Jean Paul Sartre

Jean Paul Sartre was born in Paris where he spent most of his life. After a traditional philosophical education in prestigious Parisian schools that introduced him to the history of Western philosophy with a bias toward Cartesianism and neoKantianism, not to mention a strong strain of Bergsonism, Sartre succeeded his former school friend, Raymond Aron, at the French Institute in Berlin (1933–1934) where he read the leading phenomenologists of the day, Husserl, Heidegger and Scheler. He prized Husserl's restatement of the principle of intentionality (all consciousness aims at or “intends” an other-than-consciousness) that seemed to free the thinker from the inside/outside epistemology inherited from Descartes while retaining the immediacy and certainty that Cartesians prized so highly. What he read of Heidegger at that time is unclear, but he deals with the influential German ontologist explicitly after his return and especially in his masterwork, Being and Nothingness(1943). He exploits the latter's version of Husserlian intentionality by insisting that human reality (Heidegger's Dasein or human way of being) is “in the world” primarily via its practical concerns and not its epistemic relationships. This lends both Heidegger's and Sartre's early philosophies a kind of “pragmatist” character that Sartre, at least, will never abandon. It has been remarked that many of the Heideggerian concepts in Sartre's existentialist writings also occur in those of Bergson, whose “Les Données immediates de la conscience” (Time and Free Will) Sartre once credited with drawing him toward philosophy. But it is clear that Sartre devoted much of his early philosophical attention to combating the then influential Bergsonism and that mention of Bergson's name decreases as that of Heidegger grows in Sartre's writings during the “vintage” existentialist years. Sartre seems to have read the phenomenological ethicist Max Scheler, whose concept of the intuitive grasp of paradigm cases is echoed in Sartre's reference to the “image” of the kind of person one should be that both guides and is fashioned by our moral choices. But where Scheler in the best Husserlian fashion argues for the “discovery” of such value images, Sartre insists on their creation. The properly “existentialist” version of phenomenology is already in play.
Though Sartre was not a serious reader of Hegel or Marx until during and after the war, like so many of his generation, he came under the influence of Kojève's Marxist and protoexistentialist interpretation of Hegel, though he never attended his famous lectures in the 1930s as did Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. It was Jean Hyppolite's translation of and commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that marked Sartre's closer study of the seminal German philosopher. This is especially evident in his posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics written in 1947–48 to fulfill the promise of an “ethics of authenticity” made in Being and Nothingness. That project was subsequently abandoned but the Hegelian and Marxist presence became dominant in Sartre's next major philosophical text, the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and in an essay that came to serve as its Introduction, Search for a Method (1957). Dilthey had dreamt of completing Kant's famous triad with a fourth Kritik, namely, a critique of historical reason. Sartre pursued this project by combining a Hegelian-Marxist dialectic with an Existentialist “psychoanalysis” that incorporates individual responsibility into class relationships, thereby adding a properly Existentialist dimension of moral responsibility to a Marxist emphasis on collective and structural causality—what Raymond Aron would later criticize as an impossible union of Kierkegaard and Marx. In the final analysis, Kierkegaard wins out; Sartre's “Marxism” remains adjectival to his existentialism and not the reverse. This becomes apparent in the last phase of his work.
Sartre had long been fascinated with the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. In what some would consider the culmination of his thought, he weds Existentialist biography with Marxian social critique in a Hegelian “totalization” of an individual and his era, to produce the last of his many incompleted projects, a multi-volume study of Flaubert's life and times, The Family Idiot (1971–1972). In this work, Sartre joins his Existentialist vocabulary of the 1940s and early 1950s with his Marxian lexicon of the late 1950s and 1960s to ask what we can know about a man in the present state of our knowledge. This study, which he describes as “a novel that is true,” incarnates that mixture of phenomenological description, psychological insight, and social critique that has become the hallmark of Sartrean philosophy. These features doubtless contributed to his being awarded the Nobel prize for literature, which he characteristically refused along with its substantial cash grant lest his acceptance be read as approval of the bourgeois values that the honor seemed to emblemize.
