The Early Sartre and Marxism

Modem French Identities
Edited by Peter Collier
Volume 64
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Sam Coombes
The Early Sartre
and Marxism
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

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Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to the following people whose help has been
invaluable during the preparation of this book:
Christina Howells, Françoise Krai, David Drake, Valeria Ingegno,
Simone Rinzler, Toby Garfitt and Crystal Webster.

Contents
Acknowledgements
5
Introduction
9
Part One: Ontological Bases
23
I.
Conceptions of Concrete Reality: Sartre's Refusal of
Materialism
25
II. The Free Subject In Situation
59
Part Two: From Ontology and Ethics to Politics and History
83
Introduction
85
III. Inauthenticity and Ideology
89
IV. Sartre's Search for Authenticity
117
V. Commitment, Humanism and Left Political Thought
137
VI. Towards a Dialectics of History
169
VII. Authentic Ethics and Socialist Politics in Sartre's
Cahiers pour une morale
191
Part Three: Writing and Politics
229
Introduction
231
VIII. Les Petits camarades: Personal, Political and Literary
Issues Which Defined the Sartre-Nizan Relationship
231
IX. Committed Writing
273
Bibliography
319
Index
329

Introduction
There are good reasons for believing that the recent resurgence of
interest in Sartre is a revealing indicator of the turn which the political
and cultural conjuncture has taken over the last few years. Certainly,
this renewed interest seems far too apt and timely to be the conse-
quence merely of cyclically revolving intellectual trends or of the
recent centenary celebrations. It is well known that for many years
previously Sartre's thought had been considered outdated or passé.
The reasons why his work long suffered comparative neglect are
complex and multiple but they can nevertheless be identified quite
clearly in certain of their key intellectual and conjunctural dimensions.
By the 1980s and 1990s, not only had Sartre's existential Marxism
been supposedly eclipsed by a number of successive French intel-
lectual tendencies from structuralism through to postmodernism, but
the collapse of the Soviet bloc seemed for many in the West to mark
not only the end of the Cold War but also the final demise of Marxism
both as a political force and as a valid theoretical model. Indeed, by
the mid 1990s, Sartre's thought, and a fortiori that of Marx, seemed
something of an irrelevance to many. In the latter years of his life,
Sartre had of course distanced himself from his previous existentialist
Marxist positions, but he had nonetheless remained on the radical left
until his death. The ultimate victory of the Western capitalist model of
society over that of the Soviet Union in conjunction with the growth
of an increasingly consumer-oriented postmodern cultural ambience in
the 1990s appeared to be enough to seal the fate of both Marxism and
Sartrean thought definitively. In postmodernist intellectual circles,
truth-questioning relativism, hostility to universals, and the supposed
end of grand narratives were the order of the day, and the Hegelian-
inspired historicising theoretical models of the Marxist philosophers
and all forms of humanistic thinking had never seemed more out of
date.
9

With the growth of the anti-globalisation movement during the
1990s, and subsequently the Anglo-American-led 'War on Terror' in
the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001, however, new
forms of political resistance to post-Cold War neoliberal policies and
ideology have been developing. The war against Iraq in particular laid
bare the imperialist dimension of the neoliberal agenda and in many
ways showed that a new, harder-nosed brand of western capitalist
expansionism was afoot, one whose readiness to appropriate natural
resources was barely veiled and whose ideological self-justifications
were almost as wrong-headed as the Islamic fundamentalism it was
claiming to combat. The force of reaction within western nations
themselves to the invasion of Iraq, coupled with concerns both about
pressing environmental issues and the nature of our relations with
developing economies, indicate strongly that a broad questioning of
the operations of the western-led globalised capitalist economy has
been acquiring a new urgency. In this context, the work of radical
critique undertaken by Marx and, in the twentieth century, by Sartre
and his contemporaries comes once again into sharp focus. 'With the
spread of capitalism across the globe and its burgeoning in once
'under-developed' economies such as Brazil and India,' observes
Peter Osborne, 'Marx's writings have become more, not less relevant
to the present. In particular, as what began in the early 1990s as the
'anti-globalization' movement becomes more self-consciously 'anti-
capitalist' (at least in its rhetoric), it is increasingly important to know
precisely what capitalism is.'
1
The matter of the ways in which Sartrean thought relates to that
of Marx and a range of Marxist theorists will constitute the principal
focus of the present study, and I do not wish to effect some sort of
easy assimilation of the one to the other in the context of these prefa-
tory remarks. There can be little doubt, however, that in the course of
his career Sartre came to represent the paradigmatic example of the
committed intellectual in the twentieth century. As such, his relevance
is fairly self-evident. In view of his active involvement in the protest
movements at the time of the Algerian war of independence and the
1
Peter Osborne, How to Read Marx (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005)
p.3 .
10

Vietnam war, to name just two of the collective struggles to which he
lent his support publically, it is fair to suppose that had he been alive
today he would have found plenty to be voluble and vocal about since
2001.
Sartre's relevance today is not due solely to his role as a public
intellectual, however. It is also owing, in key respects, to the nature of
the theoretical claims on which his committed radical left stance was
founded. Postmodern thinking has often shown itself to be sceptical of
overarching explanatory systems, the possibility of absolute truths
and, like certain strands of post-structuralist theory before it, of a
belief in the unity of theory and practice. For all that postmodernism,
and perhaps postmodern art above all, has been willing to ironise and
deflate prominent tendencies of mainstream western culture, the
underlying scepticism inherent in postmodernism, in either its theoret-
ical or artistic expressions, does not render it a particularly suitable
mode of thought for those seeking to initiate concerted action in the
name of political resistance. Sartre on the other hand believed it not
only possible but necessary to account theoretically for our condition
as historically situated human beings, and in the idea that our theoret-
ical explanations of the world and our place in it should form a
coherent unity with our ethical conduct and political practice. His
theoretical world-view underpinned a belief in showing solidarity
with the dispossessed and in siding with them in their opposition to
the hegemonic powers that were oppressing them. It is well known
that ethics constituted a central preoccupation for Sartre throughout
his career. But from around 1947 onwards, what he understood ethics
to involve did not correspond with that of traditional morality, nor
with that which the flourish in ethical thinking of recent years has
foregrounded. Ethical reflection in the latter case, as with the trad-
itional variety, often becomes, as Emmanuel Renault has indicated,
2
a
way of sidelining discussion of political questions. For the postwar
Sartre, as for Marx and Trotsky before him, ethical questions were by
their very nature historicised and politicised. The right course of
action on the part of individual subjects could only be ascertained in
2
Emmanuel Renault, Mépris social: éthique et politique de la reconnaissance
(Bègles : Editions du Passant, 2000) pp. 19-20.
11

the light of a conception of the common good, and this was not just an
ethical question in the narrow sense of the term but also a political
question.
As protesting against the operations of powerful political, mili-
tary, and ideological forces has come to the fore in western nations
once again in recent years, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the
anti-Vietnam War protests, so the work of committed radical left
intellectuals such as Marx and Sartre has gained a new currency.
There are of course many different varieties of radical left commit-
ment and it is not my intention to suggest indirectly that the numerous
important contributors to reflection on the contemporary geopolitical
and cultural conjuncture active today have necessarily been taking
their lead directly from Marx or Sartre.
3
My point is rather to suggest
that whether or not contemporary radical theorists choose to draw on
the theories and example of such seminal figures explicitly, there is an
important sense in which the presence of these predecessors is in-
escapable. This is particularly the case in periods of acute political and
cultural tension and discontentedness. And if, as Terry Eagleton
argues,
4
cultural theory is in need of a new direction in our post-2001
era, postmodernist thinking proving less and less relevant to a world in
which the real has made a sudden and decisive reappearance in the
form of terrorist attacks, then the radical theoretical and political
tradition may prove vital to our critical thinking in the years ahead.
Turning to the particular orientation and focus of the present
study, there are a number of points which I would like to touch upon
in these introductory remarks, relating to both the general aims and
orientation of my enquiry and the methodological approach I have
adopted. In the light of the preceding reflections I think it important
to make explicit that what is contained in these pages is first and
foremost a critical réévaluation of Sartre's thought up until the close
of the 1940s. That is to say that although this is a committed study it is
committed principally at the level of seeking to reassert the lasting
3 In this regard, I have in mind such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton,
Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Zizek who have all made significant
contributions to radical critique over the last decade.
4 Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin, 2003) pp. 221-2.
12

value of Sartre's thought, and notably in so far as the latter shares
common ground with classic Marxist philosophy. Contemporary the-
oretical debates about the political and cultural dynamics of today's
world are absent from my discussion and I have in no sense attempted
to draw a critical enquiry into early Sartrean thought into those
debates. This study is hence committed in only an indirect way,
despite my conviction that Sartre's thought and example as a
committed intellectual remain vital to the trajectory of contemporary
cultural theory.
Sartre's Marxism has received a good deal of critical attention
but the scope of studies devoted to it has invariably been limited to the
postwar years and most commonly to the 1950s and 1960s, with a
particular focus on the Critique de la raison dialectique.
5
Although the
interest stimulated by the later period of Sartre's work is entirely
appropriate in this regard, the special attention bestowed on the
Critique has reinforced the long-held view that Sartre's early thought
and literary output, by contrast, had little to do with Marxism, or
indeed with any type of political commitment. Moreover, studies of
later Sartrean thought and politics have rarely included critical analy-
sis of the theories of other Marxist thinkers, commentators often
seeming to bypass or overlook the numerous and diverse antecedents
to many of Sartre's positions in the canon of Marxist theorising. The
key premise of this study is that the relationship between Sartre's
thought and the Marxist theoretical tradition merits detailed attention.
Most commentators concur in the view that from the latter half of the
1940s through to the early 1970s - the large part of his career -
Sartre's thought was significantly influenced by Marxism. Yet Marx-
ism has all too often remained a rather unspecific and ill-defined
phenomenon in critical appraisals of Sartre, attempts to relate his ideas
to those of specific Marxist theorists being rare.
6
Sartre's later work in
5 Wilfred Desan's The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Doubleday,
1965), Pietro Chiodi's Sartre and Marxism (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976), and
Mark Poster's Sartre's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1979) are representative
of this critical tendency.
6 Thomas Flynn's valuable study Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984) is one of the few critical works in the field
that does examine the claims of certain Marxist theorists, although the large
13

particular clearly lends itself to critical comparison with Marxist
philosophy and at numerous points in this study I highlight areas of
reciprocity which merit further examination. The central contention of
this study, however, is that such common ground can also be iden-
tified, albeit to a lesser extent, between Marxist philosophy and the
writings comprising Sartre's early period. From 1940 onwards,
Sartre's writings reveal a tendency on his part to seek to integrate the
different areas of his thought - ontology, ethics, politics, histori-
ography and aesthetics - into a coherent whole, ie. a synthetic totality.
This is also a defining characteristic of much Marxist philosophy.
Moreover, at the level of each specific area of enquiry, numerous con-
ceptual overlaps and reciprocities can be identified between Sartre's
positions from the late 1930s onwards and those of different Marxist
thinkers.
The story of the early Sartre is well known and it is not my
intention to recount the particular events and intellectual positions
which comprise it except in so far as they inform my project to eluci-
date the particular development of Sartre's left-wing sympathies and
the conceptual relationships which can be identified between his
theoretical positions and those of Marxist thinkers. It is for this reason
that the methodological approach I have adopted is primarily a
thematic rather than a chronological one. Each chapter focuses on a
specific thematic area or a given phase in Sartre's development rather
than the principal criterion for the organisation of the material being
the desire to progress from one set of events and developments to the
next in their order of occurrence. Moreover, where Part One is devot-
ed to questions of ontology, in Part Two the focus turns primarily to
Sartre's ethical and political thought, and Part Three is devoted to his
aesthetics. These divisions are by no means rigid, however, and are
inevitably artificial to some extent, being established primarily for the
purposes of clear exposition. Sartre was such a synthetic thinker that
the attempt to discuss his ontological, ethical, aesthetic and political
claims in isolation from each other, though necessary in a critical
study, is in reality distorting. I have attempted to circumvent this dif-
part of Flynn's discussion of Sartre's ideas in relation to Marxist concepts is
devoted to Sartre's postwar and, in particular, later writings.
14

ficulty by frequently pointing the reader to chapters elsewhere in the
book where the other implications of the issues being discussed are
examined.
The chronological scope of this study is limited to the 1930s and
1940s but the account of Sartre's thought during those years which is
offered nevertheless lays no claim to absolute comprehensiveness.
Indeed, important areas of critical reflection on Sartre, though
acknowledged in passing, have been bypassed entirely, such as the
ways in which Sartre's philosophy relates to that of Kant, or to
psychoanalysis. My enquiry has been restricted on the whole to
examination of the ways in which Sartre's positions intersect with
those of Marxist theorists, and to analysis of lesser or badly known
aspects of Sartre's thought, a guiding aim being to cast the story of the
early Sartre in a new light. My adoption of a primarily thematic
expository approach, however, by no means implies a disregard for
the chronological order in which events and intellectual developments
unfolded in Sartre's life. Indeed, it is only by presenting Sartre's
trajectory precisely as a process of development through time that one
can hope to offer an accurate account of his increasing involvement
with politics, and with Marxism more specifically. Within each
chapter, the chronological order of developments is hence respected
by and large except when there is a good reason to transgress it for the
purposes of better elucidating the given theme(s) under scrutiny.
Moreover, in both Parts Two and Three respectively, I have
maintained a largely consistent chronological progression from each
chapter to the next thereby uniting the thematic and chronological
expository approaches throughout much of the book in an attempt to
obtain the advantages of both. Part Two begins with Sartre's
reflections on inauthentic conduct in the Carnets de la drôle de guerre
and concludes with his formulation of an integral conception of
authenticity in the Cahiers pour une morale, examining along the way
the initial stages of his quest for authenticity in the Carnets, his
developing concept of commitment from 1940-6, and his reflections
on the nature of history. An in-depth discussion of Sartre's
relationship with Nizan in the late 1930s opens Part Three, and is
followed in chapter IX by a detailed examination of Sartrean aes-
thetics with a special focus on Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?
15

The early Sartre's developing awareness of the economic and
political dimensions of life is often presented in the critical literature
as an awakening to Marxist concepts and the need to be politically
committed after the Liberation. Without rejecting this reading, I have
sought to problematise it by highlighting the ways in which it can lead
to an overly schematic view of Sartre's development. My account
hence questions and challenges the separation of the postwar Sartre's
political thought from his wartime and even pre-war writings which
this reading involves. Throughout this study, the continuities in
Sartre's thought throughout the period are emphasised, although not
with the objective of proving that Sartre became Marxist much sooner
than is commonly believed. Rather, I have set out to demonstrate that
the philosophical, political, and even ethical and aesthetic tendencies
which were to characterise his Marxist-tending and, in some cases,
unambiguously Marxist positions of the latter half of the 1940s were
already firmly in place in his thinking long before this time in key
respects.
A key question posed by this study, often in an implicit way, is
that of what is to be understood by 'Marxism'. That is, what does this
overarching term include in its span, and what kind of theoretical
issues does Marxist philosophy treat? Although most Sartre commen-
tators acknowledge that the early Sartre's assessments of Marxist
philosophy and of his own relationship to it are not reliable and hence
are to be treated with circumspection, rare are those who have chosen
to explore the Marxist canon in depth themselves. There has been a
consequent tendency in the literature to ignore certain fields of Marx-
ist reflection when discussing Sartre's development. Marxist ethics
and aesthetics are notable examples of areas which have been almost
entirely overlooked. For many commentators, Sartre exhibited Marxist
tendencies only upon his awakening to history and socio-economic
constraints on freedom, and once he began advocating a working-class
led socialist revolution. These tendencies are invariably considered to
have developed in his thought only after the Liberation. Yet, the first
two of these tendencies had in fact been germinating in Sartre's
writings from as early as 1940, and although not actively committed,
Sartre had been a supporter of the proletarian cause throughout the
1930s. Furthermore, Marxist philosophy is much broader in its span
16

(and indeed more heterogeneous) than the aforementioned criteria
allow. Might it not be the case, for example, that Sartre's evident
hostility to affirmations of legal rights in L'Enfance d'un chef is in
fact a 'Marxist' tendency? Certainly, his repeated identification of
rights with intellectual abstractions is strongly reminiscent of the early
Marxian critique of rights. And might not Sartre's conception of
authentic ethics in the Cahiers in fact be at least as derivative of the
Left's insistence on solidarity in the political struggle as it is an
'ethical' theory in the sense meant by liberal ethical theorists? My
point is that a broader and more detailed knowledge of Marxist
philosophy does not simply enhance our understanding of Sartre's
thought but is perhaps indispensable to a thorough grasp of its real
implications.
As I have indicated, during the period under examination in this
study Sartre's knowledge of the Marxist theoretical tradition was
comparatively limited. Indeed, it would not be before the very end of
the 1940s that evidence of a more wide-ranging and thorough know-
ledge of different theorists' claims would start to be apparent in his
texts. It is for this reason in part that I have not restricted the Marxist
authors discussed in this study to those theorists with whose works
Sartre was familiar with at the time. The imposition of such a limi-
tation would from the outset have defeated the aim of identifying
conceptual relationships between early Sartrean and Marxist thought.
It is unlikely that Sartre had read the works of the early Lukâcs before
the 1950s, for example, and Gramsci's Prison Notebooks were not
available in French translation during the 1940s. Sartre was quite well
informed about Trotskyism during the 1930s and 1940s, although it is
unlikely that he had read Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1925),
which constitutes an important focus of our discussion in chapter IX.
My choice of Marxist authors for special attention was made in
accordance with a number of criteria. First, I wanted this choice to
reflect to some degree at least the diversity of preoccupations and
theoretical positions of theorists of the first half of the twentieth
century who are typically placed in the 'Marxist' category. This ap-
proach seemed the most effective way of deconstructing the quasi-
monolithic character which is sometimes foisted upon the term 'Marx-
ist' in non-Marxist critical discourse. Secondly, Marxism was an
17

international movement and I did not wish to restrict my choice of
authors to one country or context, hence the juxtapostion in this study
of figures as diverse in this respect as Trotsky, Lukâcs, and Gramsci.
It was more important to choose authors who made particularly
significant theoretical contributions than those who merely shared the
same geographical and cultural moorings as Sartre's. More was to be
gained from relating Sartre's concept of inauthenticity to the Gram-
scian concept of hegemony, for example, than from comparing it with
the threadbare claims of Jean Kanapa. On the other hand, the work of
French intellectuals Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre is discussed in some
detail in this study, and Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical
writings are frequently referred to, so the French intellectual milieu
has by no means been neglected. Thirdly, in view of Sartre's anti-
Stalinist intellectual and political stance during the 1930s and 1940s,
and his consequently tense and troubled relationship with the PCF, I
believe it important (and considerably more interesting from a
theoretical standpoint) to concentrate on thinkers who did not endorse,
or who were openly hostile to the scientistic Marxist theoretical
paradigm. With the exception of brief references to Merleau-Ponty's
study of Marxist dialectics Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955) in a
number of chapters, and a general discussion of the ethical humanist
Marxist current which extended from the 1940s until well into the
1960s, the Marxist primary sources referred to in this study do not
extend chronologically beyond the 1940s, which is where my
examination of Sartre stops.
Given the breadth of the field of Marxist theory, it goes almost
without saying that my choice of authors for close attention was
selective, this study laying no claim to provide an exhaustive account
of the ways in which Sartre's early thought relates to Marxism.
Nevertheless, I have endeavoured to choose those authors (and, in the
case of Lukâcs in particular, the relevant period of his career) whose
theoretical positions lend themselves most readily to comparison with
Sartre's thought. These authors by and large share the characteristics
of being humanist thinkers and of subscribing to the Marxian insist-
ence on a unity of theory and practice, both of which are also Sartrean
tendencies. Throughout the book, I have tended to group such thinkers
under the formulation 'classic Marxist' even though some of them
18

(notably Lukâcs and Gramsci) are often categorised in critical
literature on Marxism as 'western Marxists'. Uniting these authors
under the heading 'classic Marxist' has allowed me implicitly to set
them apart from certain Marxist currents either whose theoretical
positions were anti-humanist, or which disconnected the activity of
theorising from political practice, or both (Althusserian structuralist
Marxism is a notable example in this regard). Moreover, I have tended
to focus with regard to specific subject-areas in Sartre's writings on
Marxist thinkers whose theories lent themselves particularly well to
comparison with Sartre's ideas in those areas. This was often due to a
Marxist thinker having theorised or contributed significantly in one
area but not in another: Nizan, for example, is known for his commun-
ist novels and writings on aesthetics but not for having produced
detailed ontological or ethical theories, hence discussion of his work is
limited to Part Three. It was also due to the necessity of a certain
selectiveness and in view of the heterogeneity of different Marxist
theorists' ideas. Choosing to focus my discussion of Sartre's postwar
aesthetics on its relationship with Trotsky's Literature and Revolution,
for example, meant limiting considerably the amount of space devoted
to consideration of early Lukâcian aesthetics. This was not because
the latter seemed inappropriate for further discussion but was rather
owing to the fact that focusing on both Trotsky and Lukâcs in this
regard would have involved adopting two contrasting methodological
approaches.
The extension of the chronological scope of this study from the
1930s through to the latter part of the 1940s might appear problematic
in view of my explicit designation of the 'early' Sartre in the title. Not
late enough to be counted amongst the mature writings and too late to
be considered part of the early period, writings such as Qu 'est-ce que
la littérature? and the Cahiers pour une morale seem to fall in a sort
of'no man's land' between two commonly acknowledged 'periods' of
Sartre's development. I nevertheless chose to allow my account of
Sartre's intellectual and political itinerary to extend well beyond the
seminal post-Liberation writings for a number of reasons. First, as a
key objective was to demonstrate the conceptual continuities between
Sartre's early thought and the developments of the postwar period it
was evidently necessary that my discussion included consideration of
19

Sartre's important texts of the immediate postwar years such as
Matérialisme et révolution, Cahiers pour une morale, and Qu 'est-ce
que la littérature? so that the appropriate comparisons could be made.
Secondly, the continuities that can be identified between these works
and writings which date back long before the Liberation such as the
Carnets de la drôle de guerre, and even L'Imaginaire and certain of
Sartre's literary works, intrinsically problematise the designation of
any precise date between the Liberation and 1948 as the moment
which separated the 'early' and 'later' periods of Sartre's work. I
argue in Part Two of the book that a global coherence to Sartre's
thought can be perceived which incorporates the inauthentic ethico-
ontological vision articulated in L'Etre et le néant on the one hand and
the authentic ethics and socialist politics of the Cahiers on the other.
The Carnets de la drôle de guerre, which focus on questions sur-
rounding the nature of both inauthenticity and authenticity, suggest
that Sartre had already conceived of the ideal of an ethics of authen-
ticity as early as 1940. His claims in L'Etre et le néant, from the
standpoint of ethics at least, were to be essentially limited to articu-
lating the dimension of human life which he reproved firmly, namely
man's inauthentic condition prior to ethical conversion.
I have tended to highlight the centrality of ethical reflection to
early Sartrean thought and close attention is paid to the Carnets de
la drôle de guerre, which is a vital document revealing Sartre's
developing ethical and political thought. The centrality of ethics to
this study owes in particular to the fact that Sartre's ethical reflections
constitute an important bridge area linking both ontology and politics,
and also aesthetics and politics. As is apparent notably in chapters III
and IV, my account of the concept of inauthenticity is more multi-
dimensional than in the critical literature on Sartre to date, where there
has been a tendency, in addition to discussion of bad faith as lying to
oneself, to focus on the idea that individual subjects seek the inert
substantiality of the material. I argue that Sartre's ontology-derived
ethical concept of inauthenticity is just as frequently represented in
his texts as involving flights into abstraction in an attempt to escape
the real, and as a refusal of the temporal present in favour of an
identification with a past self or past state of affairs. In chapter III, a
close parallel is established between representations of inauthenticity
20

involving the desire for abstraction or elevation in certain Sartrean
texts and the abstract character of the dominant ideology for the Marx
of The German Ideology. In other words, Sartre's concept of inauthen-
ticity is shown to occupy the space that, in Marxist theory, is occupied
by ideology theory. An area of thematic similarity and coherence
between Sartrean ethics and Marxist political theory thus being
established, I proceed at the close of chapters III and VII to explicate
not only the postwar Sartre's Marxian-derived concept of ideology in
the pejorative sense but also his concepts of ideology in the positive
and neutral senses. The appearances made by these concepts (the latter
two in particular) in Sartre's writings, although of considerable
importance, are typically discreet which probably goes some way
towards explaining why they have been very largely overlooked in the
existing critical literature on Sartre. My account links the pejorative
and positive conceptions of ideology to Sartre's ethical journey from
inauthenticity to authenticity respectively. Moreover, a connection is
established between Sartre's conception of writing and the role of
literary art expounded in Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? and the positive
conception of ideology in chapters VII and IX.
21

Part One:
Ontological Bases

I. Conceptions of Concrete Reality:
Sartre's Refusal of Materialism
The Sartre of the 1930s was in agreement with many of the key
political convictions of the Marxists of his day. In numerous places in
her autobiographical work La Force de l'âge, Simone de Beauvoir's
account centres on Sartre's left political tendencies and on his associ-
ations and interests of the period, many of which suggest a certain
sympathy and potential common ground with a Marxist outlook and
project. Sartre shared not only his friend Paul Nizan's hatred of the
bourgeoisie but also his hopes for a proletarian revolution.
1
Although
Sartre did not commit himself to any left political group, he consid-
ered joining the French Communist Party many times during the
1930s. Despite these political sympathies and, like his Marxist
contemporaries, a strong antipathy towards idealist philosophy, Sartre
was to remain sceptical of Marxism, and his existentialist philosophy
would itself become the object of increasingly scathing criticisms on
the part of his Marxist contemporaries. The source of these disagree-
ments was largely located at the level of philosophical rather than
political convictions.
2
In particular, Sartre wanted to account for the
concrete reality of existence, but he rejected the Marxist insistence on
materialism which, as he would later explain in his preface to Nizan's
Aden Arabie, he had from a young age perceived to be deterministic
and reductive of subjective freedom.
3
From the mid 1940s onwards,
Sartre's Marxist critics in the PCF for their part were highly critical of
his insistence on the irreducible freedom of consciousness, consid-
1 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l'âge (Gallimard, 1960) pp. 41-2 (hereafter
FA).
2 Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton University
Press, 1975) p.131, and Andrew Dobson, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of
Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 46-7, have both expressed this
view.
3 Situations IV (Gallimard, 1964) p. 147
25

ering this tendency to be an instance of philosophical idealism. The
principal bone of contention between the two sides was therefore the
issue of what constituted concrete reality as both believed that they
were better placed to account for it. The PCF's rejection of Sartre,
with the exception of only a few critical studies by communists,
4
tended to be excessively reductive of his thought due in good measure
to the feeling that the popularity of existentialism represented a chal-
lenge to that of the Party after the Liberation. The question of the early
Sartre's knowledge of the materialist conception which underlies
Marxist philosophy, and of the implications of his view of it for the
relationship between his thought and Marxism, is a more complex
one. Our discussion will turn to this following an examination of the
early Sartre's conception of reality.
Sartre's Conception of the Concrete Reality of Existence:
'Etre-en-Situation'
Speaking of his ontological preoccupations of the 1930s, Sartre claims
in Questions de méthode that it was
4
au concret absolu que nous
voulions arriver.'
5
There is much in his works of the period to
substantiate this claim. In La Transcendance de l'ego, Sartre rejects
the Husserlian transcendental ego insisting that, unlike consciousness,
it is transcendent. This means that the ego cannot be separated off
from the objects of the external world. Moreover, Sartre remains
faithful to Husserl's principle of intentionality thereby ensuring that
consciousness can exist only in relation to those objects. It is of the
4
Henri Lefebvre's L'Existentialisme (Editions du Sagittaire, 1946), and Henri
Mougin's La Sainte famille existentialiste (Editions sociales, 1947) had the
merit of treating the question at length and in some depth. Jean Kanapa's
vitriolic L'Existentialisme n 'est pas un humanisme (Editions sociales, 1947),
however, was more representative of the tone of the French communists'
response to existentialism in the immediate postwar years.
5 Questions de méthode (Gallimard, 1960) p.23 (hereafter QM).
26

very nature of both being and consciousness to be in the world: 'tout
est dehors, tout, jusqu'à nous-mêmes: dehors, dans le monde', he
writes in an article of 1939 devoted to Husserl's thought.
6
In
opposition to the idealist French philosophers who had given con-
sciousness a content comprised of external objects which it was
supposed to have assimilated, Sartre insists on consciousness being
empty and translucid, constantly projecting outwards: 'si [...] vous
entriez "dans" une conscience, vous seriez saisi par un tourbillon et
rejeté au dehors, près de l'arbre [...] car la conscience n'a pas de
"dedans"; elle n'est rien que le dehors d'elle-même'.
7
Sartre hence
entirely rejects any notion of there being an interiority to conscious-
ness, a refusal which, in so far as it is of a piece with his dislike of 'la
vie intérieure' [FA: 32], harmonises with his reservations about bour-
geois literature which were later to find fuller expression in the in-
depth critique included in Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?.
If the phenomenological movement had called for a return to our
perception of things themselves, Sartre's philosophical vision radical-
ises that of Husserl in this regard. Moreover, it is his refusal of
transcendental idealism from the outset and his insistence on situating
the ego in the world along with the objects of perception which is one
of the key reasons why his early philosophy could subsequently draw
closer to Marxism without fear of debilitating internal contradiction.
In L'Etre et le néant, Sartre states unequivocally that 'l'être est
antérieur au néant et le fonde'.
8
Consciousness cannot be conceived
of as an abstraction from being: 'on ne [peut] concevoir le Néant en
dehors de l'être, ni comme notion complémentaire et abstraite [...] Il
faut que le Néant soit donné au cœur de l'Etre' [EN: 57]. Conscious-
ness is a negation of being but its capacity to negate must be a
characteristic of being itself because only something that enjoys the
status of being can negate [EN: 57]. Consequently, Sartre argues,
'[l]'Etre par qui le Néant arrive dans le monde est un être en qui, dans
son Etre, il est question du Néant de son Etre' [EN: 58]. The only kind
of being which matches this description, Sartre concludes, is man
6 'Une Idée fondamentale de Husserl', in Situations I (Gallimard, 1947) p.34
7 Ibid p.33
8 L'Etre et le néant (Gallimard, 1943) p.51 (hereafter EN).
27

[EN: 59]. What is striking here, in view of the commonly reductive
readings of Sartrean existentialism of the 1940s which presented it as
a form of philosophical idealism, is the unambiguous way in which
Sartre accords initial priority to being over consciousness. He even
argues that the very apparition of consciousness 'renvoie bien à
l'effort d'un en-soi pour se fonder' [EN: 122]. Moreover, although his
discussion centres elsewhere on consciousness' capacity for tran-
scending being, he insists that consciousness should nevertheless not
be conceived of as dissociable from the body which is 'une structure
permanente de mon être et la condition permanente de possibilité de
ma conscience comme conscience du monde et comme projet
transcendant vers mon futur.' [EN: 376] Although it is in the nature of
consciousness to transcend, the body remains indispensable to my
future possibilities. Consciousness does enjoy a certain autonomy, but
it is never distinct as such from being and Sartre goes so far as to
speak of there being a 'facticité du pour-soi. C'est cette facticité qui
permet de dire qu'il est, qu'il existe' [EN: 121].
Sartre's emphasis on the concreteness of existing things with
which consciousness comes into contact is clearly perceptible in his
fictional writings of the period. In works such as La Nausée and
Erostrate,
9
there is at once a sense of intense fascination and of
Célinian violence and disgust vis a vis the concrete reality of objects
in the world. It is the 'atroce jouissance' [N: 187] that overcomes
Roquentin when observing the root of the chestnut tree in La Nausée
which is generally taken to be the high point of the work. His
consciousness is so entirely taken with perceiving the root, which is
described as 'au-dessous de toute explication' [N: 185] and as having
'perdu son allure inoffensive de catégorie abstraite' [N: 182], that he
feels that he becomes the root itself: 'J'étais la racine de marronnier.'
[N: 187] Sartre's retention of the principle of intentionality in con-
junction with his preoccupation with the reality of objects here yields
a heightened awareness of the concreteness of existence as Roquentin
seems to be consumed by the object of his perception. In Erostrate,
Paul Hilbert has a prostitute parade around the room naked whilst he
watches, thereby reducing her to the condition of brute facticity, an
9 Le Mur (Gallimard, 1939) pp. 77-99.
28

object to be observed by the transcendental consciousness. The
narrator's descriptions of Marcelle in L'Age de raison similarly often
focus on the facticity of the body and it is the physical condition of
pregnancy, and the consequent need for Mathieu to arrange an abor-
tion, which provide the impetus for the central action of the novel. We
are informed of Marcelle's 'diarrhées' and she is described, because
pregnant, as 'pourrie' [AR: 156]. Her pregnancy represents the con-
siderable potential of the facticity of existence to limit the freedom of
consciousness.
Sartre's opposition to philosophical idealism and desire to ac-
count for concrete reality in his works of the 1930s and early 1940s is
hence clear. He accords priority to the objects of the world and not to
ideas. And yet, concrete reality is highly complex in Sartre's con-
ception because it is neverthless dependent on the perception and
synthetic understanding of consciousness: 'si la négation n'existait
pas, aucune question ne saurait être posée, en particulier celle de
l'être.' [EN: 57] Sartre remains faithful by and large to the subjective
outlook onto the world of phenomenology and hence claims that
without the existence of consciousness, not only would being lack the
justification that it seeks but would be without a foundation: 'Pour
fonder son propre être, il faut exister à distance de soi et cela impl-
iquerait une certaine néantisation de l'être fondé comme de l'être fon-
dant, une dualité qui serait unité: nous retomberions dans le cas du
pour-soi.' [EN: 119] The paradox both of asserting that being has pri-
ority over consciousness and of suggesting, as Sartre also does, that it
is dependent on consciousness is indicative of a tension between his
dual focus on ontological and on phenomenological questions in his
philosophy. Sartre wants to assert the existence of a mind-independent
reality and to account for it on the one hand, and yet also claims that
this reality is dependent on consciousness' perception and appre-
hension of it. In La Transcendance de l'ego, this dual ambition is
expressed in his positing a kind of simultaneity of consciousness and
world: 'Il suffit que le Moi soit contemporain du monde et que la
dualité sujet-objet [...] disparaisse définitivement des préoccupations
philosophiques. Le Monde n'a pas créé le Moi, le Moi n'a pas créé le
Monde'. [TE: 86-7] He explains in his war diaries that he is postu-
lating 'non l'esprit, non le corps [...] mais la condition humaine en
29

tant qu'unité indivisible', and seeks to 'établir la réalité humaine, la
condition humaine, l'être-dans-le-monde de l'homme et son être-en-
situation.'
10
This synthesis of external reality and consciousness is
often presented by Sartre, as Dominic LaCapra suggests,
11
as involv-
ing a sort of dialectical interplay between the two. Sartre claims in
L'Etre et le néant, that '[1]'homme et le monde sont des êtres relatifs
et le principe de leur être est la relation.' [EN: 355] Indeed, his
discussion of the freedom of consciousness in relation to the facticity
of situation presupposes such a relationship [EN: 538-612]. The
synthesis of consciousness and world, Sartre argues, is not however
a matter of bringing together two disparate phenomena because they
should be seen as forming a synthetic totality from the outset. It is
this synthetic totality comprised of consciousness and world which
Sartre labels the concrete:
Le concret ne saurait être que la totalité synthétique dont la conscience comme
le phénomène ne constituent que des moments. Le concret, c'est l'homme dans
le monde avec cette union spécifique de l'homme au monde que Heidegger [...]
nomme « être-dans-le-monde ». [EN: 37-8]
Sartre's conception of the concrete is clearly not that of materialism
although it is worth noting that his fictional representations of con-
crete reality and the betwitching and limiting influence which it can
exercise over consciousness often seem closer to materialism than his
theoretical formulations do. In these theoretical formulations, having
asserted the intial priority of the
4
en-soi' over the 'pour-soi', Sartre
posits the concrete as a synthetic whole composed of both which
would seem to suggest that they are entirely interdependent. However,
lest one should conclude that Sartre thereby gives some quarter to
idealism, it should be remembered that his view of consciousness as
empty and translucent, and the central role which he accords to the
Husserlian principle of intentionality, mean that he conceives of
consciousness as in any case thoroughly taken up with external objects
10 Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre (Gallimard, 1995) p.205 (hereafter Q.
11 Dominic LaCapra, A Preface to Sartre (London: Methuen, 1978) pp. 122-3.
30

of perception.
12
Although consciousness retains an independence from
being and confers meaning on being which it would otherwise entirely
lack, consciousness hence remains an opening onto its 'massif,
contingent character, its 'pleine positivité' [EN: 33]. Moreover, Sartre
is keen to avoid the suggestion that the qualities which we habitually
attribute to the 'en-soi' can be assimilated to the meaning-conferring
consciousness. Although an unperceived 'en-soi' would not exist,
its qualities are nevertheless intrinsic to it as the following statement
suggests: 'si nous aimons une femme, c'est parce qu'elle est aim-
able.'
13
What then does the Sartrean conception of the concrete ultim-
ately amount to? Sartre rejects philosophical idealism and yet cannot
accept what LaCapra terms a 'captive objectivism', be this interpreted
primarily as Heideggerian ontologism,
14
as positivism,
15
or, as I shall
take it principally to mean, as materialism. Sartre rejects the 'pensée
de survol' of idealism whilst insisting at the same time on the
irreducible freedom of consciousness. The view, expressed in
L Imaginaire, that the aesthetic involves transcendence of a material
analogon through the imaginary appears to suggest that it is by defin-
ition a metaphysical phenomenon. However, Sartre's keeness to stress
that consciousness is in the world and to accord to the objects of
perception their full reality means that he in fact tends strongly
towards realism, although with the important caveat that the freedom
of consciousness must be safeguarded. Sartre's description of his
position as "néo-réaliste" in a letter to Beauvoir of January 1940
would seem to be the most accurate.
16
12 Juliette Simont, in Jean-Paul Sartre. Un demi-siècle de liberté (De
Boeck&Larcier, 1998, p. 19), points to the importance of Sartre's fidelity to the
principle of intentionality in his avoidance of idealism, and in his advancing a
realist position which does not succumb to the ills of positivism.
13 Situations I (Gallimard, 1947) p.34
14 LaCapra op.cit. p. 122
15 Simont op.cit. pp. 19, 86.
16 Lettres au Castor II p.56 (Gallimard, 1983) (hereafter LCII).
31

