This uneasy thinking is dominated by the sense, which few intellectuals can think away, of the historical transitoriness of capitalism in its present form. Placed as we are we find it hard to be either convinced dualists or simple empiricists. Sartre’s picture of consciousness as a totalité détotalisé may be thought of as a sort of myth of our condition. The spirit seems to have deserted our social fabric and to hang in the air, blowing to and fro on the ideological gales. The problem is how to bring it back into our daily life. The Marxists who claim to have achieved a society where doing and believing form a concrete unity have done it at w
hat seems to us too high a cost to the integrity of the individual. A confused sense of the preciousness of this integrity remains to us as an article of faith, and it finds expression too in the philosophy of Sartre.

  Sartre described very exactly the situation of a being who, deprived of general truths, is tormented by an absolute aspiration. If this appears to be an exploration of the condition of his contemporaries, it will not be the first time that important philosophical writing will have been of this type. Sartre is enough of a humanist to find this aspiration touching and admirable, enough of a romantic to enjoy adding that it is fruitless, and enough of a politician to introduce a theoretical contradiction for immediate practical ends. His philosophy is not just a piece of irresponsible romanticism; it is the expression of a last ditch attachment to the value of the individual, expressed in philosophical terms. Sartre is performing the traditional task of the philosopher; he is reflecting systematically about the human condition. The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind. Such a definition will cover both analysis and metaphysics. What the psychoanalyst does for the particular consciousness of the individual the metaphysician does for the intellectual consciousness of the group he is addressing, and through them perhaps for the consciousness of an epoch. He presents a conceptual framework which is an aid to understanding. The answer to those who wish to eliminate metaphysics is the ‘moral’ answer: that it is proper for intellectual groups to make this particular sort of effort at self-comprehension. That the influence of such attempts, for good or evil, is not limited to the groups concerned is evident from the history of philosophy.