In his last years, Sartre, who had lost the use of one eye in childhood, became almost totally blind. Yet he continued to work with the help of a tape recorder, producing with Benny Lévy portions of a “co-authored” ethics, the published parts of which indicate, in the eyes of many, that its value may be more biographical than philosophical.
After his death, thousands spontaneously joined his funeral cortège in a memorable tribute to his respect and esteem among the public at large. As the headline of one Parisian newspaper lamented: “France has lost its conscience.”
Like Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre distinguished ontology from metaphysics and favored the former. In his case, ontology is primarily descriptive and classificatory, whereas metaphysics purports to be causally explanatory, offering accounts about the ultimate origins and ends of individuals and of the universe as a whole. Unlike Heidegger, however, Sartre does not try to combat metaphysics as a deleterious undertaking. He simply notes in a Kantian manner that it raises questions we cannot answer. On the other hand, he subtitles Being and Nothingness a “Phenomenological Ontology.” Its descriptive method moves from the most abstract to the highly concrete. It begins by analyzing two distinct and irreducible categories or kinds of being: the in-itself (en-soi) and the for-itself (pour-soi), roughly the nonconscious and consciousness respectively, adding a third, the for-others (pour-autrui), later in the book. He concludes with a sketch of the practice of “existential psychoanalysis” that interprets our actions to uncover the fundamental project that unifies our lives.
Being-in-itself and being-for-itself have mutually exclusive characteristics and yet we (human reality) are entities that combine both, which is the ontological root of our ambiguity. The in-itself is solid, self-identical, passive and inert. It simply “is.” The for-itself is fluid, nonself-identical, and dynamic. It is the internal negation or “nihilation” of the in-itself, on which it depends. Viewed more concretely, this duality is cast as “facticity” and “transcendence.” The “givens” of our situation such as our language, our environment, our previous choices and our very selves in their function as in-itself constitute our facticity. As conscious individuals, we transcend (surpass) this facticity in what constitutes our “situation.” In other words, we are always beings “in situation,” but the precise mixture of transcendence and facticity that forms any situation remains indeterminable, at least while we are engaged in it. Hence Sartre concludes that we are always “more” than our situation and that this is the ontological foundation of our freedom. We are “condemned” to be free, in his hyperbolic phrase.
One can see why Sartre is often described as a Cartesian dualist but this is imprecise. Whatever dualism pervades his thought is one of spontaneity/inertia. His is not a “two substance” ontology like the thinking thing and the extended thing (mind and matter) of Descartes. Only the in-itself is conceivable as substance or “thing.” The for-itself is a no-thing, the internal negation of things. The principle of identity holds only for being-in-itself. The for-itself is an exception to this rule. Accordingly, time with all of its paradoxes is a function of the for-itself's nihilating or “othering” the in-itself. The past is related to the future as in-itself to for-itself and as facticity to possibility, with the present, like “situation” in general, being an ambiguous mixture of both. This is Sartre's version of Heidegger's “Ekstatic temporality,” the qualitative “lived” time of our concerns and practices, the time that rushes by or hangs heavy on our hands, rather than the quantitative “clock” time that we share with physical nature.
The category or ontological principle of the for-others comes into play as soon as the other subject or Other appears on the scene. The Other cannot be deduced from the two previous principles but must be encountered. Sartre's famous analysis of the shame one experiences at being discovered in an embarrassing situation is a phenomenological argument (what Husserl called an “eidetic reduction”) of our awareness of another as subject. It carries the immediacy and the certainty that philosophers demand of our perception of other “minds” without suffering the weakness of arguments from analogy commonly used by empiricists to defend such knowledge.
The roles of consciousness and the in-itself in his earlier work are assumed by “praxis” (human activity in its material context) and the “practico-inert” respectively in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Praxis is dialectical in the Hegelian sense that it surpasses and subsumes its other, the practico-inert. The latter, like the in-itself, is inert but as “practico-” is the sedimentation of previous praxes. Thus speech acts would be examples of praxis but language would be practico-inert; social institutions are practico-inert but the actions they both foster and limit are praxes.