Marxism, Determinism and the Question of Subjectivity
In the closing paragraph of La Transcendance de l'ego, Sartre's
insistence on a simultaneity of consciousness and world is articulated
explicitly in conjunction with his rejection of the doctrine of material-
ism and his reservations about Marxist philosophy:
Il m'a toujours semblé qu'une hypothèse de travail aussi féconde que le
matérialisme historique n'exigeait nullement pour fondement l'absurdité qu'est
le matérialisme métaphysique. Il n'est pas nécessaire, en effet, que l'objet
précède le sujet pour que les pseudo-valeurs spirituelles s'évanouissent et pour
que la morale retrouve ses bases dans la réalité. [TE: 86]
This statement is immensely rich in significance, revealing as it does
on the one hand Sartre's sympathies with historical materialism and
yet also pointing to the fact that his conception of concrete reality
developed partly in opposition to the materialist conception which he
saw as lying at its basis. Sartre's reactions to Marxist philosophy can
hence be seen as important to the very formation and articulation of
his own philosophical position from as early as his first major publish-
ed work. Indeed he would later, in Questions de méthode, highlight
the importance of this complex relationship, arguing that his existen-
tialism 's'est développé en marge du marxisme et non pas contre lui.'
[QM: 22]
The closing sentence of La Transcendance de l'ego indicates that
not only a political awareness but also a clear concern with the future
articulation of an ethico-and politico-philosophical position is of
importance to Sartre at this time. He claims that once consciousness is
accorded equal status with the facticity of the world, rather than being
relegated to secondary status, '[i]l n'en faut pas plus pour fonder
philosophiquement une morale et une politique absolument positives'
[TE: 87], a wish which considerably problematises any portrayal of
the pre-war Sartre as having been almost entirely apolitical. What
must not be overlooked is the fact that much of Sartre's early work is
expressive of an initial destructive phase - destructive notably of
bourgeois thought - which he was to speak of a few years later in his
32

war diaries and which he claims is contrary to his fundamentally
constructive disposition: 'J'ai toujours été constructeur et La Nausée
et Le Mur n'ont donné de moi qu'une image fausse, parce que j'étais
obligé d'abord de détruire.' [C: 280]
The question of Sartre's attitude to materialism lies at the heart
of his relationship to Marxist philosophy up until the 1950s. In an
interview of 1970, Sartre defined his project as having been from the
outset about attempting to 'donner à l'homme à la fois son autonomie
et sa réalité parmi les objets réels, en évitant l'idéalisme et sans
tomber dans un matérialisme mécaniste.'
17
The inclusion of the term
'mécaniste' to describe the materialism he opposed is significant not
least because it is almost entirely absent from his references to materi-
alism in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, as I shall argue with reference
to the diverse interpretations of Marx and distinctive theoretical
positions of the early Lukâcs, Antonio Gramsci, and Henri Lefebvre,
all of whose thought was in the lineage of Marxist philosophy, the
question of what is implied by the term materialism in the context of
historical materialism is highly complex. The plurality of interpret-
ations of Marx's thought is itself a major source of difficulty. Sartre's
knowledge of the Marxist theoretical tradition was generally some-
what limited until the latter years of the 1940s and the 1950s and he
tended to take a reductive view of what its thinkers had understood by
materialism in the context of the materialist conception of history, as
the first part of his Matérialisme et Révolution (1946) reveals.
18
This
text, originally published in Les Temps modernes, is the most import-
ant document of Sartre's relationship with Marxism amongst his
theoretical works of the 1930s and 1940s and will provide the
principal focus of our discussion in this chapter subsequent to a brief
survey of previous appearances made by materialism, determinism
and Marxism in Sartre's writings.
It is clear that Sartre's principal objection to materialism, and
hence the basis of his reservations about Marxist philosophy, was that
he believed that postulating the materiality of the world meant that
human consciousness would be relegated to the status of a mere
17 Situations IX (Gallimard, 1972) p. 104
18 In Situations III (Gallimard, 1949) pp. 135-225 (hereafter MR).
33

epiphenomenon, subject to the determinations of matter rather than
acting upon the world. In his war diaries he notes that '[1]'erreur du
matérialisme [...] est de faire de l'homme un être naturel.' [C: 204-5]
As an entirely natural being, Sartre thinks, man becomes nothing more
than an object in the world amongst other objects. Sartre cannot
conceive of how any place for an independent, creative consciousness
can be safeguarded in such a schema. In L'Existentialisme est un
humanisme, he claims that '[t]out matérialisme a pour effet de traiter
tous les hommes, y compris soi-même [...] comme un ensemble de
réactions déterminées, que rien ne distingue de l'ensemble des qualités
et des phénomènes qui constituent une table ou une chaise' [EH: 58].
Sartre considers the Marxist adherence to the doctrine of materialism
and the priority accorded to the objective over the subjective as an
instance of the 'sérieux': 'Marx a posé le dogme premier du sérieux
lorsqu'il a affirmé la priorité de l'objet sur le sujet.' [C: 579] In Les
Chemins de la liberté, the communist Brunet's adherence to Stalinist
Marxist ideology unites both this type of 'sérieux' and a fatalist view
of historical change: he sees only bourgeois idealist abstraction in
Mathieu's defence of independent, free thinking and he 'continu[e] à
[s]e prendre pour le processus historique', as Schneider puts it.
19
In L'Imaginaire, Sartre argues that '[c]e n'est pas le déter-
minisme, c'est le fatalisme qui est l'envers de la liberté.' [/: 99]
Determinism posits that specific causal relationships must pertain
between given phenomena, whereas fatalism involves working back-
wards from a posited future outcome to insist that the causal chain of
events which led to it was bound to happen. For Sartre, the key
difference between the two is that fatalism necessarily involves the
work of consciousness whilst determinism belongs to natural pro-
cesses alone and 'ne saurait s'appliquer en aucune façon aux faits de
conscience' [/: 99]. Sartre is wary of determinism nevertheless with
respect to theories such as materialism which do not stop at the idea of
causal determinations in nature but also - erroneously, Sartre believes
-
assimilate consciousness to the natural such that it must be subject to
the same causal processes as material things. Materialist anthropology,
Sartre thinks, involves a huge category error because man, by virtue of
19 La Mort dans lame (Gallimard, 1949) p.342 (hereafter MA).
34

his possessing a consciousness, should conversely be seen as qualita-
tively different from the natural world and not subject to its physical
laws.
Sartre's film script Les Jeux sont faits is highly illuminating of
his relationship with Marxist philosophy and politics in the first half
of the 1940s. In this work, remarkably written only a short time after
L'Etre et le néant in 1943, Sartre stages the idea of social determinism
commonly associated with Marxist thought, ostensibly adopting a
philosophical stance of which he is himself critical. He was to remark
in an interview of 1947 that his film script 'ne sera pas existentialiste'
adding that 'l'existentialisme n'admet point que les jeux soient jamais
faits.'
20
In the piece the protagonists Pierre Dumaine and Eve Charlier,
who first meet each other in a dreamworld-like afterlife, discover that
their amorous relationship is unworkable upon their return to the real
world in which they are situated once again in class-divided society
and are each implicated, directly or indirectly, in a conflictual political
situation. Pierre is working class and the leader of a radical left polit-
ical group whereas Eve is bourgeois and the wife of 'milicien' leader
André Charlier. Sartre's comment that his text 'baigne dans le déter-
minisme'
21
is clearly a reference to the ultimate failure of Eve and
Pierre to transcend the obstacles posed by their concrete situations.
Were the reader not aware of Sartre's refusal of deterministic
thinking, she could be forgiven for categorising Les Jeux sont faits
with the Marxist literature of the period as the text is essentially
supportive of the Marxist world-view. The idea of class identity being
ultimately more defining of individuals' personalities and possibilities
than personal characteristics is clearly perceptible. For example, when
forced to choose, Pierre feels he must put his political associates
before a personal attachment whereas Eve, in line with the values of
her bourgeois social context, does not understand why he feels that he
should. Pierre's feeling of obligation towards his fellow political
activists is suggestive of the classic Marxist notion of a proletarian
class consciousness which, in its cohesiveness, Marxists supposed
20 Le Figaro (29/4/47), re-printed in Michel Contât and Michel Rybalka, Les
Ecrits de Sartre (Gallimard, 1970) p. 156
21 Contât and Rybalka op.cit.p . 156
35

would serve as an arm against bourgeois oppression. Pierre holds a
more pronounced idea of class identity than Eve does, tending towards
the view that a person is indelibly marked by her social origins, as
when he tells Eve:
- [. ..] je hais ceux qui vous entourent.
-
Je ne les ai pas choisis.
-
Ils vous ont marquée.
22
Sartre's staging of the classic Marxist emphasis on social conditioning
through the characterisation of Pierre is not, in and of itself, sufficient
for Les Jeux sont faits to be categorised as a Marxist text however.
What could potentially justify such a categorisation is rather the fact
that the story's dénouement itself confirms Pierre's world-view.
Ultimately, class division and conflict render the couple's relationship
impossible. This outcome accords Pierre, and more importantly the
class struggle in which he is implicated, a sort of moral victory over
the bourgeois world-view. From a political standpoint, Les Jeux sont
faits is hence without any doubt a work which supports the communist
cause. However, the reader's awareness that Sartre is deliberately
staging the Marxist idea of social determinism - even though he does
so in a somewhat exaggerated manner
23
-
which he himself does not
support debilitates any attempt to categorise the text as Marxist.
Ultimately, Les Jeux sont faits is best understood as an expression of
political sympathy but philosophical divergence with Marxism and, as
such, is highly representative of Sartre's stance with regard to
Marxism at the time.
Despite accusing Marx's philosophy of being a manifestation
of the 'sérieux' in his war diaries, Sartre's remarks about Marx are
of a very different sort in 'A Propos de l'existentialisme: Mise au
point' (1944), a piece published in the communist journal Action,
which sought to answer communist criticisms of existentialism
and to smooth over points of philosophical divergence. Here Sartre
22 Les Jeux sontfaits (Nagel, 1947) p. 117
23 Only Marxists with a limited knowledge Marxist reflection on history and
society would have advocated a view of the historical process whose determin-
istic character was mechanistic to the degree suggested by Les Jeux sont faits.
36

seems keen to present Marx as a sort of proto-existentialist thinker, in
a manner similar to the humanist Marxists who stressed the existential
dimension implicit in Marx's conception of man: 'Marx n'accepterait-
il pas [...] cette devise de l'homme qui est la nôtre: faire et en faisant
se faire et n'être rien que ce qu'il s'est fait.'
24
In fact, this reading of
Marx is perhaps best seen to some extent as a conciliatory gesture
towards the communists by Sartre, who was seeking to be accepted as
a critical fellow traveller.
25
His attitude towards Marx was never as
unreservedly favourable in other works of these years and he tended,
in the heat of polemic, to assimilate Marxist thought in general, with
the exception of Trotskyism, to the scientistic, positivistic thought
characteristic of the Stalinist theoretical paradigm of the era.
In the immediate postwar years, Sartre's existentialist philosophy
was the object of virulent attack notably from the communist left,
which saw existentialism's popularity as a challenge to that of the
PCF. Amongst a plethora of articles, and a number of full-length
studies by communist intellectuals, Henri Lefebvre's L'Existen-
tialisme (1946), Henri Mougin's La Sainte famille existentialiste
(1947), and Georg Lukâcs's Existentialisme ou marxisme? (1948)
stand out in particular as valuable critiques of existentialism. The
debates of these years have received a good deal of critical attention,
and a thorough account, including appraisals of these key full-length
works, is provided by Mark Poster in his Existential Marxism in
Postwar France (Princeton, 1975).
26
Broadly speaking, whilst Mougin
made the charge of philosophical idealism the focal point of his
critique of Sartre's philosophy, Lefebvre and Lukâcs concurred in the
view that existentialism was a manifestation of the philosophical
irrationalism characteristic of bourgeois thought since the nineteenth
24 Action no. 17 (12/1944), reprinted in Contât and Rybalka Les Ecrits de Sartre
p.655
25 On a raison de se révolter (Gallimard, 1974) p.26 (hereafter ORR).
26 For a more recent discussion of relations between Sartre and the PCF in the
immediate postwar years, see David Drake's Intellectuals and Politics in
Postwar France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) pp. 23-33 . This matter was also
the focus of Drake's 'Sartre et le Parti Communiste Français après la Libération
(1944-48)', a paper given on 23rd July, 2005 at a conference entitled 'Jean-Paul
Sartre : écriture et engagement' which was held at Cerisy-la-Salle.
37

century. Only dialectical materialist philosophy could offer a remedy
to the ills of philosophical irrationalism, Lefebvre arguing that not
only did it save reason from irrationalism but also, in Hegelian fash-
ion, that it could incorporate and transform the irrational: 'cet
irrationnel - l'action et la pratique, les contradictions multiples de la
vie et de la pensée - devient le contenu, le fondement de la Raison
concète, au lieu d'en être exclu.'
27
For all three writers, existentialism
went hand in hand with a reactionary politics and Lukâcs went so far
as to present contemporary existentialism as the latest expression of
bourgeois ideology. Existentialism, he claimed, reflected 'sur le plan
de l'idéologie, le chaos spirituel et moral de l'intelligence bourgeoise
actuelle',
28
a conviction shared by Herbert Marcuse in an article of
1948 devoted to Sartre's philosophy.
29
With hindsight, the excessive
reductiveness of this charge is readily apparent in its derivation from a
dogmatic insistence on evaluating Sartre's philosophy in accordance
with the classic Marxist assimilation of non-materialist philosophy to
bourgeois ideology.
Sartre's Matérialisme et révolution
Matérialisme et révolution was clearly intended by Sartre as a riposte
to his communist critics. In this text, he goes on the offensive,
polemically labelling Marxist philosophy inept and charging it with
being an unsuitable theoretical basis for a revolutionary politics.
Matérialisme et révolution is an indispensable and yet difficult work
to assess as an indicator of how Sartre's thought relates to Marxist
philosophy. A brief recapitulation of the principal arguments of the
first part of the text, which is what will concern us in this chapter,
should provide an adequate basis for an in-depth analysis of this
27 Henri Lefebvre L'Existentialisme p.249
28 Georg Lukâcs L'Existentialisme ou marxisme? (Nagel, 1948) p. 19
29 Herbert Marcuse 'Existentialism: remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Etre et le
néant\ in Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 8, no.3, pp. 309 -336,
(3/1948). Marcuse presents existentialism as a support to the ideology of free
competition under capitalism (p.323).
38

relationship. Sartre delivers a brilliant critique of the doctrines of
materialism and dialectical materialism intended as a settling of scores
with the areas of Marxist thought which he opposes and as a prelude
to advancing an alternative, existentialist-inspired theory of revolution
in the second part of the text. The difficulty in the first part centres on
the issue of precisely what role these doctrines play in the theories
of Marx and Marxist theorists. For all that Sartre exposes the contra-
dications and incoherences of materialism and in particular dialectical
materialism, the full relevance of his criticisms to the thought of Marx
and many other Marxist theorists is questionable and inevitably leads
us back to complex questions of interpretation which have themselves
long been the subject of controversy within Marxism. It remains
nevertheless broadly the case, as Mark Poster points out,
30
that
Sartre's critique is primarily a response to the Stalinist philosophical
world-view which was dominant in the PCF of the 1940s and which
the Soviet leader had set out in his highly influential Dialectical and
Historical Materialism (1938).
31
The first major argument of Matérialisme et révolution is that
materialism, although an ostensibly positivistic and anti-metaphysical
doctrine, is itself guilty of metaphysical abstraction because it in-
volves the superimposition of an objectivist conception of the world
onto reality. The objectivist conception is superimposed because it
denies the subjective experience which is necessary to legitimate it.
If man is entirely composed of matter, Sartre thinks, then his free
subjectivity is denied. The affirmation that everything is material
hence cannot be derived from our actual experience of the world.
Materialists are caught in an insoluble contradiction because they re-
ject metaphysics outright in the name of a scientific conception of
reality and yet fall back on metaphysics to make this very claim. It is
what Sartre sees as the denial of subjectivity in particular, however,
which is the basis for his opposition to materialism. If everything is
matter, Sartre argues, then explanations of why things are as they are
30 Mark Poster op.cit. p . 129
31 Michael Kelly, in Modern French Marxism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) p.39,
reminds us that Stalin's primer was by far the most influential introduction to
Marxist ideas in the period.
39

and how change occurs can be reduced to nothing more than scientific
descriptions. Sartre speaks of materialism as engendering a 'mythe de
l'objectivité', as a doctrine which works to 'éliminer la subjectivité en
réduisant le monde, avec l'homme dedans, à un système d'objets'
[MR: 138].
The complexity of evaluating Sartre's critique of materialism
stems at one and the same time from the perceptiveness and, in many
places, validity of his objections on the one hand, and yet their
problematic applicability to the Marxist philosophy to which they are
supposed to relate. On the issue of materialism, Sartre himself ac-
knowledges the questionable relevance of his criticisms to Marxism,
explicitly anticipating the objection that the materialism of which he
speaks is in fact ie matérialisme naïf d'Helvétius et d'Holbach' [MR:
144]. Indeed, even brief consideration of the writings of Marx suffices
to confirm the accuracy of this assessment. In the first of his 'Theses
on Feuerbach' (1845), Marx had argued that '[t]he chief defect of all
previous materialism (including Feuerbach's) is that the object, real-
ity, what we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the
form of object or contemplation; but not as sensuous human activity,
as practice; not subjectively.'
32
This statement problematises greatly
any mechanistic reading of Marx or any interpretation which presents
his opposition to philosophical idealism as involving a conception of
reality that suppresses the active and creative role of the subjective
consciousness, as does the following which opens Marx's third
'thesis': 'The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of [men's]
circumstances [...] forgets that circumstances are changed by men'.
33
Marx's criticisms of the materialism of Feuerbach and his prede-
cessors thus highlight specifically its inability to account for the
centrality of human activity both in historical change and, in a manner
which seems to anticipate Sartre's conception of the concrete, to how
we should conceive of reality itself. Marx distinguishes between this
materialism and a 'new materialism', which we can suppose to be his
32 Karl Marx, 'Theses on Feurbach', in The Portable Karl Marx (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1983), ed. Eugene Kamenka, p. 155
33 IbidpA56
40

own, whose standpoint is 'human society'.
It follows that Sartre's
objection that the materialist doctrine involves a metaphysical super-
imposition of a theoretical schema onto reality is hence hardly appli-
cable to Marx's thought of the 1840s. Indeed, Antonio Gramsci was
later to point out that affirmations of materialism in the first half of the
nineteenth century in any case involved rejecting philosophical ideal-
ism more than they implied an adherence to a precise doctrine:
The term "materialism" in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century should
be understood not only in its restricted technical philosophical sense [...]. The
name materialism was given to any philosophical doctrine which excluded
transcendence from the realm of thought. It was given therefore, not only to
pantheism and immanentism, but to any practical attitude inspired by political
realism [...] .
35
If the conception of materialism advanced by Marx is not reductive
of subjectivity, but rather an expression of opposition to idealist phil-
osophy as Gramsci argues, Sartre's charge of positivism, at least as
Sartre formulates it, would similarly seem to be of doubtful relevance
to his thought. Sartre presents the materialism adhered to by Marxists
as an extreme type of positivism because involving a flat, unverifiable
assertion about the nature of reality. Whereas nineteenth-century
positivists recognised the limitations of their approach, Sartre argues,
and they refrained from pronouncing on certain questions, such as
whether God existed, the materialist assumes that his conceptual
schema is a complete explanatory theory and flatly denies the exist-
ence of God. Sartre identifies here 'une prise de position nette et a
priori sur un problème qui dépasse infiniment notre expérience.' [MR:
139] Whereas in reality, Marx's acknowledgement of the crucial role
played by subjectivity means that his materialism does not involve the
kind of abstraction from immediate human experience which would
make his theoretical claims a wholly metaphysical 'pensée de survol'.
Sartre hence exaggerates greatly the positivist implications of Marx's
thought, reading Marx's materialism as a mere reaffirmation of the
34 Ibidp.\5S
35 Antonio Gramsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1971), p.454 (hereafter PN).
41

philosophical doctrine of materialism rather than as an insistence on
taking the practical conditions for man's life as a social being and for
his ideas as the basis for a conception of human history.
Sartre's extended critique of'dialectical materialism' is similarly
flawed by his excessively literal and narrow interpretation of the con-
cept's comprising terms. Sartre starts out from the basic assumption
that dialectical materialism involves a conceptual marriage of the
Hegelian dialectical schema on the one hand, and of the assertion that
reality is entirely composed of matter on the other. Sartre presents this
marriage as a union of two radically different, analytically separate,
elements which are in fact irreconcilable. Not only are the ideas which
comprise the Hegelian system 'naturellement synthétiques' [MR: 145]
but they are characterised by a 'dynamisme' [MR: 144] which propels
the dialectic forward, whereas 'la matière dont parlent les savants'
which materialists insist on is characterised by its inertia [MR: 145].
Sartre offers little to substantiate this controversial latter claim, adding
only that '[c]ela signifie qu'elle est incapable de rien produire par soi-
même. Véhicule de mouvements et d'énergie, ces mouvements et
cette énergie lui viennent toujours du dehors' [MR: 145]. In fact, the
claim that matter is inert is an essential support to the distinction
which Sartre wishes to maintain between matter and consciousness in
order to affirm the independence of the latter. As such it is indicative
of a fundamental opposition between spontaneity and inertia which
runs through his entire philosophy,
36
Sartre conceiving of conscious-
ness alone as capable of creative agency. Sartre also objects that the
Hegelian consciousness is an intrinsically dialectical construction, but
when the dialectic is inverted so as to explain the progression of the
material world it is not intrinsic in this way and hence loses its
essential and necessary character. Dialectical materialists are attempt-
ing the impossible: they want to retain the essential character of the
dialectic and yet they invert the dialectic so as to apply it to the
material world even though this inversion undermines the claim to
essentialness. Turning the materialists' hostility to idealism against
36 Thomas Flynn, in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason (University of
Chicago Press, 1997) Vol.1, p.39, reminds us of this vital central axis of
Sartre's thought.
42

them, Sartre argues furthermore that in trying to give matter a
synthetic mode of development which belongs only to ideas, dia-
lectical materialists also inadvertently fall into an idealism. Their
interpretation of the material world turns its objects into ideas because
it involves projecting the Hegelian dialectical schema onto them.
Stalin's Marxism
Sartre's rather literal understanding of the formulation 'dialectical
materialism' is not without precedent in Marxist thought. Behind his
interpretation clearly lurks the theory of the dialectic of nature, associ-
ated in particular with the later Engels. Sartre discusses aspects of this
influential theory, which Engels had formulated in his Anti-Duhring
(1878) under the influence of Darwinian theory and which had
constituted the basis for the scientistic conception of Marxism devel-
oped in the writings of the Second International thinkers, finally
receiving its most brief and simplified formulation in Stalin's
Dialectical and Historical Materialism. However, Marx himself never
actually employed the formulation 'dialectical materialism'
37
and the
question of the appropriateness of the concept in the context of the
historical materialism of even his mature thought has long been a
subject of debate within Marxism.
38
Moreover, even those Marxist
theorists who were affiliated to the PCF in the high Stalinist period of
the 1930s to the early 1950s cannot all be fairly said to have employed
the expression in the sense characteristic of the aforementioned
scientistic current. I shall examine in some depth later the ways in
which the PCF intellectual Henri Lefebvre in particular set out an
alternative theoretical basis to the communist world-view in Le
Matérialisme dialectique (1939) and other works.
37 Poster op.cit. p .40
38 David McLellan, for example, in his The Thought of Marx (London:
Macmillan, 1971) p. 139, argues that Marx subscribed to the dialectic of nature
thesis nevertheless. Humanist Marxists, by contrast, have long tended to set
Marx apart from the thought of the later Engels.
43

Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism is one of the
principal texts to which Sartre's attack on Marxist philosophy is a
response. Even a cursory glance at this short work suffices to confirm
the theoretical poverty of the world-view which Stalin sets out and the
validity of Sartre's objections. In what is a most egregious distortion,
Stalin gives the order of priority to dialectical materialism over histor-
ical materialism, thus seemingly recasting Marx's theory in the image
of the work of the later Engels. Stalin writes: 'Historical materialism
is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study
of social life.'
39
Social change, then, is presented by Stalin as
operating along the same lines as the 'laws' governing nature which
Engels had employed the Hegelian schema to establish. In conse-
quence, history is perceived as having no element of contingency
because social change can be entirely predicted:
[...] social life, the history of society, ceases to be an agglomeration of
'accidents', and becomes the history of the development of society according to
regular laws, and the study of the history of society becomes a science.
40
Conceiving of historical change as such a predictable phenomenon,
Stalin's claim that 'the liberation of the working class from the yoke
of capitalism cannot be effected by slow changes, by reforms, but only
by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by revolution'
41
ap-
pears, at least from the Sartrean perspective, paradoxical and out of
place. If man's agency and the progression of history can be reduced
to dialectical materialist laws, then surely the future advent of a social-
ist society must be an inevitability, whereas the affirmation of the
necessity of revolution implies a conscious decision on the part of
individual subjects to engage in concerted political activity.
42
Sartre
39 Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1939) p.3
40 IbidpAl
41 Ibidp.12
42 It is worth noting that the struggle for political revolution was not one of the
more central Marxist themes for Stalin, as it would never be for the PCF either.
In Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1945
[1926]), his urgings for proletarian mobilisation in the construction of the
USSR suggested an implicit recognition of the importance of subjective partici-
44

points up this incompatibility between the Stalinist theoretical reliance
on dialectical materialism and the political objective of proletarian
revolution and counters, echoing his ontological claims in L'Etre et le
néant, that man must be conceived of as ontologically free in order
to be able to emancipate himself politically: 'si l'homme n'est pas
originellement libre, mais une fois pour toutes déterminé, on ne peut
même pas concevoir ce que pourrait être sa libération.' [MR: 207]
Sartre is also critical of Stalin's claim in Dialectical and Historical
Materialism that society's superstructures are a reflection of the eco-
nomic base, clearly wary of its determinist implications, and points to
the incoherence of a theory which postulates that superstructural and
ideological elements enjoy a certain autonomy whilst at the same time
riveting them to a dialectical materialist schema [MR: 157-159].
Non-Mechanistic Marxist Dialectics: Lukâcs, Gramsci and Lefebvre
Sartre's critique of materialism and dialectical materialism in the first
part of Matérialisme et révolution is hence a sustained attack on the
scientistic current of Marxism, known since the Stalinist era as
'diamat', which remained the dominant theoretical world-view
amongst Sartre's communist contemporaries. There is almost no dis-
cussion of Marx himself in the original 1946 version of the text, a
point which Sartre would subsequently acknowledge grudgingly in an
added footnote when the piece was re-published in 1949 [MR: 135].
Yet, Sartre's references to 'marxistes' [MR: 161, 162], 'la matière
marxiste' [MR: 161], and to 'l'attitude révolutionnaire' for which 'la
foi matérialiste' has historically been the theoretical basis [MR: 173],
in addition to occasional negative allusions to Marx [MR: 141, 165,
169], suffice to give the impression that he is addressing his critique
of dialectical materialism to Marxism in its entirety. Examination
of the thought of Marx and much Marxist literature reveals the
pation in collective action, but this was in a post-revolutionary situation.
Moreover, even in this text, there is more than a strain of dictatorial fatalism in
his projecting onto the proletariat 'an invincible faith in the victory of Socialist
construction' (p. 177), as if the latter is bound to take place.
45

inappropriateness of such an amalgamation. Although the scientistic
world-view was the most influential in Marxist circles, notably in the
late 1930s and 1940s, owing to the dominance of Stalinism, the most
significant contributors to Marxist theory of the first half of the twen-
tieth century insisted that this tendency was not a faithful represen-
tation of the thought of Marx and themselves produced Marxist
theories which ran counter to it. It is to these debates which we will
now turn our attention, keeping in mind the early Sartre's fundamental
theoretical objection to Marxist philosophy, namely his belief that its
insistence on a materialist conception of reality is deterministic and
reductive of free subjective thought and agency.
In the work of many Marxist writers, the dividing line between
exposition of Marx's thought and a distinctive Marxist theoretical
position is often difficult to establish, exegesis and original theorising
becoming almost indissociable. References to such as 'Marxist
method', 'dialectical method', and 'dialectical materialism' take on
particular meanings and resonances in the context of different
theorists' preoccupations, even though those theorists often claim to
be merely elucidating the ideas of Marx. What is striking, however, is
the marked scepticism which is in evidence with respect to the doc-
trines of the dialectic of nature and of philosophical materialism in the
writings of thinkers whose theories are otherwise contrasting in
significant ways. In what follows, I shall focus on three thinkers in
particular, the pre-Stalinist Lukâcs, Gramsci and Lefebvre, relating
their positions to Sartre's thought.
In History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukâcs' declared
task is 'to understand the essence of Marx's method and to apply it
correctly', and this involves 'defending orthodox Marxism against
Engels himself.'
43
The failing of Engels' position in the Anti-Duhring,
Lukâcs argues, is that it does not acknowledge 'the most vital inter-
action, namely the dialectical relation between subject and object in
the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves.'
[HCC: 3] If the objects of the world remain unaltered by thought, then
thought in turn is relegated to a merely contemplative role. The
43 History and Class Consciousness Preface (xlii) (London: Merlin Press, 1971
[1923]) (hereafter: HCC).
46

dialectical method sets out to change reality and this requires the
interaction of the two fields, Marx's commitment to a unity of theory
and practice depending on their interaction. Lukâcs uses the formu-
lation 'dialectical materialism' when describing the Marxist philo-
sophical vision although it is clear that, as in the case of Lefebvre after
him, this should not be understood as the simple union of two separate
doctrines which have not been worked into a new conceptual synthe-
sis. First, he is critical of 'the vulgar materialists' suggesting, as Sartre
does, that the unmediated positivism of their position involves
metaphysical abstraction. They are unable, Lukâcs argues, to relate the
phenomena of the world to the 'concrete totality' [HCC: 9]. Second,
although Lukâcs articulates what is in many ways a Hegelian Marx-
ism, his preoccupation with conceiving of reality as a totality being
itself clearly derivative of Hegel's philosophy, the dialectical relation-
ships which he charts are some way removed from the Hegelian
schema, as set out in the Logic, interpreted strictly.
44
Indeed, stressing
as it does an ongoing dialectic of subject and history, his theory can be
seen as a vital precursor to that of Sartre in Questions de méthode, a
line of filiation which we will examine in Part Two.
Rather as Merleau-Ponty would do notably in the immediate
postwar years,
45
Lukâcs argues that for a dialectical theory there is no
contradiction between asserting at one and the same time that the
progression of history follows a pattern and that the course of histor-
ical change is decided in the present moment [HCC: 4]. Indeed, for
Lukâcs the dialectical method necessarily implies that history be made
in the present in relation to the objective conditions provided by social
history thus far. Human praxis is hence indispensable to historical
change. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci also insists on the centrality
44 Maurice Finocchiaro, in a section of his Gramsci and the History of Dialectical
Thought (Cambridge University Press: 1998) (pp. 182-230) devoted to Hegel's
dialectic, points to four principal interpretations of the dialectic. Finocchiaro
argues that the 'triadic' reading, which takes the dialectic to be principally the
synthesis of thesis and antithesis, is both the most widespread and the least
plausible. It is the version of the dialectic which became central to the scien-
tistic current of Marxism and hence to diamat.
45 Our discussion will turn to Merleau-Ponty's Sens et non-sens (Nagel : 1948)
and Humanisme et Terreur (Gallimard, 1947) in chapter VI.
47

of human praxis, although without explicitly emphasising the role of
dialectics as such. Indeed, praxis becomes the basis of Gramsci's
historicist reading of Marxist philosophy. Not only historical change
but also knowledge itself, and hence explanatory theories, depend on
the subject in the existential present. For Gramsci, no given phil-
osophy, including Marxism itself, can be timelessly true because such
theories are inevitably a response to the historical eras in which they
are produced. This thorough-going historical relativism ties in closely
with Gramsci's opposition to all forms of objectivism, and hence to
the dialectic of nature. Gramsci is critical of these positivistic tenden-
cies' failure to take into account the conditions of possibility of
objective knowledge, which is to say that they do not conceive of our
knowledge of objects as mediated by subjective thought. The unity of
theory and practice is itself part of the historical process for Gramsci
and he is scathing of those whose 'mechanical determinism' suppres-
ses subjective knowledge and agency. Moreover, it is an error, he
argues, to ascribe such a deterministic materialism to Marx whose
'concept of regularity and necessity in historical development cannot
be thought of as a derivation from natural science but rather as an
elaboration of concepts born on the terrain of political economy'.
46
For Gramsci, only a return to a form of transcendental reflection en-
ables us to escape the trap of objectivism, and Thomas Nemeth argues
that although Gramsci should not be seen as a phenomenalist and was
wary of subject-based philosophies, his position bears affinities with
the philosophy of Husserl.
47
There is an interesting parallel between Sartre's and Gramsci's
respective critiques of mechanistic materialist Marxism at the level of
what might be called a 'paradox of subjectivity'. Both thinkers sug-
gest that those who subscribe to this theoretical tendency do so to re-
lieve themselves of having to recognise the necessity of taking an
46 Prison Notebooks p.410 (hereafter: PN).
47 Thomas Nemeth, Gramsci's Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980) pp.
103-9 . Nemeth remarks that although Gramsci would have wished to guard
against the dangers of solipsism implied by the Husserlian phenomenological
reduction, '[t]o a surprising extent Husserl's phenomenological reduction
operates in a dimension comparable to Gramsci's philosophy of praxis.'
(p.107).
48

active role in bringing about change. They are subjects who prefer to
be non-subjects, constantly deferring to a putatively objective histor-
ical process. Sartre writes: 'J'ai vu des conversions au matérialisme:
on y entre comme en religion; je le définirais volontiers comme la
subjectivité de ceux qui ont honte de leur subjectivité'. He describes
materialism as 'une des formes de l'esprit de sérieux et la fuite devant
soi-même.' [MR: 162-3] This analysis of the mechanistic materialists,
irrespective of it being couched partly in the terms of Sartre's
conception of inauthenticity, is remarkably similar in substance to the
following given in the Prison Notebooks:
Real will takes on the garments of an act of faith in a certain rationality of
history and in a primitive and empirical form of impassioned finalism which
appears in the role of a substitute for the Predestination or Providence of
confessional religions. It should be emphasised, though, that a strong activity of
the will is present even here, directly intervening in the "force of circumstance",
but only implicitly, and in a veiled and, as it were, shamefaced manner. [PN:
336]
Gramsci laments the fact that mechanical determinism becomes 'a
cause of passivity' masking the responsibility of the working class to
change history [PN: 337]. The link between praxis and responsibility
is stressed by Gramsci and can be seen as conceptually related to
Sartre's insistence on freedom implying responsibility in L'Etre et
le néant and L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. As Sartre came
increasingly to emphasise the link between his ontology and his
ethical and ultimately political positions in the first half of the 1940s
(an exception having to be made for L'Etre et le néant, as I shall argue
in chapter III), the link between freedom and action was to become
increasingly explicit, Sartre himself eventually adopting the notion
of praxis. From 1946-7 onwards, under the influence of Merleau-
Ponty and Trotsky, he was also to subscribe to the Marxist idea of a
dialectics of history led by the revolutionary proletariat. This idea
had been at the heart of both Lukâcs's Hegelian Marxism and Gram-
scian historicism. We will examine in greater depth the numerous
ways in which Sartre's positions cohere with the Marxist emphasis on
praxis and the historical dialectic in Part Two.
49

Henri Lefebvre's Le Matérialisme dialectique (1939) appeared
the year after the publication of Stalin's Dialectical and Historical
Materialism. Although not as influential as Stalin's work, it was a
best-seller in France and became 'the principal introduction to Marxist
ideas for two or three generations of non-communist readers after the
war.'
48
Sartre indicates in a footnote in Matérialisme et révolution that
he has read this work and contrasts Lefebvre's analyses with those of
the more orthodox PCF intellectual and spokesman Roger Garaudy
[MR: 165-6]. Lefebvre's account of Marxism highlights the dialectic-
al conception in the mature Marx's thought rather than taking the later
Engels as a starting point. The historical materialism of Marx and
Engels in The German Ideology had marked a rejection of Hegel's
logic, their materialism taking as its basis man's practical life rather
than ideas, and employing a radically transformed version of the
Hegelian concept of alienation. The account which Marx and Engels
offer in this work of the development of history implied 'une certaine
dialectique: opposition des classes, de la propriété et de la privation -
dépassement de cette opposition. Mais cette dialectique n'est pas
rattachée à une structure du devenir exprimable conceptuellement.
Elle est conçue comme donnée pratiquement et constatée empirique-
ment.'
49
In so far as dialectical relationships can be identified in the
theory of the Marx of the 1840s, then, they exist only loosely and at a
macroscopic level.
Lefebvre shows how the later Marx progressively reinstates
dialectics subsequent to his renewed interest in Hegel after 1858.
Whilst still insisting on the primacy of the material circumstances of
men's lives, Marx increasingly finds that his analyses of the economic
phenomena of society lead him to identify certain abstract relations,
that is economic categories such as value, labour and so on. Marx
thought it necessary to incorporate such categories into economic
analysis in order to penetrate beyond the superficial appearance of
market relationships and explain their 'essence'. However, he does
48 Michael Kelly, 'Towards a heuristic method: Sartre and Lefebvre' in Sartre
Studies International Vo\. 5, No.l, 1999, p.3
49 Henri Lefebvre, Le Matérialisme dialectique p.75 (Presses Universitaires de
France, 1940) (hereafter MU).
50

not, Lefebvre continues, transpose the real entirely onto the level
of abstraction because these abstract categories are the theoretical
expression of real economic phenomena and '[l]e donné réel peut
donc rester toujours présent comme contenu et présupposition.' [MD:
81]
Lefebvre's account of later Marxian dialectics centres on the
interaction between the concrete and the abstract, that is between
particular economic phenomena and abstract categories. The
dialectical thought of the later Marx, he argues, achieves a synthesis
of the two such that '[1]'abstrait est en même temps concret. Le
concret est en même temps, et par un certain aspect, abstrait.' The
result is what Lefebvre terms 'l'abstrait concret' [MD: 82], and this is
a preoccupation which becomes central to his own theorising some
years later, notably in his Logique formelle, logique dialectique
(1947).
50
Lefebvre discusses Marx's distinction between use value and
exchange value and shows how the relationship between the two
reveals this dialectical interaction of the concrete and the abstract.
Marx accounts for how the value of an object, seen in terms of its
practical application, changes when it enters the process of exchange
on the market. It takes on a different, more abstract, status as part of a
network of social relations although without, for all that, being di-
vorced from its original use value: 'Ces deux aspects de la valeur ne
se séparent jamais complètement et cependant ils se différencient et
s'opposent.' [MD: 83] Exchange value is the most fundamental of all
economic categories, Lefebvre argues, proceeding to explain that
Marx's account shows it to be the basis of other abstract features of
capitalist society such as money, the division of labour and the market
economy. These categories emanate one from another dialectically
and compose collectively the totality that is modern society. This
totality, Lefebvre argues, is an abstraction and creates the impression
of an objectivity of social and historical change which goes beyond
man's individual action. Such an impression is an illusion, however,
because its constituting categories, although abstract, are rooted in the
concrete. Marx's theory, then, accords primacy to the material base
50 In this text, Lefebvre's principal focus is the question of why form and content,
that is the abstract and the concrete, should be seen as constituting a unity.
51

whilst acknowledging that, in modern society, abstractions veil it.
Men make their own history even if it appears that they do not:
La réalité historique ne peut être qu'en apparence extérieure aux hommes
vivants, comme une substance histonque, économique ou sociale, mystérieux
sujet du devenir. Le véritable sujet du devenir est l'homme vivant. Mais autour
de lui, au-dessus de lui, les abstractions prennent une étrange existence [...]
[MD: 91]
Lefebvre is keen to set the dialectical materialism which he attributes
to Marx apart from the scientistic Marxist conception of dialectics. He
corrects the commonly-held scientistic view that the origin of the later
Marx's dialectical method lay in Hegel's Logic,
51
pointing out that
that it is rather to the Phenomenology that we should look: 'Elle est
pour Marx la clef du système hégélien. On y retrouve le contenu réel
de la vie humaine, le mouvement ascendant qui va "de terre au ciel".'
[MD: 54] This view of Marxian dialectics as a conception which inte-
grates the material dimension without falling into the dialectic of
nature is confirmed by David McLellan:
For Marx, the dialectical interchange between man and nature was conducted
through a specific mode of production which itself generated new needs and the
means to satisfy them - even human nature itself being subject to the dialectic
of social change.
52
Lefebvre's insistence on the union of the abstract and the concrete is
closely related to his conviction that historical materialism transcends
the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism. Histor-
ical materialism, Lefebvre argues, is a fusion of these two tendencies.
Once formulated by Marx and Engels, it turned against philosophy in
general, whose approach was merely contemplative, to accede to the
truth which was located in the totality, that is the unity of thought and
world. Henceforth theory and practice were no longer separate but
united as human praxis. Rather than philosophy, or ideas, being the
sole guide to truth, '[l]e vrai est dans le concret' [MD: 66] although
51 See footnote 44. It is this reliance on Hegel's Logic which gave rise to the
implausible 'triadic' interpretation of the dialectic which Finocchiaro refers to.
52 David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx p. 139
52

the role played by ideas remains crucial nevertheless, ideas being
given a new vitality by their unity with material practices: 'Le
matérialisme cherche à rendre à la pensée sa force active, celle qu'elle
avait avant la séparation de la conscience et du travail' [MD: 66]. In
Matérialisme et révolution, Sartre rejects Lefebvre's claim that a unity
of idealism and materialism is achieved in historical materialism.
Apparently assimilating Lefebvre's interpretation of Marx to the
scientistic dialectical materialist tendency, Sartre calls this unity 'fall-
acieuse': if the concept of matter remains that of natural science, he
argues, then there cannot be any real synthesis of the two fields [MR:
166]. Sartre's objection visibly takes the historical materialist insist-
ence on material practice as an affirmation of the centrality of inert
matter rather than as man's practical activity characterised principally
by the activity of labouring. Sartre hence rejects Lefebvre's account of
historical materialism's uniting of thought and practice because he is
wary of the freedom-limiting effects of what he supposes to be a
theory which gives priority to the inert. If this fear is an ill-founded
one, it leads to a misreading of historical materialism on Sartre's part
which is all the more unfortunate because his own theory of the
concrete in L'Etre et le néant originates precisely in a similar attempt
to transcend the opposition between ideas and the world. In fact,
Lefebvre's conception of the concrete as a totality comprised of ideas
and material practice appears to differ from that of Sartre principally
only in so far as Sartre's philosophy does not extend to speaking of
the objective world as involving material practices, and notably lab-
our. Indeed, from L'Existentialisme est un humanisme and his other
theoretical works of the immediate postwar years onwards, Sartre
would make increasingly explicit the relationship between free
thought and action. Although this latter would not be conceived of as
labour as such, the similarities between Sartre's position on this issue
and the Marxist insistence on the unity of theory and practice are
undeniable.
Sartre's assimilation of Lefebvre's account to the scientistic
paradigm appears paradoxical in the light of the fact that one of
the overarching general tendencies of Lefebvre's Le Matérialisme
dialectique is its attempt to 'excise philosophical materialism from
53

Marxism'.
Lefebvre plays down the Feuerbachian phase in Marx's
development, ultimately preferring to present Marxism as developing
essentially in response only to Hegelianism. As a consequence,
Lefebvre's account of Marxism ultimately does not tend, as Sartre
implies, towards metaphysical materialism but rather, as Michael
Kelly points out, towards philosophical idealism. Kelly concludes that
4
[i]n place of materialism he offers an updated, self-propelling Hegel-
ianism whose idealism is nominally disowned but substantially
retained',
54
an assessment which, in its turn, pushes Lefebvre fraction-
ally too far in the other direction, underestimating as it does the extent
to which he insists that Marxian historical and then dialectical mater-
ialism modifies Hegelian idealism, and notably the dialectic, when it
unites them with concrete realities of man's practical life and of
economic relationships.
Sartre, the Marxists and Marx
These brief surveys of the accounts of Marxism offered by Lukâcs,
Gramsci and Lefebvre point to the conclusion that the early Sartre's
theoretical disagreements with Marxism stemmed principally from his
assessments relying too heavily on the scientistic brand of Marxism
which characterised the thinking of his Stalinist contemporaries in the
PCF. The addition of the following crucial footnote at the start of the
amended version of Matérialisme et révolution, published in 1949,
suggests a recognition on Sartre's part that the specific focus of his
critique had perhaps obstructed a clear view of Marx's thought itself:
'je précise que mes critiques ne s'adressent pas à [Marx] mais à la
scolastique marxiste de 1949. Ou, si l'on veut, à Marx à travers le
néo-marxisme stalinien.' [MR: 136] This statement is in fact more
defensive than it is self-critical, suggesting as it does that Sartre had
focused his critique on 'la scolastique marxiste' intentionally rather
53 Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism p.37
54 Ibid p.39, see also pp.57-60.
54

than on Marx, and had merely omitted to make this explicit at the
time. Whilst not entirely implausible, this assessment is of rather
doubtful accuracy, it being more likely that Sartre's knowledge of
Marx's work remained somewhat limited in 1946, his focus on 'la
scolastique marxiste' involving an inadvertent conflation of Marx and
the Stalinist world-view. Sartre had read Marx's Capital and The
German Ideology whilst at the Ecole Normale but, by his own
admission,
55
had not gained much from the experience. In his war
diaries, he makes brief reference to Marx's Misery of Philosophy
[C: 360], and Annie Cohen-Solal reports that Sartre returned to
reading Marx in 1941 during the period of the existence of his
resistance group 'Socialisme et liberté'.
56
In the amended version of
Matérialisme et révolution Sartre adds a number of footnotes, no less
than five of which clearly seek to correct the negative image of Marx
given by the original text [MR: 135, 141, 184, 210, 213]. In par-
ticular, he recognises that Marxian materialism should not be reduced
to a crude objectivism [MR: 141], and refers to works of the early
'humanist' Marx such as the 1844 Manuscripts and the 'Theses on
Feuerbach', implying the latter's claims harmonise with his own
existentialist conception of man [MR: 184, 210]. These additions to
the original text of 1946 are far from minor in significance, and the
likelihood is that Sartre read the crucial early works of Marx for
the first time during the period 1946-9 .
57
A certain misrepresentation of Marxian thought is hence un-
deniable in the original 1946 version of Matérialisme et révolution
and it is clear that this was due to an insufficient knowledge of
Marx's writings on Sartre's part. It was perhaps also owing to a
desire to steer clear of the complex questions of interpretation which
have long surrounded Marx's thought. Although Ronald Aronson is
by and large right to conclude that 'it was only around 1949 that
Sartre was able to reflect on Marxian theory as distinct from the
55 Questions de méthode p.23
56 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre (Gallimard, 1985) p.235
57 The 1844 Manuscripts (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), which had
become available in France in 1938, and were at the centre of debate in Marxist
circles from the Liberation onwards.
55

official Communist movement's version of it', we should never-
theless not imagine that Sartre was unaware that he was evading
certain key questions surrounding Marx. Moreover, Sartre cannot be
fairly accused of assimilating Marxism in its entirety to the Stalinist
current because Matérialisme et révolution actually contains a brief
but suggestive passage on Trotskyism which Sartre defends against
the attacks of the PCF intellectuals [MR: 170-1]. In a revealing
footnote Sartre refers to 'des conversations que j'ai eues à maintes
reprises avec des intellectuels communistes' [MR: 171] in which he
had countered the communists' accusation that the Trotskyists were
police informers. Sartre's sympathy with Trotskyism in opposition to
the Stalinism of the PCF comes as little surprise when one considers
Beauvoir's references in La Force de l'âge to Sartre's and her
own interest in Trotskyism during the 1930s. She remarks that they
had 'la plus grande estime pour Trotsky', and were drawn to 'l'idée
d'une "révolution permanente'" [FA: 156]. Trotsky's Ma Vie had
been one of the more important non-literary works for them in
the early 1930s [FA: 59] and they had also struck up a personal
friendship during these years with Colette Audry, who was a
Trotskyist [FA: 140-1]. This Trotskyist leaning on Sartre's part
points to the conclusion that his opposition to the Stalinist Marxism
of the PCF was founded not just on philosophical disageements but
also to a more limited extent on divergent political convictions as
well.
59
Trotskyist sympathising aside, Sartre's attitude towards Marx-
ism until the latter part of the 1940s was globally characterised by
a certain wariness and scepticism and was, as we have seen,
founded to a significant extent on a misunderstanding of the real
58 Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy In The World (London: Verso,
1980).
59 Ian Birchall 'Sartre and gauchisme', in Journal of European Studies, Vol. 19,
1989. Birchall argues convincingly that Sartre and Beauvoir, although not
politically committed, were familiar with the positions of the different left
tendencies. If Sartre did not join the PCF, this was not only because of his
philosophical disagreements with Marxism but also because 'he already knew
something of the gauchiste critique of Stalinism and [...] he felt strongly
distrustful of the PCF on political grounds.' (p.24)
56

import of many of its central theoretical claims. His misreading
of Marxism, rather like his communist contemporaries' unjustly
reductive view of existentialism, placed serious obstacles in the path
of the identification of the many points of convergence between the
two philosophies.
57

IL The Free Subject in Situation
Developments in Sartre's Concepts of Freedom and
Situation
We have seen that, in opposition to both idealism and materialism,
Sartre seeks to 'établir la réalité humaine, la condition humaine, l'être-
dans-le-monde de l'homme et son être-en -situation.' [C: 205] Sartre
employs a variety of formulations to express the fundamental idea that
the ontological nature of reality is comprised of the synthetic unity of
consciousness and world. In true dialectical fashion, it is the relation-
ship between the two domains, and the way in which they act upon
each other in relations of interdependence, which is of crucial import-
ance for Sartre. The attempt to explain 'la réalité humaine', then,
involves both offering an ontological account of the world in relation
to its perception by consciousness and accounting for the nature and
freedom of consciousness in relation to its situational constraints in
the external world. Nevertheless, it is the anthropological dimension
of Sartre's phenomenologico-ontological enquiries which remains of
greatest interest to him, that is to say the implications of the freedom-
situation relationship for an account of man.
In the introduction to his Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions,
Sartre subordinates the discipline of pyschology to the burgeoning
field of phenomenology. Psychology seeks to explain 'l'homme
en situation' but this can only be achieved, Sartre argues, by
the formulation of a phenomenological anthropology which has
succeeded in elucidating 'les notions d'homme, de monde, d'être-
dans-le-monde, de situation.'
1
This conviction will form the basis of
Sartre's central theoretical concerns in the years to come, announcing
as it does the orientation of key claims advanced in L'Etre et le néant.
1 Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Hermann, 1939) p.27
59

If consciousness is by definition ontologically free because irreducible
to and inassimilable to the material world, then a vital principle of the
early Sartre's philosophy is that the situation itself, by and large
synonymous with his conception of the concrete, involves the creative
input of consciousness because it must be apprehended by the subject.
In L'Imaginaire, Sartre refers to situations as 'les différents modes
immédiats d'appréhension du réel comme monde' [/: 355], and the
situation is described more even-handedly in L'Etre et le néant as the
'produit commun de la contingence de l'en-soi et de la liberté' [EN:
544]. Sartre argues that it is only by being situated in the world that
consciousness can imagine [/: 355], a claim which is echoed by the
conviction that 'il ne peut y avoir de pour-soi libre que comme engagé
dans un monde résistant.'[EN: 540] Indeed, the imaginary and the
freedom of consciousness are concomitant concepts for Sartre, as they
both involve transcendence of the real, conceived in L'Etre et le néant
as the constraining situation, whilst at the same time depending on it.
Sartre argues that it is by the very same process that consciousness
imagines and realizes its freedom [/: 358], a claim which implies a
conceptual reciprocity between his conception of the aesthetic and his
existentialist anthropology.
In the first chapter of Part IV of L'Etre et le néant, entitled 'Etre
et faire: la liberté', Sartre discusses at some length the situational
contexts of subjective freedom. The concept of situation was to
become an important 'bridge concept'
2
linking existentialism and
Marxism, it being an obvious point of intersection between the early
Sartre's subject-based philosophy and the historico-social basis of
much classic Marxist theory. The examples of situations which Sartre
gives in L'Etre et le néant, however, remain some way removed from
the sort of contexts which have traditionally interested Marxist theori-
sts. Social and economic structures in particular are not accorded any
significant place in Sartre's account whose scope is restricted to the
local level environment and concerns of the free subject. Sartre
discusses a number of 'structures de la situation',
3
but to take the
2 Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism p.26
3 L'Etre et le néant pp. 546-606: 'Ma place', 'Mon passé', 'Mes entours', 'Mon
prochain', 'Ma mort'.
60

example of the 'structure' which Sartre puts under the heading 'Mon
passé', for instance, rather than giving special consideration to differ-
ent types of conditioning as one would expect almost any non-
existentialist theory to do, Sartre's discussion remains focused on the
matter of how my free consciousness in the present relates to my past.
Sartre argues that 'je suis l'être par qui le passé vient à soi-même et au
monde' [EN: 553], and that 'la signification du passé est étroitement
dépendante de mon projet présent.' [EN: 555] The meaning of the
past, then, is conferred on it by the choices which my free conscious-
ness makes in the present moment. Sartre's view of the role of the free
consciousness in relation to the facticity of situations in general is by
and large consistent with this argument. On the opening page of the
chapter devoted to the situation, Sartre claims that '[l]e coefficient
d'adversité des choses, en particulier, ne saurait être un argument
contre notre liberté, car c'est par nous, c'est-à-dire par la position
préalable d'une fin, que surgit ce coefficient d'adversité.' [EN: 538] In
this regard, it is important to note that in L'Etre et le néant Sartre,
because strongly influenced by phenomenology, tends to assess all
phenomena from the standpoint of the subject. In his analyses of the
situation, as elsewhere in the work, Sartre does not much concern
himself with the implications of factors which the subject does not
have direct awareness of, tending to work on the assumption that a
constraining situation that is not percieved as such by the subject is
not really worthy of consideration as a genuine limit on freedom.
Whilst this might be true from the subject's standpoint, it draws a veil
over those constraints on freedom in his life which he may not be
aware of or which withstand a mere change of psychological attitude
on his part towards them. The consistently subjectivist slant of early
Sartrean philosophy is of course one of its key points of divergence
and incommensurability with much classic Marxist philosophy al-
though, as I have suggested in chapter I and as will become more
apparent subsequently, areas of overlap and reciprocity in this regard
can nevertheless be identified.
To return to Sartre's subsection entitled 'Mon passé', one might
object that the fact that the past would be devoid of meaning without
the work of the free consciousness in the present does not entail the
idea that there hence had not been a past which conditioned the
61

present, including my consciousness itself amongst other things. In the
famous example of the rock which seems too steep to climb, Sartre
grants that there remains 'un residuum innommable [...] qui appar-
tient à l'en-soi' [EN: 539], which is to say intrinsic qualities of the
rock itself which make it difficult to scale, but otherwise emphasises
the importance of the attitude of the free consciousness to the rock.
4
Sartre's tendency to suggest that the potential limitations implied by a
given situation can be transcended by the subject choosing to take one
attitude rather than another towards them points to the conclusion that,
as Thomas C. Anderson argues,
5
the conception of freedom which
Sartre formulates in L'Etre et le néant is only really a freedom of
consciousness. Indeed, when justifying his famous claim that the slave
is as free as his master, Sartre claims that the slave is free to choose to
break his chains, that is to decide to revolt, or not to do so [EN: 608].
Sartre does not give consideration to the basic difficulty that freely
choosing to revolt may well prove ineffectual in the face of the
material constraints and oppressive social structures which confront
the slave.
What this last example in particular illustrates clearly, however,
is the fact that there is not one conception of freedom in L'Etre et le
néant but two, namely ontological freedom and freedom in situation.
Margaret Whitford points out that this distinction was given in-
sufficient attention by Sartre's contemporary critics, Merleau-Ponty
amongst them.
6
In particular, Sartre's insistence that 'ou bien l'homme
4 Sartre skilfully nuances this example more than the others he gives in his
discussion of the situation, however, by linking consciousness' perception of
the degree of difficulty which the rock poses to scale to the matter of the
subject's 'choix originel de [s]oi-même' [EN: 519]. Sartre suggests that the
rock, as a thing that is to be climbed, retains a sort of objective difficulty level
because 'une conversion radicale de [s]on être-dans-le-monde' [EN: 520] on the
part of the subject would be necessary to accomplish the task. He could do it
'mais à quel prix?' [EN: 509]
5 Thomas C. Anderson Sartre's Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral
Humanity (Chicago: Open Court, 1993) p.24
6 Margaret Whitford, Merleau-Ponty 's Critique of Sartre (Lexington, Ky: French
Forum, 1982) pp.56, 61. Whitford points out that Merleau-Ponty, in his critique
of Sartre in Les Aventures de la dialectique (Gallimard, 1955), recognises that
Sartre has two definitions of freedom, but addresses only the ontological kind.
62

est entièrement déterminé (ce qui est inadmissible...) ou bien
l'homme est entièrement libre' [EN: 497] received sharp criticism,
commentators often failing to acknowledge that the notion of absolute
freedom referred to man's ontological condition and consequently
inalienable capacity to make choices rather than to his position as a
situated being. The example of the slave focuses almost exclusively
on the former type of freedom, Sartre being keen to insist that no
matter how constraining a person's circumstances are, he nevertheless
always has a freedom of decision. By contrast, the example of the rock
which seems difficult to climb shows that subjective freedom in
situation is not absolute. Although I can always freely choose to at-
tempt the climb, the facticity of the rock imposes a situational con-
straint on my actual ability to accomplish the task. Whitford concludes
that although in L'Etre et et le néant 'the emphasis is on the possi-
bilities of freedom rather than on its limits, nonetheless the limits are
clearly defined'.
7
Whitford is right to insist on the importance of freedom in
situation in L'Etre et le néant, but it is far from certain that her
defence of Sartre is sufficient to answer Anderson's objection. Sartre
tends to suggest, as in the case of 'Mon passé', that not only did a
given 'structure' of a situation depend on the work of consciousness
for its very existence in the first place but that it is the meaning that
consciousness confers on it which decides whether or not it is to be a
constraint on freedom. The limits Whitford speaks of are hence
considerably reduced, as the following remarks confirm: 'La liberté
est totale et infinie, ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'elle n 'ait pas de limites
mais qu'elle ne les rencontre jamais. Les seules limites que la liberté
heurte à chaque instant, ce sont celles qu'elle s'impose à elle-même'
[EN: 589]. It is worth noting, however, that even in the chapter of
L'Etre et le néant devoted to the situation Sartre is generally keener to
insist on the inalienability of the ontological kind of freedom than
on examining in depth the implications of genuinely constraining
circumstances for subjective freedom. His subsections devoted to the
'structures de la situation' are comparatively weaker argumentatively
than much of his writing elsewhere in the work, the capacity of the
7
Whitford op.cit.p.59
63

situation to limit freedom being presented as ultimately so implausibly
small that it seems unlikely that Sartre could have intended to present
such 'structures' as entirely representative of his views on the
implications of the situation for freedom. When he writes, towards the
close of the chapter, 'Ces différentes descriptions [...] n'ont pas la
prétention d'être exhaustives, ni même détaillées' [EN: 606], it is
almost as if to acknowledge areas of inadequacy in his analyses.
Indeed, his account of freedom in relation to situation in L'Etre et le
néant is not representative of the position he adopts on the matter
either explicitly or, as is more often the case, implicitly in numerous
of his other wartime writings. His wartime novels L 'Age de raison and
Le Sursis are notable, amongst other reasons, for the complexity
and realism of the worldly situations which they portray and the
difficulties which such situational factors pose for subjective freedom.
One need only recall the fact that the starting point for much of the
narrative development of L'Age de raison, for example, is Mathieu's
need to raise the money necessary to finance Marcelle's abortion. In
Le Sursis, through a skilful blending of personal preoccupations and
political events, Sartre succeeds in conveying the uncertainties and
anxieties of the immediate prewar situation. Indeed, it is not only the
work's numerous characters who are disoriented by difficult and
complex circumstances but also the reader whose attempts to perceive
a coherent narrative development are thwarted by frequent changes of
narratorial focus.
In certain key works of the years immediately following the
Liberation, such as Réflexions sur la question juive (1944), 'Présen-
tation des Temps Modernes' (1945), and the second part of
Matérialisme et révolution (1946), Sartre was to offer more convin-
cing theoretical accounts of the nature of situations and the real
conditions and constraints which they imply for subjective freedom. In
Réflexions, Sartre argues that we must employ the concept of situation
to account for the position of the Jews in society. It is precisely their
'situation commune de Juif
8
in a society that labels them Jewish,
rather than any intrinsic racial or religious characteristics, that French
Jews share. In line with his ontology-derived ethics of L'Etre et le
8 Réflexions sur la question juive (Gallimard, 1954 [1944]) p.81 (hereafter RQJ).
64

néant, and revealing his characteristic tendency to play down any
notion of a fixed, pre-determined identity or essence, Sartre argues
that the Jews' identity is foisted upon them by other members of
society [RQJ: 83]. However, there is a certain theoretical tension in
this work between the anti-essentialist conception of man which
constitutes the basis of Sartre's defence of the Jewish community
and the Marxist-tending conception of situation which he has now
adopted. On the one hand, he argues that the Jewish community is
'ni religieuse, ni ethnique, ni politique: c'est une communauté quasi
historique' [RQJ: 176] Yet he had asserted earlier in the same work
that man 'forme un tout synthétique avec sa situation biologique,
économique, politique, culturelle' [RQJ: 72], a claim which involves a
significantly broadened conception of situation in relation to that of
L'Etre et le néant. Hence, Sartre asserts that people are fundamentally
without any determinate or fixed identity when his aim is to defend
them against racial prejudice. Yet, when his objective is to lend
support the struggle of the working class against bourgeois dominance
he insists that people's material and cultural conditioning is integral to
who they are, which surely implies that they have some kind of
determinate identity. This paradox is indicative of a tension which
begins to become perceptible from the Liberation onwards between
the libertarian orientation of Sartre's ontology and his developing
political thought.
'Depuis quinze ans,' Sartre later remarked in an interview of
1960, 'je cherche quelque chose: il s'agit [...] de donner un fondement
politique à l'anthropologie.'
9
Indeed, it is in his founding statement to
Les Temps modernes that the conception of man which would receive
mature expression in the Critique de la raison dialectique first be-
comes clearly recognisable. In 'Présentation des Temps Modernes\
Sartre gives a more detailed exposition of the idea that man is best
understood as a synthetic whole, and this is accompanied by a con-
comitant development in his concept of situation. Stating that he seeks
to found 'une anthropologie synthétique', Sartre argues that man
should be seen as a totality,
10
which involves acknowledging not only
9 Situations IXp.9
10 'Présentation des Temps modernes'' in Situations II p.23 (hereafter P).
65

that he is necessarily in situation but also that he is conditioned by his
economic circumstances and by his social class. Such situational
constraints encroach much more significantly on subjective freedom
than those discussed in L'Etre et le néant. 'L'homme n'est qu'une
situation: un ouvrier n'est pas libre de penser ou de sentir comme un
bourgeois' [P: 27], he remarks, indicating that ontological freedom,
though not reducible to or determined by situation, nevertheless can-
not simply transcend the conditioning it produces.
Sartre's call for a synthetic anthropology is closely related to his
rejection of analytical thought and his adoption of 'une conception
synthétique de la réalité' [P: 17-22]. Broadly speaking, in 'Présen-
tation des Temps Modernes' these contrasting categories correspond to
bourgeois and liberal thought on the one hand and left-wing thought
on the other. Sartre explains that the 'esprit d'analyse' was the mode
of thought which served as an intellectual weapon of the bourgeoisie
in its struggle against the aristocracy and consisted in asserting the
indivisible particularity of individuals in the interests of affirming
their rights as citizens. Whilst it had originally been a progressive
tendency, in contemporary France the analytic mode of thinking has
since become a means by which the bourgeoisie protects its economic
and political dominance. It legitimates a refusal to acknowledge the
real condition of the working class: 'La bourgeoisie a tout intérêt à
s'aveugler sur les classes [...]. Elle persiste à ne voir que des hommes,
à proclamer l'identité de la nature humaine à travers toutes les variétés
de situation' [P: 18-19]. Convinced that the 'esprit d'analyse' only
serves today to 'troubler la conscience révolutionnaire et d'isoler les
hommes au profit des classes privilégiées' [P: 20], the synthetic con-
ception of reality is that of '[c]eux qui ont fortement compris que
l'homme est enraciné dans la collectivité et qui veulent affirmer
l'importance des facteurs économiques, techniques et historiques' [P:
24]. Clearly, this synthetic conception is strongly reminiscent of
the classic Marxist idea that acknowledging men's practical circum-
stances as labourers working in a socio-economic structure are central
to understanding their condition. Ultimately, it is best seen as part of a
radical critique of political liberalism. In Réflexions, the analytic
thought Sartre speaks of with regard to the bourgeoisie in 'Présen-
tation des Temps Modernes' is formulated as the 'libéralisme abstrait'
66

of the democrat which accords Jews rights as it accords them to other
citizens but fails to see the Jews as 'des produits concrets et singuliers
de l'histoire.' [RQJ: 142] Sartre's conclusion in this text is that a
'libéralisme concret', which would recognise the rights of minorities
in their concrete particularity, is needed to remedy this state of affairs
[RQJ: 177]. As he develops this argument, however, it becomes clear
that he considers the very formulation itself to be something of a
misnomer. Improving the situation of the Jews requires working to
eradicate anti-Semitism, but this latter is a symptom of bourgeois-
dominated class society, hence a socialist revolution is necessary
[RQJ: 181-2]. In effect, concrete liberalism is not political liberalism
as such at all, it is socialism. In 'Présentation des Temps Modernes',
Sartre's declared aim is hence to 'concourir à produire certains
changements dans la Société qui nous entoure' [RQJ: 16], his
synthetic anthropology being part of a project of man's emancipation.
Sartre's adoption of the synthetic view of reality is indicative of
his increasing philosophical rapprochement with Marxism. His
broadening of the concept of situation draws it closer to the Marxist
emphasis on socio-economic factors, and his understanding of the
concept of the concrete clearly marks a departure from the much more
limited definition offered in L'Etre et le néant. The concrete for
Sartre is no longer simply the synthesis of consciousness and world
but, in Marxist fashion, is explicitly opposed to the abstraction of
idealism and to political liberalism's failure to take individuals'
worldly conditions of possibility into account. However, he is never-
theless keen to guard against what he sees as Marxism's freedom-
limiting subsuming of the individual in the collectivity. He considers
there to be an antinomy between the Marxists and the liberal demo-
crats on this matter and wishes to retain something of the latter's
defence of the freedom of the individual. Formulating for the first
time a position which would remain central to his existential Marxism
until the Critique and beyond,
11
Sartre hence argues that the capacity
11 In Questions de méthode, Sartre describes his method as 'régressive-progressive
et analytico-synthétique' (p.94). The regressive-progressive method would
accord a more central place to the dialectical interaction between the free
subject and his socio-historical situation than the position Sartre advances in
67

for subjective self-determination must be safeguarded within the syn-
thetic conception of reality: 'Nous concevons sans difficulté qu'un
homme, encore que sa situation le conditionne totalement, puisse
être un centre d'indétermination irréductible.' [P: 26] This coexistence
of conditioning and freedom is indispensable to the philosophy of
political revolution which Sartre expounds in the second part of
Matérialisme et révolution. In this text, the conditioning of the work-
ing class takes on a decidedly Marxist character, Sartre focusing on
the socio-economic constraints which define the worker's situation:
'[l]e double caractère de producteur et d'opprimé suffit à définir la
situation du révolutionnaire' [MR: 178] Yet, as we have seen, Sartre
insists, in opposition to Stalinist thinking, that it is only by according
man subjective freedom that the revolution is a genuine possibility: 'si
l'homme n'est pas originellement libre, mais une fois et pour toutes
déterminé, on ne peut même pas concevoir ce que pourrait être sa
libération.' [MR: 207] The revolutionary must be ontologically free,
then, in order to be able to emancipate himself from his constraining
socio-economic situation. Sartre explains this double requirement of
freedom by pointing out that 'ce n'est pas sous le même rapport qu'il
[le révolutionnaire] est libre et enchaîné.' [MR: 209] The distinction
which Sartre maintains here and throughout this text between the
subjective and the political types of freedom is the direct descendant
of that established between ontological freedom and freedom in
situation in L'Etre et le néant. By the time of 'Présentation des Temps
Modernes' and Matérialisme et révolution, Sartre's adoption of the
'Présentation' does, but the basic idea of the subject who is conditioned by
history and yet free to act upon and change her circumstances remains the same.
However, the temptation to conclude that as of 1945 Sartre, clearly on course
for his existential Marxism of the Critique, hence departs radically from his
claims of L'Etre et le néant should be resisted. Although the adoption of the
synthetic view and of a Marxist conception of situation clearly mark a
progression on Sartre's earlier positions, his conceptions of the concrete and
indeed of situation itself in L'Etre et le néant similarly involved the idea of the
interdependency and interaction of the free consciousness and the world. If
Sartre was able to bring his existentialism into gradually greater alignement
with Marxism, not only politically but also philosophically, so relatively soon
after the publication of L'Etre et le néant, it was because the two philosophies
already shared key areas of common ground.
68

synthetic conception of man and reality implies a full acknowledge-
ment of the socio-economic conditioning and constraints of the
working class. Yet he insists that man's ontological freedom which, as
we saw with the example of the slave in L'Etre et le néant, guarantees
power of choice vis-à-vis the situation, always remains irreducible.
The worker, like the slave, is free either to accept his condition or to
revolt [P: 28]. Sartre's marked rationalist tendency
12
is such that he
refuses at this stage to entertain the possibility that the existential
choice itself may, in certain circumstances, be affected by the
subject's conditioning. Both the slave and the worker might, for
instance, be so thoroughly conditioned by their oppressive situations
that the option of revolting does not present itself to them even in
thought. They might, for example, be under the influence of a power-
ful dominant ideology, a form of false consciousness, to the extent
that even the intellectual choice of whether to revolt or not is no
longer a real one for them. Paradoxically, it was during the same
period as writing L'Etre et le néant that Sartre composed not only Les
Jeux sont faits, ostensibly giving credence to the idea of social
determinism, but also Les Mouches in which he staged a community,
the Argives, which is so thoroughly in the grip of an insidious
dominant ideology that its members cannot even see the possibility of
12 In an interview of 1944, discussing the question of which French thinkers have
influenced him, Sartre claims that 'un seul a agi profondément sur mon esprit,
c'est Descartes. Je me range dans sa lignée et me réclame de cette vieille
tradition cartésienne qui s'est conservée en France.' (Contât and Rybalka
op.cit.p.108). Sartre refers appreciatively in 'La Liberté cartésienne' (1946) to
the vital role that Descartes attributes to thought, interpreting his predecessor's
philosphy as a defence of the unassailable character of intellectual freedom:
'Descartes nous pourvoit d'abord d'une entière responsabilité intellectuelle. Il
éprouve à chaque instant la liberté de sa pensée en face de l'enchaînement
des essences' (Situations I p.317); 'Cette entière liberté, précisément parce
qu'elle ne comporte pas de degrés [...]' (Ibidp.318); 'Descartes a parfaitement
compris que le concept de liberté renfermait l'exigence d'une autonomie
absolue' (Ibid p.332). Such statements, written in the same year as
Matérialisme et révolution, are evidence that despite advancing a Marxist
conception of situation by 1946, Sartre's conviction that ontological freedom
and the power of choice are irreducible remains unshaken.
69

emancipation from their oppressed condition. We will discuss repres-
entations of ideology in Sartre's literary works in Part Two.
Sartre's Insistence on the Freedom of the Subject:
an Un-Marxist Preoccupation?
It is clear from the texts we have discussed, as well as others of the
period, that in the early to mid 1940s Sartre believed that his insist-
ence on man's inalienable ontological freedom distinguished his
position from Marxism. Many commentators, explicitly or implicitly
taking Sartre's lead on this matter, have endorsed this view. Indeed,
the existentialist dimension even of Sartre's later philosophy has been
considered a tendency which set it apart from Marxism.
13
Sartre would
explain in an interview of the 1970s that at the time he took the inter-
ests of the working class to be entirely represented by the PCF [ORR:
28, 30]. The dominance of the Stalinist world-view in the PCF at the
time, and Sartre's still relatively limited knowledge of Marxist writ-
ings prior to the late 1940s, explain his somewhat reductive view of
Marxist philosophy. In reality, the question of the extent to which
Sartre's insistence on the existential freedom of the subject within
situational contexts retains an independence from a Marxist philo-
sophical position is more complex than any of these assessments
suggest. When Sartre writes that 'un ouvrier ne peut pas vivre en
bourgeois' [P: 27] he recognises the importance of conditions of pos-
sibility for subjective agency, and reveals that the concept of what
Lukâcs had called 'objective possibility' [HCC: 51] is firmly in place
in his conception of the subject's relationship to situation. Yet Sartre
refuses to accept that the operations of consciousness may perhaps
also be subject to conditions of possibility, and insists that although
13 Even as sympathetic a commentator to Marxism as Thomas Flynn, when
describing Sartre's later philosophy, opts for 'Marxist Existentialism' rather
than 'Existential Marxism', thereby suggesting that the existentialist emphasis
of Sartre's position distinguishes it from Marxism.
70

man is entirely conditioned, his capacity for free thought cannot be
encroached on. This stance relates closely to Sartre's refusal of the
doctrine of materialism, marking as it does a rejection of any form of
causal determinism, and does appear to be an area of incompatibility
with Marxist philosophy. However, the fact that the contributions to
the field of such major theorists as the early Lukâcs, Gramsci and
Lefebvre not only acknowledge but explicitly insist on the crucial role
played by subjective thought in the process of historical change, as I
indicated in chapter I, suggests that such a conclusion is far from
unproblematic.
A central area of difficulty is the fact that the aforementioned
Marxist thinkers did not formulate in-depth theories of subjectivity,
which means that the matter of exactly what free subjective thought
entails for them is left inexplicit. Consequently, it is not possible to
ascertain with sufficient precision how they conceived of the relation-
ship between conditioning and freedom of thought at the level of the
subjective consciousness. Our investigation hence encounters an area
of basic incommensurability between Sartrean existentialism and
Marxism. Consider the following statements by Gramsci, for example,
drawn from a paragraph in which he enquires into the definition of
man:
Possibility is not a reality but it is in itself a reality. Whether or not a man can
or cannot do a thing has its importance in evaluating what is done in reality.
Possibility means "freedom". The measure of freedom enters into the concept
of man.
Man is to be conceived as an historical bloc of purely individual and subjective
elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the
individual is in an active relationship. [PN: 360]14
14 It is worth noting in passing that Gramsci's position here as elsewhere is at
one and the same time reminiscent of that of Lukâcs in History and Class
Consciousness and foreshadows key claims concerning the subject/history
dialectic which Sartre was later to articulate in Questions de méthode, notably
the progressive-regressive method. The areas of common ground between
Gramsci's philosophy and these other two seminal Marxist works merit in-
depth study but are beyond the scope of this study.
71

The question of what exactly is entailed for Gramsci by 'freedom' and
'individual and subjective elements' in relation to 'objective or mater-
ial elements' is difficult to answer with greater accuracy than to assert
that he clearly believes that subjective thought cannot be assimilated
to a fatalistic conception of objective reality. The 'active relationship'
which he speaks of presupposes that consciousness is independent
enough to be able to make choices which influence the course of
objective reality and history. The relationship between these exist-
ential choices and the conditioning of consciousness remains unclear
however. More precisely, the extent to which such choices might
themselves be influenced in part by that conditioning is not articulated
by Gramsci. What is almost certainly the case however, in view of the
crucial role which Gramsci and other Marxists attribute to the histor-
ical and social forces which condition subjective thought and agency,
is that their conception of the subject could not be as resolutely and
uncompromisingly rationalist as that of the early Sartre. In The Ger-
man Ideology, Marx and Engels state that although man possesses a
consciousness, it is not "pure" but is 'from the very beginning a social
product',
15
thereby emphasising the historico-social dimension of
subjective thought.
By the time of writing Questions de méthode, Sartre had come to
the view that the existential dimension of man, although neglected in
the work of many of his Marxist contemporaries, was fully acknow-
ledged in the work of Marx: 7e fondement du marxisme, comme
anthropologie historique et structurelle, c'est l'homme même'; 'le
marxisme de Marx, en marquant l'opposition dialectique de la
connaissance et de l'être, contenait à titre implicite l'exigence d'un
fondement existentiel de la théorie.' [QM: 108] Indeed, the dialectic
which is the basis of Sartre's progressive-regressive method in this
work is not substantially different from, but rather illuminates that
implied by Marx's famous dictum, 'Men make their own history, but
[...] they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted
15 The German Ideology pp. 50-1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970)
(hereafter GI).
72

from the past.'
16
When Sartre claims that it is important to 'maintenir
provisoirement l'autonomie de l'idéologie existentielle' [QM: 107] in
relation to Marxism, the Marxism he is referring to is that of his neo-
Stalinist contemporaries, not that of Marx. Nor, as we have seen with
regard to the work of the early Lukâcs, Gramsci, and Lefebvre, is he
referring to that of the most capable classic Marxist theorists. Sartre's
existential Marxism of the Critique is hence at once an original and
contemporary elaboration of certain of the basic claims of Marxist
philosophy and also in some sense a call for a return to Marx.
The later Sartre's greater awareness of the implicit existential
dimension of Marxian historical materialism induces us to question
the extent to which his positions of even the mid 1940s are, in their
existentialist emphasis, distinct from Marxism. If the existential
dimension is fully acknowledged by Marx and other theorists, then it
may be that the basic claims advanced in texts like 'Présentation des
Temps Modernes' and the second part of Matérialisme et révolution,
rather than standing in opposition to Marxism as the polemical debates
of the immediate postwar years suggested, are better understood when
seen as contributing to a debate situated within Marxism, rather than
as being part of a distinct philosophical current.
17
In such a case,
Sartre's emphasis on the existential dimension of reality would consti-
tute the particularity of his philosophy within the Marxist context just
as the particularity of the early Lukâcs' theory, for instance, is the
centrality which it accords to the notion of totality and that of
Gramsci's theory its absolute historicism. This is a matter which our
discussions of subsequent chapters will continue to probe in different
ways.
16 Karl Marx: Selected Writings ed. David McLellan (OUP, 2000) p.300
17 Michael Kelly, in Towards a heuristic method: Sartre and Lefebvre' (Sartre
Studies International Vol.5, No.l, 1999, pp. 5-6), argues that the polemical
tone of the debates between Sartre and the Marxists masked important areas of
common ground. In his L'Existentialisme (1946), for instance, Lefebvre 'was at
pains to point out how close Sartre came to understanding the dialectical
relationship between thought and action' (p.6) in L'Etre et le néant.
73

Continuity in Sartre's Concepts of Freedom and Situation
The development in Sartre's thought between L'Etre et le néant and
his writings of the postwar years on the matter of the crucial question
of the relationship between freedom and situation lies, as we have
seen, at the level of the situation itself which comes to take on the
Marxist characteristics of economic and social circumstances and
conditioning. These modifications to the concept of situation in-
evitably have implications for Sartre's understanding of subjective
freedom, the limitations on which are acknowledged much more fully
in the postwar writings. However, Sartre continues to insist that indi-
viduals' ontological freedom imposes inalienable existential choices
on them, and that they hence cannot be absolved of responsibility for
their actions. This insistence ensures a fundamental coherence and
continuity with the position articulated in L'Etre et le néant.
It was notably with the belated appearance of Sartre's Carnets de
la drôle de guerre in 1983, however, that it became apparent that
any marked separation of early Sartrean from Marxist thought was
excessively schematic, and reductive of both philosophies. Much of
our discussion of the Carnets, which constitute a vital document of
Sartre's intellectual progress during the phoney war period, will be
reserved for chapters III and IV. For the time being, our enquiry will
be limited to the implications of Sartre's reflections in the diaries for
his concepts of freedom and situation.
There is a perceptible progression in the course of the diaries
towards conceiving of subjective situation in a way which clearly
anticipates the synthetic conception of reality and the broadened
conception of situation which surface explicitly in the postwar writ-
ings. There is, for instance, Sartre's account of the abstraction and
rootlessness of his character with reference to the political and
economic developments of modern French history. Sartre had earlier
identified his rootlessness as a symptom of a socially and econom-
ically privileged status, remarking that, by contrast, '[r]ien n'enracine
davantage qu'une âpre et dure situation pécuniaire.' [C: 485] 'Je suis
certainement le produit monstrueux du capitalisme, du parlemen-
74

tarisme, de la centralisation et du fonctionnarisme' [C: 537], reads the
opening sentence of an account which, in its derivation of individual
characteristics from economico-social phenomena, would seem to
draw more heavily on a classic Marxist than an existentialist explana-
tory schema.
From an early stage in the diaries, there is a movement in
Sartre's thinking towards the idea that he must perceive the real nature
of his situation and take full responsibility for himself in it, eventually
culminating in an outright rejection of his own abstraction and root-
lessness: 'Ce que j'ai compris c'est que la liberté n'est pas du tout le
détachement stoïque des amours et des biens. Elle suppose au con-
traire un enracinement profond dans le monde et on est libre par-delà
cet enracinement, c'est par-delà la foule, la nation, la classe, les amis
qu'on est seul.' [C: 538] The conception of situation implied by these
remarks is considerably broader than that which Sartre was to
articulate in L'Etre et le néant. Individual freedom is only genuine and
meaningful, Sartre suggests, when defined in the context of the
collectivity. It is only in circumstances which condition and place con-
straints on the individual consciousness that the subject, understood as
a detotalised totality, as Sartre would later put it, enjoys a freedom that
is not debilitatingly abstract. The conception of the subject implied by
such a view of individual freedom is in fact closer to Marxism than it
is to existentialism, although the final clause of the aforementioned
quotation appears to suggest that Sartre's desire to be rooted in the
world is partly in the interests of better affirming his individuality.
This distances him from communist collectivism, anticipating as it
does his insistence in the postwar theoretical writings that the freedom
of the subject always be safeguarded.
In a later passage, Sartre is critical of his tendency during the
1930s to turn a blind eye to the influence which objective circum-
stances could exert over his freedom: 'cette façon de me réfugier en
haut de la tour, quand le bas en est attaqué, et de regarder de haut en
bas, sans sourciller, avec des yeux tout de même un peu agrandis par
la peur' [C: 576]. It is worth pausing to note the coherence of this
metaphor, and also Sartre's earlier opposition between rootlessness
and rootedness, with the Marxist philosophical world-view, opposing
as it does the abstract or elevated to real objective conditions. The
75

abstraction implied by the tower is suggestive of that of both philo-
sophical idealism and bourgeois social elevation in relation to the
material conditions of possibility which Marx and Engels, in The Ger-
man Ideology, argued that both tendencies denied. Sartre explains that
it was only at the time that he thought he was going mad that he made
the valuable discovery that 'tout pouvait m'arriver à moi\ a feeling
which he sees to be a precious one [C: 576]. He concludes that he
must now definitively shut the door leading up to the tower [C: 580]:
'[M]on réapprentissage doit consister précisément à me sentir "dans le
coup", sans défense.' [C: 577]
What is sketched out in these reflections in the Carnets is the
first tentative formulation of the politicised conception of man later
developed in Sartre's postwar writings and whose closest point of
theoretical reference is the Marxist tradition. If being 'dans le coup' is
of a piece with staying at the base of the tower in heat of the action as
Sartre suggests, then it involves a refusal of abstraction in the interests
of participating fully in the concrete reality of the situation, with all
the genuine limitations on subjective freedom which this implies. In
short, although Sartre's reflections rarely extend as far as in-depth
consideration of economic and social conditioning at this stage, they
nevertheless culminate in an acknowledgement of conditions of
possibility for subjective thought and agency which, in so far as they
are suggestive of the synthetic conception of reality he would later
advocate, points in the direction of the politicised anthropology of
classic Marxism. We will examine more closely in chapter IV the
ways in which the Carnets anticipate Sartre's later engagement with
Marxism.
The continuity between the conclusions which Sartre arrives at in
his war diaries and the position which he advances in his post-war
writings poses the problem of how we are to account for the
contrasting position which is set out in L'Etre et le néant and is
sandwiched chronologically between the two. That is, how are we to
explain the fact that following his return to Paris in April 1941 Sartre
proceeded to set out a conception of subjective freedom in situation
which contrasted so evidently with the position he had formulated
whilst in captivity, only then to return to this earlier position from late
1944 onwards? This difficulty has not been given the attention it
76

merits in the critical literature, appearing to have been largely over-
looked in accounts of early Sartrean thought. The apparent divergence
marked by Sartre's position in L'Etre et le néant can only be
satisfactorily explained, I believe, by insisting on the specificity of the
work as a study in phenomenological ontology. That is, L'Etre et le
néant cannot be taken to treat matters which touch on the social,
political or economic fields in any convincing depth because they are
distant from its focus. Hence, although Sartre includes a discussion of
certain dimensions of the situation in L'Etre et le néant, the views he
expresses should not be taken as representative of his entire concep-
tion of the nature and implications of situations.
It is important to resist the temptation to view L'Etre et le néant
as a work which encompasses all the key aspects of Sartre's philo-
sophical world-view at the time that it was written. L'Etre et le néant
was of course Sartre's most lengthy and in-depth theoretical work to
date when it was published, so it is tempting to imagine that he sought
to present a philosophical system therein which grouped together all
his key theoretical positions. Reading L'Etre et le néant this way,
however, would seem to give credence to the misapprehension that
Sartre lacked an awareness of the political dimension of human free-
dom at the time of its composition. In reality, although Sartre's
knowledge of Marxism remained limited in the early 1940s, he was
already an astute observer of the political dimension of life, as his
literary works reveal. One need only think of the portrayals of such as
Lucien Fleurier in L'Enfance d'un chef and Brunet in Les Chemins de
la liberté. Moreoever, the very fact that Sartre was writing L'Etre et le
néant during a period and in a context - Nazi-occupied Paris - in
which the political dimension of life was very prominent, is sufficient
to dismiss any notion that he could have genuinely believed that all
the situations in which subjective freedom finds itself were limited to
those he sets out in the chapter entitled 'Liberté et Facticité: La
Situation', in the fourth part of his existentialist classic. He, as a
Frenchman, was enduring a situation which was the epitome of
political wrcfreedom and in 1941 he even initiated a resistance group,
'Socialisme et liberté', in response to it.
If L'Etre et le néant is taken for a philosophical system then it is,
as such, undoubtedly an incomplete work. Not only are the political,
77

social and economic dimensions of life absent but, equally impor-
tantly, Sartre's ethical views are misrepresented because presented
entirely one-sidedly. Our discussion in chapters III and IV will ana-
lyse the way in which Sartre, although ostensibly separating ontology
off from ethics in L'Etre et le néant, in fact makes what he sees as our
pre-conversion habitually inauthentic ethical outlook on life a funda-
mental though suppressed premise for his ontological claims. In his
war diaries, the conditions and quest for authenticity had also been a
central preoccupation but were not to resurface explicitly in his writ-
ings until the postwar years. In short, L'Etre et le néant in fact marks
just one stage in Sartre's exposition of his ideas at the time looking
forwards as it does to the account of authentic ethics, now known as
the Cahiers pour une morale, which of course never materialised in
published form during Sartre's lifetime.
It is for these reasons that an accurate account of the develop-
ment of Sartre's thinking between 1940 and the Liberation must at one
and the same time take full account of the theses advanced in L'Etre
et le néant and look beyond them. If L'Etre et le néant is taken as
largely representative of Sartre's global position in the early 1940s,
our understanding of his social, political, ethical and historical aware-
ness will inevitably be distorted. It would not be until the postwar
period that Sartre would begin to address these areas in his published
writings, but an accurate assessment of his thinking during the war
years must acknowledge not only his interest in such questions but
also the fact that some of the theoretical positions which he was to
adopt and develop after the Liberation were already established in his
thinking at the time. The tendency to see L'Etre et le néant as repre-
sentative of Sartre's thinking in the early 1940s long encouraged the
misapprehension that his progression towards a proto-Marxist position
in the mid 1940s took place in the short time separating L'Etre et le
néant and the Liberation. In reality, this progression is better under-
stood as a more gradual process of development between 1940 and
1945.
78