The Other in Being and Nothingness alienates or objectifies us (in this work Sartre seems to use these terms equivalently) and the third party is simply this Other writ large. The “us” is objectified by an Other and hence has the ontological status of being-in-itself but the collective subject or “we,” he insists, is simply a psychological experience. In the Critique another ontological form appears, the “mediating” third, that denotes the group member as such and yields a collective subject without reducing the respective agents to mere ciphers of some collective consciousness. In other words, Sartre accords an ontological primacy to individual praxis while recognizing its enrichment as group member of a praxis that sustains predicates such as command/obedience and right/duty that are properly its own. The concepts of praxis, practico-inert and mediating third form the basis of a social ontology that merits closer attention than the prolix Critique encourages.
Sartre's gifts of psychological description and analysis are widely recognized. What made him so successful a novelist and playwright contributed to the vivacity and force of his phenomenological “arguments” as well. His early studies of emotive and imaging consciousness in the late 1930s press the Husserlian principle of intentionality farther than their author seemed willing to go. For example, in The Psychology of Imagination (1940), Sartre argues that Husserl remains captive to the idealist principle of immanence (the object of consciousness lies within consciousness), despite his stated goal of combating idealism, when he seems to consider images as miniatures of the perceptual object reproduced or retained in the mind. On the contrary, Sartre argues, if one insists that all consciousness is intentional in nature, one must conclude that even so-called “images” are not objects “in the mind” but are ways of relating to items “in the world” in a properly imaginative manner, namely, by what he calls “derealizing” them or rendering them “present-absent.”
It should be admitted that Sartre never read Husserl's posthumously published lectures on the image that might have corrected his criticism. Though Husserl struggled with the notion of mental image for the first thirty years of his career and distinguished imaging consciousness Bildbewusstsein from the imagination Phantasie, he resisted any account that would employ what Sartre calls “the principle of immanence” and so invite an infinite regress in the vain attempt to reach the transcendent. Still Husserl continued to appeal to mental images in his account of imaging consciousness while eventually avoiding them in analyzing the imagination.
Similarly, our emotions are not “inner states” but are ways of relating to the world; they too are “intentional.” In this case, emotive behavior involves physical changes and what he calls a quasi “magical” attempt to transform the world by changing ourselves. The person who gets “worked up” when failing to hit the golf ball or to open the jar lid, is, on Sartre's reading, “intending” a world where physiological changes “conjure up” solutions in the problematic world. The person who literally “jumps for joy,” to cite another of his examples, is trying by a kind of incantation to possess a good “all at once” that can be realized only across a temporal spread. If emotion is a joke, he warns, it is a joke we believe in. These are all spontaneous, prereflective relations. They are not the products of reflective decision. Yet insofar as they are even prereflectively conscious, we are responsible for them. And this raises the question of freedom, a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility and the heart of his philosophy.
The basis of Sartrean freedom is ontological: we are free because we are not a self (an in-itself) but a presence-to-self (the transcendence or “nihilation” of our self). This implies that we are “other” to our selves, that whatever we are or whatever others may ascribe to us, we are “in the manner of not being it,” that is, in the manner of being able to assume a perspective in its regard. This inner distance reflects not only the nonself-identity of the for-itself and the ekstatic temporality that it generates but forms the site of what Sartre calls “freedom as the definition of man.” To that freedom corresponds a coextensive responsibility. We are responsible for our “world” as the horizon of meaning in which we operate and thus for everything in it insofar as their meaning and value are assigned by virtue of our life-orienting fundamental “choice.” At this point the ontological and the psychological overlap while remaining distinct as occurs so often in phenomenology.