Sartre's Stance with Regard to Idealist Abstraction
It will be evident from the above that the early Sartre was hostile to
modes of thought which were detached from the concrete reality of
man's existence in the world. This hostility highlights a basic area of
common ground with Marx for whom, notably in his early writings,
the refusal of idealist abstraction had been a fundamental premise.
However, Sartre rejects idealism not to embrace materialism but rather
in the name of a conception of concrete reality inspired by phe-
nomenology. His war diaries reveal an implicit questioning of the
phenomenological brand of philosophical realism, Marxist concepts
entering Sartre's discourse and problematising his pre-war world-
view. It would only be in the postwar years, however, that Sartre's
published theoretical works would convey this development in his
thinking. Prior to the Liberation, Sartre's published theoretical writ-
ings essentially remained faithful to the conception of philosophical
realism which he had first formulated in La Transcendance de I 'ego
when he rejected the Husserlian transcendental ego, insisting that the
ego was transcendent and only consciousness was transcendental.
There are a number of further points I would like to clarify in this
regard, in view of the centrality of Sartre's conception of the real both
to his conception of subjective freedom in situation and to the possi-
bility of his advancing meaningful positions with respect to ethics and
politics. These latter areas will constitute our principal focus in Part
Two.
It might be objected that it is inappropriate to discuss early
Sartrean thought in terms of an opposition between abstraction and
realism as I do here. Sartre declared a desire to avoid both idealism
and materialism [TE: 85-6, EN: 31], so the objection might run, and
his theoretical positions should hence not be situated on this sort of
vertical axis. It is Marx's philosophical world-view - his rejection of
Hegelian idealism in the name of materialism - which emphasises the
vertical axis, not Sartre's. This objection is a well-founded one,
although I nevertheless believe it important to consider Sartre's
thought in the light of the traditional idealism/materialism opposition
79

all the same. As LaCapra reminds us,
18
certain early Sartrean formu-
lations - his references to the freedom of consciousness being of a
transcendental nature, for example - misleadingly suggest the abstrac-
tion of idealism. An accurate understanding of Sartre's claims hence
requires a reappraisal of their implications. Commentators such as
Simont
19
and notably Levy
20
have rightly suggested that the early
Sartre of even the pre-war years in reality tended more towards
materialism than idealism because of his fascination with the external
objects of perception. In short, Sartre's stance with regard to idealist
abstraction is not always what it seems.
L'Imaginaire, although published in 1940, was written in 1935-6
and is hence a work that is contemporaneous with La Transcendance
de Vego. In these works Sartre appears more sympathetic towards
philosophical abstraction than he would at any subsequent point in his
career. In La Transcendance de l'ego, Sartre's use of the term
'transcendental' to describe consciousness' inassimilability to the ego
suggests that it in some sense 'rises above' the ego. This suggestion is
confirmed in L'Imaginaire in which the ability of consciousness to
imagine is presented as constitutive of its freedom in relation to the
real:
Lorsque l'imaginaire n'est pas posé [...] le dépassement et la néantisation de
l'existant sont enlisés dans l'existant [...] l'homme est écrasé dans le monde,
transpercé par le réel [...][/: 359]
Sartre's references, here as elsewhere in L'Imaginaire, to the
'dépassement' and 'néantisation' of the world seem to suggest that a
process of abstraction from the real is vital to imagining and to the
freedom of consciousness. However, the formulations Sartre employs
are somewhat misleading, his endorsement of abstraction from the real
not being as unqualified as his terminology suggests. When he claims,
for example, that 'l'objet en image est un irréel' [/: 240] he does not
mean to imply that imagining involves literally denying the physical
reality of the object. He rather seeks to distinguish imagining the
18 LaCapra op.cit. pp. 48-9.
19 Simont op.cit. pp . 17-20.
20 Bernard-Henri Levy Le Siècle de Sartre (Grasset, 2000) pp. 222 -228.
80

object in its absence from actually perceiving it directly. There is,
he says, a '"pauvreté essentielle" des objets en image' [/: 284].
The image I have of Anny in her absence is less detailed than my
perception of her when she was present, and as time goes on it
increasingly fades [/: 278]. For Sartre imagining, then, implies the
unreal by contrast with perceiving which involves the real. It does not
necessarily or intrinsically involve a vertical movement towards ab-
straction as such.
Sartre's attitude with regard to philosophical abstractions re-
mained ambivalent in the latter years of the 1930s. On the one hand,
La Nausée closes with Roquentin seeking an escape from the con-
tingency of the world through writing a fictional work which he would
like to be to be 'au-dessus de l'existence' [TV: 249]. And in his short
stories La Chambre and Erostrate Sartre also strongly evokes the
imaginary as a means of escaping the real. Yet, Sartre's position is in
fact considerably more complex than it appears in this regard. The
story Roquentin plans to write apparently symbolises a flight into the
imaginary and yet he claims that it should be 'belle et dure comme de
l'acier' [N: 250]. This statement of intention, synthesising as it does
the aesthetic with brute facticity, is too striking to be passed over as
insignificant. Of greater consequence, however, is Sartre's subtle but
increasingly confident engagement with social critique in works like
La Nausée and L'Enfance d'un chef. His scathing portrayals of the
bourgeoisie and of far right anti-Semitists in these works respectively
reveal a keen awareness of important socio-political issues of the late
1930s. As such, they implicitly challenge the idea that the literary text,
as imaginary work and aesthetic object, should not be concerned with
real-world issues of a political and ethical nature. We will return to
this matter in subsequent chapters.
Even from as early as the mid 1930s, Sartre hence does not tend
towards idealist abstraction to anything like the degree that his formu-
lations suggest. What happens as his thought develops, however, is
that he becomes increasingly explicit in his criticisms of idealist-
tending abstractions. This tendency becomes particularly prominent in
the postwar years of course, and notably in the Cahiers and Qu 'est-ce
que la littérature?, but had also been an increasingly important theme
in the Carnets of 1940, as we have seen. I will demonstrate in chapter
81

Ill that from as early as La Nausée certain of his representations of
inauthenticity are clearly associated with abstraction from the real.
Indeed, in this work as well as in L'Enfance d'un chef, Sartre's hostil-
ity to idealist abstraction is linked with social critique. In particular, it
is integral to his numerous negative representations of the bourgeoisie,
who are typically characterised as inauthentic, and also to his portray-
al of the liberal democratic conception of political rights.
I think it important to stress, however, that my claim that Sartre's
critical attitude towards idealist abstraction becomes increasingly
apparent is not tantamount to saying that his position hence takes a
materialist turn in the strict philosophical sense of the term 'material-
ist'. Towards the end of the Carnets, for instance, he is highly critical
of the abstraction of his pre-war bourgeois condition and sees the need
to be more rooted, but nevertheless does not want to become 'sérieux',
the concept in this instance designating the desire for material
substantiality [C: 580]. Similarly, when he concludes in the same text,
as we shall see in chapter IV, that authenticity requires the unity of
principles and practical conduct, no 'downward' movement is implied
towards the materialist concrete (nor, it should be noted, had such a
'downward' movement been indispensable to the Marxist insistence
on the unity of theory and practice: in the 'Theses on Feuerbach',
Marx criticised the inertia of 'contemplative materialism' insisting
that concrete reality was better understood as constituted by human
agency). Indeed, the Sartre of Matérialisme et révolution (1946)
would remain as critical of the doctrine of philosophical materialism
as he had been at the time of La Transcendance de l'ego (1936). But
by 1946 his hostility to idealist abstractions would involve the belief
that man should be conceived of as a synthetic totality, and that there
was the need for a proletarian-led revolution. Sartre was to pursue
further his attack on idealist abstraction in the Cahiers and in Qu 'est-
ce que la littérature? The Marxian tone of the anti-idealist arguments
articulated in the latter work in particular is very noticeable. In the
Cahiers, he rejects the 'universel abstrait' in the name of 'l'universel
concret',
21
and describes his ethics of authenticity as a 'morale
concrète' [CM: 111].
21 Cahiers pour une morale p. 14 (Gallimard, 1983) (hereafter CM).
82

Part Two:
From Ontology and Ethics
to Politics and History

Introduction
Sartre never published an ethical treatise, but ethical preoccupations
underpinned not only his several attempts to formulate a formal ethics
but also many other central areas of his thought. In a manner to some
extent reminiscent of the Marxist intellectual tradition, the ethical
problematic in Sartre's works, whilst vital, long remained implicit.
The posthumous publication of his Cahiers pour une morale, as well
as the Carnets de la drôle de guerre and the Lettres au Castor which
preceded them, served to illuminate this area which, although clearly
perceptible in Sartre's works of the 1930s and 1940s,
1
had by and
large lacked explicit articulation. Fabrizio Scanzio rightly points out
the need to distinguish between Sartre's reflections on ethics and
Sartrean ethics proper. The latter, Scanzio argues, is the ethics of
authenticity announced in L'Etre et le néant and undertaken but never
completed in the immediate postwar years. Although the site of
Sartre's formal ethical enquiries, this ethics, to be found today in the
Cahiers pour une morale, should be seen only as existing in close
relation to reflections on ethical matters which are present throughout
Sartre's oeuvre.
2
The value of Scanzio's interpretative distinction is
that it facilitates a better understanding of the ethical drive which can
be clearly perceived in many of Sartre's works even when they do not
explicitly address questions which have traditionally been seen as the
province of 'ethics'. It hence becomes possible to identify the ethical
implications not just of Sartre's famous awakening to the politics of
ideas and to politics proper in his published works of the postwar
years but also, and less obviously, the ethical perspectives which
1
Francis Jeanson's study of Sartre's early work, Le Problème moral dans la
pensée de Sartre (Editions du Seuil, 1965), was the first to perceive the central-
ity of ethical questions to the author's ostensibly ontological and aesthetic
centres of interest.
2
Maurizio Scanzio, Sartre et la morale (Naples : Vivarium, 2000) pp. 14 -15.
85

accompany the positions he advances with respect to aesthetic matters
and even ontology.
The early Sartre's ethical convictions developed in parallel to,
and in association with, his aesthetic and ontological positions.
Indeed, he described one of his numerous early 'morales' as a 'morale
esthétique' [C: 286] and in the closing paragraph of La Transcendance
deI
y
ego he argued, as he would do later in the final chapter of L'Etre
et le néant, that ethical prescriptions could be derived from his
ontological account of the relationship between consciousness and
world [TE: 87]. Beauvoir recounts that it was in the early 1930s that
Sartre first elaborated his concept of bad faith [FA: 149], which
indicates that he had formulated an early version of his concept of
authenticity prior to encountering the ideas of Heidegger.
Sartre's preoccupation with authenticity was subsequently to
become the central focus of his ethical thought. In Part Two, I will
chart the progression in Sartre's writings from fictional repre-
sentations and theoretical descriptions of what he sees as our habitual
inauthentic condition to an integrally authentic type of conduct with
both ethical and political implications. In my account of Sartre's
concept of inauthenticity in chapter III, I emphasise the fact that the
ethical impulse was so central to his thought that the scope of
inauthenticity is ultimately broad enough to underpin the ontology of
L'Etre et le néant almost in its entirety. Sartre later referred to L'Etre
et le néant as an 'eidétique de la mauvaise foi',
3
his phenomenologico-
ontological account of the human condition being a description of man
in his inauthentic state prior to conversion. I also argue, identifying a
point of overlap between ethics, ontology and political thought earlier
than is commonly acknowledged in the critical literature, that Sartre's
concept of inauthenticity can be seen, in some of its manifestations, as
a bridge area with the Marxist concept of 'ideology in the pejorative
sense', as Raymond Geuss terms it.
4
This discussion is followed in
chapter IV by an account of Sartre's progression towards an ethics of
authenticity notably during his time as a military conscript in the
3 'Merleau-Ponty Vivant' in Situations IV p. 196
4
In The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1981) (pp. 12 -
22), Geuss offers a detailed discussion of this phenomenon.
86

phoney war period and, in chapter V, by an analysis of his developing
concept of commitment from this time through to Matérialisme et
révolution (1946). Chapter VI focuses on Sartre's nascent dialectical
theory of history, and in chapter VII I argue that Sartre's attempts to
formulate an ethics in the postwar years, and in the Cahiers pour une
morale in particular, are best understood when taken in conjunction
with his increasing involvement with left-wing political thought and
the Marxist conception of morality founded on the historical dialectic.
On many interlinking levels, the transition in Sartre's thought
between accounting for man's inauthentic condition and outlining an
alternative, ethically defensible type of conduct is of a piece with his
increasingly explicit political commitment to the struggle for social-
ism. The rejection of man's desire for a fixed identity, or 'being', in
favour of an emphasis on 'doing' develops in conjunction with an
acknowledgement of the importance of active participation in the
political struggle. The movement towards an ethics of reciprocity
develops in parallel with recognising the value of intersubjective soli-
darity. And the progression towards an explicit politicisation of the
concept of 'engagement', most famously with respect to writing and
aesthetics in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, clearly echoes certain
tendencies in Marxist political and aesthetic theorising. Moreover, I
shall argue that these developments are accompanied by a progression
in Sartre's thinking towards endorsing a positive conception of ideol-
ogy reminiscent of the idea of proletarian class consciousness to be
found notably in the Leninist-inspired work of the early Lukâcs.
Around 1946, in addition to explicit references to the Marxist concept
of dominant ideology, Sartre starts to employ the term 'ideology' in
such a way as to suggest that it is a weapon in the struggle for political
emancipation. A more general use of the term which roughly corres-
ponds to the idea of a world-view or outlook, and which is reminiscent
of the neutral sense of ideology to be found in the work of Gramsci, is
also perceptible in Sartre's writings of this period.
Overall, in my argument of Part Two, I seek to illuminate a
political trajectory which can be traced through Sartre's developing
ethical and ontological positions from the 1930s through to the late
1940s. Whilst the latter part of this journey, namely that of Sartre's
ethics of authenticity and his growing emphasis on commitment, has a
87

perceptibly political dimension, it is preceded by ethical and onto-
logical positions which are less obviously expressive of a political
stance. These positions, however, when examined in their situational
representations in Sartre's fiction in addition to their theoretical
formulations, are also harmonious with a left political vision. Indeed,
the progression in Sartre's thought from inauthentic, alienated ethics
to an ethics of authenticity and socialist commitment can be seen as
loosely reminiscent of the passage from the alienated life of pre-
socialist society to socialism famously envisaged by Marx. There is a
clear correspondence between Sartre's ethical ideal of authenticity and
the political ideal of socialism, and there is also a coherence between
the habitually inauthentic condition of man charted by Sartre notably
in works up to and including L'Etre et le néant and the alienated, frac-
tured life of man in society prior to the advent of socialism against
which Marx's writings were directed.
88

III. Inauthenticity and Ideology
Sartre's Concept of Inauthenticity
Amongst the writings of the early Sartre, the Carnets de la drôle de
guerre offer the most revealing and sustained discussions of the
Heideggerian-influenced concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity,
which form the backbone of his ethical world-view. The war diaries
are most profitably read in conjunction with the Lettres au Castor,
written during the same period, which comment on their content and
provide supplementary information aiding their interpretation. Most
importantly, whereas the starting point for the surviving diaries is 12
November 1939, the letters allow us to follow Sartre's experiences
right through his time as a military conscript starting in September
1939 and thus provide details about the developments in his thinking
that had taken place since the beginning of the phoney war.
Many of Sartre's initial reflections on inauthenticity in his letters
and war diaries are to be found in the analyses of his fellow conscripts
which he offers. His remark that amongst the soldiers '[i]l règne une
camaraderie courtoise, serviable, et superficielle qui s'adresse indis-
tinctement à l'homme, créature interchangeable'
1
is reminiscent of his
negative portrayal of the inauthentic humanism of the Autodidact in
La Nausée who favours the generality of the concept of man over
recognising the particularity of individual subjects. Setting aside the
'léger sentiment de supériorité' in himself of which he is critical [LC
I: 302], Sartre's attitude towards the soldiers in his entourage is
characterised principally by his assessment of their ethical outlook on
the world. Sartre's observation of and discussions with fellow con-
script Pieter, in particular, prove to be notably revealing of his concep-
tion of inauthenticity. At an early stage, Sartre informs Beauvoir that
1 Lettres au Castor I p.216 (hereafter LC /).
89

he feels 'un peu de sympathie pour le "matérialiste" [...] Pieter' [LCI:
287] which he does not feel for the others, in spite of the fact that
Pieter is the incarnation of the Heideggerian "das Man" [LC I: 282].
Sartre describes Pieter as 'hardi, optimiste, débrouillard' [LC I: 286],
personality traits which clearly resemble his own. What Pieter has in
common with Sartre, unlike the others, is a lucidity about his own
ethical outlook on the world. It is this lucidity, coupled with the
thorough coherence of his inauthenticity, which makes him an inter-
esting case for Sartre, who will do intellectual battle with him on
ethical questions over many months, sometimes openly but more
commonly in his letters and diaries. Ultimately, it is an open dispute
with Pieter on 13th November 1939 which will ignite what Sartre
would subsequently refer to as 'cette drôle de crise d'où, au fond, est
sortie ma théorie de l'authenticité'. [LC IL 131] We will examine the
progression in Sartre's thinking towards this ethics of authenticity, and
the catalytic role played by the dispute with Pieter, in chapter IV.
In one of his earliest remarks about Pieter, Sartre comments that
'on n'imagine pas qu'il ait pu, une seconde dans sa vie, être touché
par l'existentiel' [LC L 282]. In view of the centrality which Sartre
accords to the existential present, from which derive his insistence on
making self-defining choices and taking full responsibility for them, it
is clear from the outset that he has detected characteristics in Pieter
entirely at odds with his own world-view. Indeed, Sartre's subsequent
observations about Pieter corroborate his initial suspicions, Pieter
proving to be 'le plus beau spécimen du rationalisme inauthentique,
très exactement du "o«" heideggerien.' [C: 193] This inauthenticity
manifests itself in Pieter's repeated attempts to assimilate the particu-
lar characteristics of individuals to general types and antecedently
existing social categories [C: 194-5]. Pieter subscribes implicitly to a
naturalistic conception of man, explaining individuals' thoughts and
actions in terms of a supposed natural temperament which, in turn, he
assimilates to social categories [C: 194]. On Pieter's view, Sartre
continues, these social categories themselves derive from Tinter-
section de la nature héritée et de l'activité professionnelle' [C: 194].
From this ineptly conceived synthesis of naturalism and sociologism
Pieter proceeds directly to what Sartre terms 'la morale de l'intérêt',
the assumption being that following one's natural temperament will
90

involve seeking to serve one's own interests [C: 194]. Moreover,
Pieter's rhetorical strategies are geared to satisfying his desire to 'jouir
le plus longtemps possible de l'accord de son esprit avec lui-même'
[C: 193], a tendency which is at odds with Sartre's characteristic lack
of solidarity with himself.
On all these different levels, Pieter's outlook is one which
denies the subject genuine autonomy of thought and the capacity for
individuality. It hence conflicts with the central tenets of Sartre's
world-view. Sartre's brief account of Pieter's faith in legal rights is
consistent with this outlook:
Il se considère [...] comme sujet de droit. Mais il s'agit de droits sociaux, c'est
dans une société donnée et le code à la main qu'il entend user de ses droits - et
tout juste ceux que le code lui accorde. Il n'imaginerait pas d'en rêver d'autres
[...] [C: 195]
For Pieter, the subject's possibilities for action are hence exactly
coextensive with the rights conferred upon him by a system of law
which not only pre-exists him but which he would not dream of trying
to alter. Sartre, by contrast, dislikes appeals to legal rights for the
purposes of self-justification, considering the attempt to fall back on
them a manifestation of the 'sérieux'. We will discuss this concept
shortly.
Sartre's critique of Pieter's faith in legal rights had been
anticipated in the closing pages of L'Enfance d'un chef by his
characterisation of the young bourgeois Lucien Fleurier's new-found
self-assurance . Lucien's 'J'existe [...] parce que j'ai le droit d'exist-
er'
2
is an attempt to dispense with existential uncertainty by
subordinating subjective freedom in the existential present to the
notion of a pre-existing right. In this work, the inauthenticity of a
reliance on rights is directly linked with the 'sérieux' of the bour-
geoisie. Moreover, Sartre explicitly politicises this theme by showing
how the legitimacy which the bourgeois imagine are conferred on
them by rights, and by the social roles they inhabit, act as crucial
supports to the maintenance of a position of dominance in relation to
the working class: 'Des générations d'ouvriers pourraient [...] obéir
2 L'Enfance d'un chef in Le Mur pp. 243-4 (hereafter EC).
91

scrupuleusement aux ordres de Lucien, ils n'épuiseraient jamais son
droit à commander' [EC: 243], reads a concluding passage. Sartre
hence shows how the bad faith and social status of the bourgeoisie
protected by the rule of law, and the maintenance of an oppressive
social structure go hand in hand with each other.
Sartre notes with surprise the day after his dispute with Pieter
that
4
[c]e qui me frappe c'est que son inauthenticité est sans aucun
trou, à la différence de celle de la plupart des gens. C'est un système
du monde cohérent et sans failles. C'est là que se pose le mieux la
question du Castor: « Mais si l'inauthenticité est cohérente, qu'est-ce
qui prouve qu'elle vaut moins que l'authentique ? »' [C: 196]. Sartre
proposes no answer to this question and the likelihood is that he feels
both challenged and genuinely perplexed at this time by the problem
of an inauthentic world-view which is entirely coherent. Yet, Sartre's
apparent disorientation on this issue is belied by his own fictional
writing of the period as we have seen: Lucien's inauthenticity at the
end of L'Enfance d'un chef is also coherent but, in so far as it
involves justifying his socially elevated position by appealing to
rights laid down by bourgeois law, it contributes to the maintenance
of an unjust social structure. In short, the political content of Sartre's
text has strong implications for his ethical thought: the coherence of
Lucien's inauthenticity takes nothing away from the fact that his
social position is morally reprehensible because it contributes to the
oppression of the freedom of others.
In so far as Pieter's bad faith, like that of Lucien, involves an
unquestioning acceptance of legal rights as a guide to and justification
for ethical conduct, he is implicated in an ongoing process of legitima-
tion of the liberal order. By the time of the Cahiers pour une morale
Sartre would present legal rights as essential supports to an oppressive
liberal political structure:
Le droit est [...] dans une société d'oppression l'exigence que les oppresseurs
formulent vis-à -vis des opprimés
3
Le droit du libéralisme est [...] la mystification dans sa forme la plus pure.
[CM: 153]
3 Cahiers pour une morale p. 15 2 (hereafter: CM).
92

In such statements, Sartre's stance on rights is clearly aligned to the
Marxist position. Marx, in his article of 1843 entitled On the Jewish
Question, questioned the extent to which the rights of man, as
formulated in 1791 following the French Revolution, accorded real
freedom to individuals. '[T]he so-called rights of man [...] are quite
simply the rights of the member of civil society, ie. of egoistic man, of
man separated from other men and from the community',
4
Marx
argued. 'Liberty', according to this conception of rights, 'is [...] the
right to do and perform everything which does not harm others [...].
The liberty we are dealing with is that of man as an isolated monad
who is withdrawn into himself.'
5
For Marx, such a conception of
rights takes the bourgeois citizen for a model and is limited to the
protection of his interests. It fails to take into account the economic
conditions which are necessary for such a bourgeois citizen to exist,
and hence also ignores the real circumstances of most people in
society who are involved in the process of economic production.
Understanding real freedom requires taking man's economico-social
context as the starting point for political reflection:
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as
an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his
individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized
and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no
longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human
emancipation be completed.
6
In the 'Présentation des Temps Modernes' Sartre also explictly criti-
cises the conception of rights which was to become a pillar of political
liberalism in the nineteenth century. In the following passage he in-
advertently echoes Marx's claims, although with the particularity that
he links bourgeois thought to the 'esprit d'analyse':
Ces principes [i.e . analytical thinking] ont présidé à la Déclaration des Droits de
l'Homme. Dans la société que conçoit l'esprit d'analyse, l'individu, particule
4 Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Karl Marx Early Writings p.229
5
Ibidp.229
6
Ibidp.234
93

solide et indécomposable [...] est tout rond, fermé sur soi, incommunicable.
[P: 18]
Sartre's postwar Marxian rejection of the liberal conception of rights
had first been suggestively although inchoately formulated years
earlier in L'Enfance d'un chef and had made an initial appearance in
his theoretical writings in the passages devoted to Pieter in the Carnets.
In L'Enfance d'un chef the politics of the text are veiled, however, by
Sartre's pervasive use of irony. We will discuss the nature and func-
tion of irony in Sartre's pre-war literary writings in chapter VIII. In
the context of the present discussion, it suffices to remark that the
literary dimension of a work such as L'Enfance d'un chef complicates
the identification of the text's ideological content, although without in
any sense nullifying that ideological content.
It is in July 1940, only a few weeks after being made a prisoner
of war, that Sartre announces in a letter to Beauvoir that he has started
writing L'Etre et le néant [L IL 286]. The writing of this work marks a
turning point in Sartre's development because, as Scanzio points out,
7
it is only from the time of his conceiving L'Etre et le néant that ethics
and ontology would ostensibly take separate paths in his thought and
that ontology, at least in his published output, came to enjoy pre-
eminence in relation to ethics. In reality, the status of the ontology set
out in L'Etre et le néant was to remain ambiguous with respect to
ethics. On the one hand, Sartre suggests that it is not possible to dis-
cuss ethics in the context of an ontological account of man. There is,
for example, the well known footnote in which Sartre refers to 'la
possibilité d'une morale de la délivrance et du salut. Mais celle-ci doit
être atteinte au terme d'une conversion radicale dont nous ne pouvons
parler ici.' [EN: 463] Moreover, Sartre entitles the final, brief chapter
of L'Etre et le néant 'Perspectives morales' thereby suggesting that
the ontological account he has given points in the direction of a future
ethics for which it is only the foundation. 'L'ontologie,' this closing
chapter begins, 'ne saurait formuler elle-même des prescriptions mor-
ales. Elle s'occupe uniquement de ce qui est, et il n'est pas possible de
tirer des impératifs de ces indicatifs. Elle laisse entrevoir ce que sera
7
Scanzio op.cit. p. 102
94

une éthique qui prendra ses responsabilités en face d'une réalité
humaine en situation' [EN: 690] On the other hand, Scanzio's distinc-
tion between Sartrean ethics proper and the reflections on ethics which
are to be found throughout Sartre's writings makes it possible to
acknowledge fully the extent to which the ontology of L'Etre et le
néant, whilst being preparatory to Sartre's planned ethical treatise, is
itself saturated with ethical presuppositions.
8
Sartre's ontological
claims are intended as a description of man's habitual condition
which, in Sartre's view, is an inauthentic one. Sartre makes it clear
that although he does not intend to discuss in this work the possibility
of reaching a more authentic condition, authenticity nevertheless re-
mains the ultimate ethical ideal for man, despite the difficulty of its
attainment. The well-known footnote at the close of the first part of
the work evokes the possibility of a radical departure from bad faith,
'[m]ais cela suppose une reprise de l'être pourri par lui-même que
nous nommerons authenticité' [EN: 107]. A clearly perceptible ethical
axis can hence be identified in Sartre's thought extending from L'Etre
et le néant to the attempt to formulate an ethics of authenticity in
Cahiers, the relationship between the two works not simply being that
of ontology to ethics. When Sartre claims to be reserving discussion of
ethics for a later work [EN: 692], it is in reality only the positive ethics
of authenticity and reciprocity which he is temporarily putting to one
side, the negative ethical vision taking its full part in the ontology
itself.
The habitually inauthentic condition of man, as Sartre conceives
of it, manifests itself in a number of different ways, each being part
of an attempt to evade the basic futility of our existence as unavoid-
ably free beings in a contingent world of facticity. The most central
aspect of man's inauthentic condition is his desire to give himself a
foundation in the world: 'l'apparition du pour-soi [...] renvoie bien à
l'effort d'un en-soi pour se fonder: il correspond à une tentative de
l'être pour lever la contingence de son être' [EN: 122]. At its most
8 Gérard Wormser, in 'L'Etre et le néant et la phénoménologie des valeurs',
included in Sartre et la phénoménologie éd. Jean-Marc Mouille p.312, notes:
'L'éthique sartrienne ne rompt pas avec les orientations de sa recherche
phénoménologique, qu'il est impossible de séparer de la morale.'
95

basic ontological level, this manifests itself in consciousness' desire
to be self-identical. Sartre refers to Ten-soi-pour-soi, c'est-à -dire
l'idéal d'une conscience qui serait fondement de son propre être-en -
soi par la pure conscience qu'elle prendrait d'elle-même.' In other
words, Sartre concludes, i'homme est fondamentalement désir d'être
Dieu.' [EN: 626] Man's project to be God involves his attempting to
find stability and identity in an already existing self, concomitant with
which are his identification with existing value-systems and social
roles, and his attempts to gain psychological ascendancy over others
who, like himself, also seek to be God.
Sartre's concept of the 'sérieux' is a close relative of the project
to be God. 'Il y a sérieux, en somme', Sartre had noted in his
war diaries, 'quand on part du monde et quand on attribue plus de
réalité au monde qu'à soi - ou, à tout le moins, quand on se confère
une réalité dans la mesure où on appartient au monde.' [C : 578] The
account of the 'sérieux' included in L'Etre et le néant [EN: 640-1]
reiterates this definition, Sartre adding that '[i]l va de soi que l'homme
sérieux enfouit au fond de lui-même la conscience de sa liberté, il est
de mauvaise foi
9
[EN: 641]. Sartre's hostility to the 'sérieux' is
directed at those, such as the bourgeoisie notably, who think that their
material situation justifies their existence, and at those left political
revolutionaries who derive their conduct from a reductively materialist
conception of the world [C: 577-9]. It is also directed at those
who fall back on pre-existing values and roles. Another dimension of
Pieter's integral inauthenticity which Sartre remarks upon is his in-
ability to distinguish value from fact. Pieter takes the values he holds
for things with objective existence rather than recognising the work of
consciousness in creating these values. He consequently defends lazy,
habitually inauthentic forms of conduct rather than recognising that,
although commonly practised, they are ethically questionable. 'Si on
lui parle de la valeur d'une union libre,' Sartre notes, 'il répond en
disant: « Toutes celles que je connais ont fini par un mariage ou ont
tourné au collage. »' [C: 195] Pieter, then, only recognises values in
so far as they are borne out by normative social practices, whereas it is
precisely the gap between the inauthentic nature of an unreasoning
fidelity to such conventional practices on the one hand, and the ethical
96

ideal of authenticity on the other, which Sartre wishes to emphasise by
insisting on the distinction between facts and values.
In the famous example of the inauthentic waiter presented in
L'Etre et le néant, Sartre offers an illustration of his conviction that
individuals' over-identification with roles involves a similar reliance
on convention in the interests of evading subjective freedom. The
waiter who 'joue à être garçon de café' [EN: 95] seeks an 'être-en -soi
du garçon de café' [EN: 96], that is a foundation in the world through
a full identification with his role. It is worth noting, however, that in
contrast to Sartre's definition of the 'sérieux' in the Carnets which
presents it as tending towards the inert substantiality of the material,
this case of inauthentic conduct tends conversely towards abstraction.
Sartre points out that the waiter knows that the role of waiter in which
he invests himself consists of both obligations and rights. These con-
cepts, however, 'renvoient au transcendant. Il s'agit de possibilités
abstraites, de droits et de devoirs conférés a un « sujet de droit ».' It is
this possessor of a right which the waiter thinks he must be but is not,
and he attempts to make the leap by imitating the gestures of waiters
and 'en [s]e visant comme garçon de gafé imaginaire à travers ces
gestes pris comme « analogon ».' [EN : 96]
The tendency towards abstraction is a dimension of Sartre's
concept of bad faith in certain of its manifestations. Bad faith, Sartre
argues, involves lying to oneself in order to mask from oneself an
unpleasant truth [EN: 84] and is described by Sartre as an attitude
which is 'essentielle à la réalité humaine' [EN: 83]. In the famous
example he gives of the coquettish young woman, Sartre describes an
individual who persists in deluding herself that her suitor's intentions
are not of a sexual nature, even though she is actually aware that they
are. She maintains her state of delusion in two principal ways. First,
she 'purifie le désir de ce qu'il a d'humiliant, en n'en voulant con-
sidérer que la pure transcendance qui lui évite même de le nommer.'
[EN: 93] That is, she only recognises the sexual nature of her suitor's
intentions 'dans la mesure où [le désir] se transcende vers l'admir-
ation, l'estime, le respect' [EN: 91]. The situation starts to become
problematic for her, however, when the suitor takes her hand: 'On sait
ce qui se produit alors: la jeune femme abandonne sa main, mais ne
s'aperçoit pas qu'elle l'abandonne. Elle ne s'aperçoit pas parce qu'il
97

se trouve par hasard qu'elle est, à ce moment, tout esprit. Elle entraîne
son interlocuteur jusqu'aux régions les plus élevées de la spéculation
sentimentale [...] . Et pendant ce temps, le divorce du corps et de
l'âme est accompli' [EN: 91-2]. It is also via a movement towards
transcendence, or abstraction, that the woman is able to ignore the
immediate significance of her suitor's physical gesture, because she
'se réalise comme n'étant pas son propre corps' [EN: 92]. This
tendency towards transcendence in bad faith also manifests itself as a
crucial support to the 'sérieux' of Mathieu's bourgeois brother Jac-
ques in L 'Age de raison. When Mathieu asks him for money because
Marcelle is pregnant, Jacques' apparent inability to intuit that the
money is to be used for an abortion is presented as an instance of bad
faith:
Mathieu rougit de colère: comme toujours, Jacques refusait d'envisager
honnêtement la situation, il tournait obstinément autour d'elle et pendant ce
temps-là, son esprit s'évertuait à trouver un nid d'aigle d'où il pût prendre des
vues plongeantes sur la conduite des autres. Quoi qu'on lui dît, quoi qu'on fît,
son premier mouvement était pour s'élever au-dessus du débat, il ne pouvait
rien voir que d'en haut, il avait la passion des nids d'aigle. [AR: 128]
In this example, Jacques wilfully abstracts from the concrete reality of
the situation in order to postpone the moment of acknowledging the
real reason for Mathieu's request. It is also by this process of abstrac-
tion that Jacques attempts to gain the psychological upper hand over
Mathieu, both as a point-scoring manoeuvre in their tense and com-
petitive relationship and also in the interests of reaffirming his social
standing as a bourgeois lawyer.
Such examples of inauthenticity involving a movement towards
abstraction are not representative of all the cases of inauthentic con-
duct which Sartre's texts present. As we have seen, Sartre also
conceives of the 'sérieux', in particular, as conversely involving a
desire for the substantiality of the material. The tendency towards
abstraction is nevertheless an important dimension of many instances
of inauthenticity in Sartre's writings. We have seen that it is Pieter's
'rationalisme inauthentique' [C: 22 my italics] which Sartre seeks to
understand and that, like Marx, Sartre considers a reliance on legal
rights to involve a movement towards abstraction from the real. For
98

Lucien in L'Enfance d'un chef, rights are 'par-delà l'existence, comme
les objets mathématiques' and '[q]uelque chose dans le genre des
triangles et des cercles: c'était si parfait que ça n'existait pas' [EC:
243]. Our identification of the relationship between inauthenticity and
abstraction in early Sartrean thought is significant because, as will
become apparent shortly, it constitutes an important bridge area with
the classic Marxist concept of ideology.
9
Prior to the Liberation,
Sartre's writings do not contain any explicit references to ideology in
the sense meant by Marxists when they refer to dominant ideologies.
Certain of Sartre's literary texts offer representations of relations of
socio-political dominance and oppression, but the absence of refer-
ences to ideology in his theoretical writings means that these repre-
sentations have to be read, initially at least, as exemplifications of his
ethical concept of inauthenticity.
As my argument of the next subsection will show, our
recognition that Sartre's concept of inauthenticity involves a move-
ment not simply towards substantiality but also, in other cases,
towards abstraction allows for a broader and richer understanding of
the early Sartre's writings, and notably of their political content and
implications. However, the identification of these tendencies, i.e.
towards abstraction or towards substantiality, involves situating
Sartre's concept of inauthenticity on the vertical axis of the traditional
idealism/materialism antinomy. My reading of Sartre's concept of
inauthenticity will involve the claim that an accurate and fuller under-
standing of its appearances in Sartre's texts must also situate it on the
horizontal axis of temporality. In the case of certain textual examples,
it is clear that inauthenticity for Sartre is ultimately as much about the
subjective consciousness's refusal to face up to the responsibility im-
posed by the temporal present as it is about its desire for substantiality
or elevation. Consciousness's constant attempts to give itself a
foundation in the world involve, at the level of ontology, trying to
identify with a past self, namely its being, in which it seeks a fixed
and stable identity. And consciousness's attempts to identify with pre-
9 It goes without saying that not all cases of inauthenticity portrayed in Sartre's
works, however, lend themselves to comparison with the concept of ideology in
the pejorative sense, only those which have a socio-political dimension.
99

existing values and pre-established social status are derived from this
basic inauthentic project. Ultimately, such attempts are all doomed to
failure, Sartre believes, because consciousness is condemned to self-
definition in the temporal present. It is condemned, in other words, to
be free.
Sartre's account of interpersonal ethics in L'Etre et le néant, to
which he attributes an almost exclusively negative character, is
amongst the better known features of the work. It is, moreover, one of
the few areas of Sartre's work of phenomenological ontology which
falls within the category of 'ethics' as traditionally conceived although
the positions Sartre advances are in reality best understood as deriva-
tive of his ontological account of man's habitually inauthentic con-
dition. They are in reality as much a part of the ethical ramifications of
the ontology as they are expressive of the early Sartre's definitive
views on interpersonal ethics, the exposition of which he says he is
reserving for a forthcoming work on ethics.
10
In the chapter of L'Etre
et le néant entitled 'Les relations concrètes avec autrui', Sartre
presents the various types of relationship which we enter into with
others, including those which are usually thought of as positive such
as love and sexual relationships, as instances of fundamentally
conflictual relations between the self and others: 'Le conflit est le sens
originel de l'être-pour-autrui.' [EN: 413] Sartre's paints a picture of
intersubjective alienation in which each subject attempts to capture
and enslave the free consciousness of those with whom he or she
enters into contact. Earlier in the work, Sartre had established that the
principal instrument of this enslavement was the glance which I cast
on the other in order to objectify him, that is to turn him into an object
in my world. The other is of course attempting to do the same to me,
and Sartre describes the feeling of disempowerment which the other's
glance produces thus: 'je vis une aliénation subtile de toutes mes
possibilités qui sont agencées loin de moi, au milieu du monde avec
10 Sartre includes a lengthy discussion of alienated intersubjective relations in
L'Etre et le néant, but his references to the possibility of an ethics of authen­
ticity which he intends to formulate in a subsequent work suggest strongly that
he considers these negative ethical relationships principally to be derivative of
the habitually inauthentic condition of man which he is describing.
100

les objets du monde' [EN: 311]; '[p]ar le regard d'autrui, je me vis
comme figé au milieu du monde, comme en danger, comme irréméd-
iable.' [EN: 314]
Sartre's negative portrayal of intersubjective ethics, rather like
the other dimensions of man's inauthentic condition such as the
project to be God, the 'sérieux', and bad faith, can be traced without
difficulty back to the fundamental propositions of the ontology of
L'Etre et le néant. The need to objectify the other, and hence the
impossibility of non-conflictual intersubjective relations, stems from
the glance of the other putting into jeopardy my project to be an ens
causa sui or, as Sartre puts it, to be God. Being reduced to the status
of a thing in the world for the other obstructs my attempts to establish
my own foundation. My only defence against the challenge posed by
the other is to attempt to objectify him just as he objectifies me:
'L'objectivation d'autrui [...] est une défense de mon être qui me
libère précisément de mon être pour autrui en conférant à autrui un
être pour moi.' [EN: 315] The basis of the intersubjective ethics of
L'Etre et le néant is hence a power struggle between conflicting 'pour
-soi', and this struggle can in turn be related back to the project of
each subjectivity to be God. The origin of the project to be God,
moreover, can itself be identified in the most fundamental claims of
Sartre's ontology, namely the relationship which he posits between
consciousness and being. Consciousness, Sartre argues, seeks to be
reconciled with being 'parce qu'elle surgit à l'être comme perpétu-
ellement hantée par une totalité qu'elle est sans pouvoir l'être, puisque
justement elle ne pourrait atteindre l'en-soi sans se perdre comme
pour-soi.' [EN: 129] Such attempts to achieve full self-coincidence are
doomed to failure as the relationship between consciousness and being
is by its very nature one of non-coincidence. It is precisely this
disjunction, or fissure, in the composition of the subject which ensures
his irreducible freedom. The subject habitually persists in the attempt
to evade this freedom by seeking to give himself a foundation,
however, and is hence inauthentic.
The intimate connection between the evasion of freedom and the
condition of inauthenticity illustrates the impossibility of arguing for
any marked separation between ontology and ethics in Sartre's work.
An inauthentic mode of existence, for Sartre, is one which involves
101

trying to work against the nature of one's ontological make-up. The
movement towards authenticity, by contrast, starts with facing up to
the reality of one's condition and accepting that one's inalienable
freedom implies responsibility and the necessity to be self-defining
through action. In fact, the very failure of consciousness's inauthentic
projects described by Sartre in L'Etre et le néant points in the direc-
tion of his ethics of authenticity. Scanzio rightly points out that
'[1]'ontologie sartrienne n'est pas statique: elle contient et esquisse
déjà le mouvement qui la projette vers la morale.'
11
Sartre's famously
describes the inauthentic man of his ontological account, who is
characterised by the ultimate failure of his habitual attempts to give
himself a foundation, as a 'passion inutile' [EN: 678]. The passage
from inauthentic ethics to the authentic ethics of the Cahiers involves
the transformation of this ineffectual and dishonest 'passion' into
outward-looking, creative action, and commitment.
Inauthenticity, Dominant Ideology and False
Consciousness
There is a clear thematic connection, as we have seen, between the
condition of inauthenticity described in Sartre's ontology and the
representation of power holders and defenders of the status quo in his
fictional works. The inauthenticity of such power holders, as we have
seen, is notably represented in the bourgeois 'sérieux', a pronounced
form of the project to be God which is a fundamental tendency of
man's ontological make-up. What is less readily apparent is the con-
ceptual link which can be established between certain of these repre-
sentations and the Marxist concept of the dominant ideology,
12
or
11 Scanzio op.cit.p . 130
12 Sartre's representations of the inauthentic conduct of the bourgeoisie give his
writing a dimension of social critique, a tendency which is also central to
Marxist theories of ideology. It might be objected, however, that the anti-
bourgeois sentiment expressed in Sartre's works is not necessarily evidence of a
102

what Raymond Geuss appropriately terms 'ideology in the pejorative
sense'.
13
One of the most important areas of common ground between
Sartre's libertarian thought and Marxism is a shared hostility to
the oppression of individuals' capacity for creative agency. This
oppression of freedom is expressed in Sartre's conceptual schema in
the terms of his concept of inauthenticity: both the socially dominant
(the bourgeoisie, notably) and the oppressed (the non-privileged
classes) are inauthentic, the former because they are 'sérieux', the
latter because they are in bad faith with respect to their capacity for
creative agency. I shall argue that in those cases in which politico-
social power relations are represented in Sartre's literary texts, the one
type of inauthenticity engenders the other. That is, the 'sérieux' of the
dominant is generative of the bad faith of those they dominate: it is the
'sérieux' of the bourgeoisie which encourages the passive acceptance
of the existing social hierarchy in the non-bourgeois characters, who
deceive themselves that they are not free to act creatively to change
their situation. Sartre himself did not explicitly articulate this relation-
ship in his theoretical writings. Politico-social relationships, although
clearly portrayed in many of his fictional works, were never a key
focus of his critical attentions prior to the Liberation. Moreover, by
the time that he started to address questions relating to political theory
directly in his theoretical writings, during the years 1945-7, he was
already on course for the positive ethics and commitment of the
Cahiers and Qu'est-ce que la littérature? It is my intention here to
elucidate the implicit politics of Sartre's early thought which he left
unarticulated at the time of its genesis.
Marxist tendency because anti-bourgeois satire had long been a feature of
French literary writing, much of which had not been the work of politically
radical authors. This objection is well-founded and it is not my intention to
argue that the Sartre of the late 1930s was proto-Marxist as such, but rather
merely to point up areas of conceptual common (or parallel) ground between
Sartre's satire of the bourgeoisie and the Marxist view of bourgeois dominance.
If Sartre was to adopt and endorse the Marxian conception of ideology in the
pejorative sense in his postwar writings, it was because his earlier
representations of bourgeois power-holders already tended in this direction in
certain key ways.
13 Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory p. 12
103

In Marxist thought, the concept of ideology in the pejorative
sense, rather than that of inauthenticity, is employed to account for the
relationship between the socially dominant and the non-privileged
classes. Classic Marxist thinkers have generally conceived of ideology
in the pejorative sense as involving a dominant ideology which shores
up the interests of the ruling class. This dominant ideology is often
presented as also engendering a form of consciousness, commonly
known as 'false consciousness', in the non-privileged classes, and not-
ably the working class, which involves them holding a distorted view
of the social and economic relations that are characteristic of capitalist
society. The workers' false consciousness serves to conceal from them
the oppressive and exploitative attitude of the ruling elite, thus redu-
cing the force and frequency of their challenges to the dominance of
that elite. In the discussions which follow of instances in Sartre's
literary texts of inauthenticity shoring up unequal social structures, I
shall argue that a parallel can be drawn with the Marxist concept of
ideology in the pejorative sense. My intention is on the one hand to
highlight the compatibility between the inauthenticity of the socially
dominant, namely their 'sérieux', and the concept of a dominant ideol-
ogy in the Marxist conceptual schema. I will seek on the other hand to
reveal the compatibility between the inauthenticity of the oppressed,
namely their bad faith, and the Marxist concept of false consciousness.
In the Bouville museum scene in La Nausée, Roquentin describes
the reactions of a man and woman who are looking at the portraits of
the bourgeois leaders of the town. The humility with which they
admire the portraits reveals their modest social origins. The relation-
ship which is implied here between the bourgeois represented in the
portraits and the couple can be elucidated with reference to Sartre's
conception of inauthenticity. It is clear from Roquentin's descriptions
of the portrayal of the bourgeois leaders that these individuals
represent for Sartre classic cases of the bourgeois 'sérieux'. Every-
thing about them, from their poses to their facial expressions,
communicates a confidence in their social status because they enjoy
important standing in society. Rather as Sartre would present the
'sérieux' waiter oîL'Etre et le néant a few years later, the 'sérieux' of
these bourgeois is portrayed as tending strongly towards abstraction,
or elevation, and not towards substantiality. The glance of Pâcome, for
104

example, 'errait au loin' [N: 126]. There is a spirituality in the glance
of Rémy Parrottin. [N: 128] His brother, Jean Parrottin, 'avait la
simplicité d'une idée.' [N: 130] And Roquentin observes that Olivier
Blévigne had been portrayed as if taller than he really was: 'le destin
des hommes de cette taille,' Roquentin comments, 'se joue toujours à
quelques pouces au-dessus de leur tête.' [N: 136] It is through their
desire to be portrayed as elevated that these bourgeois attempt to
confirm the superior social status which society has conferred upon
them. The effect of this bourgeois 'sérieux' depicted in the portraits
on the couple in the gallery is predictable, struck as they are by the
importance of these leaders of Bouville. Moreover, a passivity on their
part engendered by an over-identification with their social role, and
a capacity for self-delusion about the nature of their real condition,
can be perceived in the text. In reaction to the stare of Jean Parrottin,
'[l]a dame restait bouche bée, mais le monsieur n'était pas fier: il avait
l'air humble, il devait bien connaître les regards intimidants et les
audiences écourtées.' [N: 132] When faced with the stare of a
'sérieux' bourgeois, then, the man's response is to adopt a humble
attitude which Roquentin presumes is a habitual reaction born of
frequent experience of such situations in real life. The man's response
serves only to confirm the superior status of the bourgeois in relation
to himself. It would seem to be inconceivable to him to question
Parrottin's superior status. Doing so would require a recognition of his
own capacity, as a free being, to dissociate himself from the social
role as an inferior which he has come to accept. The man is in bad
faith in his obedient acceptance of the unequal social hierarchy of
which he is a part.
Interpreting the relationship between the bourgeois and their
less prestigious observers in the light of the early Sartre's conceptual
schema hence reveals this episode of La Nausée to be an illustration of
different types of inauthentic conduct. The episode lends itself equally
well, however, to a Marxist analysis of the role of ideology in the
pejorative sense in the maintenance of unequal class relations. The
portrayals of the 'sérieux' bourgeois in the portraits can clearly also
be seen as an instance of a dominant ideology inducing false con-
sciousness in the non-privileged classes. This false consciousness is
apparent in the couple's reactions to the bourgeois, as these reactions
105

correspond exactly to the impression of themselves which the latter
sought to project. In response to the portrait of Rémy Parrottin, for
instance, the woman remarks how intelligent he seems, and she is
somewhat intimidated by Olivier Blévigne's self-aggrandising pose
[N: 133]. 'Les rouspéteurs devaient trouver à qui parler', her com-
panion responds with regard to the latter, following which, Roquentin
notes, the man 'se mit à rire avec un petit bruit [...] d'un air fat et
tatillon, comme s'il était lui-même Olivier Blévigne.' [N: 133] This
response to the portrait of Blévigne is an illustration of Marx's and
Engels' claim in The German Ideology that '[t]he ideas of the ruling
class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie. the class which is the
ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intel-
lectual force.' [GL 64] The man endorses the image of superiority
which Blévigne projects to such an extent that he even simulates
identification with the role Blévigne is playing out. He has himself
been frequently belittled by individuals such as Blévigne and Jean
Parrottin but is entirely supportive of their belief in their own social
superiority nevertheless. He is, in other words, entirely incorporated
by the ruling ideology because unable to understand the world
differently from the ruling class's vision of the world. The Marxist
concept of false consciousness seeks to explain this phenomenon of
mystification or delusion, presenting the dominant ideology as capable
of producing a disjunction between individuals' perception of class
relationships and their understanding of their real implications.
Individuals' delusions about their real condition are of course central
to Sartre's concepts of the 'sérieux' and of bad faith too, although
Sartre's ontology points to the conclusion that these delusions are
individuals' se^f-delusions.
14
What is common to both the Marxist and
early Sartrean conceptual schémas in this regard, however, is the
fundamental claim that the majority of people, in their habitual
condition, are blind to the truth of their condition, and that an appre-
hension of their true condition is the first step on the road to self-
emancipation.
14 In chapter IX, I will highlight the role played by the imaginary in the creation of
these self-delusions.
106

The type of false consciousness which the man and woman in the
gallery demonstrate corresponds to that which Geuss describes as
characterised by its 'functional properties'. That is, their world-view
serves a function by 'supporting, stabilizing, or legitimizing certain
kinds of social institutions or practices.'
15
This world-view is that of
the ruling elite as it is the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie that,
for classic Marxists, characterises the way in which the class relation-
ships which constitute society are understood by members of all social
classes. In the case of the portraits of the bourgeois leaders of
Bouville, the abstraction-tending character of their 'sérieux' can be
interpreted, drawing on Marxist ideology theory, as closest to the con-
ception of ideology employed by the early Marx, expounded notably
in The German Ideology. In this work, ideology is presented as by its
very nature an abstraction from concrete reality. Ideology for the early
Marx is of a piece with idealist philosophy, both phenomena eman-
ating from the same source, namely the bourgeoisie; it is, as Eagleton
puts it, 'essentially otherworldliness: an imaginary resolution of real
contradictions which blinds men and women to the harsh actuality of
their social conditions.'
16
The world-view which the couple in the
gallery have been conditioned to adopt is one which seeks to escape
concrete reality into abstraction; the bourgeois of the portraits, whose
authority and superior status they admire, have assumed poses and
expressions suggestive of immortality as a symbolic representation of
their dominance.
This tendency towards abstraction is corroborated by the
numerous negative references to the rights of the bourgeoisie which
are made in the text, Sartre once again presenting rights as
intrinsically abstract in character. In his first remarks about the bour-
geois of the portraits, Roquentin associates the idea of rights with the
abstractions typically associated with religious thinking such as God
and eternal life. Imagining the circumstances of these men's death, he
comments : 'En règle, ce jour-là comme les autres jours, avec Dieu et
avec le monde, ces hommes avaient glissé doucement vers la mort,
pour aller réclamer la part de vie éternelle à laquelle ils avaient droit.'
15 Geuss op.cit. p . 15
16 Terry Eagleton, Ideology. An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991 ) p.77
107

[TV: 123] Of Jean Parrottin, Roquentin comments: 'Son regard était
extraordinaire; il était comme abstrait et brillait de droit pur.' 'Cet
homme', he continues, 'avait la simplicité d'une idée. Il ne restait plus
en lui que des os, des chairs mortes et le Droit Pur.' [N: 130]
Like the portrait gallery scene in La Nausée, Sartre's Les
Mouches offers a fine illustration of social relations of dominance and
subordination which, although primarily derived from his concept of
inauthenticity, can similarly be better understood when the Marxist
concept of ideology in the pejorative sense is introduced as an
accompanying interpretative tool. In Act II, scene 5 the inauthenticity
of the evil king Egisthe becomes fully apparent, his remarks about the
years he has spent as ruler of Argos revealing the mixture of role-
playing, the 'sérieux', and the God project which have characterised
his conduct. 'Voilà quinze ans que je joue la comédie,'
17
he admits,
referring to the culture of guilt which he contrived and propagated in
the city so as to blind the population to their real nature as free beings.
These fifteen years' role-playing have made him weary, he claims,
wondering what had condemned him to playing out such a role for so
long. Jupiter informs him that his passion for order lay at the basis of
it all. 'L'ordre. C'est vrai', Egisthe admits, 'je voulais que l'ordre
règne et qu'il règne par moi.'
18
The claim which lies at the heart of
Sartre's account of man's habitually inauthentic condition in the
ontology of L'Etre et le néant, namely that man's fundamental desire
is to be God, is instantiated here in the portrayal of Egisthe. Egisthe's
project to instigate and incarnate order is part of an attempt to give
himself a foundation in the world. As the 'Fête des morts' scenes at
the start of Act II show, it is this 'sérieux' of Egisthe's project which
has induced a passivity in the people of Argos. Their full identification
with the culture of guilt which he introduced, and which finds full
expression in this ceremony of the dead, involves concealing from
themselves their autonomy of thought and freedom to define them-
selves. They are hence classic examples of Sartrean bad faith.
17 Les Mouches, Act 2 scene IV, in Huis clos suivi de Les Mouches (Gallimard,
1947 [1943]), p.200
18 Ibidp.202
108

Analysis of Les Mouches in the light of the Marxist ideology
theory is illuminating of Sartre's treatment of social relations of
dominance and subordination but also reveals how that treatment
differs from his portrayal of such relations in the scenes in La Nausée
which we have examined.
19
As with the bourgeois leaders of Bouville
and their humble admirers, the guilt culture which Egisthe has
propagated and the bad faith of the Argives can be seen as an instance
of a dominant ideology engendering false consciousness. This false
consciousness, as in the case of the false consciousness of the couple
in the portrait gallery, matches up to the type which Geuss describes
as characterised by its 'functional properties'
20
because it serves a
function by 'supporting, stabilizing, or legitimating certain kinds of
social institutions or practices.'
21
However, whereas the dominant
ideology of the bourgeois leaders in La Nausée tended towards
abstraction and was hence reminiscent of the early Marxian concep-
tion of ideology, the dominant ideology in Les Mouches is notable for
the way in which it is transmitted and expressed through institutional
and material practices. As such, it is reminiscent rather of the concept
of hegemony which, in Gramsci's thought, largely substitutes for the
concept of ideology in the pejorative sense. Under Egisthe's rule, the
19 Clearly, Les Mouches is set in a pre-capitalist era and comparison with the class
relations portrayed in La Nausée cannot be a strict one. Nevertheless, the
Marxist theory of ideology can still be fruitfully employed to describe the ways
in which the dominant obtain acquiescence to their rule from their subordinates.
20 It also corresponds to the type of false consciousness which Geuss claims
involves subjects mistaking the epistemic status of certain beliefs which they
hold, ie. taking for true certain beliefs which are actually false; these false
beliefs are vital to the perpetuation of the unequal social power structure. I will
not discuss here the ways in which this dimension of the concept of false
consciousness can be identified in Sartre's portrayal of the Argives. Such a
discussion would divert the course of the argument away from showing how the
types of ideology in the pejorative sense which can be identified in Sartre's
texts relate to Marx's and other Marxists' conceptions of ideology in the
pejorative sense. I have examined this dimension of Sartre's portrayal of the
Argives in my article 'Sartre's Concept of Bad Faith in Relation to the Marxist
Notion of False Consciousness: Inauthenticity and Ideology Re-Examined',
published in Cultural Logic Vol.2 No.2, March 2002.
21 Geuss op.cit. p. 15
109

ceremony of the dead and acts of repentence are practices which are
both constitutive of and central to the maintenance of the culture of
guilt. The ceremony of the dead is religious in character as it is
presided over by the High Priest. Moreover, this ceremony, along with
the other practices in which the Argives are induced to participate,
serves to ensure the continued acceptance in Argos of the culture of
guilt without it being necessary for Egisthe to employ coercive
measures. For Gramsci, hegemony is characterised by just such rule
by consent, rather than by coercion, on the part of dominant powers.
Such dominant powers avail themselves of institutional practices in
civil society, such as those of the church and the family, through
which they are able to transmit beliefs and values that are supportive
of the existing social power structure. These institutions become hege-
monic apparatuses or, as Louis Althusser would later put it in his
Gramscian-influenced structuralist theory, Ideological State Appar-
atuses.
22
The parallel I have established between Sartre's concept of
inauthenticity and the Marxist concept of ideology in the pejorative
sense highlights the potential for some sort of cross-fertilisation or
synthesis of the two concepts. I have suggested that Sartre's concept
of inauthenticity, when a feature of representations of relations of
political dominance and subordination in his writings, occupies the
space which, in Marxist theory, is reserved for the concept of the
dominant ideology. In other words, the early Sartre and Marxists
employ different conceptual schémas - the Sartrean being an
ontologico-ethical schema, whereas the Marxist is part of a theory of
society and history - to account for the same phenomena. The
examples we have discussed have shown that the two approaches
nevertheless complement and shed new light and meaning on each
other.
22 Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards
an Investigation)' re-printed in Slavoj Zizek Mapping Ideology (London: Verso,
1994)pp. 100-140.
110

Explicit References to Ideology in Sartre's Writings:
Ideology in the Pejorative Sense
Our discussion of the early Sartre's ideas in relation to the Marxist
concept of ideology has so far centred on cases of inauthenticity in his
fictional works which lend themselves to interpretation as instances of
ideology in the pejorative sense. In certain cases, Sartre's ontology-
based concept of inauthenticity provides the theoretical basis for
fictional representations which Marxists would most commonly em-
ploy the concept of ideology to explain. Indeed, in Sartre's literary
texts examples of inauthentic conduct stand in for ideology rather as
bad faith replaces the unconscious of psychoanalysis in Sartre's
philosophy [EN: 85-90]. But what of the concept of ideology in
Sartre's writings? That is, what sort of explicit mentions of ideology
does Sartre make in his theoretical works?
Explicit references to ideology are not common in Sartre's
writings prior to 1946. The early Sartre's theoretical writings do not
contain any discussion of ideology, the phenomenon being accorded
no explicit role in L'Etre et le néant}2.
Itisonlyasofthetimeof
Sartre's increasingly explicit engagement with Marxist ideas in the
immediate postwar years that references to ideology appear more
frequently in his writings. In Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?, where the
term is employed more often than in any other works of this period, a
wide range of phenomena are made adjectival to the concept of
ideology, there being references to 'l'idéologie chrétienne',
24
'l'idéo-
logie des dirigeants' [QL: 90], 'l'idéologie religieuse et politique'
[QL: 96], 'l'idéologie de l'élite' [QL: 98], 'l'idéologie spirituelle'
[QL: 100], '[l']idéologie révolutionnaire' [QL: 113], and 'l'idéologie
bourgeoise' [QL: 125]. In fact, the diversity of phenomena to which
the term 'ideology' is applied can be broken down, in the context of
Sartre's historical account of the place of literature at different stages
of social development, into the three basic models of ideology pro-
posed by Geuss in his discussion of the topic, namely ideology in the
23 Majumdar op.cit. p .32
24 Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? p.92 (hereafter QL).
Ill

'pejorative' sense, ideology in the 'positive' sense, and ideology in the
'descriptive' sense.
25
These three models themselves constitute a
broad enough spectrum, however, to rule out any simple explanation
of what Sartre takes the concept of 'ideology' to mean. Moreover, in
certain of his references to ideology from Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?
onwards, it is difficult to pinpoint precisely to which of these classic
models of ideology Sartre's meaning is closest, there being a certain
fluidity in his use of the term. Discussion of the appearances of the
latter two models of ideology in Sartre's writings will be postponed
until chapter VII. We will address here only ideology in the pejorative
sense whose areas of reciprocity with Sartre's concept of inauthen-
ticity we have have been charting.
Sartre presents the majority of the phenomena listed above to
which he attributes an ideological character as closely related histor-
ically to the idea of 'l'idéologie de l'élite' [QL: 98]. He posits such a
connection notably in his account of the place of the writer in
seventeenth-century society. Sartre describes the writer in this period
of classicism as almost entirely hemmed in by a myriad of ideological
forces which collectively contributed to the maintenance of the
existing social and political structure at the summit of which was the
rule of the absolute monarch. Writers were generally bourgeois,
depended for their material well-being on the nobility, and were
read by only a limited and privileged section of the public, as a
consequence of which, Sartre argues, they produced works destined
for the consumption of those who upheld the existing structures of
society [QL: 97], Thus although secular in some cases themselves, the
majority of these writers implicitly accepted the religious and political
ideology of the period [QL: 96-7]. This account shows the clear influ-
ence of Marxist thought in the relationship it charts between economic
conditions of possibility and the superstructural sphere of cultural
production. As in much classic Marxist theory, the superstructure is
presented not as merely secondary, but as the crucial site of the
production of ideological supports to an existing social order. The
seventeenth-century writer, Sartre argues, became fully complicit with
25 Geuss op.cit. pp . 4 -26.
112

the various dimensions of the ideology which bolstered up the rule of
the aristocracy.
Unsurprisingly, it is in his analyses of bourgeois dominance from
the nineteenth century to the present day that Sartre's conception of
ideology corresponds most closely to the classic Marxist model of
ideology in the pejorative sense. In fact, the conception of ideology
which Sartre's analyses presuppose draws considerably on the early
Marxian conception of The German Ideology which portrays the
dominant ideology as fundamentally abstract in nature because
concomitant with the bourgeois social condition. In Matérialisme et
révolution, Sartre explicitly presents the abstraction of idealist phil-
osophy as of a piece with the bourgeois condition and world-view in a
thoroughly early Marxian way. The thought of bourgeois philosophers
seeks to 'se cacher son caractère pragmatique: comme elle ne vise pas
à changer le monde mais à le maintenir, elle déclare qu'elle le con-
temple tel qu'il est. Elle envisage la société et la nature du point de
vue de la pure connaissance'. This philosophy contributes vitally to
the bourgeoisie's ideological defence of its interests: 'Il faut noter que
la pensée des philosophes issus de la classe dirigeante est action [...] .
Nizan l'a bien montré dans ses Chiens de garde. Elle vise à défendre,
à conserver, à repousser.' [MR: 182] In Qu'est-ce que la littérature?,
Sartre reaffirms the close reciprocity between the bourgeois world-
view and idealist abstraction: 'comme le bourgeois n'a de rapport avec
les forces naturelles que par personnes interposées [...] comme sa
tâche consiste essentiellement à manier des symboles abstraits, mots,
chiffres, schémas [...], comme sa culture tout aussi bien que son métier
le disposent à penser sur de la pensée, il s'est convaincu que l'univers
était réductible à un système d'idées' [QL: 120-1]. Sartre's argument
subsequently develops into an abridged version of Marx's critique of
Hegelianism in The German Ideology. The bourgeois, Sartre claims,
conceives of human progress 'comme un vaste mouvement d'assimi-
lation: les idées s'assimilent entre elles et les esprits entre eux. Au
terme de cet immense processus digestif, la pensée trouvera son
unification et la société son intégration totale.' [QL: 121] In fact, this
early Marxian-influenced hostility to the Hegelian idealist view of
history had been subtly anticipated in the portrait gallery scene in La
Nausée which we have already examined. Roquentin notes that upon
113

encountering the portrait of Rémy Parrottin, the man in the gallery
exclaims to his wife: 'Parrottin, de l'Académie des sciences [...] par
Renaudas, de l'Institut. C'est de l'Histoire!' [N:133] Here Parrottin's
pseudo-elevated pose, and the elevated status of the institutions to
which he and Renaudas belonged, seem to permit their assimilation
into a greater abstraction which transcends them both, namely the idea
of history written with a capital 'H'.
Sartre's explicit references to dominant ideologies in his postwar
writings hence draw greatly on the classic Marxist concept of ideol-
ogy. In the case of ideologies which intrinsically involve a movement
towards abstraction and 'otherworldliness', Sartre specifically sub-
scribes to the early Marxian view of ideology. In fact, most of the
dominant ideologies to which Sartre refers in his historical account in
Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? are presented as tending in this direction
albeit in a largely implicit way, unlike in the case of bourgeois
ideology. To return to the 'idéologie de l'élite' [QL: 98] served by the
seventeenth-century writer, for instance, Sartre presents numerous
ideological tendencies as supportive of and concomitant with this rul-
ing ideology. These tendencies clearly suggest a certain movement
towards abstraction: mention of 'l'idéologie religieuse' [QL : 96] and
'l'idéologie spirituelle' [QL: 100], in conjunction with a political
ideology which reinforces the position of the absolute monarch and
the nobility [QL: 96-7] evokes a clear upward movement.
Continuity Between Sartre's Ethical and Political Thought
Sartre's increasing tendency in his postwar writings to employ con-
cepts and terminology drawn from political thought is one of the
factors often thought to correspond to an awakening on his part to the
need for left-wing political commitment. When Sartre starts to use the
terminology of discourse on ideology, for example, he begins to
articulate for the first time certain of his key intellectual positions in
the terms employed by Marxist theorists. Our analysis of the areas of
114

reciprocity between Sartre's concept of inauthenticity, in certain of its
manifestations, and the Marxist concept of ideology in the pejorative
sense, however, points to the continuity of Sartre's ontology-linked
ethical stance right through from his 'pre-political' years as a
phenomenologico-ontologist 'atteint de moralisme' [C: 267] to his
subsequent gradual conversion to the conceptual apparatus of left
political theory. The relative ease with which we have been able to
establish a parallel between Sartre's concept of inauthenticity and the
Marxist concept of ideology in the pejorative sense is owing to the
fact that early Sartrean and classic Marxist philosophy, although
employing contrasting explanatory schémas, share basic ethical
presuppositions. I will examine in more detail the areas of ethical
common ground between early Sartrean and Marxist thought notably
in chapters V and VII.
The libertarian tendency which, as I will argue in chapter V, is
central to early Sartrean and humanist Marxist thought alike gives
rise, in both cases, to a preoccupation with explaining the causes of
unfreedom, and in particular the oppression of people's freedom by
others. This preoccupation, in turn, provokes a shared interest in the
characteristics of the power holders who are responsible for this
oppression. We have seen that, in Sartre's thought, it is individuals'
habitually inauthentic desire to establish for themselves a foundation
in the world which constitutes the basis of both their antagonistic and
alienated intersubjective relations with others and their tendency,
notably in the case of the bourgeoisie, to dominate others. In the latter
case, the early Sartre's ontology-derived concept of inauthenticity
permits him, notably in his literary works, to shed light on cases of
socially-generated unfreedom which Marxists explain with the aid
of the concept of ideology in the pejorative sense. The transition
which Sartre was subsequently to make in the postwar years to
employing the Marxist theoretical model to explain social oppression
would be a relatively smooth one because of areas of common ground
between his characterisation of bourgeois 'sérieux' and the early
Marxian view of bourgeois ideology. In both cases, the bourgeoisie is
characterised as attempting to evade the concrete reality and con-
tingency of the situation by identifying with an inappropriate and
dishonest idea of elevation. Not only did Sartre dislike the dominance
115

of the bourgeoisie, then, as did Marx, but he presents it as manifesting
itself in similar psychological and intellectual tendencies to those
Marx attributed to the bourgeoisie in his writings.
The early Sartre's ontology-linked ethical convictions, as they
are represented in his treatment of the oppression of people's free-
dom in class relations, hence anticipate in important ways the Marxist
political tendencies of his postwar writings. Sartre's formulation of
his ethical views in the terms of his ontology-linked concept of in-
authenticity does not distance them as much from the Marxist concept
of ideology as the apparent contrast between these two conceptual
schémas might appear to suggest.
116

IV. Sartre's Search for Authenticity
The outbreak of war and Sartre's experiences as a conscript lead him
to undergo a period of profound self-questioning and réévaluation of
his ethical outlook on life. Sartre's life in the military camp and his
feeling that he is a participant in a major historical event provoke an
increased lucidity about his pre-war self which he comes to see as
having been fundamentally inauthentic. Sartre's surviving war diaries,
published as the Carnets, reveal a progression in his thinking from
what he would refer to some months later as 'cette drôle de crise' [LC
IL 131] of November 1939 to the formulation of a new, more au-
thentic 'morale'
1
early the next month, and ultimately, in the winter
months of early 1940, to a conception of authentic conduct stressing
the concrete nature of the worldly situations in which human freedom
defines itself. It is this progression which we will chart in this chapter.
In his letters of the first two months of the war Sartre documents
the transition in his thinking towards a new understanding of man
in the world. A few weeks after being conscripted, on 28 September,
he writes to Beauvoir that his 'être-dans-le-monde' has changed. It is
now an 'être-pour-la-guerre' [LC L 321]. A discussion of this devel-
1 I employ the term 'morale' rather than the English 'ethics' because what Sartre
terms his 'morale' consists in claims which are both of an ethical and an
ontological nature. Sartre has not yet introduced the formal separation of ethics
and ontology which he would do at the time of writing L'Etre et le néant.
Moreover, as we have seen, the Sartre of the 1930s consistently employed the
term 'morale' to indicate not just his own ethical but also ontological and even
aesthetic outlook on the world.
With regard to my references to 'morality' and 'ethics' henceforth, it is
worth noting that Monique Canto-Sperber, in her recent study of morality
entitled L'Inquiétude morale et la vie humaine (PUF, 2002), acknowledges the
difficulties involved in attempting to make a distinction between the two, and
states that she uses them interchangeably throughout her study. 'Après tout,'
she concludes, 'il n'y a aucun doute sur le fait que les termes « morale » et
« éthique » désignent le même domaine de réflexion.' (p.25).
117

opment is to be found in his diary entry of the previous day. In so far
as he is not in a position to avoid being in a war situation, he argues,
the war engenders both 'une modification du monde et de mon être-
dans-le-monde [...] La guerre est une manière d'exister pour le monde
et moi qui suis dans le monde, mon destin individuel commence à
partir de là'. [C: 59] In other words, facing up to the reality of the war,
Sartre believes, involves recognising that the war provides the context
and conditions in which all one's thoughts are formulated, hence the
introduction of the concept * être-pour-la-guerre' as a stand-in for
'être-dans-le monde'. The substitution of 'pour' for the less resolute
'dans' in this new formulation is far from incidental, marking as it
does Sartre's tendency at this time to want to take an increasingly
positive attitude with respect to being part of a war. In a letter of 4
October, he remarks that he feels a strange obligation to 'en faire le
plus possible pour sentir la guerre le plus possible' [LC I: 332].
Indeed, throughout his time as a conscript, the process of attaining
greater authenticity will involve him not only progressively coming to
a better awareness of the reality of his situation as a participant in the
war, but also personally shouldering the responsibility for it. Sartre
observes in a letter of 26 October 1939 to Beauvoir that during the
whole interwar period he had been 'en totale inauthenticité' [LC I:
378] with respect to the war. The future war had been constantly on
the horizon but he had not recognised this, seeking, rather, to evade its
looming menace. He has now come to the view - one which involves
more than a touch of uncharacteristic fatalism - that '[c]hacun a sa
guerre, comme il a sa mort [...] on a un être-pour-la-guerre [...]
comme on a un être-pour-mourir. Et depuis le début.' [LCI: 356] This
position is closely linked to Sartre's adoption of the concept of
'historicity' gleaned from his readings of Heidegger. Had he con-
ducted himself during the interwar period in a manner appropriate to
the fact that the future war was its 'sens concret', Sartre argues, he
would have grasped his own historicity [LC I: 378]. As early as
October 1939, Sartre believes that through changing his attitude
towards the war he has now arrived at a correct understanding of his
place in relation to it. Indicating that he has written ten pages on
historicity in his notebook, he remarks, 'Je commence à m'y
118

reconnaître.' [LCI: 377] He feels that he is now taking his full part in
a war which is ia plus conforme à ma destinée' [LCI: 369].
It is hence not without justification that in late October 1939
Sartre writes to Beauvoir of there being 'bien du changement dans ma
morale' [LC I: 377]. However, it is Sartre's dispute with fellow con-
script Pieter on the 13th November, which ignites the crisis of ethics
which he later says set him on course for his theory of authenticity
[LC II: 131]. This dispute is the follow-up to a series of tensions be-
tween Sartre and the conscripts in his entourage which he had reported
in letters to Beauvoir during the first two months of the war. In
particular, as we saw in chapter III, Sartre had subjected the ethical
outlook of his fellow-conscripts to harsh criticism in his letters, as he
would continue to do subsequently in his war diaries. However, in this
case it is Sartre's own ethical credibility which is in question, and his
inability to find convincing answers to Pieter's objections leaves him
profoundly troubled. Sartre reports in his notebook that in response to
one of his customary jibes at the bourgeois social origins of the other
conscripts in his entourage, Pieter replies that if he dislikes the
bourgeoisie so much he should renounce his bourgeois privileges [C:
188-9]. Why, Pieter asks, does Sartre not join those army regiments
which would be amongst the first to be sent to fight the enemy and
why does he not renounce his state employee's salary? 'Pourquoi en
effet? Toute la question est là' [C: 188], Sartre concedes privately in
his notebook. Pieter openly acknowledges his own lack of moral
scruples about benefiting from the privileges which his bourgeois
social condition affords him: in an unequal society, he argues, there
will inevitably be a privileged minority, and if he were not one of
them someone else would take his place. There is a fundamental
inconsistency in Sartre's position, by contrast, between principles and
acts. Sartre criticises the social superiority and inauthenticity of the
bourgeoisie whilst continuing to enjoy bourgeois privileges, Pieter
objects, and then tries to win the moral high ground over the bour-
geois 'salauds' by showing that he is lucid about the unjustifiability of
his position whereas they are not: 'toi tu dis que tu es un salaud, c'est
plus habile, mais tu profites comme moi des avantages de la météo.
Un type qui dirait: je suis un salaud et puis qui refuserait ces avan-
tages, qui partirait s'engager dans la biffe, celui-là je dirais qu'il est
119

sincère.' [C: 189] Determined not to lose face, Sartre riposts so not to
appear to be defeated by Pieter, but he knows that the arguments he is
employing are sophistical and that he has lost the battle: 'Je reprends
l'offensive, mais [...] je suis sonné: j'aurai Pieter parce que je veux
l'avoir par vanité blessée, mais au fond je sais qu'il m'a eu' [C: 189—
190]; 'mon triomphe est d'apparence, au fond Pieter m'a touché au
vif [C: 191].
Pieter clearly manages to touch a raw nerve in this dispute and he
does so despite being a less skilful debater than Sartre [C: 191], which
indicates that Sartre's unease is due to a fundamental weakness in the
position he is defending. Pieter's unquestioning acceptance of his
own privileged social status is an instance of what Sartre sees to be
his thoroughly inauthentic tendency to conflate values and facts. To
Pieter's way of thinking, the fact that society is unequal means that he
is entirely justified in continuing to enjoy the privileges which his
social position accords him. His ethical conduct faithfully follows
existing social conventions and he sees no sense in holding values
which, because based on principles rather than existing conventions,
might run counter to those conventions. The basis of Pieter's objec-
tions to Sartre, by contrast, is that Sartre's repeated criticisms of the
bourgeoisie are of no significance whatsoever as long as he does not
renounce his bourgeois social condition. In reality, Sartre is just as
much a bourgeois as he is, and just as complicitous with the unequal
structure of society. Sartre is, according to his own principles, there-
fore just as inauthentic. Moreover, Sartre's attempt to gain moral high
ground over the bourgeois conscripts in his entourage by admitting
that he is a 'salaud' whilst they do not is insufficient to extricate him
from this predicament. In fact, this ruse is an instance of what could
be described as 'enlightened inauthenthenticity', somewhat in the
manner of Pieter Sloterdijk's concept of 'enlightened false conscious-
ness'.
2
Sloterdijk describes a condition in which individuals are aware
of the fact that they are subject to the workings of a dominant
ideology, and that they harbour false or distorted ideas about social
realities, and yet continue to be cynically complicitous with the
2
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), chapter I.
120

existing social structure rather than trying to change it. The formul-
ation 'enlightened inauthenthenticity' is appropriate particularly in
view of the important areas of reciprocity between the Sartrean
concept of inauthenticity and the Marxist concept of ideology in the
pejorative sense which we have charted in chapter III: we have seen
that, with respect to the representation of unequal social relations in
Sartre's fiction, the concept of inauthenticity often substitutes for the
Marxist concept of ideology in the pejorative sense. In the present
case, Sartre imagines that his lucidity about his own moral unjusti-
fiability in some sense disculpâtes him from it, or at least reduces
the force of its unpleasant reality. His private acknowledgement of
Pieter's victory over him in the argument, however, is an implicit
recognition of the fact that such lucidity is an unconvincing ploy, an
attempt to mask the basic untenability of his position.
This dispute highlights the increasing importance which a more
concrete
3
conception of man will start to take in Sartre's concept of
authenticity from the early months of 1940 onwards. At the time of
the dispute, Sartre imagines, as he had done throughout much of the
1930s, that he can dissociate himself from the bourgeois inauthenticity
of such as Pieter by making consistently critical remarks about the
bourgeoisie. Sartre's underlying assumption here is that contestatory
ideas and intellectual positions alone are in and of themselves constitu-
tive of a critical stance with regard to the bourgeoisie. To Pieter's
pragmatic way of thinking, however, the notion that ideas could enjoy
the kind of autonomy from concrete social realities which Sartre
thereby implicitly attributes to them is untenable. For Pieter, ideas
hostile to the bourgeoisie are only meaningful if accompanied by a
rejection of all concrete bourgeois privileges. In this, Pieter paradox-
ically demonstrates an area of common ground with the classic
Marxist world-view to which Sartre will draw closer in his quest for
authenticity during the months to come. Although far from a Marxist -
indeed, his specifically political leanings are much further removed
3 I use the term 'concrete' in the everyday sense rather than in the specifically
Sartrean sense discussed in chapter I. That is, I have in mind a conception of
man which takes the practical realities of his life into account to a greater
extent.
121

from Marxism than Sartre's - Pieter's objection to Sartre actually
resembles closely that of the early Marx to Hegelianism: ideas which
are completely disconnected from concrete social realities, Marx
argues in The German Ideology, are mere abstractions which have no
more reality than figments of the imagination. In this light, Sartre's
artful ruse, consisting in admitting that he is himself a 'salaud', can
clearly be seen as similarly lacking any real argumentative force
because it does nothing to change the embarrassing facts of the
concrete situation, namely that Sartre continues to enjoy the privileges
of the bourgeois social condition. Whether or not Sartre thinks he is a
'salaud' is of no importance unless he is willing to align his ethical
conduct with his ideas and change his concrete situation. Overall,
when Sartre privately admits defeat in this dispute, he is not, contrary
to appearances, conceding a point to Pieter, whose overall ethical
outlook he reproves firmly. Rather, he is in fact starting to intuit, with-
out explicitly tracing them to their theoretical source, certain of the
basic claims of classic Marxist philosophy with which Pieter's
bourgeois pragmatism ironically overlaps. This acknowledgement will
become more apparent as Sartre becomes gradually more aware, some
months later, not just of his own historicity but also of his concrete
existence in the world.
The immediate developments in Sartre's ontologico-ethical
reflections documented in Carnets and Lettres in the weeks following
this dispute do not show its influence on his thinking. The real impact
of the dispute, and of a few more vital months spent as a military
conscript, will become apparent with Sartre's gradually increasing
awareness, from late February 1940 onwards, not just of his own
historicity but also of his concrete existence in the world. We will turn
to these developments after examining Sartre's reflections on ethics of
late November and December 1939. On 28 November, Sartre an-
nounces in a letter to Beauvoir that he has just made 'mon énième
rupture morale' [LC I: 441], a clear indication that his ethical outlook
is in a state of flux. This is followed on 1 and 2 December by an
extended critical appraisal of the different phases through which his
thinking has passed from his adolescence until the present. 'Je ne crois
pas schématiser trop,' he begins, 'en disant que le problème moral qui
m'a préoccupé jusqu'ici c'est en somme celui des rapports de l'art et
122

de la vie.' [C: 268] He had always had the desire to write from the
outset but a host of questions surrounded the matter of how he should
lead his life outside of his writing. Sartre describes how his unhap-
piness at having to make the transition to adulthood upon becoming a
teacher in Le Havre led him to attach increasingly great importance to
the outlook on life which he had adopted whilst still a student. This
outlook, for which he uses the formulations 'morale de salut par l'art'
[C: 275] and 'morale esthétique' [C: 286], involved the idea that it
was only through creating works of art that one could justify one's
otherwise absurd existence. Roquentin's desire for salvation through
the aesthetic in the closing pages of La Nausée was subsequently to
stage this attitude, although Sartre himself had actually moved beyond
it by the time of the work's publication.
4
This auto-critique in Sartre's war diaries is followed only one
day later, on 3 December, by his announcement to Beauvoir that he
has conceived of a new 'morale': 'j'ai vu cette morale que je pratique
depuis trois mois sans en avoir fait la théorie [...] . Tout tourne
naturellement autour des idées de liberté, de vie et d'authenticité.'
[LC I: 455] Sartre sets it out in his diary on 7 December and then
presents a brief exposition of it to Beauvoir in a letter of two days
later. The composition of this new 'morale' represents a highly sig-
nificant moment in the development of Sartre's thought in a number
of ways. The account of the basic defining features of the human
condition which he offers is the earliest clearly recognisable formu-
lation of the account of man which he would set out in L'Etre et le
néant. Human reality is 'd'abord conscience, c'est-à-dire qu'elle n'est
rien qu'elle ne soit conscience d'être' [C: 314]. Consciousness lacks a
foundation and projects itself into the world in an attempt to escape its
fundamental gratuitousness. The most effective way for consciousness
to achieve this aim is for it to become its own foundation and it hence
'se jette vers l'avenir pour y être son propre fondement.' [C: 315]
Sartre argues that this project is doomed to failure and that man's
4 Sartre explains that his study of the work of Scheler during the 1930s drew his
attention to the existence of values. Prior to this, he had been so preoccupied
with the idea of personal salvation that 'je n'avais jamais bien compris le
problème spécifique de la morale.' [C: 288]
123

constant attempts to become God, as he would later put it, ultimately
leave him where he started, 'gratuit jusqu'aux moelles' [C: 316]. This
search for a foundation which can never be attained is inauthentic, and
human reality is hence characterised by its fundamentally inauthentic
character. In L'Etre et le néant, the vision of man's basic condition
which Sartre sketches out in this 'morale' will be more commonly
formulated in the terms of ontology and its ethical dimension will be
left largely implicit, but here in the Carnets he makes it very clear that
there is a fundamental connection between ontology and ethics. 'La
réalité humaine est morale parce qu'elle veut être son propre fonde-
ment' [C: 316], he writes. The attempts of the 'pour-soi', as he was to
describe consciousness in L'Etre et le néant, to identify with the 'en-
soi' hence themselves have clear ethical implications: the desire to be
one's own foundation is part of one's ethical outlook in life. Indeed,
these constant attempts are so fundamental to human reality's being in
the world that Sartre describes human reality itself as at one and the
same time being and value:
[...] la réalité humaine est d'un type existentiel tel que son existence la
constitue sous forme de valeur à réaliser par sa liberté.
[...] cet être-valeur qui nous constitue en tant que valeur de nos horizons [...]
c'est le sursis toujours mouvant de la réalité humaine elle-même [...]. La réalité
humaine existe à dessein de soi. Et c'est ce soi avec son type d'existence propre
(comme ce qui l'attend dans l'avenir pour être réalisé par sa liberté) qui est la
valeur. Il n'existe d'autre valeur que la réalité humaine pour la réalité humaine.
[C:314]
Sartre's new 'morale' is a significant development in his thought partly
because it sketches out and reveals the ethical dimension of the ontol-
ogy of L'Etre et le néant in this way, but also because it is here that
Sartre charts for the first time the possibility of progressing beyond
human reality's habitually inauthentic condition towards an ethics of
authenticity. Indeed, this 'morale' anticipates, structurally at least, the
progression which will characterise Sartre's reflections on ethics dur-
ing the 1940s, that is, in particular, the progression between L'Etre et
le néant and the promised future work on ethics which will ultimately
become the uncompleted Cahiers pour une morale. Sartre's well
124

known reference to a 'conversion' to 'une morale de la délivrance et
du salut' in L'Etre et le néant [EN: 463], which he presents as a
necessary step in order to escape our habitually inauthentic condition,
is also anticipated in this 'morale'. These early appearances of key
features of Sartre's better known works of subsequent years confirm
that there is a clear continuity in his reflections on ethics from much
earlier than the specifically ontological formulations of L'Etre et le
néant through to Cahiers and beyond.
Sartre's references to authenticity in his 'morale' of December
1939 are actually somewhat misleading, however, as the term does not
imply a rejection of the inauthentic project to be God, or commitment
and socialist political struggle as it would do in his writings of the
postwar years. For the time being, Sartre limits his definition of the
conversion to the idea that one becomes fully aware of, and respon-
sible for, oneself and for one's inauthentic desire to give oneself a
foundation. 'La recherche d'un fondement exige qu'on assume ce
qu'on fonde', Sartre argues. 'En outre assumer signifie reprendre à
son compte, revendiquer la responsabilité.' [C: 319] Consciousness'
inalienable ontological freedom means that '[t]out ce qui lui arrive
doit lui arriver par elle-même' [C: 319]. One hence cannot make
excuses for one's conduct because one is entirely responsible. What
Sartre refers to as authenticity in this 'morale' is based primarily on
the idea of a total lucidity which human reality can attain about its
condition if it undergoes the conversion. This latter involves 'une
intuition du vouloir qui consiste à prendre à son compte la réalité
humaine. Et par cette reprise la réalité humaine est dévoilée à elle-
même dans un acte de compréhension' [C: 319]. This conception of
authenticity actually anticipates certain key claims of Sartre's account
of our habitually /«authentic condition set out in L'Etre et le néant
more than it is an obvious predecessor to the conception of authen-
ticity elaborated in his postwar works. In L'Etre et le néant, this total
lucidity will be ensured by the pre-reflexive consciousness in particu-
lar which renders impossible our attempts to deceive ourselves fully
when in bad faith; Sartre argues that we must know the unpleasant
truth which we are striving to conceal in order to lie to ourselves
[EN: 84-5]. Similarly, the idea of total responsibility which Sartre ex-
pounds in his 'morale', and indeed throughout the war diaries, is most
125