Such fundamental “choice” has been criticized as being criterionless and hence arbitrary. But it would be better to speak of it as criterion-constituting in the sense that it grounds the set of criteria on the basis of which our subsequent choices are made. It resembles what ethicist R. M. Hare calls “decisions of principle” (that establish the principles for subsequent decisions but are themselves unprincipled) and what Kierkegaard would describe as “conversion.” In fact, Sartre sometimes employed this term himself to denote a radical change in one's basic project. It is this original sustaining “choice” that Existential psychoanalysis seeks to uncover.
Sartre's use of intentionality is the backbone of his psychology. And his psychology is the key to his ontology that is being fashioned at this time. In fact, the concept of imaging consciousness as the locus of possibility, negativity and lack emerges as the model for consciousness in general (being-for-itself) in Being and Nothingness. That said, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, so important a role does imaging consciousness or its equivalent play in his work.
Sartre was a moralist but scarcely a moralizer. His earliest studies, though phenomenological, underscored the freedom and by implication the responsibility of the practitioner of the phenomenological method. Thus his first major work, Transcendence of the Ego, in addition to constituting an argument against the transcendental ego (the epistemological subject that cannot be an object) central to German idealism and Hussserlian phenomenology, introduces an ethical dimension into what was traditionally an epistemological project by asserting that this appeal to a transcendental ego conceals a conscious flight from freedom. The phenomenological reduction that constitutes the objects of consciousness as pure meanings or significations devoid of the existential claims that render them liable to skeptical doubt-such a reduction or “bracketing of the being question” carries a moral significance as well. The “authentic” subject, as Sartre will later explain in his Notebooks for an Ethics, will learn to live without an ego, whether transcendental or empirical, in the sense that the transcendental ego is superfluous and the empirical ego (of scientific psychology) is an object for consciousness when it reflects on itself in an objectifying act that he calls “accessory reflection.” His works take pains either to ascribe moral responsibility to agents individually or collectively or to set the ontological foundations for such ascriptions.
Authenticity is achieved, Sartre claims, by a conversion that entails abandonment of our original choice to coincide with ourselves consciously (the futile desire to be in-itself-for-itself or God) and thereby free ourselves from identification with our egos as being-in-itself. In our present alienated condition, we are responsible for our egos as we are for any object of consciousness. Earlier he said that it was bad faith (self-deception)to try to coincide with our egos since the fact is that whatever we are we are in the manner of not being it due to the “othering” nature of consciousness. Now his mention of “conversion” to authenticity via a “purifying”(non-objectifying) reflection elaborates that authentic project. He insists that we must allow our spontaneous “selfness” (what he termsipseity here and in Being and Nothingness) to replace the “Me” or Ego, which he criticizes as an “abusive intermediary” whose future prefigures my future. The shift is from relations of “appropriation” or being where I focus on identifying with my ego in a bad-faith flight from freedom,to relations of “existence” and autonomy where I attend entirely to my project and its goal. The former is egoistic, Sartre now implies, where the latter is outgoing and generous. This resonates with what he will say about the creative artist's work as a gift, an appeal to another freedom and an act of generosity.
It is now common to distinguish three distinct ethical positions in Sartre's writings. The first and best known, existentialist ethics is one of disalienation and authenticity. It assumes that we live in a society of oppression and exploitation. The former is primary and personal, the latter structural and impersonal. While he enters into extended polemics in various essays and journal articles of the late 1940s and ‘50s concerning the systematic exploitation of people in capitalist and colonialist institutions, Sartre always sought a way to bring the responsibility home to individuals who could in principle be named. As Merleau-Ponty observed, Sartre stressed oppression over exploitation, individual moral responsibility over structural causation but without denying the importance of the latter. In fact, as his concept of freedom thickened from the ontological to the social and historical in the mid ‘40s, his appreciation of the influence of factical conditions in the exercise of freedom grew apace.