emphatically expressed in his rationalist existentialist account of man
in L'Etre et le néant: 'la responsabilité du pour-soi est accablante,
puisqu'il est celui par qui il se fait et qu'il y ait un monde' [EN: 612].
As we saw in chapter II, in this latter work Sartre accords to
consciousness a considerable capacity for creative agency in relation
to the situation. When Sartre states that 'si je suis mobilisé dans une
guerre, cette guerre est ma guerre, elle est à mon image et je la mérite'
[EN: 613], the claim rests on the presumption of this constitutive role
of consciousness in relation to worldly circumstances.
5
In his new 'morale' Sartre primarily gives theoretical formulation
to his ontologico-ethical reflections of the first three months of the
war. Although initially content with it, only a short while later he
will nevertheless start to question the originality of his claims. On
9 January 1940 he offers the following critique in a letter to Beauvoir:
[...] j'ai relu mes cinq carnets et ça ne m'a pas fait l'impression agréable que
j'escomptais un peu. Il m'a semblé qu'il y avait du vague, des gentillesses et
que les idées les plus nettes étaient des resucées de Heidegger, qu'au fond je ne
faisais depuis le mois de septembre, avec les trucs sur « ma guerre », etc., que
développer laborieusement ce qu'il dit en dix pages sur l'historicité. [L IL. 27]
As his developing reflections on ethics of the early months of 1940
reveal, it is not just the originality of his 'morale', however, which
Sartre will start to question. Rather as his admission of defeat in the
dispute with Pieter had been an implicit acknowledgement of the
failure of lucidity alone to disculpate him from an inauthentic, ethic-
5 The total responsibility which Sartre attributes to consciousness in his 'morale'
clearly implies an austere ethical outlook, and indeed Sartre comments to
Beauvoir that his 'morale' is 'sombre comme il se doit' [L h 458]. This newly
acquired tendency on Sartre's part to stress the total responsibility of conscious­
ness, which would subsequently become central to the vision set out notably in
L'Etre et le néant, is best understood as in part a response to the feelings of
disorientation and powerlessness which the outbreak of war and being con­
scripted provoke in him. Sartre's claim that 'ce que sera pour moi la guerre, le
visage qu'elle me dévoilera, ce que moi-même je serai dans la guerre et pour la
guerre, tout cela, je le serai librement et j'en suis responsable' [C: 144] involves
pushing his rationalist tendencies further than ever before in order to bestow
upon himself a sense of psychological control over an objectively difficult
situation.
126

ally unjustifiable form of conduct, Sartre will gradually come to the
conclusion that attaining genuine authenticity requires more personal
adaptation than simply coming to full awareness of and shouldering
the responsibility for one's habitually inauthentic condition. Sartre's
moral defeat in the dispute on 13 November, which pre-dates the
formulation of the new 'morale' by three weeks or so, in fact announ-
ces what Sartre would subsequently see as the inadequacy of this
'morale' as a theory of authenticity.
Pieter had objected to the abstract character of Sartre's ethical
principles, pointing to the discrepancy between these principles and
Sartre's ethical conduct. Beauvoir, in her response to the abridged
version of the 'morale' which Sartre sends her on 9 December, is highly
approving of Sartre's new theory but suggests that it in its present state
it remains too formalistic:
[...] tout sur la volonté et la morale est convaincant et je n'y vois aucune faute,
et ça m'éblouit d'évidence [...] Seulement je suis cupide de la suite, je ne vois
pas du tout comment se fait le passage à la morale pratique [...] je trouve ligne
à ligne tout exact, je me demande seulement comment vous en sortirez, que
dois-je assumer, et quand j'assume ma liberté, que fais-je de cette liberté
assumée?
6
Beauvoir's questions would remain unanswered, as Sartre does not
address them in subsequent letters of December 1939. Moreover, in
the final chapter of L'Etre et le néant, entitled 'Perspectives morales',
Sartre will briefly touch upon the ethical implications of his freedom-
based ontology. The questions he poses echo those of Beauvoir and
similarly leave them open-ended, the implications of ontology for
practical ethics apparently still remaining indeterminate. In the Car-
nets de la drôle de guerre, Sartre's continuing reflections on the
nature of authenticity during February and March 1940 nevertheless
not only reveal the influence of Pieter's and Beauvoir's objections to
his ontologico-ethical position but also suggest that he is approaching
a new position in the light of them. Before the middle of March, Sartre
has in certain key ways gone beyond the neo-Heideggerian tendencies
in his own thought of which he had been critical in January. This
6 Beauvoir, Lettres à Sartre 1930-9 (Gallimard, 1990) p.350.
127

development is provoked by a few more months' experience of life as
a conscript and by the impact of Pieter's and Beauvoir's objections.
Furthermore, Sartre undergoes a personal life crisis in February 1940
which leads him to reevaluate once again his overall ethical outlook.
This crisis plays a vital role in his reaching the new position of March
1940.
In a letter to Beauvoir of 21 January 1940, Sartre remarks that
the war has enabled him to push ahead intellectually and distance
himself more easily from ideas he formerly held: 'C'est bien curieux
comme la guerre et le sentiment d'être, malgré tout, un peu "perdu"
m'a donné de la hardiesse, c'est-à-dire d'aller de l'avant sans me
préoccuper jamais de savoir si j'étais ou non en accord avec mes idées
antérieures' [LC IL 51]. Prior to going on leave on 3 February, Sartre
notes in his diary that he wants to live these ten days away in an
authentic way and shows a certain apprehensiveness about the effect
which returning to Paris will have on him [C: 414]. Upon his return,
the experience of military leave becomes a point of reference allowing
him to be more clear-sighted about his intellectual and personal
development in the camp. On 16 February, he concludes an account of
his stay in Paris with the following reflection: 'Ce que j'ai appris [...]
c'est qu'il est beaucoup plus facile de vivre propre et authentique dans
la guerre que dans la paix.' [C: 421] This is followed on 20 February
by a more explicitly critical judgement on his time in Paris, and by an
in-depth account of authenticity which updates in certain ways the
'morale' of December. 'Je crois un peu que j'étais authentique avant
ma permission', writes Sartre. 'Sans doute parce que j'étais seul. A
Paris je ne l'ai pas été.' [C: 447] '[L]'authenticité s'obtient d'un bloc,'
he continues, 'on est ou on n'est pas authentique.' One's authenticity
has to be constantly re-created in the existential present as there is
the constant danger of falling back into one's habitually inauthentic
condition [C: 447]. Moreover, the desire for authenticity, writes
Sartre, reiterating his position of December, 'n'est au fond qu'un
désir d'y voir plus clair et de ne pas la perdre' [C: 449]; authenticity,
in other words, involves being lucid about one's condition. This
assertion is followed by a revealing passage which shows the clear
influence of the criticisms of Pieter and Beauvoir. Examining the
128

obstacles which an individual encounters when striving to attain
authenticity, Sartre argues that:
[...] la résistance vient non pas de résidus d'inauthenticité qui demeureraient ça
et là dans une conscience mal époussetée mais simplement de ce que les
situations antérieures résistent au changement comme choses. Il les a vécues
jusque-là d'une certaine façon et en les vivant il les a constituées. Elles sont
devenues des institutions, elles ont en dehors de lui leur permanence propre et
même elles évoluent malgré lui. Il faut remettre en question. Le désir de
remettre en question [...] ne peut paraître que sur un fond d'authenticité. Et il
ne suffit pas de remettre en question, il faut changer. Mais ces changements
révolutionnaires qui se traduisent par une lutte contre la cohérence des
institutions ne sont pas différents par nature des changements qu'un politique
veut apporter aux institutions sociales et rencontrent les mêmes résistances.
Aussi ne suffit-il point d'être authentique, il faut adapter sa vie à son
authenticité. [C: 449]
This densely-written passage is revealing of a development in Sartre's
thinking in a number of ways. It is here that he openly acknowledges
for the first time that authenticity defined as lucidity alone is inade-
quate: one must adapt one's ethical conduct to one's principles for
one's authenticity to be genuinely meaningful. This process involves
personal development and change. The opposition between movement
and inertia which is characteristic of early Sartrean thought is
clearly perceptible in the passage, inauthenticity being identified with
inertia. What is significant, though, is the way in which Sartre employs
social and political metaphors to articulate this opposition: 'situations
antérieures' are referred to as 'institutions'; and the process of self-
transformation which should accompany the questioning of these
situations is described in terms of 'changements révolutionnaires'. In
the penultimate sentence of the passage, not only are the ideas of move-
ment and inertia translated through metaphor into entirely social and
political terms, but are explicitly compared with the real-life attempts
and difficulties of politicians to change social institutions. Given the
clear socio-political dimension to Sartre's concept of inauthenticity,
perceptible notably in his repeated identification of the bourgeoisie
with a strongly inauthentic condition, this comparison is neither inno-
cent nor coincidental. Indeed, the terms which Sartre employs meta-
phorically to describe the pre-existing situation and the movement
129

towards self-transformation are so semantically close to the explicitly
socio-political phenomena with which he is comparing them that a
sort of literalisation of metaphor results. That is, in effect, a sort of
metamorphosis takes place in the text such that Sartre's original point
about the relationship between pre-existing situations and self-trans-
formation seems almost to become a point principally about the nature
of political change. Although Sartre remains at this stage some way
off explicitly acknowledging the political implications of ideas and
intellectual positions as he would do increasingly in the postwar years,
this passage is undoubtedly a harbinger of the connection which he
would later establish between radical philosophy and radical politics.
The significance of the political references in this passage is
confirmed by a remark which Sartre makes in a letter to Brice Parain
written on the very same day, 20 February: 'Pour ce qui est de la
politique, n'aie pas peur. J'irai seul dans cette bagarre, je ne suivrai
personne et ceux qui voudront me suivre me suivront.' [LC IL 82]
With a few notable exceptions,
7
and in particular his brief involvement
in practical politics in 1948,
8
in the immediate postwar years 'politics'
for Sartre would mean the politics of ideas and ultimately political
philosophy. It is in this sense that the term is best understood in
Sartre's letter to Parain. Moreover, rather as the political references of
the passage in the war diaries are linked to a discussion of subjective
autonomy in relation to situation, Sartre's remark in this letter is
preceded by a discussion of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle which concludes
with the similar claim that an individual is in situation but cannot be
7
In 1947, Sartre organised a petition, which was signed predominantly by
intellectuals, demanding that the PCF provide evidence to substantiate the
slanderous accusation that Nizan had been a police informer. Later the same
year, Sartre and the Temps modernes team found themselves at the centre of a
heated dispute with the Gaullists following their radio broadcast 'La Tribune
des Temps Modernes' of 20th October devoted to De Gaulle.
8 In 1948, Sartre joined the short-lived Rassemblement Démocratique Révolu­
tionnaire which sought to steer a course politically between the western
bourgeois democratic social modeland the PCF's brand of communism which
was modelled on the Stalinist eastern bloc. In the increasingly polarised
political climate of the early Cold War years, this project proved unworkable in
practice.
130

reduced to his situation. A close thematic link between the concept of
situation and a politicised conception of man in society is hence first
suggestively formulated by Sartre as early as February 1940.
'Ma permission a consommé la rupture avec mon passé', Sartre
notes in his diary on 21 February [C: 460]. In the course of the
following three weeks, this rupture will prove to be the point of
departure for significant developments in his overall ethical outlook.
As of 23 February, his letters to Beauvoir chart over the period of a
week a crisis in his personal life which incites him to draw important
conclusions for his future ethical conduct. The crisis is ignited by his
girlfriend Tania's discovery of a short-lived past amorous involvement
which she has been misled to believe is still ongoing. Sartre feels
impelled to send an unpleasant letter to the ex-girlfriend in question,
Martine Bourdin, in order to save his relationship with Tania
10
. The
following day, he confesses in a letter to Beauvoir that this whole
episode is making him feel 'dégoûté de moi très profondément' [LC
IL 92]. A harsh auto-critique follows in which he puts into question
his entire ethical approach to relationships with women, concluding
that 'je n'ai jamais su mener proprement ni ma vie sexuelle ni ma vie
sentimentale; je me sens tout profondément et sincèrement un salaud.'
[LC IL 94] By 28 February, Sartre's relationship with Tania is
returning to normal, the storm having passed, but the intervening days
of uncertainty and self-questioning have made a real impact on his
thinking. 'Je suis en train de changer,' he tells Beauvoir, going on to
explain that he would like to approach social relationships in general
differently in the future. He intends to 'rompre avec tout ce genre de
9 Sartre argues that it is not plausible to exonerate Drieu from criticism on the
grounds that his ideas are those of his generation. 'L'individu Drieu est de sa
génération, c'est entendu et il a connu les problèmes de sa génération. Mais il
ne faut pas dire qu'il est sa génération.' [L II: 82] Seventeen years later, in
Questions de méthode, Sartre would reaffirm this position in opposition to
mechanistic Marxism. 'Paul Valéry est un intellectuel bourgeois, cela ne fait
pas de doute', he quips. 'Mais tout intellectuel bourgeois n'est pas Valéry.'
[CRD: 44] Valéry's ideas, then, cannot be explained exclusively in terms of his
social class just as Drieu's are not just the product of the generation to which he
belongs.
10 Pseudonym for Wanda Kosakiewcz.
131

générosité louche qui me fait passer des heures et des heures avec des
gens avec qui je ne tiens pas plus qu'à une rognure d'ongle [...].
Je veux tenir à des choses, j'en ai assez d'être un poisson à sang
froid ou un sépulcre. Donc je ne veux pas m'éparpiller et gâcher mes
possibilités d'aimer les gens et les choses' [LCII: 104-5].
During the period of this crisis, Sartre does not refer in his war
diary to the personal difficulties which he is experiencing, but an
undercurrent of psychological and emotional uncertainty is perceptible
in the long diary entries written at this time. These entries, which are
predominantly given over to self-analysis, indicate a profound self-
questioning on Sartre's part. He discusses the fundamental human
desire to appropriate and his own lack of any sense of ownership
[C: 473-483]. His tendency to spend money freely he explains as the
consequence of having grown up in a milieu of civil servants, adding
that '[l]à encore je n'ai pas de racines' [C: 485]. He offers a detailed
account of what it is to want to be loved, highlighting the inauthentic
character of this desire before going on to admit that he has himself
long been guilty of this type of inauthentic conduct [C: 492-500].
And he engages in a lengthy account of his defining character traits
and of his attitude towards close friendships, personal relationships,
and social relationships in general from childhood through to adult-
hood [C: 501-530].
The tone of these autobiographical passages is neutral rather than
self-critical, Sartre apparently attempting to reach a clearer under-
standing of his outlook on life via an analysis of his past. In the first
weeks of March, however, having thus achieved a greater lucidity
about his principal character traits and the main lines of his thought,
his tone becomes highly self-critical. Pieter's and Beauvoir's objec-
tions to his conception of authenticity as lucidity, it will be remem-
bered, consisted essentially in drawing attention to the excessively
formalistic character of his thought: his principles were severed from
practical ethical conduct. The thrust of Sartre's entire autocritique in
March 1940 centres on his psychological, philosophical and ethical
tendency towards this kind of abstraction. Sartre explains this
tendency partly in terms of his social and economic situation from
childhood through to the present day.
4
Je suis certainement le produit
monstrueux du capitalisme, du parlementarisme, de la centralisation et
132

du fonctionnarisme', begins a powerful critique of the underlying rea-
sons for his outlook on life. 'A toutes ces abstractions prises ensemble
je dois d'être un abstrait et un déraciné' [C: 538], he concludes.
Beauvoir has told him, he notes, that true authenticity consists in
plunging into life fully rather than trying to set oneself apart from it.
Initially daunted at the idea of such a radical self-transformation, he
resolves to adopt the principle that 'il faut s'enraciner [...] j'entends
que la personnalité doit avoir un contenu' [C: 538]
By 11 March 1940, Sartre is not only fully lucid about the
abstract-tending character of his outlook on life and the ways in which
his situational contexts to date have engendered it, but is in a position
to set out much more confidently an alternative ethical vision. This
alternative vision, although Sartre does not label it as such, constitutes
a new 'morale', that is a revised overall ethical outlook in relation to
the 'morale' he had formulated in December 1939. Referring once
again to the milieu of civil servants ('fonctionnaires') to which he has
always belonged, Sartre observes that what he has always had in
common with Gide is a sense of being detached from reality: 'nous
n'étions que trop disposés à prendre le réel pour un décor.' [C: 575]
He contends, taking a rather severe line on his earlier work, that the
central thesis of La Transcendance de Vego had been expressive of
this kind of abstract conception of the self in relation to the world. He
had at that time conceived of consciousness as capable of completely
transcending the difficulties presented by situations to such an extent
as to be entirely unaffected by them [C: 575]. Sartre goes on to discuss
his dislike of the 'sérieux' at some length and acknowledges that this
aversion, linked as it often was to a scepticism about all forms of
substantiality, was derivative of and fully coherent with the abstract
conception of the freedom of consciousness which he had always held
[C: 577-9].
'Le passage de la liberté absolue à la liberté désarmée et humaine
[...] s'est opéré cette année', Sartre claims, summing up the develop-
ment in his thinking since his mobilisation in September. He now
realises that he must learn to conceive of himself differently in
relation to the world around him: 'mon réapprentissage doit consister
précisément à me sentir "dans le coup", sans défense.' [C: 575] This
process also involves a new understanding of oneself as an individual
133

in the world: 'Je suis en train d'apprendre, au fond, à être une per-
sonne', he notes. In reality, what Sartre is calling into question is the
tendency in his thinking towards a detached rationalist conception of
the subject. This tendency, he now believes, had been encouraged and
facilitated by his social and economic condition as a state employed
teacher ('fonctionnaire'). The abstraction inherent in such rationalist
detachment had been the source of his aversion for the 'sérieux',
hence his characteristic lightness and 'frivolité' [C: 575]. It had also
left its mark on his personal relationships. When, as we have seen,
Sartre says to Beauvoir following the Tania-Bourdin crisis, 'Je veux
tenir à des choses, j'en ai assez d'être un poisson à sang froid' [LC IL
104], it is partly this detachment which he is putting into question
because it is an obstacle to his having meaningful relationships.
Authenticity, Sartre now believes, depends crucially on refusing all
attempts to escape the reality of the situation. Departing from the
'morale' he formulated in December, this refusal involves questioning
in a fundamental way the abstract conception of the self which he
has always held up until this time. He now wishes to accord to the
situation its full reality and believes that subjective freedom which
does not define itself in relation to the situation is inauthentic. More-
over, Sartre's newfound conviction that only ethical principles which
are accompanied by the corresponding forms of practical ethical con-
duct can be constitutive of an authentic outlook is fully coherent with
this critique of abstract thinking. To attain genuine authenticity it is
not enough to be lucid about and responsible for one's inauthentic
condition, one must change one's conduct.
Sartre discusses the aversion he has always felt for all manifest-
ations of the 'sérieux' and reaffirms this feeling [C: 577-9]. However,
his new conception of authenticity problematises his position on this
issue considerably. On the one hand, he is critical of materialists, and
notably political revolutionaries, because 'ils se connaissent à partir
[du] monde' [C: 577]. He had always been insulated from such think-
ing by his own psychological and intellectual tendencies, and by his
social condition as a state employed teacher which had facilitated and
encouraged them. On the other hand, the principal defining character-
istic of his new conception of authenticity seems to be a rejection of
the abstract character of this outlook on life. He is highly critical of his
134

own thinking to date, speaks of the importance of being rooted, and
intends to engage himself more fully in his situation. The ambiguity of
his position on this issue is apparent in the following short passage:
'j'étais protégé contre le sérieux par ce que j'ai dit. Plutôt trop que pas
assez: je n'étais pas du monde parce que j'étais libre et commence-
ment premier.' [C: 579] Clearly, the acknowledgement that he was too
insulated from the 'sérieux' is an indication that he is now critical of
his earlier assumption that he was 'pas du monde' and 'commence-
ment premier'. In fact, it is precisely this idea of his being a
'commencement premier' which the appraisals of the personal and
social origins of his thought implicitly put into question in February
and March; his acknowledgement that his outlook on life was in part a
symptom of his social and economic condition is nothing if not a
recognition of the role played by objective conditions in the develop-
ment of modes of subjective thought.
Sartre perceives the difficulty which his new conception of
authenticity poses for his rejection of the 'sérieux'. Can he avoid
becoming 'sérieux', he wonders, whilst striving to live in conformity
with such a conception of authenticity? His answer is confident if
rather brief in view of the complexity of the problem: he will not
become 'sérieux', he replies, '[c]ar se saisir comme une personne
c'est bien l'opposé de se saisir à partir du monde. Et pour authentique
qu'on est, on n'en est pas moins libre [...] puisqu'on est condamné à
une liberté sans ombre et sans excuse. Et enfin être-dans-le-monde ce
n'est pas être du monde.' [C: 580] In these passages, Sartre identifies
the 'sérieux' notably with materialist doctrine, and hence with the
desire for substantiality, and singles out Marx in particular: 'Marx a
posé le dogme premier du sérieux lorsqu'il a affirmé la priorité de
l'objet sur le sujet.' [C: 579] His own position will not become
'sérieux', he thinks, because its refusal of an abstract detachment from
the world nevertheless does not involve postulating that man is a
material thing, an object in the world of material objects. As we saw
in chapter I, at this stage in his career Sartre holds a reductive view of
the materialism of Marx, apparently seeing it as a simple determinism
which denies subjective freedom. Setting aside the complex question
of whether Marxian materialism actually does or does not correspond
to the Sartrean concept of the 'sérieux', the irony of Sartre's position
135

is that his new concept of authenticity in fact draws close to early
Marxian thought without him realising it. Indeed in these passages on
authenticity in the latter pages of the Carnets de la drôle de guerre,
although Sartre does not go so far as to embrace materialism, his
critique of different forms of abstraction is clearly reminiscent of
Marx's position in The German Ideology. Sartre makes an explicit
link between the abstraction of his own detached rationalist outlook on
life and the privileged social and economic condition he has always
enjoyed. He presents his characteristic lightness, detachment from the
real, lack of seriousness, and insouciance with regard to money as of a
piece with coming from a social milieu of civil servants whose
financial well-being was always sound and stable. The intellectual and
socio-economic forms of abstraction from the real hence went hand in
glove. When Sartre claims, speaking of how he arrived at his new
conception of authenticity, '[c]'est la guerre et c'est Heidegger qui
m'ont mis sur le chemin' [C: 577], there is the clear suggestion that
his position has now gone beyond the Heideggerian influence which
he was seeking to distance himself from in January. Although it was
indeed Heideggerian concepts which put him
4
sur le chemin', the
experience of being a military conscript, in conjunction with being
confronted with the objections of Pieter and Beauvoir, led him to
intuit a new conception of philosophical realism. It is this realism,
based not only on a lucidity about the inauthenticity of his bourgeois
social condition but involving a commitment to adapting his practical
ethical conduct to his principles, which he now sees as the basis of
commitment.
136

V. Commitment, Humanism and Left Political
Thought
Sartre's political commitment has often been a focal point of interest
in critical discussions centering on the intellectual debates of the
French postwar years. The subject of controversy and disagreement at
the time, it has since become a mainstay of the critical literature on
Sartre.
1
The centrality of Sartre's awakening to politics and to the
importance of active commitment can hardly be overestimated as it is
what principally marks the transition between his 'early' and 'later'
thought. In this chapter, I will offer an account of the development of
Sartre's concept of commitment and its full flowering in the theory
of revolution he proposes in the second part of Matérialisme et
révolution (1946). This discussion will be followed up in chapter
IX with an examination of Sartre's conception of committed writing.
The impetus for this account is my feeling that the political content
of Sartre's pre-Liberation texts in particular has not been given as
much attention as it merits, the ways in which Sartre's ethical and
ontological positions harmonise with left-wing politics and political
philosophy deserving in-depth examination.
Commitment is of course not just a Sartrean concept as it is
and has always been traditionally central to the Marxist political and
intellectual outlook. Marxist conceptions of commitment have them-
selves always been varied and diverse, as our discussion of Nizan and
Trotsky in chapters VIII and IX respectively will show. It is vital on
the one hand that the specificity of Sartre's concept of commitment in
relation to Marxist conceptions be recognised because it originates
in his ontological world-view and this contrasts with the materialist
ontology of classic Marxism in many key ways. On the other hand,
1 See, for example, David Archard's Marxism and Existentialism: The Political
Philosophy of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1980) or
Michael Scriven's Jean-Paul Sartre. Politics and Culture in Postwar France
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
137

the significance of Sartre's concept of commitment can nevertheless
only be properly understood in the light of the Marxist tradition's
reflections on commitment because it is predated and in key ways
anticipated by this tradition. We will relate these two tendencies to
each other in this chapter and notably in chapter IX.
In the critical literature, it is often suggested that Sartre awoke
to the political and moral dimensions of commitment after the
Liberation, that is around the time that he first explicitly entered into
the long intellectual debate with Marxism which would ultimately
lead him to Critique de la raison dialectique. Hence, politicised
Sartrean commitment, it is implied, is a development that is con-
comitant with Sartre's growing interest in Marxism. Whilst it is accu-
rate that Sartrean commitment took on an increasingly pronounced
political and moral character in the postwar years, what this reading
overlooks is the fact that there are important examples in Sartre's pre-
Liberation texts of commitment of this sort. Furthermore, as we saw in
chapter IV, prior to this, in March 1940, Sartre's preoccupation with
authenticity led him to conclude that his principles and practical
conduct must form a coherent unity. This view, whilst not an affirm-
ation of political commitment as such, was nevertheless thoroughly
saturated in ethical presuppositions and undoubtedly laid the ground
for Sartre's positions of the postwar years. Moreover, examples such
as these have to be taken to some extent in conjunction with the
contributions to left social critique made by Sartre in texts as early as
La Nausée and L'Enfance d'un chef. As we saw in chapter III, not
only is the bourgeoisie mercilessly ridiculed in these works but in
numerous places Sartre offers examples of his concept of inauthen-
ticity, and this effectively occupies the space reserved for ideology
critique in classic Marxist theory.
Andrew Dobson's account of Sartre's famous defence of existen-
tialism in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme provides an example of
the critical tendency to pass over the political and moral dimensions
of Sartre's thought prior to the Liberation.
2
Dobson perceives a
2 Dobson Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason (Cambridge University
Press, 1993) pp. 44 -6. The account of Sartre's politics offered by Scriven (op.
cit.) also exemplifies this critical tendency.
138

development in Sartre's thought which he describes thus: 'In Being
and Nothingness, freedom was an ontological truth [...] now it has
become a moral imperative, a political exercise. Perceptibly, Sartre
has moved onto the plane of politics.'
3
This statement suggests that
moral and political concerns came to take on an importance for Sartre
between 1943 and 1945, Sartre presumably becoming preoccupied
with these areas in the latter part of the war and in its aftermath.
If Sartre 'has moved onto the plane of politics' in L'Existentialisme
est un humanisme, then one can only suppose that politics were
not amongst his intellectual concerns prior to this time. It is not that
Dobson is incorrect in his identification of a significant difference of
emphasis between L'Etre et le néant and L'Existentialisme est un
humanisme. The focus of the former work was indeed limited largely
to questions of ontology. And Dobson's statement does not of course
explicitly commit him to the stronger and evidently untenable claim
that Sartre had no interest whatsoever in questions of politics or
morality prior to or at the time of writing L'Etre et le néant. The
difficulty lies not so much in what Dobson actually states as in what
he omits to mention, and a somewhat distorted view of the Sartre of
the early 1940s results from this omission.
As we saw in chapter II with regard to the globally unsatisfying
account of the 'situation' in L'Etre et le néant, Sartre's focus on
ontology in this work often led him to put to one side temporarily the
treatment of themes which lay outside the purview of ontology. We
saw that it was the absence of any convincing treatment of the historical
and social dimensions of the situation in L'Etre et le néant which left
Sartre's account not only incomplete and inadequate, but also un-
representative of his global position on the matter. Works such as L 'Age
de raison and Le Sursis, between which L'Etre et le néant falls
chronologically, presented a much fuller view of human situations. In a
similar way, in-depth consideration of questions of morality, politics
(and indeed aesthetics) are temporarily shelved by Sartre, only making
appearances in a way that is ancillary to his ontological enquiries. In
L Etre et le néant he rarely touches on matters directly pertaining to
politics at all, and in the closing chapter of the work he explicitly
3
IbidpA6
139

indicates that a study of ethics is being reserved for a subsequent
work. However, as we saw in chapters III and IV, it is clear from the
Carnets de la drôle de guerre that Sartre had been giving in-depth
consideration to ethical issues from as early as 1940. In reality, postwar
texts such as L'Existentialisme est un humanisme and 'Présentation
des Temps Modernes' are hence best understood as continuing and
developing the reflections of the Carnets, rather than as evidence of a
sudden awakening to politics and morality on Sartre's part. This is
what statements such as Dobson's fail to make explicit.
Much of the discussion of Sartre's concept of 'engagement' has
centred on his famous conception of committed writing as set out in
postwar theoretical texts such as 'Présentation des Temps Modernes'
and in particular Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? As Sartre was first and
foremost a writer, the matter of what commitment entailed for the
writer was central to his view of commitment. It was also during the
immediate postwar years of course that Sartre first began to insist
explicitly on the importance of left political commitment. In Qu 'est-ce
que la littérature?, as we shall see in chapter IX, these two themes are
woven together into a complex synthesis. However, the conceptual
basis of Sartre's conception of commitment lies in his ontology and
anthropology and cannot be accurately understood without reference
to these areas. There is a clear conceptual continuity between the
view of commitment to be found in L'Etre et le néant and that
of L'Existentialisme est un humanisme and 'Présentation des
Temps Modernes'. In what follows, I will argue against any marked
separation of Sartre's ontology and his postwar politics. The latter
builds on and is an extension of the former rather than being in any
sense a rejection of it. This is not to say that the ontology hence
precedes the ethical convictions which underpin Sartre's more overtly
politicised postwar theoretical works. As our examination of the
Carnets in chapters III and IV showed, the ontology was in fact
formulated by Sartre in tandem with reflections on ethics. The two
fields underwent a largely formal separation when Sartre wrote L'Etre
et le néant. Nor is it to suggest that between L'Etre et le néant and
Sartre's postwar writings leading up to the ethics of authenticity of the
Cahiers and the strong affirmation of left commitment in Qu 'est-ce
que la littérature? there was no development of Sartre's ontological
140

world-view. There can be no doubt that Sartre's thought underwent a
process of conceptual development between the early 1940s and the
positions of 1947-8 . Yet the fact remains that there are a number of
important reasons for believing that Sartre had already conceived
some kind of over-arching vision which was both ontological, ethical,
and even political as early as 1940-1, however comparatively inchoate
this vision may still have been at this stage. On 20 February 1940 in a
letter to Brice Parain [LC II: 82], Sartre had unambiguously declared
his intention to involve himself in politics. The following year, he not
only initiated a resistance group but also drafted a constitution for
postwar France.
4
As David Drake points out, 'Sartre should be given
credit for attempting to "do something" at a time when there was
virtually no organised resistance at all.'
5
And the account of man in
L'Etre et le néant, which Sartre says deals only with man's condition
prior to the ethical conversion, is best understood, in one sense, as a
prelude to a future work on ethics. Indeed, it appears to have been
written with such a future work in mind.
The relationship between Sartre's distinctive left theoretical
stance and other distinctive left positions was more complex than has
tended to be portrayed in the critical literature. The avoidance of in-
depth analysis of Marxist texts in much of the literature on Sartre has
led to the tendency to present rather schematically an increasing
rapprochement with Marxism from 1945 onwards. Whilst it is of
course correct that there is a perceptible development towards Marxist
concepts in Sartre's works after 1945, it is important to recognise that
in reality his thought between 1940 and 1948 was always at once con-
ceptually closer to and more distant from Marxist thought than this
reading suggests. Closer because Sartre's ideas share important areas
of political and philosophical common ground with Marxism at a
much earlier stage in his oeuvre than has often been acknowledged.
And yet also more distant, because many of the aspects of his thought
which were not obviously reconcilable with Marxism in the early
1940s remained fundamentally in place in his thought until well into
the 1950s, as Merleau-Ponty was later to argue - in fact spitefully
4 Cohen-Solal op.cit. p.l 69. No surviving copy of this text has been located.
5
David Drake, Sartre (London: Haus Publishing, 2005) p.51.
141

exaggerating the claim somewhat
6
-
in Les Aventures de la dia-
lectique. Indeed, even the Marxist Sartre of Critique de la raison
dialectique would remain a particular kind of Marxist, although this
idiosyncrasy would not in and of itself mark his work off from the
canon of western Marxist writing.
7
Beauvoir, in La Force des Choses II (Gallimard, 1963), rightly remarks that
'l'attaque de Merleau-Ponty était dans son fond d'une grande âpreté' (p.62),
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty having fallen into political disagreement in 1950 at
the time of the Korean War (Sit IV : pp. 236-240).
The particularity of Sartre's Marxism is widely acknowledged in the literature.
However, there has been a tendency implicitly to oppose the particularity of
Sartre's existentialist Marxism to a supposed Marxist orthodoxy. In reality,
outside of the Marxist-Leninist lineage, which reached its apogee in scientistic
Stalinist Marxism, there was no such orthodoxy amongst Marxist theorists, and
it is consequently very difficult even to decide upon firm criteria which define
philosophers as 'Marxist' rather than 'non-Marxist'. Thinkers such as the early
Lukâcs, Gramsci, and Lefebvre all demonstrated idiosyncrasies which con­
firmed them as distinctive theorists in relation to the Marxist tradition rather as
the later Sartre did. There would hence appear to be equal reason to question
the Marxist credentials of these thinkers as those of the later Sartre and yet they
are habitually categorised unambiguously as western Marxist theorists. Flynn,
in his Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (pp. 173-177), acknowledges the
difficulty involved in any attempt to set the later Sartre's philosophy apart from
Marxism. Flynn is keen to establish such a distinction but has to concede that
on virtually no recognised criteria does the philosophy of the Critique fail to be
Marxist. He ultimately falls back on Lucien Goldmann's claim that the concept
of the collective subject is indispensable to Marxism. For Goldmann, Sartre's
refusal to accept the idea of a trans-individual subject excluded his philosophy
from being Marxist (Marxisme et sciences humaines, Gallimard, 1970, pp. 330 -
1). Even this criterion proves to be of uncertain reliability, however, Flynn
acknowledging that the humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts problematises the
idea of a collective subject even in Marx's work. Flynn ultimately argues that
the position Sartre advances in the Critique remains primarily existentialist
despite now also being "Marxist" because of the primacy Sartre accords to
praxis (p. 196). This conclusion is far from entirely satisfying, however, in view
of the importance which not only the early Marx but also leading western
Marxist theorists such as Lukâcs and, in particular, Gramsci attached to
subjective agency in the historical process, as we saw in chapter I. Ultimately, it
would seem that if the Sartre even of the Critique was to remain a particular
kind of Marxist, he was hardly more divergent from the Marxist-Leninist
orthodoxy than many other western Marxist theorists.
142

Sartrean Commitment
In Sartre's works 'engagement' is an ontological, ethical, and political
concept. Sartre synthesises these three dimensions of commitment into
one unified whole for the first time explicitly in L'Existentialisme est
un humanisme. Prior to this, the ethical and political aspects of
commitment, to the extent to which they had taken form in Sartre's
thinking, had been left largely implicit or were expressed indirectly.
The discussion of commitment in L'Etre et le néant had been limited
to its derivation from Sartre's ontological claims about the nature of
man. In the Carnets, in which no formal separation of ontology and
ethics had yet taken place, Sartre had taken a significant step in the
direction of the ethical and politicised vision of man of the postwar
years although without quite arriving at the idea of active political
commitment. The personal and intellectual development undergone by
Sartre notably during 1940-1 proved to be the vital turning point in
his thinking up until that time. Although pre-war fictional works such
as La Nausée and L'Enfance d'un chef had contributed to the left
social and political critique of the period, it was only now that Sartre
began to make the transition psychologically which would later lead
him to reject his pre-war politically disengaged stance. In the Carnets,
Sartre's growing awareness of his own historicity, and of himself as a
social and political being, is concomitant with his gradual awakening
to a certain kind of humanistic belief in the possibility and value of
intersubjective solidarity. My starting point in this section will be
Sartre's new understanding of man-in-the-world in the Carnets and
the subsequent germination of his existentialist humanism from the
summer of 1940 onwards. Both of these developments would ulti-
mately prove to be vital to the ethical and political dimensions which
his concept of commitment was to take.
Whilst a military conscript during the phoney war period Sartre
undergoes a phase of rapid personal and intellectual development.
In chapter IV we charted the progression in his thinking towards a
powerful new conception of authenticity based on an insistence on
one's situational context described in the Carnets and the letters to
143