Sartre's concept of authenticity, occasionally cited as the only existentialist “virtue,” is often criticized as denoting more a style than a content. Admittedly, it does seem compatible with a wide variety of life choices. Its foundation, again, is ontological-the basic ambiguity of human reality that “is what it is not” (that is, its future as possibility) and “is not what it is” (its past as facticity, including its ego or self, to which we have seen it is related via an internal negation). We could say that authenticity is fundamentally living this ontological truth of one's situation, namely, that one is never identical with one's current state but remains responsible for sustaining it. Thus, the claim “that's just the way I am” would constitute a form of self-deception or bad faith as would all forms of determinism, since both instances involve lying to oneself about the ontological fact of one's nonself-coincidence and the flight from concomitant responsibility for “choosing” to remain that way.
Given the fundamental division of the human situation into facticity and transcendence, bad faith or inauthenticity can assume two principal forms: one that denies the freedom or transcendence component (“I can't do anything about it”) and the other that ignores the factical dimension of every situation (“I can do anything by just wishing it”). The former is the more prevalent form of self deception but the latter is common to people who lack a sense of the real in their lives.
Sartre sometimes talks as if any choice could be authentic so long as it is lived with a clear awareness of its contingency and responsibility. But his considered opinion excludes choices that oppress or consciously exploit others. In other words, authenticity is not entirely style; there is a general content and that content is freedom. Thus the “authentic Nazi” is explicitly disqualified as being oxymoronic. Sartre's thesis is that freedom is the implicit object of any choice, a claim he makes but does not adequately defend in his Humanism lecture. He seems to assume that “freedom” is the aspect under which any choice is made, its “formal object,” to revive an ancient term. But a stronger argument than that would be required to disqualify an “authentic” Nazi.
Though critical of its bourgeois variety, Sartre does support an existentialist humanism, the motto of which could well be his remark that “you can always make something out of what you've been made into” (Situations 9:101). In fact, his entire career could be summarized in these words that carry an ethical as well as a critical message. The first part of his professional life focused on the freedom of the existential individual (you can always make something out of…); the second concentrated on the socioeconomic and historical conditions which limited and modified that freedom (what you've been made into), once freedom ceased to be merely the definition of “man” and included the possibility of genuine options in concrete situations. That phase corresponded to Sartre's political commitment and active involvement in public debates, always in search of the exploitative “systems” such as capitalism, colonialism and racism at work in society and the oppressive practices of individuals who sustained them. As he grew more cognizant of the social dimension of individual life, the political and the ethical tended to coalesce. In fact, he explicitly rejected “Machiavellianism.”
If Sartre's first and best known ethics corresponds to the ontology of Being and Nothingness, his second, “dialectical” ethics builds on the philosophy of history developed in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. In a series of posthumously published notes for lectures in the 1960s, some of which were never delivered, Sartre sketched a theory of ethics based on the concepts of human need and the ideal of “integral man” in contrast with its counter-concept, the “subhuman.”What this adds to his published ethics is a more specific content and a keener sense of the social conditions for living a properly human life.
Sartre's third attempt at an ethics, which he called an ethics of the “we,” was undertaken in interview format with his secretary, Benny Lévy, toward the end of his life. It purports to question many of the main propositions of his ethics of authenticity, yet what has appeared in print chiefly elaborates claims already stated in his earlier works. But since the tapes on which these remarks were recorded are unavailable to the public and Sartre's illness at the time they were made was serious, their authority as revisionary of his general philosophy remains doubtful. If ever released in its entirety, this text will constitute a serious hermeneutical challenge.
Sartre was not politically involved in the 1930s though his heart, as he said, “was on the left, like everyone's.” The War years, occupation and resistance made the difference. He emerged committed to social reform and convinced that the writer had the obligation to address the social issues of the day. He founded the influential journal of opinion, Les Temps modernes, with his partner Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron and others. In the “Présentation” to the initial issue (October, 1945), he elaborated his idea of committed literature and insisted that failure to address political issues amounted to supporting the status quo. After a brief unsuccessful attempt to help organize a nonCommunist leftist political organization, he began his long love-hate relationship with the French Communist Party, which he never joined but which for years he considered the legitimate voice of the working class in France. This continued till the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956. Still, Sartre continued to sympathize with the movement, if not the Party, for some time afterwards. He summarized his disillusionment in an essay “The Communists are afraid of Revolution,” following the “events of May,” 1968. By then he had moved toward the radical Left and what the French labeled “les Maos,” whom he likewise never joined but whose mixture of the ethical and the political attracted him.