Beauvoir. Although not yet an affirmation of the political commitment
of his postwar texts, these developments are a crucial prelude to it; it
is during this period that Sartre becomes aware of his own historicity
and also starts explicitly to view himself and his ideas in a socio-
political light. A vital accompaniment to this progression in Sartre's
thinking is his awakening, a short time later when a POW after June
1940, to a certain kind of humanistic vision of life. Prior to this time,
he had taken a sceptical and sometimes scornful attitude towards
humanism. In La Nausée, Roquentin's irritation with the Autodidact
famously develops into a tirade against 'tous les humanistes que j'ai
connus' [N: 167], all of whom in some sense believe in the intrinsic
worth of man. Roquentin's reaction to the Autodidact's humanism
finally culminates in a resolute expression of individualism, 'Je ne
veux pas qu'on m'intègre' [N: 170]. Nevertheless, it is important not
to exaggerate Sartre's pre-war aversion to humanistic values as some
commentators have done.
8
In La Force de l'âge, Beauvoir remarks
that Sartre 'avait en horreur certaines catégories sociales, mais il ne
s'en prit jamais à l'espèce humaine en général: sa sévérité visait
seulement ceux qui font profession de l'aduler' [FA: 173]. Indeed,
8 In recent criticism, Bernard-Henri Levy's Siècle de Sartre (Grasset, 2000 (pp.
229-241)) is notable for its overstatement of the pre-war Sartre's criticisms of
humanism. Levy applauds Sartre's 'anti-humanism', considering it a precursor
to the post-structuralist dissolution of the subject and rejection of humanist
thought. For Levy, the chief merit of this theoretical anti-humanism was that it
was irreconcilable with those totalitarian ideologies, and notably Stalinist
communism, which set out to fabricate a new man and then committed acts of
barbarousness as a means to this end. Entirely coherent with this reading is
Levy's severe treatment of the Sartre of the 1950s and 1960s whom he presents
as radically departing from an underappreciated anti-humanist early philosophy
only to become ensnared in communist humanist ideology. Levy's reading
hence involves distinguishing between 'good' early and 'bad' later phases of
Sartre's career. In reality, this opposition of Levy's is an erroneous one, his
assimilation of later Sartrean thought to communist ideology being as in­
accurate as his 'anti-humanist' reading of the early Sartre is. The extent of my
disagreement with Levy's reading will be apparent from my account of Sartre
in this thesis as a whole. Rather than emphasising moments of rupture in
Sartre's development as Levy does, I stress the areas of ethical, ontological and
political continuity between his pre-war and postwar thought.
144

even Roquentin himself distinguishes his non-humanist position from
anti-humanism: 'je ne commettrai pas la sottise de me dire « anti-
humaniste »', he states. 'Je ne suis pas humaniste, voilà tout.' [N: 170]
Ultimately, Sartre's pre-war attacks on humanism are best understood
as being part of a destructive phase which he subsequently explained
had been necessary to his intellectual development but was out of
keeping with his fundamentally constructive disposition. 'Si je laisse
de côté l'individualisme destructeur et anarchisant de ma dix-
neuvième année,' he comments in his diary entry of 2 December
1939, 'je vois que tout aussitôt après je me préoccupai d'une morale
constructrice. J'ai toujours été constructeur et La Nausée et Le Mur
n'ont donné de moi qu'une image fausse, parce que j'étais obligé
d'abord de détruire.' [C: 280]
Nothing in the Carnets, which span the period between Novem-
ber 1939 and March 1940, indicates that Sartre's life with the other
conscripts in the military camp provokes a sudden conversion to
humanistic values in him. As we saw in chapter III, he is highly
critical of those in his entourage, and in particular Pieter, often seeing
them as illuminating examples of inauthenticity. During his first
months in the camp in particular, Sartre prefers to underline the
otherness of his social entourage in relation to himself. In his 'morale'
of December 1939, Sartre's definition of the ethical conversion is
limited to the idea of our being fully lucid about our inauthentic desire
to give ourselves a foundation. He introduces the concept of responsi-
bility but not in a way which anticipates the strongly ethical and
political flavour of texts like L'Existentialisme est un humanisme and
'Présentation des Temps Modernes'. One must simply accept com-
plete responsibility for one's inauthentic desire to be one's own
foundation and for oneself as a being in the world. At no point is
there any suggestion of authenticity involving intersubjective relations
of reciprocity as it was to do some years later in the Cahiers. This
'morale' remains thoroughly individualistic. It is also formalistic and
abstract, as Beauvoir objected, because divorced from any genuine
consideration of practical conduct. We have seen in chapter IV how in
the first months of 1940 Sartre struggles to escape the abstraction of
this world-view. By March he is starting to formulate a new con-
ception of authenticity which, in its insistence on the necessity of
145

unifying one's principles and practical conduct, involves a profound
questioning of the formalism of the previous 'morale'. This question-
ing is of course coherent with those depictions of inauthentic conduct
in his fictional works which are characterised by the tendency towards
intellectual abstractions from the real and which can be linked with
Marxist ideology critique. Moreover, the idea of a unity of principles
and practical conduct, in its echoing of the classic Marxist insistence
on the unity of theory and practice, anticipates the synthetic anthro-
pology of the 'Présentation des Temps Modernes' five years later,
where Sartre was to argue that man must be seen as a 'totalité
indécomposable', that is, a unity of ideas, actions and situation in the
world [P: 22].
The existing war diaries stop at March 1940 and the written
evidence of Sartre's thinking from this time onwards is much more
sporadic. In late April and early May, Sartre complains to Beauvoir
that his character Mathieu 'ne s'historialise pas' [LC II: 191] and that
he is striving to rectify this [LC II: 205]. A letter of 10 May reminds
Beauvoir that 'nous pensons vous et moi qu'on doit écrire comme on
parle\ and the paragraph which follows registers Sartre's reaction to
the German invasion of Belgium and the end of the phoney war
period. He declares that the news came as 'presque un soulagement.
L'impression de toucher du réel [...] après huit mois de guerre
« pourrie ».' [LC II: 218] Sartre hence expresses his desire for realism
once again, here juxtaposing considerations pertaining to imaginative
writing with political events in a manner that is characteristic of the
Carnets and the Lettres au Castor. However, in none of this is there
any expression of fraternal feelings on Sartre's part towards his fellow
conscripts, and hence no indication that any kind of conversion to
humanistic values has yet taken hold in him. It would be during the
period he spent as a POW, from July 1940 until March 1941, that
Sartre would first develop a genuine awareness of the value of being
part of a social collectivity.
9
Unable to continue writing and reading at
9 In La force des choses I (Gallimard, 1963) (p. 16), Beauvoir notes that Sartre
'participa dans l'allégresse à la vie communautaire.' Cohen Solal (op.cit. pp.
148-159) offers a detailed account of the period Sartre spent as a POW in the
Stalag XII D.
146

the prodigious rate he had maintained during the phoney war period,
Sartre soon finds himself enjoying communal life in the prison camp.
The posthumously published 'Journal de Mathieu',
10
in which he
describes his experience as a POW, is a revealing document in this
regard, its interest lying principally in its depiction of camp life rather
than in the development of Sartre's ethical outlook. However, Sartre
does emphatically reiterate the criticisms he had made in Carnets of his
previous 'morales'. '[TJoujours de la lucidité. Suprême lâcheté de la
lucidité: c'est un alibi, tout comprendre pour ne rien faire',
11
he insists,
apparently growing increasingly frustrated with not committing
actively to anything. And he is even more scathing with regard to
the idea of personal salvation that he had long entertained during the
1930s, and which he now judges too individualistic: 'Toute morale du
salut est pourrie parce que c'est notre salut que nous voulons faire.'
12
'Il y a un saut à faire', he concludes as if in anticipation of the future.
Save for a handful of brief surviving letters,
13
Sartre's Christmas
play of 1940 Bariona is one of the only surviving written documents
from this crucial period of his development, and it provides the first
reliable evidence that he is beginning to make the leap he speaks of.
For much of the play, Bariona's attitude is roughly coherent with the
pessimism of the Sartre of the late 1930s with regard to human
solidarity. He responds to Roman oppression only with dignified
resignation and refuses to place any faith in the newly born Messiah,
preferring to advocate to his people that they simply cease to
reproduce. By the conclusion of the play, however, he has become
convinced of the importance of believing in and fighting to defend the
Messiah, and urges his people to unite in mounting resistance to the
Romans: 'marchons contre les mercenaires d'Hérode, marchons,
saouls de chants, de vin et d'Espoir',
14
he implores. There can be little
doubt that the message which Sartre conveys in allegorical form here
was clear to his captive audience in the prison camp. Bariona, staging
10 Les Temps Modernes September 1982 pp. 449-475.
11 IbidpA64
12 IbidpA66
13 Lettres au Castor II pp. 282-307.
14 Bariona, Septième tableau, scène HI (in Contât and Rybalka op.cit. p .632)
147

as it does Sartre's rejection of anti-humanist individualism, expresses
his newfound belief in the importance of human solidarity to achieve
desired ends. Its closing pages incite the audience to commit to fight-
ing the oppressor in the name of hope for a better human world. In the
context of the French defeat of 1940, the type of commitment the play
seeks to inspire is clearly of a political character and has strong ethical
underpinnings. As such, it is the first clear expression of the politi-
cised brand of commitment with which the postwar Sartre came
customarily to be associated. The absence of any surviving war diaries
dating from the period of Sartre's captivity means that we have no
explicit indication of the development of his reflections on ethics
which were charted in the course of the Carnets of 1939-40. We can
infer from Bariona, however, that by the winter of 1940 Sartre's
'morale' has undergone a transformation in relation to the position he
had adumbrated in March 1940. In particular, it seems clear that
authenticity for Sartre now implies action for the first time, and indeed
concerted action. The importance of this development could hardly be
overstated because, as we will see in chapter VII, it ties in with
the emphasis on 'doing' rather than 'being' which the Sartre of the
Cahiers pour une morale will see as indispensable to authenticity.
Action also proves vital to the concept of commitment which Sartre
will formulate subsequently in theoretical writings, and will be crucial
to his politicised conception of man in the world
The emphasis on human solidarity and concerted action is of
course characteristic of left political thought but the primarily onto-
logical focus of L'Etre et le néant excludes treatment of these ethical
and political dimensions. Rather than consolidating the developments
of Bariona, which clearly point towards the 'Présentation des Temps
Modernes' and L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, in L'Etre et le
néant Sartre appears to take a step back towards his prewar thought.
He stresses, for example, that freedom inevitably implies responsi-
bility and commitment [EN: 612-5] but his account reads much more
like an elaborate version of the 'morale' he had formulated in Decem-
ber 1939 in the Carnets than it anticipates L'Existentialisme est un
humanisme. Shorn of ethics and politics, responsibility and commit-
ment seem to be a largely individualistic affair, the direct consequence
of the inassimilability of consciousness to being rather than indispens-
148

able guides for social conduct. The impression conveyed by L'Etre et
le néant is deceptive, however, the work's ontological focus masking
as it does the considerable development which Sartre's ethical thought
and understanding of political issues has undergone since the start of
1940. Moreover it is important to note that, as with L'Imaginaire,
the freedom of consciousness is not conceived of by Sartre in such a
way as to imply abstraction from the real. Sartre argues that 'on ne
[peut] concevoir le Néant en dehors de l'être, ni comme notion
complémentaire et abstraite [...]. Il faut que le Néant soit donné au
cœur de l'Etre' [EN: 57]. There is a 'facticité du pour-soi' [EN: 117],
consciousness being embodied: 'le corps est une caractéristique
nécessaire du pour-soi [...] il découle nécessairement de la nature du
pour-soi qu'il soit corps' [EN: 357]. Indeed, it is not the vertical axis
but the horizontal axis of temporality which is implied by Sartre's
descriptions of the inassimilability of consciousness to being:
15
[...] le corps est perpétuellement le dépassé. Le corps [...] c'est ce au delà de
quoi')Q suis [...]
Ainsi le corps, étant le dépassé, est le Passé.
Dans chaque projet du Pour-soi, dans chaque perception, le corps est là, il est le
Passé immédiat en tant qu'il affleure au Présent qui le fuit. Cela signifie qu'il
est à la fois point de vue et point de départ: un point de vue, un point de départ
que je suis et que je dépasse à la fois vers ce que j'ai à être. [EN: 374]
Mais dépasser le monde, c'est précisément ne pas le survoler, c'est s'engager en
lui [EN: 375]
15 It is for this reason that I argued in chapter III that Sartre's conception of
inauthenticity is as much to do with consciousness' refusal to accept the
responsibility implied by the temporal present as it is to do with a desire for
substantiality. For Sartre, the free consciousness' relation to the body is that of
being 'au-delà', not 'au-dessus', and an authentic outlook consists in resisting
one's habitual impulsion to try to establish a fixed identity for oneself by
identifying with an already existing, or past, self. There has been a tendency in
the critical literature to neglect this horizontal axis of temporality in accounts of
Sartre's concept of inauthenticity, commentators preferring to emphasise the
connection between inauthenticity and the desire for substantiality.
149

Oreste's self-liberating act in Les Mouches, completed in 1943, incar-
nates the ontology-derived concepts of commitment and responsibility
formulated in L'Etre et le néant a short while earlier. From the
standpoint of ethics and politics, the play is ambiguous, however. On
the one hand, Oreste's act is in many ways an individualistic affair,
the intersubjective solidarity which had characterised the humanism of
Bariona being much less pronounced. And yet, the implications of his
act are undoubtedly further reaching than could be any mere illus-
tration of ontological principles in the strict sense. Indeed, Sartre
anticipates L'Existentialisme est un humanisme where a key con-
ceptual development would be the broadening of the existential choice
and the extent of subjective responsibility: in making choices, Sartre
would argue, the subject chooses for the whole of humanity [EH:
31-2].
16
Orestes' refusal to feel guilt and his decision to renounce the
throne before leaving Argos undoubtedly constitute this type of choice
and these actions clearly have ethical implications. In fact, Orestes'
actions exemplify a heroic tendency in Sartre's existentialist humanist
anthropology which is at once representative of the staunch indi-
vidualism of the pre-conversion ontology of L'Etre et le néant and
vital not only to the ethical dimension of L'Existentialisme est un
humanisme but also to the theory of political revolution expounded in
the second part of Matérialisme et révolution.
17
It is the rationalism of
16 It is worth noting that this argument makes its first appearance in Sartre's
theoretical writings some months earlier in his article 'A Propos de
l'existentialisme: Mise au point', published in the communist review Action,
no. 17, December 1944. Re-printed in Contât and Rybalka pp. 653-8 . Sartre
claims that 'en se faisant [l'homme] assume la responsabilité de l'espèce
entière' (p.656).
17 A parallel can be drawn between this heroic tendency in Sartre's humanist
existentialist anthropology and what Lesek Kolakowski has described as a
Promethean motif in Marx's thought (Main Currents of Marxism. I: The Foun-
ders, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978, p.412). Sartre is careful to avoid explicitly
vaunting heroic behaviour in his writings on the whole, probably wary of the
concept's self-regarding and narcissistic implications. There is, however, a
revealing statement on the matter in his article of 1944, 'A propos de
l'existentialisme', which sheds light on the kind of psychological attitude
which spawned works such as Bariona and Les Mouches: 'Héroïsme, grandeur,
générosité, abnégation, j'en demeure d'accord, il n'y a rien de mieux et,
150

Sartre's conception of the subject which constitutes the basis of his
heroic outlook. The inescapable ontological freedom of the subjective
consciousness means that it is not susceptible to assimilation to, or
incorporation by, any antecedent 'essence', be this its own being or
its situation in the world. It hence enjoys a considerable independence
in relation to these freedom-limiting constraints. In Les Mouches,
Orestes' heroism manifests itself in his staunch refusal of the
dominant ideology of Argos upheld by Egisthe, and in his confident
affirmation of the irreducibility of his freedom of thought. In so far as
he tries to win Electre over to his way of thinking, and hopes the
people of Argos will follow suit, this heroic stance amounts to nothing
less than incitement to resistance and even political revolution.
If the theme of human solidarity is not foregrounded in Les
Mouches, it re-surfaces the following year in the article 'A Propos de
l'existentialisme: Mise au point', published in the communist journal
Action, where Sartre asserts that 'l'existentialisme n'est pas une
délectation morose, mais une philosophie humaniste de l'action, de
l'effort, du combat, de la solidarité' [Sartre's italics].
18
In this text,
written only a few months after the Liberation, Sartre is keen to bring
to the fore the ways in which his existentialist philosophy is com-
patible with left political thought, notably drawing a parallel between
existentialist and Marxian anthropology.
19
Solidarity is also central to
the conclusions which Sartre draws at the close of Réflexions sur la
question juive, also written in the post-Liberation months. Further-
more, it is in this text that Sartre's first explicit affirmation of the need
for left revolutionary commitment is to be found. Not only should we
be 'tous solidaires du Juif puisque l'antisémitisme conduit tout droit
au national-socialisme', but 'la révolution socialiste est nécessaire et
suffisante pour supprimer l'antisémite; c'est aussi pour les Juifs que
finalement, c'est le sens même de l'action humaine.' (Contât et Rybalka op.cit.
p.658)
18 Contât and Rybalka op.cit. p .658
19 Ibid Sartre argues that his conception of man 'ne s'éloigne pas beaucoup de la
conception de l'homme qu'on trouverait chez Marx' (p.655), and points up the
centrality of action in both cases.
151

nous ferons la révolution.'
In these passages, then, Sartre suggests
that a sense of collective social responsibility is needed to guard
against the evils of fascism.
The pre-conversion view of man as inauthentic and apolitical
which Sartre set out in L'Etre et le néant had clearly not been repre-
sentative of his global philosophical world-view in the early 1940s.
The image which Sartre conveys in these texts of late 1944 of his
existentialist philosophy, and the indirect call to resistance and
political commitment of Les Mouches, are entirely coherent with the
newfound humanistic optimism of the closing pages of Bariona four
years earlier. Moreover, the anti-fascist sentiment of Réflexions sur la
question juive is essentially an extension of that which Sartre had
expressed through literary discourse in L'Enfance d'un chef However,
Sartre's pervasive use of irony in this earlier work, rather like the use
of allegory in Bariona and Les Mouches subsequently, meant that
the political content of Sartre's writing had fallen short of being an
explicit call for commitment. The article 'A Propos de l'existentialisme'
was hence the first time that Sartre revealed explicitly the political
dimension of his thought. In two texts of 1945, 'Présentation des
Temps Modernes' and L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, he then
develops this further, bringing political and ethical considerations to
the fore and discussing at length active commitment in these respects
for the first time. It is committed writing that constitutes the central
focus of 'Présentation des Temps Modernes
9
, and consideration of this
will be postponed until Part III. In the context of our present discus-
sion, we should nevertheless note the significant degree to which
Sartre makes an explicit move towards the theoretical postulates of
classic Marxism in this text. He rejects the reliance of the bourgeoisie
on analytical thought, advocating a synthetic anthropology which
takes man as a totality. The 'homme-totalité' [P: 23] is not just the
individual as conceived in liberal thought, but also involves his
economic, social, and historical situation and conditioning [P: 24]:
'Puisque l'homme est une totalité, il ne suffit pas [...] de lui accorder
le droit de vote, sans toucher aux autres facteurs qui le constituent: il
20 RQJ p. 182 Although not published until later, this essay was written in October
1944.
152

faut qu'il se délivre totalement [...] en agissant sur sa constitution
biologique aussi bien que sur son conditionnement économique' [P:
23]. This 'totalitarian' conception of man, as Sartre puts it, builds on
the conclusions which he had been feeling his way towards in the final
pages of the Carnets, discussed in chapter IV. Here Sartre's earlier
reflections receive a more sophisticated conceptual formulation and
the introduction of terms drawn from the lexicon of political theory
highlights the Marxist overtones more explictly.
The theme of intersubjective solidarity is developed in L'Existen-
tialisme est un humanisme. Bringing ethical considerations to the fore,
Sartre argues that the subject's freedom is dependent on others also
being free; seeking to ensure one's own freedom hence implies want-
ing also to ensure the freedom of others [EH: 69, 70]. This claim is
a significant step in the direction of the ethics of reciprocity of the
Cahiers, and also prepares the ground for the conception of revolu-
tionary politics of Matérialisme et révolution. However, if the idea of
interdependent freedoms in this text marks a departure from L'Etre
et le néant, the conception of commitment which it accompanies,
although now carrying political implications, remains firmly rooted
in the earlier ontology. Commitment in L'Existentialisme est un
humanisme takes on a political dimension, first, in that the broadening
of the implications of the individual's choice to the rest of humanity
[EH: 31-2] imposes enormous ethical responsibility on her with
regard to society as a whole. Secondly, Sartre emphasises the link
between commitment and action and attributes this latter concept
considerably greater politico-social implications than he had done in
L'Etre et le néant. There is much more the sense that action involves
actually getting things done in the social world. '[L]a collectivisation
[...] arrivera-t-elle?', Sartre asks. 'Je n'en sais rien, je sais seulement
que tout ce qui sera en mon pouvoir pour la faire arriver, je le ferai'
[EH: 51]; committing oneself to the project of collectivisation, then,
implies taking concrete steps to try to bring it about.
It is from 'A Propos de l'existentialisme' and 'Présentation des
Temps Modernes' that it first becomes apparent that Sartre's concept
of commitment is a vital point of intersection between his existential-
ist philosophy and Marxist politics and thought. The idea of commit-
ment, of both individual and collective varieties, had been central to
153

the vision of the class struggle promulgated by all non-mechanistic
brands of Marxist thought up until this time. However, it is important
to note the distinctiveness of Sartre's concept of commitment even in
the post-Liberation years. Until well into the 1950s, the derivation of
Sartrean commitment, even in its most overtly political expressions,
from the ontological world-view set out in L'Etre et le néant gave
it a particularity in relation to the Marxist tradition. The ethical and
political vision of commitment ofL'Existentialisme est un humanisme
is hence best understood as a conceptual development on, rather than
departure from, the vision of L'Etre et le néant. The ontological view
of man of the earlier work appears, in summary, in the formulation
"l'existence précède l'essence" [EH: 29, 32] and the central concepts
of choice, responsibility, commitment and action had all been estab-
lished previously. In reality, rather than there being any sudden leap
towards politics in the brief period separating L'Etre et le néant and
L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, the earlier work is in fact much
closer conceptually to Sartre's postwar politics than has often been
thought.
Reading Ethical Humanist Marxism in Sartre's Theory of
Revolution
In the second part of Matérialisme et révolution (1946) Sartre pro-
poses a theory of political revolution derived from the principles of
his existentialist philosophy. This text offers the most unambiguous
evidence of Sartre's commitment to the left political struggle up until
this time, but he sets out to re-write the theoretical basis on which
that struggle is predicated for Marxists, and in particular, for the
communist activists of the PCF. Having misunderstood the real import
of Marxism's theoretical reliance on materialism and rejected the
doctrine, Sartre believes that his philosophical world-view can provide
a sounder basis for revolutionary political action. In addition to
allowing a broader conception of situation so as to account for the
154

worker's economic and social conditioning and constraints, in this text
Sartre moves towards a more concrete conception of intersubjective
solidarity than had been adumbrated in the argument for the inter-
dependence of subjective freedoms in L'Existentialisme est un human-
isme. Sartre also suggests for the first time that philosophy should be
in part intrinsically political in nature. What is striking about Sartre's
existentialist theory of revolution is the fact that, as with the claims
of L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, it displays a fundamental
continuity with the ontological arguments set out in L'Etre et le néant.
Moreover, there are key areas of similiarity and overlap with the
humanist brand of Marxism which attached particular importance to
the early writings of Marx; this relationship will be discussed in some
detail in this section.
As we saw in chapter I, Sartre believes that the materialist basis
of Marxist theory makes it excessively essentialist and reductive of
subjectivity. What the political revolutionary needs is not a theory
which reduces him to his concrete situation and to a pre-defined
historical process but one which conversely recognises that, although
conditioned by his social and economic circumstances, he remains
free to bring about change. 'Le révolutionnaire se définit [...] par le
dépassement de la situation où il est' [MR: 179] and must be able to
'décoller d'une situation pour prendre un point de vue sur elle' [MR:
194], Sartre claims, reiterating the position of L'Etre et le néant. With
regard to the question of subjectivity, these existentialist claims of
Sartre's stand diametrically opposed to Stalinist Marxism, and hence
to the PCF ideologues of the day such as as Roger Garaudy and Cécile
Angrand. They do not however run counter to the theories of many
other key Marxist thinkers as they are largely incorporated into their
theories, albeit without the same degree of emphasis on the centrality
of subjective choice in the existential present.
At an early stage in the exposition of his theory of revolution,
Sartre establishes a connection between bourgeois ideology and idealist
philosophy, echoing Marx's and Engels' The German Ideology. The
bourgeois are 'monarques par droit divin; le monde est fait pour eux,
leur existence est la valeur absolue et parfaitement satisfaisante pour
l'esprit qui donne son sens à l'univers. C'est ce que signifient origi-
nellement tous les systèmes philosophiques qui affirment la primauté
155

du sujet sur l'objet et la constitution de la nature par la pensée.' [MR:
185] Idealist philosophy, then, Sartre suggests, is an outgrowth of
and harmonises with the bourgeois condition and ideology. Moreover,
whereas the bourgeois is born into a social situation which auto-
matically bestows rights on him, i'opprimé se sent un naturel: chacun
des événements de sa vie vient lui répéter qu'il n'a pas le droit
d'exister' [MR : 186]. In fact, the latter formulation had been pre-
viously employed to describe Roquentin in relation to the bourgeois
'salauds' [N: 125].
21
The use of the term 'un naturel' is of significance
in this passage, suggesting as it does an opposition between bourgeois
abstraction and the concrete reality of the condition of the working
class.
Aligning his theoretical position with the Marxist world-view
more explicitly than hitherto, Sartre suggests that the philosophy of
the revolutionary should be a total explanatory theory, that is a theory
which is not merely the basis for political action but rather a sort of
grand narrative accounting for the human condition in its entirety:
'il faut que cette philosophie soit totale, c'est-à-dire qu'elle apporte
un éclaircissement total de la condition humaine.' [MR: 180] The
Marxian emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, taken up and
elaborated by generations of Marxist thinkers, had led to the convic-
tion that philosophy in the traditional sense had been superseded by a
truth which was constituted by a synthesis of ideas and action, termed
'praxis'. When Sartre claims a propos of his own theory of revolution
that 'l'humanisme révolutionnaire apparaîtra non pas comme la
21 Roquentin remarks that Pacôme's judgemental stare 'mettait en question
jusqu'à mon droit d'exister. Et c'était vrai, je m'en étais toujours rendu compte:
je n'avais pas le droit d'exister.' Furthermore, in the closing pages of L'Enfance
d'un chef, Lucien's newfound self-confidence as a bourgeois is expressed in
terms of his possessing rights and these are presented as abstractions.
Henceforth, 'son droit à commander' is a certitude, and rights are described as
'par-delà l'existence, comme les objets mathématiques' [EC: 243]. My point is
to indicate the thematic continuity between Sartre's hostility to the bourgeoisie
and to abstractions from the real in the late 1930s on the one hand, and the
explicit Marxian tendencies of his political thought in his writings after 1946. If
Sartre was to adopt certain key aspects of the Marxian world-view in the
postwar years, it was partly because he had always shared areas not just of
political but also philosophical common ground with Marx.
156

philosophie d'une classe opprimée, mais comme la vérité elle-même'
[MR: 224], he suggests a similar indissociability of the conceptual and
the practical, the theoretical and the political, linking a global notion
of truth with the revolutionary struggle. The key development in
Sartre's thinking in this regard lies in his broadening of individual
action to include political activity, in line with his newfound socio-
economic understanding of man's situation. In L'Existentialisme est
un humanisme, the concept of action had been extended to the ethical
and even political drive to realise aims in the social world, but Sartre
had not gone as far as partisan activism. Sartre now argues that as the
worker is oppressed by his social and economic conditioning, his
desire for emancipation can only be realised through revolutionary
political activity. The concept of 'praxis' would appear explicitly in
Sartre's writings from 1947 onwards, ultimately becoming, in his later
thought, the successor to that of consciousness.
Although Sartre refuses any notion of a collective consciousness,
and would continue to do so in his later philosophy, in Matérialisme
et révolution the idea of interdependent subjective freedoms in L'Exis-
tentialisme est un humanisme is extended into a full-blown notion of
solidarity. '[L]e révolutionnaire ne se comprend que dans ses rapports
de solidarité avec sa classe' [MR: 180], Sartre argues. He seeks
liberation as a worker specifically, for which the emancipation of
his class in its entirety is necessary. Only a collective struggle can
succeed in bringing about the requisite changes in the social and
economic structure of society. The revolutionary does not however,
Sartre claims, consider such solidarity with his fellow workers to be a
temporary expedient but rather the point of departure for a new social
order under socialism, hoping that 'les rapports de solidarité qu'il
entretient avec les autres travailleurs deviennent le type même des
rapports humains.' [MR: 180] In an interesting conceptual cross-
fertilisation with the position of L'Etre et le néant, Sartre argues that it
is only because man is free rather than determined that such solidarity,
and a resulting proletarian class consciousness, is possible. Such
phenomena cannot result from a passive conception of man, Sartre
thinks, inappropriately pointing the finger at Marxist materialism.
157

If existentialism was moving increasingly in the direction of
Marxism in the course of the 1940s, the much publicised
22
1844
Manuscripts after the Liberation were stimulating a far-reaching
réévaluation of Marx's œuvre. A new image of Marx was coming into
focus, although official communist doctrine would thereafter con-
sistently minimise the importance of the manuscripts, disapproving of
the image of Marx as a fundamentally humanist thinker which was
coming to the fore. Such a view of Marx highlighted the centrality of
subjective agency and self-realisation, a dimension of his historical
materialist theory which had been identified by perceptive commen-
tators such as the early Lukâcs and Gramsci in particular but had been
overlooked by many. For the devotees of diamat in the PCF, it
appeared to challenge Marxism's status as a science of history with
objective laws of change. It also drew Marx undeniably closer to the
PCF's rival and foe of the immediate postwar years, namely existen-
tialism.
The basis of Marx's humanism in the manuscripts is his
reformulation of the Hegelian concept of alienation to account for
man's condition under capitalism. For Marx, man's alienation is three-
fold: he is separated from the products of his labour because they
belong to the capitalist; the act of production is alien to him, being
unrelated to the satisfaction of his own needs; and he is alienated from
his species,
23
that is his fundamental nature, as it is distorted by his
participation in the capitalist labour process. It is the latter form of
alienation which is the most central to ascertaining the anthropological
underpinnings to Marx's philosophy and which lends itself to com-
parison with Sartre's existentialist anthropology. Marx holds the
conviction that after the overthrow of the capitalist system man,
released from his alienated condition, will be able to realise himself
fully and flourish in a realm of freedom. It is this vision revealed in
22 The manuscripts had in fact become available in France in 1937-8 (Kelly
op.cit. p .26), but were to attract the most attention after the Liberation.
23 In the 1844 Manuscripts (pp. 112-114), Marx refers to 'species being',
Gattungswesen, following Feuerbach's use of the term.
158

the manuscripts which led many theorists of the postwar years,
24
developing the claims of key Western Marxist theorists starting with
Lukâcs,
25
to insist that a fundamental humanist impulse lay at the
basis of Marx's thought as a whole, his mature historical materialist
theory included. Such humanist readings of Marx highlighted the
ethical dimension and implications of his thought ignored by the
ideologists of the party who, in an attempt to preserve the scientistic
interpretation of historical materialism, responded by arguing for a
separation of the young and the mature Marx. It would only be some
years later, in the form of Louis Althusser's anti-humanist structuralist
Marxism, that a case of merit would be made against the humanist
Marxist insistence on the crucial importance of Marx's early thought
to his mature theory.
The postwar Sartre places emphasis on the idea that subjective
freedom is not merely a prerequisite for meaningful action because it
is itself defined through and united with action. In Matérialisme et
révolution he claims that 'la liberté ne se découvre que dans l'acte, ne
fait qu'un avec l'acte' [MR: 205]. The freedom of the working class is
hence presented as closely connected to its political struggle for
emancipation. This position signals a development in his thinking on
the position articulated in L'Etre et le néant, but it is more a difference
of emphasis, Sartre closing the formal gap between ontology and
ethics, than it denotes a conceptual departure. Although Sartre focused
in L'Etre et le néant more on ontological freedom than on action and
its ethical implications, his view of the relationship between freedom
and action had nevertheless been fundamentally the same as the
following remark indicates: 'La liberté se fait acte et nous l'atteignons
ordinairement à travers l'acte' [EN: 492]. Indeed, the progression in
Sartre's thought towards an explicitly political philosophy after the
Liberation actually takes place with surprising ease on the whole,
24 Lefebvre's Le Marxisme (PUF, 1948), Pierre Bigos's Marxisme et humanisme
(PUF, 1953), and Erich Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man (New York: Ungar,
1966) are three notable works of the period which are representative of this
humanist Marxist tendency.
25 In History and Class Consciousness, Lukâcs had remarkably anticipated the
late appearance of the early Marxian emphasis on alienation as central to radical
critique, the 1844 Manuscripts having not yet come to light.
159

involving extension and elaboration of previously established con-
cepts and positions rather than their contradiction or rejection. Sartre's
existentialist philosophy, although far from always oriented explicitly
towards left radical thought, is hence best understood as having shared
many of the latter's basic presuppositions and perhaps even as having
been formulated to some extent in accordance with its values and
demands. When Sartre argues that 'la philosophie révolutionnaire doit
être une philosophie de la transcendance' [MR: 196], he is advancing a
claim which is at one and the same time clearly an expression of a left
radical urge to go beyond the existing limitations on subjective
possibilities and which goes to the heart of his own existentialist
philosophy, with its emphasis on consciousness' capacity to transcend
constraining situations. His ethical claim in L'Existentialisme est un
humanisme that in choosing one's own path one sets the whole of
humanity on a certain course [EH: 31-2] is ostensibly unpolitical and
yet could itself in fact be taken as a loose description of the actions of
the political revolutionary and their consequences.
Sartrean humanism, both before and after Matérialisme et
révolution, is libertarian in character, posing man's freedom both as a
necessary condition for action and as a goal to be achieved through
action, freedom in the former sense being of the ontological kind and
in the latter sense being in situation. Humanist Marxist theorists,
seeing the early Marx's preoccupation in the 1844 Manuscripts with
overcoming alienation as a central, if largely inexplicit, category of his
mature thought, have stressed the centrality of human freedom to his
world view. Erich Fromm argues that 'Marx is primarily concerned
with the emancipation of man as an individual'
26
also describing his
philosophy as 'a kind of 'existentialist' thinking.'
27
R.G. Peffer's
study Marxism, Morality and Social Justice highlights freedom as one
of the fundamental principles on which Marx's thought is based:
The moral content of the various forms of alienation Marx describes in the
Manuscripts, the moral grounds upon which he condemns these forms of
alienation, can [...] be successfully reduced to three primary moral principles to
which he implicitly subscribes in the Manuscripts and throughout the rest of his
26 Fromm op.cit.p.5
27 Ibid Preface^
160

writings [...] freedom (as self-determination), human community, and self-
realization.
28
The moral imperatives of freedom and self-realization which Peffer
mentions would clearly seem to cast Marx as an important precursor
for any left libertarian position, and hence for Sartre's philosophy as
well. Henri Maler goes further in this direction than Peffer, claiming
that the basic impulse motivating all of Marx's theorising was a
libertarian one. 'La liberté est la valeur à la base de la pensée de
Marx,' Maler has argued, adding that this freedom is 'historiquement
située, pourtant universalisable'.
29
Maler's reading of Marx is of
particular interest in relation to Sartre's philosophy, to which his
assessment is also applicable. In the closing paragraph of L'Etre et
le néant, Sartre ventures that freedom might perhaps be able to take
itself for a 'valeur en tant que source de toute valeur', and then
wonders, were this possible, whether ia liberté, en se prenant pour
fin, échappera-t -elle à toute situation! Ou, au contraire, demeurera-t -
elle située ?' [EN: 691] When Sartre turns his focus to the ethical and
political dimensions of human reality over the following years, and
comes to acknowledge the necessity of seeing man as a synthetic
totality, he is drawn to the Marxian position, namely that freedom is
historically situated and therefore incapable of transcending all situ-
ations, and yet is 'universalisable' all the same.
The centrality of ethical themes to Sartre's writing is widely
recognised in the critical literature today.
30
In the case of Marx, the
prevalence of diamat in the Stalinist era gave rise to the common
misapprehension in communist and liberal circles alike that Marxian
theory, supposed to enjoy the status of scientific truth, did not contain
ethical and moral presuppositions. There is a conspicuous lack of
discussion of these fields in Marx's writings, Marx, as Yvon Quiniou
28 R.G . Peffer, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton University Press,
1990)p.51
29 These analyses were made in a paper given by Maler at Université Paris VIII,
entitled 'Marx libertaire' (18/1/2001).
30 See, for example, Yvan Salzmann's Sartre et l'authenticité (Genève: Laboret
Fides, 2000) or Thomas C. Anderson's Sartre's Two Ethics: From Authenticity
to Integral Humanity.
161

reminds us, stressing the primacy of politics in relation to morality
which he tends to associate with the abstraction of bourgeois ideol-
ogy.
32
Quiniou argues that a 'normativité morale' can nevertheless be
clearly detected in Marx's thought, problematic though it in some
ways is: 'Sa présence est évidente: Marx l'a clairement assumée à titre
de motivation initiale de son itinéraire théorico-pratique.'
33
Peffer
concurs in this reading, speaking of reconstructing Marx's 'implicit
moral theory' despite the difficulty posed by the 'submerged charac-
ter' of Marx's moral views.
34
'Although Marx never developed the
philosophical basis for a fully-fledged moral theory,' writes Peffer,
'he did exhibit a moral perspective, which remained relatively con-
stant [...] throughout his writings',
35
freedom being one of the basic
moral values, if not the most fundamental,
36
underpinning this per-
spective. In chapter VII, we will examine the Marxist conception of
morality in greater detail.
Marx's concept of alienation describes the negative effects of
capitalist labour relations on the working class individual subject. In
Matérialisme et révolution, Sartre offers an account of labour which
initially paraphrases Marx's argument but then subverts it into what is
perhaps best described as a sort of neo-Hegelian existentialist position
on the question. Sartre accepts that labour 'est commandé et prend
d'abord figure d'asservissement du travailleur' [MR: 197], that 'le
patron va jusqu'à déterminer à l'avance les gestes et les conduites du
travailleur' [MR: 197], and that the labourer's work 'lui est imposé à
l'origine et on lui vole finalement le produit.' [MR: 199] However,
he then goes on to portray labour in a much more positive light,
presenting it as an experience through which consciousness can take
cognizance of its freedom: 'le travail offre une amorce de libération
concrète' [MR: 198]; 'c'est au plus profond de son esclavage [...]
que l'action, en lui conférant le gouvernement des choses et une
31 Etudes matérialistes sur la morale (Editions Klimé, 2002) p.65
32 This point was defended by Quiniou in 'La Morale de Marx', a paper given at
Université Paris VIII, (25/1/2001).
33 Yvon Quiniou, Etudes matérialistes sur la morale p.66
34 Peffer op.cit.p .4
35 Ibidp35
36 IbidpMô
162

autonomie de spécialiste sur laquelle le maître ne peut rien, le libère'
[MR: 199]. The existentialist emphasis of Sartre's revolutionary
theory hence leads him to see in the worker's subjective agency a step
in the direction of a revolutionary movement which will overthrow
capitalism. At first glance, it seems that such a view of labour runs
counter to that of Marx whose position would appear to be founded on
the conviction that it is only subsequent to the overthrow of the
exploitative socio-economic structure which ensures man's alienation
that subjective freedom is possible. In reality, Marx's stance on this
issue was considerably more nuanced than this, incorporating to some
extent the idea of the emancipatory potential of the process of labour
itself which Sartre argues for, apparently borrowing from Hegel.
Marcuse highlights Marx's indebtedness to Hegel in this regard:
Marx lays particular stress on the decisive contributions of Hegel's concept
of labour. Hegel had said that the division of labour and the general inter­
dependence of individual labour in the system of wants alike determine the
system of state and society. Moreover, the process of labour likewise deter­
mines the development of consciousness. The 'life and death struggle' between
master and servant opens the path to self-conscious freedom.
37
If Sartre's and Marx's views on labour are hence not as dissimilar as
one might imagine, the fact remains however that for Marx man's
emancipation is primarily conceived as contingent upon the overthrow
of the structures which alienate and oppress him. There is an impor-
tant reason why this is the case for Marx which goes to the core of his
thought, and which should also serve as a reminder of the fact that
although Sartre's and Marx's philosophical world-views do share
much common ground in the ways we have examined, the con-
cordance between them is nevertheless not an obvious one. In a
nutshell, whereas the basis of Sartre's general philosophical outlook is
his anti-essentialist conception of the subject, that of Marx is the exact
opposite, the subject being conceived of as possessing an essential
37 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (New York: Humanity Books, 1999
[1964])p.259
163

nature. This fundamental disagreement inevitably problematises cer-
tain areas of theoretical concordance between the two thinkers. For
Marx, man's essential nature, which he terms 'species- life',
39
is to
engage in creative labour. Marx objects to the capitalist labour process
not simply because it is exploitative but also because he is faithful to
the idea of the possibility of the whole, total man, unfragmented by
the alienating capitalist labour process.
40
This idea of a unified man
ties in with Marx's materialist stance, Marx seeing man as ideally in
harmony with rather than working against nature. Sartre, on the other
hand, conceives of the subject not as a unified whole but as funda-
mentally fissured because, in his view, consciousness is inassimilable
to being. Wary of all naturalisms, Sartre's refusal to endorse philo-
sophical materialism is both a cause and expression of this anti-
essentialism. It is clear that Sartre's and Marx's respective positions
here are not easily commensurable, the terms of their ontological
claims being different: Sartre's focus is the relationship between
consciousness and being, whereas Marx's is man's relationship to the
labour process. The fact nevertheless remains that the two thinkers
undeniably diverge with respect to the question of whether or not
the subject possesses a fundamental nature. Regarding the issue of
each thinker's libertarianism, for Sartre the fundamental freedom
of consciousness and the subject's subsequent capacity for self-
definition are derived conceptually from his anti-essentialist view of
the subject: it is the subjective consciousness's non-coincidence with
being which ensures its freedom. For Marx on the other hand, freedom
38 As I suggested in chapter I, however, Marxist writers have not been in agree­
ment about exactly what Marx's essentialism consisted in. Lefebvre's desire
to exorcise philosophical materialism from Marxism leads him to present a
Hegelian Marx for whom man is in effect without a material foundation and
hence lacking a determinate essence. Most commentators, by contrast, have
argued that Marx saw man's essential nature to be harmonious with the material
world conceived more broadly. Eagleton, for example, describes Marx as 'a sort
of Aristotelian essentialist, who holds that there is a human nature or essence,
and that the just society would be one in which this nature was allowed to come
into its own.' (Marx and Freedom, London: Phoenix, 1997 p. 17)
39 1844 Manuscripts p. 114
40 Ernst Fischer, Marx In His Own Words (London: Allen Lane, 1970) p. 15
164

is a fundamental moral value, if not the most fundamental, and yet this
conclusion is derived conversely from the essential nature which he
imputes to man: Marx's critique of alienation is based on the convic-
tion that man is severed from engaging in creative labour. Similarly,
Sartre's largely positive view of the labour process harmonises with
his general outlook founded on his anti-essentialist ontology: Sartre
sees in the subjective thought and agency which labour involves the
possibility for change and hence a step in the direction of emanci-
pation. For Marx on the other hand, it is the labour process which
produces a primarily alienating effect on man because his essential
nature is directly contradicted by his participation in that process.
The divergence between Sartre and Marx due to the divergent
ontological bases for their claims is clearly perceptible with regard to
their respective treatment of the phenomenon which Marxists call
'reification'. In those places in his account of labour where he echoes
the Marxian critique of alienation, Sartre concludes that the bourgeois
tends to reduce the worker 'à l'état de pure et simple chose en
assimilant ses conduites à des propriétés.' [MR: 198] As a critique of
bourgeois dominance, this claim is not actually as Marxist as the
argument which it is part of, reposing as it does on Sartre's anti-
essentialist rejection of any theoretical reduction of the free subject to
the status of an object in the world. As we saw in chapter I, Sartre
assumes that material objects of the world are by definition character-
ised by their inertia in contrast to the spontaneity and dynamic activity
of the subject. The materialist and essentialist Marx, by contrast, is not
opposed to the idea that man is an object as such but rather to the
idea of him being reduced to a mechanical function in a system of
production which alienates him. Man is reified by the capitalist mode
of production because, as Lukâcs puts it, 'he is a mechanical part
incorporated into a mechanical system.' [HCC: 89]
The incompatibility between Marx and Sartre with regard to
essentialist or anti-essentialist conceptions of the subject seems much
more problematic than it is in reality. Employing the essentialism/
anti-essentialism interpretative schema to assess and compare Marx
and Sartre leads inevitably to the conclusion that the two thinkers'
world-views are divergent. This divergence is in fact more apparent
than real, their fundamental affinities belying the impression of
165

irreconcilability created by the essentialism/anti-essentialism oppo-
sition. The essential nature which Marx imputes to man is, after
all, entirely coherent not only with his own libertarian impulse but
also, by the same token, with the libertarian drive that characterises
Sartre's 'anti-essentialist' position. Marx's emphasis on 'creative
labour' harmonises with Sartre's conception of man as free and
defining the world through his actions. For Sartre, man's freedom is
derivative of his ontological make-up and is also a goal to be realised
in situation. Marx conceives of man's freedom as an implicit but
fundamental constitutive part of his essential nature and urges him to
change the social and economic structures which restrict its full
development. In fact, viewed in a Sartrean perspective, Marx's
essentialism is highly paradoxical because it does not involve a denial
of man's fundamental freedom, unlike other cases of essentialism as
Sartre sees them; rather, it makes freedom into a basic moral value as
Sartre's philosophy does.
With regard to the question of reification, although Marx's
materialist essentialism means that he does not share what Frederic
Jameson has called Sartre's dislike of 'thingness',
41
at the basis of his
hostility to the reduction of the worker to mechanical functions is
his aversion to the passivity which this induces. Lukâcs articulates the
point thus: 'As labour is progressively rationalised and mechanised
his [the worker's] lack of will is reinforced by the way in which
his activity becomes less and less active and more and more
contemplative.' [HCC: 89] In fact, looking behind the essentialist/
non-essentialist opposition central to the ontological conceptual
apparatus of L'Etre et le néant, it is a similar refusal to conceive of
man as passive or inert which lies at the very basis of Sartre's exis-
tentialist anthropology. A key area of apparent divergence between
Sartre and Marx is the fact that Marx does not share Sartre's
preoccupation with establishing the irreducible particularity of con-
sciousness in relation to the world. Michel Henry rightly argues that
the distinction between the living and the non-living is much more
41 Frederic Jameson, Sartre: Origins of a Style (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1971) p.191
166

central for Marx. Yet this distinction involves a similar opposition
between the animate and the inanimate, the active and the passive. For
Marx, when the worker is reduced to a mechanical function, he is
relegated to the category of the non-living or inanimate. When Sartre
deplores the fact that the worker is reduced to an object, it is the same
aversion for the inanimate and passive which underlies his claims.
These fundamental affinities between Sartre's and Marx's
philosophies point to the conclusion that their apparent divergences
owe much more to their use of radically contrasting conceptual
schémas to set out their ideas than to genuinely irreconcilable world-
views. The existentialist and Marxist anthropologies hence have a
great deal more in common than than they do not. We must in any
case not take for granted the validity of Sartre's essentialism/anti-
essentialism conceptual schema, derived from his ontology, which is
ostensibly so exclusive of Marx, and which, one might add, has
been so influential for postwar Sartre-influenced and post-Sartrean
French philosophy and theory. The notable fact that, as we saw in
chapter I, the majority of non-Stalinist Marxist thinkers did not deny
the role played by subjectivity in the historical process, points to the
conclusion that Sartre, who had not at the time adequately understood
the claims of materialists, perhaps went to excessive lengths in his
early philosophy to safeguard the freedom of thought of the individual
subject. Excessive because at the price of resulting in an overweening
philosophical rationalism which he would spend the rest of his career
retreating from.
Sartre's position in the mid 1940s hence demonstrates clear
conceptual as well as political affinities with the humanist brand of
Marxist thought which came to the fore after the appearance of Marx's
1844 Manuscripts, These affinities are of course most apparent in the
theory of revolution he sets out in the second part of Matérialisme et
42 Michel Henry Marx (Gallimard, 1976, 2 vols). This opposition may seem
similar to that between consciousness and world, but it is nevertheless distinct
from it in the following respect: for Marx, the living (as oppposed to the non­
living) designates notably the material human self whose 'species-being' is to
be engaged in creative labour. Sartre's distinction, by contrast, fundamentally
involves making a theoretical separation of consciousness from being.
167

révolution but are more obliquely perceptible in his theoretical world-
view as a whole at the time. In Matérialisme et révolution, as in
'Présentation des Temps Modernes' before it, Sartre employs concepts
evidently drawn from Marxist theory, but he does so whilst maintain-
ing and reaffirming the central tenets of his existentialist ontology.
Certain of the principles of his ontology undergo a degree of modifi-
cation in order to meet the requirements of a radical left political
theory, but they are not rejected as such. Ultimately, it is at the level
of their anthropologies that Sartre's and the humanist Marxists'
positions overlap. The centrality which Sartre's theory of revolution
in Matérialisme et révolution accords to a conception of man as
an active, creative being who is united with his fellow men in the
struggle for political emancipation is very reminiscent of that which
humanist Marxists attribute to Marx. It also marks a new stage in
Sartre's affirmation of political commitment.
168