Politically, Sartre tended toward what the French call “libertarian socialism,” which is a kind of anarchism. Ever distrustful of authority, which he considered “the Other in us,” his ideal was a society of voluntary eye-level relations that he called “the city of ends.” One caught a glimpse of this in his description of the forming group (le groupe en fusion) in the Critique. There each was “the same” as the others in terms of practical concern. Each suspended his or her personal interests for the sake of the common goal. No doubt these practices hardened into institutions and freedom was compromised once more in bureaucratic machinery. But that brief taste of genuine positive reciprocity was revelatory of what an authentic social existence could be.
Sartre came to recognize how the economic conditions the political in the sense that material scarcity, as both Ricardo and Marx insisted, determines our social relations. In Sartre's reading, scarcity emerges as the source of structural and personal violence in human history as we know it. It follows, he believes, that liberation from such violence will come only through the counter violence of revolution and the advent of a “socialism of abundance.”
What Sartre termed the “progressive/regressive method” for historical investigation is a hybrid of historical materialism and existentialist psychoanalysis. It respects the often decisive role of economic considerations in historical explanation (historical materialism) while insisting that “the men that History makes are not the men that make history”; in other words, he resists complete economic determinism by implicit appeal to his humanist motto: “You can always make something out of…”
Never one to avoid a battle, Sartre became embroiled in the Algerian War, generating deep hostility from the Right to the point that a bomb was detonated at the entrance to his apartment building on two occasions by supporters of a French Algeria. Sartre's political critique conveyed in a series of essays, interviews and plays, especially The Condemned of Altona, once more combined a sense of structural exploitation (in this case, the institution of colonialism and its attendant racism) with an expression of moral outrage at the oppression of the Muslim population and the torture of captives by the French military.
Mention of the play reminds us of the role of imaginative art in Sartre's philosophical work. This piece, whose chief protagonist is Frantz “the butcher of Smolensk,” though ostensibly about the effect of Nazi atrocities at the Eastern front on a postwar industrialist family in Hamburg, is really addressing the question of collective guilt and the French suppression of the Algerian war for independence raging at that time. Sartre often turned to literary art to convey or even to work through philosophical thoughts that he had already or would later conceptualize in his essays and theoretical studies. Which brings us to the relation between imaginative literature and philosophy in his work.
The strategy of “indirect communication” has been an instrument of “Existentialists” since Kierkegaard adopted the use of pseudonyms in his philosophical writings in the early nineteenth century. The point is to communicate a feeling and an attitude that the reader/spectator adopts in which certain existentialist themes such as anguish, responsibility or bad faith are suggested but not dictated as in a lecture. Asked why his plays were performed only in the bourgeois sections of the city, Sartre replied that no bourgeois could leave a performance of one of them without “thinking thoughts traitorous to his class.” The so-called aesthetic “suspension of disbelief” coupled with the tendency to identify with certain characters and to experience their plight vicariously conveys conviction rather than information. And this is what existentialism is chiefly about: challenging the individual to examine their life for intimations of bad faith and to heighten their sensitivity to oppression and exploitation in their world.
Sartre's early work Nausea (1938) is the very model of a philosophical novel. Its protagonist, Roquentin, works through many of the major themes of Being and Nothingness that will appear five years later. It can be read as an extended meditation on the contingency of our existence and on the psychosomatic experience that captures that phenomenon. In his famous meditation on a tree root, Roquentin experiences the brute facticity of its existence and of his own: both are simply there, without justification, in excess (de trop). The physicality of this revelatory “sickly sweet” sensation should not be overlooked. Like the embarrassment felt before the Other's gaze in the voyeur example cited earlier, our bodily intentionality (what he calls “the body as for-itself”) is revealing an ontological reality.
The case at hand is an artistic way of conveying what Sartre in Being and Nothingness will call “the phenomenon of being.” He agrees with the tradition that “being” or “to be” is not a concept. But if not that, how is it to be indexed? What does it mean “to be”? Sartre's existential phenomenology appeals to certain kinds of experience such as nausea and joy to articulate the “transphenomenal” character of being. Pace Kant, “being” does not denote a realm behind the phenomena that the descriptive method analyzes. Neither is it the object of an “eidetic” reduction (the phenomenological method that would grasp it as an essence). Rather, being accompanies all phenomena as their existential dimension. But this dimension is revealed by certain experiences such as that of the utter contingency which Roquentin felt. This is scarcely rationalism, but neither is it mysticism. Anyone can experience this contingency and, once brought to reflective awareness, can ponder its implications. What this novel does imaginatively, Being and Nothingness, subtitled “A Phenomenological Ontology,” pursues conceptually, though with the aid of phenomenological “arguments,” as we have seen.
In a series of essays published as What is Literature? (1947), Sartre expounds his notion of “committed” literature, a turn in his thought first indicated in the inaugural issue of Les Temps modernes two years earlier. Though steeped in the polemics of the day, this continues to be a seminal text of criticism. It underscores what I have called the “pragmatist” dimension of Sartre's thought: writing is a form of acting in the world; it produces effects for which the author must assume responsibility. Addressing the problem of “writing for our time,” Sartre underscores the harsh facts of oppression and exploitation that were not erased by the upheaval of world war. Ours remains “a society based on violence.” Accordingly, the author is responsible for addressing that violence with a counter-violence (for example, by his choice of topics to discuss) or sharing in it by his silence. Drawing a distinction between prose, which can be committed, and “poetry” (basically nonrepresentational art such as music and poetry properly speaking), which cannot—a distinction that will return to haunt him—Sartre proceeds to urge that the prose-writer reveal that man is a value to be invented each day and that “the questions he raises are always moral” (203). A clear rejection of “art for art's sake,” Sartre insisted on the social responsibility of the artist and the intellectual in general.
The artwork, for Sartre, has always carried a special power: that of communicating among freedoms without alienation or objectification. In this sense, it has stood as an exception to the objectifying gaze of his vintage existentialist texts. That relation between artist and public via the work of art Sartre calls “gift-appeal.” In his The Imaginary, he speaks of the portrait “inviting” the viewer to realize its possibilities by regarding it aesthetically. By the time he gathers these thoughts in What is Literature? and Notebooks for an Ethics, the concept of writing as an act of generosity to which the reader responds by an act of “re-creation” that respects the mutuality of these freedoms—this gift/response model assumes political significance. It is offered as an example of positive reciprocity in the political realm. And, in fact, it anticipates the “free alterity” of the group member as analyzed in the Critique. In other words, Sartre's political and ethical values and concerns conjoin in the concept of committed literature.
Before concluding with a prognosis of Sartre's philosophical relevance in the twenty-first century, let me note the several “biographies” that he produced of important literary figures in addition to his autobiography, Words. Each of these studies constitutes a form of existential psychoanalysis. The subject's literary production is submitted to a kind of “hermeneutic” in which the underlying life-project is uncovered. He begins to employ the progressive-regressive method in the late ‘50s whereby the historical and socioeconomic conditions of the subject are uncovered in a “regressive” argument from biographical and social facts to the conditions of their possibility followed by a “progressive” account of the subjects process of “personalization.” The most extensive, if not the most successful, of these “biographies” is his analysis of the life and times of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot.
But these biographies, almost exclusively about literary men, are also object lessons in an “existentialist” theory of history. Their hallmark is an attempt to reconstruct the subject's project as his manner of dialectically “totalizing” his epoch even as he is being totalized by it. While connecting impersonal historical phenomena in their dialectical necessity (for example, the unintended consequences ingredient in any historical account), these narratives are intent on conveying the subject's sense of the anguish of decision and the pinch of the real. In effect, biography is an essential part of an existentialist approach to history and not a mere illustrative appendage.