VI. Towards a Dialectics of History
Reflections on History and the Individual Subject in
Sartre's Carnets de la Drôle de Guerre
It is near the start of March 1940, a period during which he is arriving
at a new concept of authenticity, as we saw in chapter IV, that Sartre
first starts to formulate the questions concerning the nature and mean-
ing of historical events which will remain key philosophical preoccu-
pations throughout much of the rest of his career. In response notably
to his own involvement in a major historical event and also to
Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire,
1
which
had appeared two years earlier, Sartre sets out to treat a theoretical
problem which he says has been plaguing him since September 1938
[C: 539]. What order of importance, Sartre wonders, is to be given to
the different kinds of causes for historical events, and in particular to
the role played by individuals in relation to that played by social
groups? He discusses this question with reference to three contrasting
historical events: the outbreak of the First World War, Rousseau's
writing the Contrat social, and the start of the present war. It is to the
first of these examples, and specifically the matter of the extent to
which Kaiser Wilhelm's physical handicap and his English policy
were linked, that Sartre devotes most of his critical attentions. 'Qui
sait si nous n'allons pas trouver un rapport interne de compréhension
entre cette politique anglaise et ce bras atrophié?' [C: 548], enquires
Sartre. This discussion has already received a thorough analysis
elsewhere,
2
and so will not be our focus here. Its principal thematic
contours are also to be found in Sartre's other two examples. In the
cases of Rousseau's Contrat social and the looming of war in the late
1 Gallimard, 1938
2 Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason Vol.1 pp. 19-22.
169

1930s, Sartre recognises that these events were the work of both
socio-historical and individual causes. The writing of the Contrat
social can be explained on the one hand in terms of ideological cur-
rents characteristic of Geneva at the time, and on the other with
reference to Rousseau's personality [C: 541]. The build-up to war was
both the product of what Sartre describes as 'la rivalité des peuples
prolétaires avec les ploutodémocraties', and of the political decisions
taken by Hitler and his advisors [C: 541]. Sartre concludes that both
explanatory models are valid but that they do not harmonise well and
hence cannot be affirmed simultaneously:
[...] lorsqu'on explique le Contrat social par Genève, la personnalité de
Rousseau s'efface, il devient seulement la conscience abstraite, le milieu
signifiant où la liaison s'opère entre l'idéologie genevoise et le Contrat social
considéré comme un ouvrage juridique, synthèse parmi d'autres de ces courants
idéologiques. Mais si j'envisage au contraire le Contrat à partir de Rousseau, il
devient un simple prolongement de sa personnalité, une objectivation de ses
tendances personnelles, bref un objet strictement individuel et incomparable.
[C:541]
It is the apparent irreconcilability of the two explanatory models
which is problematic for Sartre, who clearly believes that a truthful
account of the historical event requires both synthesised into some sort
of totality. To make a brief analogy with Anglo-Saxon historiography,
it is as if Sartre were wishing to reconcile the Whig and the Marxist
views of history!
Sartre's ambition to find a convincing synthesis of the individual
and the collectivity would not be realised satifactorily until the
formulation of his existentialist dialectic in the Critique de la raison
dialectique. His reflections of March 1940 on Rousseau's Contrat
social and the causes of the war constitute his first formulation of the
problem and he remains as yet some way off perceiving any such
synthesis. Nevertheless, certain of his conclusions reveal him to be
feeling his way in the direction of the existentialist dialectic he would
later elaborate in detail. Anticipating his later insistence on mediation,
which would be crucial to the 'progressive-regressive' method set out
in Questions de méthode, Sartre already identifies one important way
in which the two types of historical explanation are linked. Even
170

socio-historical, economic or ideological causes of historical events
must be felt and lived out by individuals, Sartre argues. That is, such
factors must filter through individuals' experience in order that
historical events can actually take place. No matter how imposing the
external causes of events might be, it is individuals' agency which
makes these events happen [C: 542-4]. At this point, Sartre introduces
his concept of situation to encompass the diverse range of such
external causes: 'il n'y a de "situation"', he stresses, 'que pour une
réalité humaine qui se pro-jette à travers cette situation vers elle-
même. Aucune situation n'est jamais subie [...]. Ainsi n'est-il aucune
force mécanique qui puisse décider de l'Histoire' [C: 544]. Sartre
hence concludes that the historical event must be the work of both the
collectivity and the individual but he presents the former as necess-
arily mediated by the latter. The crucial role of subjective thought and
decision-making in the existential present is hence preserved.
Merleau-Ponty and the 'Sens' of History
Sartre's next significant writings on the nature of history are to be
found in his Cahiers pour une morale and reveal a considerable
development in his thinking on the matter. Written in unsystematic
note form, Sartre's reflections on history in this work are interwoven
with ethics, political philosophy, and neo-Hegelian dialectical thought.
My analysis of Sartre's arguments will be based on the assumption
that it is notably in Marxist philosophy that these different areas have
traditionally shared common ground. Sartre himself later described his
Cahiers as having principally documented his developing relationship
with Marxism at the time.
3
It is well known that the experience of war
and Occupation, and the heated intellectual debates which followed
the Liberation, stimulated an awakening to political thought in Sartre.
No account of the development in his thinking in the immediate
3 In Sartre par Sartre, the Cahiers are described by Sartre as 'rien d'autre qu'une
discussion avec le marxisme' {Situations IXp.99).
171

postwar years would be adequate, however, without some analysis of
the crucial influence which the writings of his colleague and friend
Merleau-Ponty had on him. In the lengthy obituary which he later
wrote for Merleau-Ponty, Sartre acknowledged the extent to which
Merleau-Ponty's texts provided the bridge for him between existen-
tialist philosophy and a deeper understanding of history and political
thought:
Depuis qu'il avait appris l'Histoire, je n'étais plus son égal. J'en restais à
questionner les faits quand il essayait déjà de faire parler les événements.
4
Il s'orientait mieux que moi dans le monde ambigu de la politique [S IV: 214]
Je lisais, je m'instruisais, je finissais par me passionner pour ma lecture. Il fut
mon guide; c'est Humanisme et Terreur qui me fit sauter le pas. Ce petit livre si
dense me découvrit la méthode et l'objet: il me donna la chiquenaude qu'il
fallait pour m'arracher à l'immobilisme. [S IV: 215]
Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty had been a keen student of Husserlian
phenomenology in the 1930s. However, his parallel interest in Marx-
ism had set him on the course of a reconciliation of subject-based
philosophy and socio-historical structures much earlier than his more
literary contemporary. Their contrasting early centres of interest are
perceptible in the important differences of emphasis in their respective
existentialist philosophies. The rationalism of Sartre's outlook in
L'Etre et le néant is concomitant with his identification of human
freedom with evasion of the real through the imaginary. In La
Phénoménologie de la perception, by contrast, Merleau-Ponty's less
marked distinction between consciousness and being, and greater
emphasis on the role of the body, coheres with the materialist anthro-
pology underlying Marxian thought. Similarly, whereas the early
Sartre's ethical individualism is of a piece with his relative political
disinterestedness during the 1930s, Merleau-Ponty's conviction that
human subjectivity emerges from an antecedent pre-reflective inter-
subjectivity harmonises with the Marxist focus on the politico-social
4
Situations IVpp. 206-7 (hereafter SIV).
172

dimension of life.
5
In the mid 1940s when Sartre and the French
communist left were caught in a deadlock of mutual misunderstanding
and misrepresentation, Merleau-Ponty was a vital intermediary in the
intellectual debate whose position was close enough to both to illu-
minate the inadequacies of each side. He stood almost entirely alone
6
in his insistence on the compatibility of existentialism and Marxism
and was the only thinker in the immediate postwar years who argued
forcefully for their reconciliation. In an article of November 1945
entitled 'La querelle de l'existentialisme', originally published in the
second number of Les Temps Modernes, Merleau-Ponty defended
Sartre, albeit expressing certain reservations of his own about the
latter's philosophy, against the charges of his less subtle Marxist
critics. True Marxism acknowledged the vital role played by subject-
ivity in the historical process, he argued, and had hence never been
incompatible with the precepts of existentialist philosophy.
7
Contemporary Marxism, he concluded, had everything to gain from
incorporating rather than rejecting existentialist thinking: 'Un marx-
isme vivant devrait "sauver" la recherche existentialiste et l'intégrer,
au lieu de l'étouffer.'
[SNS: 101] This conviction was undeniably
well-founded because French Marxist theorising was mired in
mechanistic and undialectical thinking in the immediate postwar
years, the majority of the most capable French Marxist thinkers having
been killed during the war.
8
Merleau-Ponty's insistence that existen-
tialist philosophy was compatible with Marxism was a call to restore
genuine dialectical thought to the latter.
Merleau-Ponty's discussions of the relationship between existen-
tialism and Marxism are to be found notably in a series of articles
published in various contemporary journals and later collected in Sens
5
For a detailed study of the points of contrast between Sartre's and Merleau-
Ponty's early philosophies, see Margaret Whitford's Merleau-Ponty's Critique
of Sartre's Philosophy.
6 Michael Kelly, in Towards a heuristic method: Sartre and Lefebvre' Sartre
Studies International Vol. 5, No. 1, 1999 pp. 5 -6, suggests that Lefebvre's
overt hostility to Sartre's thought in his full-length study L'Existentialisme
masked important areas of common ground shared by the two thinkers.
7
Re-printed in Sens et non-sens pp. 98 -101 (hereafter SNS).
8 Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism pp.52-3.
173

et non-sens? My account will draw principally on three articles which
I consider to express most clearly and succinctly Merleau-Ponty's
insistence that existentialist thinking be reinstated into the Marxist
view of history and society, namely Tour la Vérité' (1945), 'Autour
du marxisme' (1946) and 'Marxisme et philosophie' (1946). The
relationship between existentialism and Marxism is also central to the
argument he advances in Humanisme et terreur,
10
as are important
ethical questions which we will discuss in chapter VII. In this work,
Merleau-Ponty is keen in particular to illuminate the paradoxes of a
dogmatic Marxist view of history. Although a close Marxist sym-
pathiser since the 1930s,
11
Merleau-Ponty's existentialist tendencies
effectively insulated him from the unquestioning faith in the
inevitability of the historical process of the less astute communists of
the day. The outcome of the class struggle and ultimate success of a
future socialist revolution were in no sense guaranteed. They could be
realised only in the existential present and were hence subject to its
manifold uncertainties. After the Liberation, Merleau-Ponty believed
that the class struggle might make a confident reappearance following
the war years during which it had laid dormant. As the 1940s wore on,
however, he became increasingly pessimistic about the working class
realising the mission bestowed upon it by Marxism.
12
What was
chiefly at stake in Merleau-Ponty's view was classic Marxism's neo-
Hegelian notion of a rationality of history. The failure of the class
struggle to re-surface, he believed, put into jeopardy the conviction
that history followed a rational course. The articles which compose
Sens et non-sens, all written between 1945 and 1947, are expressive of
9 Nagel, 1948.
10 Gallimard, 1947.
II Sartre would later argue that Merleau-Ponty had been closer to Marxism before
1939 than at any subsequent time, surmising that the news of the Moscow show
trials had been the turning point in this regard (SIV: 204).
12 A. Rabil, in Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (Ann Arbor:
UMI, 1967) p.l 13, notes that by 1948 Merleau-Ponty was acknowledging that
'the proletariat had forgotten its mission and was unaware of any universal
significance its struggle might have. The following year, 1949, he stated that
the proletariat had failed to materialise in any universal form, which was only a
short stepfromdenying that it could do so.'
174

Merleau-Ponty's still tentatively optimistic stance. Indeed, Sens et
non-sens is the last of his major publications in which he continues to
hold out hope that the Marxist vision of a working-class-led revolution
ushering in a genuine socialist society may prove true in contemporary
France.
In response to the dogmatic Stalinist Marxist view of history as
developing rationally according to a set pattern, Merleau-Ponty
emphasises the role of contingency in the unfolding of events. The
historical event, for Merleau-Ponty, is an ambiguous phenomenon as
his juxtaposition of the terms 'sens' and 'non-sens' suggests. It should
be remembered that 'sens' carries a dual signification being at once
history's direction and its meaning. In the context of a rational theory
of history, these two senses of the term are closely linked as postu-
lating a direction or a course is a way of ascribing meaning, and the
concept of rationality encompasses both. If history is said to have both
a 'sens' and a 'non-sens', then it is at once rational and non-rational.
The historical event follows a pattern and is subject to a causal process
on the one hand, whilst also being crucially decided and realised in the
existential present. Merleau-Ponty argues that the contingent, or
existential, dimension of the event is the reason why there have been
moments and periods at which history was diverted from its course.
The real difficulty for the Marxist historian is knowing whether the
recurrence of diversions does not ultimately invalidate the very idea of
history having a rational development at all:
Bien que l'analyse marxiste nous permette mieux qu'aucune autre de
comprendre un très grand nombre d'événements, nous ne savons pas si, pour
toute la durée de notre vie ou même pour des siècles, l'histoire effective ne va
pas consister en une série de diversions dont le fascisme a été la première, dont
l'américanisme ou le bloc occidental pourraient être d'autres exemples. [SNS:
147]
[...] un marxiste lucide, voyant comme le schéma de la lutte des classes se
diversifie et se nuance, en vient à se demander si, de diversion en diversion,
l'histoire sera bien finalement l'histoire de la lutte des classes [...] [SNS: 150]
In addition to demonstrating Merleau-Ponty's doubts about the idea of
a rational history, these statements are also revealing of a certain
175

ambiguity in his stance with regard to Marxism itself. On the one
hand, there is his repeated insistence in numerous of the essays of
Sens et non-sens that the valuable insights of the major Marxist
theorists should not be conflated with the mechanistic, reductive
world-view of Stalinist communism.
13
He plainly believes the theor-
etical positions of such as Marx, Trotsky, and the early Lukâcs, all of
whom acknowledged the vital role of contingency in historical
change, to have been the work of 'lucid' Marxist thinkers. Marx's
Capital does not tend towards any sort of fatalistic laws of nature, he
argues, but stresses the importance of social structures in the forward
movement which carries capitalism towards its own demise. 'Une
économie politique marxiste,' he adds, 'ne peut parler de lois qu'à
l'intérieur de structures qualitativement distinctes et qui doivent être
décrites en termes d'histoire.' [SNS: 153] The Marxist conviction that
history is a totality is founded not on some physical or mathematical
law but on the phenomenon of alienation. When alienated man
reclaims his real self and the world from which he has become
estranged, he as a conscious and active agent forms a totality with the
world and together they carry history forwards [SNS: 156]. Explicitly
answering the objection made by Sartre in Matérialisme et révolution
that materialism is incompatible with dialectics, he argues that
Marxism never considers matter and consciousness in isolation from
each other: '[la matière] est insérée dans le système de la coexistence
humaine, elle y fonde une situation commune des individus contem-
porains et successifs [...] et rend possible une ligne de développement
et un sens de l'histoire, mais si cette logique de la situation est mise en
train, développée et accomplie, c'est par la productivité humaine'
[SNS: 157]. Marxism, then, postulates an interdependent and inter-
active relationship between matter and consciousness and this is the
basis of the historical dialectic. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty's
deep-seated reservations about the idea of history essentially follow-
ing a discernible pattern are nevertheless somewhat more than a mere
13 In 'Marxisme et philosophie', for example, Merleau-Ponty pithily remarks that
although left radicals have every nght to adopt scientistic and mechanistic
modes of thinking if they wish, 'il faut savoir et dire que ce genre d'idéologie
n'a rien de commun avec le marxisme.' [SNS: 153]
176

rejection of Stalinist diamat. They point to theoretical difficulties
which he perceives in Marxism itself. In the closing pages of his
article 'Autour du Marxisme', he offers a succinct exposition of what
he sees to be the fundamental weakness in the Marxist belief in a
rational history founded on the class struggle. True Marxism fully
acknowledges that there is both a logic and a contingency of history
but '[s]i l'on admet qu'à chaque moment, quelle que soit la probabilité
de l'événement, il peut toujours avorter [...] il peut se faire finalement
que la logique et l'histoire divorcent et que l'histoire empirique ne
réalise jamais ce qui nous paraît être la suite logique de l'histoire. Or,
en perdant le caractère d'un avenir nécessaire, la révolution ne cesse-t -
elle pas d'être la dimension fondamentale de l'histoire, et, à l'égard de
l'histoire effective, qui après tout importe seule, celui qui juge de
toutes choses sous l'angle de la lutte des classes n'opère-t -il pas une
mise en perspective arbitraire?' [SNS: 146] Acknowledging the role
played by contingency in the unfolding of events in history, then, is to
recognise the possibility that the socialist revolution which Marxism
presents as the logical outcome of the class struggle might never
happen. This uncertainty, Merleau-Ponty thinks, surely undermines
the validity of the claim that the class struggle culminating in revo-
lution is the motor of human history.
In Humanisme et terreur, the discussion centering on rationality
and contingency is by and large presented as an opposition between
objectivist and subjectivist conceptions of reality.
14
Merleau-Ponty's
analyses of the Roubachof character in Koestler's Le Zéro et l'infini
15
is first and foremost an in-depth interrogation of the dogmatic Marxist
belief in an objectively determined and rational history. In his portray-
al of Roubachof, Koestler stages what he sees as the impossibility of a
synthesis of the subjectivist and objectivist conceptions of reality.
Roubachof, rather like Sartre's character Brunet in Les Chemins de la
liberté, incarnates the faithful party activist who believes he can
subordinate his subjectivity entirely to the objective course of history.
14 This opposition can equally be interpreted, as does David Archard in Marxist
Existentialism p.52, as involving a dichotomy between fatality and will.
15 Humanisme et terreur Part One, 'Les Dilemmes de Koestler', and 'L'Ambi­
guïté de l'histoire selon Boukharine'.
177

The Stalinist Marxist ideology of the Soviet bloc can be clearly
perceived as the model for this characterisation. In his account of Le
Zéro et Vinfini, Merleau-Ponty criticises Koestler for staging the
undialectical and mechanistic version of Marxism as if it were repre-
sentative of the Marxist world-view as a whole. Koestler, he believes,
presents a caricature of Marxism in order to discredit it: 'Dans la
pensée de Roubachof et dans le communisme de Koestler, l'histoire
cesse d'être ce qu'elle était pour Marx: la réalisation visible des
valeurs humaines par un processus qui comporte des détours dialec-
tiques [...]. Elle devient une force extérieure dont le sens est ignoré de
l'individu, la pure puissance du fait.'
16
Merleau-Ponty argues that it is
Koestler's rigid, undialectical view of Marxism which leads him to
believe that there is a stark dichotomy between objectivity and
subjectivity. A deeper and less jaundiced understanding of Marxism
would permit a more accurate view of the ambiguous character of
historical reality. History, like the present social situation, is not for
Merleau-Ponty either completely rational and external to man or
entirely contingent and motivated by ahistorical individuals, but is the
work of the dialectical interaction of these two fields.
Although the Merleau-Ponty of Sens et non-sens and Humanisme
et terreur consistently defends Marxism against misrepresentation and
caricature in the hands of its detractors and indeed certain of its
advocates, his own reservations about the Marxist rational view of
history persist: Marxism's belief in the class struggle and the working
class motoring history towards socialism might, he thinks, yet prove
unfounded. In response to this difficulty, he underlines the importance
of carefully observing contemporary events. Analysis of the contem-
porary social and political situation, he argues, will either prove the
Marxist predictions about the course of history accurate or inaccurate:
Notre seul recours est dans une lecture du présent aussi complète et aussi fidèle
que possible, qui n'en préjuge pas le sens, qui même reconnaisse le chaos et le
non-sens là où ils se trouvent, mais qui ne refuse pas de discerner en lui une
direction et une idée, là où elles se manifestent.
17
16 Humanisme et terreur p. 18 (hereafter HT).
17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Pour la vérité' in Sens et non-sens p.205
178

Si le marxisme reste toujours vrai, nous le retrouverons sur le chemin de la
vérité actuelle et dans l'analyse de notre temps.
18
Merleau-Ponty's reflections on the classic Marxist view of history
ultimately conclude, then, in an existentialist reaffirmation of the role
of contingency and of the centrality of the subject. It is essential to
recognise 'l'esprit prolétarien sous sa figure du moment',
19
he insists.
The working class might prove unready or unwilling to fight the
revolution, and might even grow increasingly distant from this object-
ive which Marxism had set for it. For Merleau-Ponty, the culmination
of the class struggle in socialist revolution, far from being an objective
and immutable truth, should be seen as conditional on contemporary
working-class politics making a tangible move in that direction. As an
explanatory schema, the Marxist view of history hence remains at best
a plausible hypothesis whose validity depends on being empirically
proven in the existential present.
The Subject and History: Sartre's Existentialist Dialectics
in the Cahiers pour une morale
As we have seen, as early as 1940 Sartre had arrived at the conclusion
that both individual and social factors contributed to producing
historical events, and he had emphasised in particular the role of the
individual without whom events could not take place. Although
Merleau-Ponty's reflections of the mid 1940s ultimately seem to
culminate in a similar position, they in fact constitute a highly dis-
tinctive body of work in the context of existentialist thought. Their
particularity lies in Merleau-Ponty's recognition of a political dimen-
sion to questions of historical meaning. When Merleau-Ponty speaks
of the role played by individuals in the historical process in Sens et
non-sens, he is referring to members of the working class who may or
18 Ibidp.208
19 Ibid p.200
179

may not engage in revolutionary action. And his discussions of the
rationality of history go beyond the idea of the social collectivity to
designate the historical pattern and direction ascribed to the class
struggle by Marxism. In short, Merleau-Ponty's reflections are very
largely situated within the parameters of Marxist historiography
whereas those of Sartre's war diaries had not been. Sartre's thinking
on history in the Cahiers pour une morale reveals a considerable
development on his earlier position, and bears the stamp of Merleau-
Ponty's Marxist-influenced discussions. Indeed, it is through Merleau-
Ponty's lessons in the politics of history that the postwar Sartre first
begins to reconcile his views on history with an increasingly overt
political radicalism and insistence on commitment. However, Sartre's
Marxist turn in the philosophy of history would always be of a more
explicitly Hegelian character than that of Merleau-Ponty. Whereas
Merleau-Ponty's enquiries into the 'sens' of history are ultimately
limited to explaining the ambiguity and unpredictability of the exist-
ential present, from the Cahiers through to the Critique Sartre en-
deavours to elaborate an existentialist version of the Hegelian dialectic
so as to propose a new global account of history's forward movement.
In the Cahiers, it is not only history which is understood as
having a fundamentally political dimension. Certain key questions of
ethics are similarly presented as intertwined with matters of political
theory and practice:
4
La morale aujourd'hui doit être socialiste révolu-
tionnaire',
20
claims Sartre in the first notebook of the series. More-
over, in many places in the Cahiers, Sartre presents questions of
history and of ethics as interconnecting: 'La morale doit être his-
torique' [CM: 14]; 'La fin de l'Histoire ce serait l'avènement de la
Morale' [CM: 95]. This intertwining of historiography, ethics and
politics is reminiscent of key theoretical contributions to the Marxist
intellectual tradition and hence draws Sartre philosophically closer to
Marxism than he had ever been before. We will examine the prece-
dents in Marxist philosophy for Sartre's blending of ethical and
political issues in chapter VII. Our present discussion will focus on the
close relationship which the Sartre of Cahiers identifies between his-
tory and politics.
20 Cahiers pour une morale p.20 (hereafter CM).
180

The discussions of the ideas of thinkers such as Marx and, in
particular, Engels and Trotsky, documented in the Cahiers reveal that
Sartre's reflections on history, like Merleau-Ponty's, now presume to
a significant degree the validity of Marxist historiographical paradigm
founded on the concept of class struggle. In these discussions, as also
in other parts of the Cahiers, Sartre's analyses and constructive
criticisms are for the most part those of an insider who is seeking to
resolve certain theoretical difficulties and tensions having basically
accepted the key premises of the Marxist theoretico-political project.
21
In numerous places, his concern with the cause of the oppressed is a
clear priority as it is for Marxists and, in a manner reminiscent of
Merleau-Ponty's position in Humanisme et terreur, he is critical of
political liberalism and accepts the need for possibly violent revolu-
tionary change. Yet Sartre's nascent Marxism is from the outset subtly
divergent from classic Marxism and, to some extent for this very
reason, also significantly contrasts with Merleau-Ponty's arguments
despite the two thinkers' mutual affiliation to existentialist philosophy.
Although Sartre recognises the capacity of economic factors to limit
man's possibilities, he is keen to safeguard man's independence
from any form of material determination. History, Sartre insists, is by
definition a human rather than a natural or material phenomenon.
Economic factors can do no more than provide the concrete situation
or structure in which men's actions decide the future course of history:
[...] l'économique est la structure extra-historique de la situation historique.
[CM: 82]
Un homme est toujours au-delà de l'économique, qu'il conserve d'ailleurs
comme soubassement dépassé. [CM: 82]
The basis of this position is of course Sartre's continuing fidelity to
the subject-oriented philosophical outlook of L'Etre et le néant. On
the plane of ethics, this subject-oriented dimension of Sartre's reflec-
tions in the Cahiers underlies his attempts to formulate a traditional
21 In La Force des Choses I p.207, Beauvoir relates that in unpublished notes
written a few years later, Sartre was to observe that 'A partir de 1947 [...] je
jugeais aussi mes principes à partir de ceux des autres - du marxisme.'
181

ethics centering on intersubjective relationships even though he now
also tends towards the more politicised and foundational type of ethics
characteristic of Marxism. Indeed, the reflections on ethics contained
in the Cahiers straddle both ethical conceptions and hence lie on the
cusp between Sartre's early thought and the long period leading up to
and including the Critique. These issues will constitute the central
focus of our discussion in chapter VII.
In his discussions of the difficulties surrounding the idea of a
rational course of history, Merleau-Ponty does not embrace a Hegel-
ianism that is not mediated by the Marxist paradigm of the class
struggle. The putative rationality of history, for Merleau-Ponty, is
essentially that of the working class's mission to usher in a socialist
revolution. The Sartre of the Cahiers, although also influenced by
the politicised Marxist paradigm, nevertheless also maintains a more
direct relationship to the thought of Hegel. At one moment early on in
the first notebook, he declares that
4
Hegel représente un sommet de la
philosophie. A partir de lui, régression: Marx apporte ce qu'il n'avait
pas donné entièrement (développement sur le travail). Mais il manque
beaucoup de grandes idées hégéliennes.'
22
[CM: 67] Although attract-
ed by the challenge posed by Hegel's philosophy at a relatively early
age,
23
it was not until 1945 that Sartre started to investigate it in any
depth. In this regard, the critical studies of Jean Hyppolite and, in
particular, Alexandre Kojève devoted to Hegel proved pivotal, and
Sartre's Cahiers contain numerous quotations drawn from these
writings.
24
The unsystematic thematic exposition and formal presenta-
tion of the Cahiers renders difficult the attempt to identify an entirely
coherent view of history. Comparison of thoughts noted by Sartre in
22 If Sartre is critical of Marxism, he goes on to deliver scathing assessments of
Husserl and Heidegger ('petits philosophes' CM: 67), and of French philosophy
('nulle' CM: 67), the unbridled severity of which suggests that these remarks
should probably not be taken for his considered opinion.
23 Raymond Aron, in his obituary for Sartre, would recall a conversation of their
student days in which Sartre expressed the ambition to measure up to Hegel
philosophically ('Mon petit camarade', L 'Express, 19-25 April 1980).
24 Sartre quotes from the following works: Hyppolite Genèse et structure de la
Phénoménologie de l'Esprit (Aubier, 1946), prefatory note to the Philosophy of
Right (Gallimard, 1946); Kojève Introduction à Hegel (Gallimard, 1947)
182

different places sometimes reveals semantic ambiguities and appar-
ently contrasting positions. I believe it nevertheless possible to chart
the main lines of a view of history which, in its blend of subject-based
and historicist approaches, unites existentialism and Hegelianism and
which, in conjunction with Sartre's accompanying radical left political
convictions, is somewhat reminiscent of the Hegelian Marxism of
Lukâcs' History and Class Consciousness,
There are moments in the first notebook of the Cahiers in
particular where Sartre's discussions of history seem to reiterate
Merleau-Ponty's arguments in Sens et non-sens and Humanisme et
terreur with little more than slight variations of wording to disguise
the allusions.
25
The forty-page section Sartre devotes to history bears
the eminently Merleau-Pontian title, 'Ambivalence de l'Histoire.
Ambiguïté du fait historique' [CM: 26]. There is, however, a con-
spicuous absence of explicit references to Merleau-Ponty's writings in
the Cahiers which is itself significant as it is in all probability in-
dicative of the extent to which Sartre himself had difficulty at the time
distinguishing his ideas about history from those of his political editor
at Les Temps modernes}
6
Yet closer analysis of the Cahiers reveals
that Sartre, who was never one to undergo an intellectual influence
passively, is in fact beginning to formulate the premises of a distinct-
ive theoretical position almost from the outset.
'S'il y a une Histoire c'est celle de Hegel. Il ne peut y avoir
d'autre' [CM: 31], he states unequivocally, apparently attracted by the
ambitiousness of Hegel's philosophy. More specifically, it is Hegel's
idea of dialectical relationships composing history conceived as a
25 Furthermore, it is likely that certain of Sartre's choices of subject for discussion
in the Cahiers were prompted by reading Merleau-Ponty who had treated the
same topics in his writings. The role and implications of violence, for example,
constituted a central theme in Humanisme et terreur and is subsequently raised
by Sartre on numerous occasions in the Cahiers. And it seems somehow more
than mere coincidence that Sartre should undertake an in-depth analysis of
Trotsky's Their Morality and Ours {Cahiers pp. 167-176) when Merleau-
Ponty's case for a Marxist ethics had drawn significantly on the text a short
while earlier (see Humanisme et terreur, pt. II).
26 Sartre would later remark of Merleau-Ponty's work of the postwar years that 'il
me semblait, à le lire, qu'il me découvrait ma pensée.' [5/^:214]
183

totality that appeals to Sartre. In the ontology of L'Etre et le néant,
prior to taking a keen interest in Hegel, he elaborated a view of man
and the world which also involved the basic ideas of interaction and
unity. '[L]'homme et le monde sont des êtres relatifs et le principe
de leur être est la relation' [EN: 355], he argued. Moreover, conscious-
ness and situation not only interact constantly with each other, they
form a synthetic totality [EN: 37-8]. What lay at the heart of the
relationship Sartre posited between consciousness and situation were
the ideas of movement and change, and it is these characteristics
which have an appeal for him in the Hegelian dialectic where they are
also central.
From the first notebook of the Cahiers onwards, it is apparent
that Sartre's aim with respect to the philosophy of history is wider
reaching than the attempt to decipher the existential present. However,
for all that his reflections about history now seem to be under the spell
of Hegelian thought, his own distinctive philosophical tendencies can
nevertheless be clearly perceived. Elaborating on the attempt to
synthesise the individual and the collectivity begun in his war diaries,
he argues that subjectivity is a 'détotalisation de la Totalité' [CM:
94]. This formulation signifies that the thoughts and actions of the
individual subject exist in relation to the totality of history whilst
remaining irreducible to it. Her existential freedom places her beyond
any kind of causal determinism and compels her to make history in the
present. Although she is an 'objet de l'Histoire' and a 'transcendance
transcendée [pour] l'Autre', she is also a 'sujet de l'Histoire en tant
qu['elle] reprend ou non à [s]on compte les propositions.' [CM: 37-8]
Sartre encapsulates this idea of dual movement in the phrase, 'chaque
être historique est en même temps un absolu ahistorique' [CM: 32]
The subject's actions make history whilst also being the product of
history, and the historical fact itself is consequently a fundamentally
ambiguous phenomenon [CM: 26]. The germ of the dialectic of sub-
ject and history which would later form the basis of the 'progressive-
regressive' method of Questions de méthode is clearly perceptible in
these arguments, as it is also in the following statements:
Chaque fait histonque enferme [...] en lui-même l'inertie de l'extériorité de la
nature en même temps qu'il est perpétuellement historicisation active. [CM: 43]
184

[...] FHistoire non progressive est récupérée réellement comme progrès par le
progrès progressif [CM: 48]
[...] universel dans le singulier; singulier dans l'universel. [CM: 51]
je m'historialise en me revendiquant comme conscience libre d'une époque en
situation dans cette époque, ayant son avenir dans l'avenir de l'époque et ne
pouvant manifester que cette époque, ne pouvant dépasser l'époque que si je
l'assume et sachant que ce dépassement même de l'époque est d'époque et
contribue à la faire. [CM: 506]
Even at this early stage, Sartre's nascent dialectical theory is percep-
tibly divergent from the classic Hegelian dialectic of history. Sartre's
existentialist emphasis on human subjectivity is such that he conceives
of history's dialectical movement as open-ended and contingent.
Human reality, because irreducible to historical determinants and
conditioning, is in Sartre's view the basis of historical change.
Although an individual is himself a totality, he is unsubsumable to a
unified totality of history or society. Sartre concludes that there is
hence not one totality of history, but a multiplicity of totalities [CM:
All\ Historical events, Sartre argues, are more contingent in nature
than any closed dialectical schema allows because they are made up of
numerous individual consciousnesses whose freedom of thought has
the capacity to influence the course of events. Sartre gives the
example of a strike and concludes that such an event is 'ni un objet
dialectique ni un objet antidialectique, mais c'est une dialectique à
trous.' [CM: 474-5]
Merleau-Ponty's discussions of the 'sens' and 'non-sens' of
history presume a broadly Hegelian philosophical problematic but
rarely involve detailed analyses of Hegel's thought because Merleau-
Ponty, following classic Marxism, essentially takes it to have been
superseded. Sartre's reflections on the philosophy of history in the
Cahiers, by contrast, expressed as they often are in explictly Hegelian
terminology, communicate a desire to rehabilitate Hegel's dialectics
of history with the proviso that closer attention be paid to the role of
the individual consciousness. The Lukâcs of History and Class Con-
sciousness seems to unite these two approaches, presenting Marx's
philosophy as a signal advance on that of Hegel whilst nevertheless
185

accentuating the Hegelian elements that contribute to it. For Lukâcs,
Marx retained all that was progressive and valuable in Hegelian
dialectical thought but found a way to adapt it so as to account for
concrete and social realities accurately:
[...] Marx's dialectical method continued what Hegel had striven for but had
failed to achieve in a concrete form. [HCC: 17]
It is at reality itself that Hegel and Marx part company. Hegel was unable to
penetrate to the real driving forces of history. [HCC: 17]
Lukâcs presents a Hegelian Marx who, whilst not subscribing to the
dialectic of nature advocated by the later Engels and eventually the
Stalinists, believed that history and society form a totality. 'It is not
the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that
constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois
thought,' Lukâcs goes so far as to claim, 'but the point of view of
totality.' [HCC: 27] With the discovery of historical materialism,
Marx was able to avoid the pitfall of Hegelian idealist abstraction and
was in a position to describe the concrete unity of the world. It was on
the basis of this powerful new philosophical realism that the working
class, with its unique awareness of the real conditions of existence,
would lead humanity towards emancipation.
In so far as Lukâcs adopts a classically Hegelian insistence on
there being one unified totality of history and society, his theory sets
itself apart from that adumbrated by Sartre in the Cahiers. In many
other ways, however, History and Class Consciousness proves to be
an important precursor for Sartre's nascent existentialist dialectic of
history.
27
For Lukâcs the role played by individual consciousnesses in
27 Years later, when highlighting the inadequacies of the mechanistic thought of
his communist contemporaries in Questions de méthode, Sartre gives special
attention to the Lukâcs of the Stalinist era whose thought he portrays as
representative of the communist 'idéalisme volontariste' [QM: 28] which
paradoxically writes man out of history. Sartre's barbs at the later Lukâcs are no
doubt a belated response to the latter's hostility to Sartrean existentialism in his
polemical Existentialisme ou marxisme? (Nagel, 1948) Arguing that Lukâcs
misunderstood his early thought and misrepresented it in the latter work, Sartre
goes on to formulate the 'progressive-regressive' method in which he moulds
186

the historical process is vital as, in his view, there is no doubt that it is
men who make history and not natural or economic causal processes
alone. And yet Lukâcs, like Sartre after him, realises that he must
nevertheless account for the ways in which individuals are acted upon
and conditioned by history. The conclusions he reaches on this matter
read like Merleau-Pontian and later Sartrean historiography avant la
lettre.
c
[M]an,' he argues, 'must become conscious of himself as a
social being, as simultaneously the subject and object of the socio-
historical process.' [HCC: 19] He approvingly recapitulates Marx's
conception of man in the following way:
[Marx] sees man historically and dialectically, and both are to be understood in
a double sense. (1) He never speaks of man in general, of an abstractly
absolutized man: he always thinks of him as a link in a concrete totality, in a
society. The latter must be explained from the standpoint of man but only after
man has himself been integrated in the concrete totality and has himself been
made truly concrete. (2) Man is himself the objective foundation of the
historical dialectic and the subject-object lying at its roots, and as such he is
decisively involved in the dialectical process. To formulate it in the initial
abstract categories of dialectics: he both is and at the same time is not. [HCC:
189]
into a synthesis the existentialist concern with the free subject and the Marxist
focus on objective conditions in history. What Sartre omits to acknowledge
however, probably not wanting to do Lukâcs the honour of a positive mention,
are the ways in which his new position is indebted to that of History and Class
Consciousness with respect to the issue of the dialectical interaction of subject
and history. Putting to one side the key ideas of the subject making history and
of the historical process being mediated by her in the present, both of which had
also been central in History and Class Consciousness■, the distinctly Sartrean
character of the 'progressive-regressive' method principally lies only in its
comparatively greater emphasis on the creative role of the subjective project in
the existential present. Questions de méthode can hence be seen as an extended
dialogue with Lukâcs, only one aspect of which - the negative, critical side - is
explicit. In reality, the later Sartre sides with the early Lukâcs, as Merleau-
Ponty had done a few years earlier in Les Aventures de la dialectique, whilst
rejecting his Stalinist successor. The complex relationship between the later
Sartre's existentialist Marxism and the Hegelian Marxism of the early Lukâcs
merits thorough examination but is beyond the scope of this thesis.
187

In this account of Marxian anthropology, man is the place where
objectivity and subjectivity, and past and present meet. For Lukacs,
there is nothing incongruous about this synthesis of contrasting
phenomena. 'Fatalism and voluntarism are only mutually contra-
dictory to an undialectical and unhistorical mind,' he notes. 'In the
dialectical view of history they prove to be necessarily complementary
opposites' [HCC: 4].
The historical dialectic, for the Sartre of the Cahiers onwards, is
meaningless if it does not culminate in the individual subject whose
actions push history forwards in the existential present. He had argued
in the founding statement of Les Temps Modernes that although the
subject might be entirely conditioned she nevertheless remained a
'centre d'indétermination irréductible' [P: 26], that is a free being
capable of acting on the world around her. The issue of conditioning
in the Cahiers is subsumed in Sartre's newfound neo-Hegelian view
of history, but it is clear from other postwar texts that Sartre conceives
of individuals as situated in and conditioned by their social class.
Moreover, his insistence in Matérialisme et révolution on the need for
solidarity in the political struggle is of a piece with his endorsing the
Marxist idea of a united working class whose concerted actions push
the historical dialectic forwards towards the socialist revolution, as we
will see in chapter VII. For Lukâcs, it is the consciousness of the
proletariat as a class which is the culmination point of the historical
dialectic in the existential present: '[Dialectics,' he writes, 'is not
imported into history from outside [...] but is derived from history
made conscious as its logical manifestation at this particular point in
its development [...]. [I]t is the proletariat that embodies this process
of consciousness. Since its consciousness appears as the immanent
product of the historical dialectic, it likewise appears to be dialectical.'
[HCC: 177] He later offers the following contrasting formulation of
this point: 'the proletariat is the identical subject-object of the
historical process, i.e. the first subject in history that is (objectively)
capable of an adequate social consciousness.' [HCC: 199] Proletarian
class consciousness, then, is the outcome of the dialectical process and
its revolutionary militantism in the present carries the historical
dialectic forward towards the advent of a socialist society. The key
claim which sets Lukâcs's theory apart from that of Sartre in the
188

Cahiers, and indeed later in Questions de méthode, can be perceived
in these statements. It lies in his endorsement of the idea of a
collective consciousness of the proletariat. Sartre's insistence on
individual self-determination led him consistently to repudiate such a
trans-subjective phenomenon and would remain one of the points
distinguishing his philosophy from much classic Marxist theory.
189

VIL Authentic Ethics and Socialist Politics in
Sartre's Cahiers pour une morale
The progression in Sartre's thought towards a humanistic brand of
existentialism sharing common ground with ethical humanist Marxism
is paralleled by other developments in his thought during the years
1944-7 which show a movement towards an ethics of authenticity. In
Réflexions sur la question juive, 'A Propos de l'existentialisme', and
notably L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, Sartre's evident concern
with questions of ethical responsibility suggests the possibility of
intersubjective relationships which are not irredeemably alienated, and
points towards a solution to the problem in L'Etre et le néant of man's
existence being futile. Formulations derivative of the philosophy of
Kant are often used by Sartre to voice these preoccupations, and it is
notably during these years that a complex relationship between
Sartrean and Kantian ethics comes to the fore. This crucial period of
development in Sartre's ethical thinking has received in-depth critical
examination elsewhere
1
and will not be the focus of our discussion
here.
In and amongst the scattered notes of the Cahiers, there is a clear
attempt on Sartre's part to define how it is possible for man to cast off
his habitually inauthentic condition by undertaking the ethical con-
version alluded to in L'Etre et le néant. The new, more authentic
outlook on life sketched out by Sartre opens up the possibility for
intersubjective relationships involving such positive values as under-
standing, generosity and solidarity. In what follows, I will initially
examine this transition between L'Etre et le néant and the Cahiers
1 For an analysis of Sartre's relationship to Kantian philosophy, see Christina
Howells Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1988),
chapter II, and Sorin Baiasu 'The Anxiety of Influence: Sartre's Search for an
Ethics and Kant's Moral Theory', in Sartre Studies International Vol.9, No.l,
2003. Flynn's Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (pp. 33-41) offers an examin-
ation of Sartre's ethical claims in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme.
191

before progressing to an account of Sartre's often overlooked adher-
ence to a Marxist historicised and politicised conception of morality in
the latter work. I shall seek to highlight the coherence between
Sartre's ethics of authenticity and this conception of morality which
posits the class struggle as the basis of a historical dialectic culmin-
ating in a socialist revolution.
The Possibility of Non-Conflictual Interpersonal
Relationships in the Cahiers pour une morale
Sartre's preoccupation with authenticity is a mainstay of his ethical
thought of the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas the ethical dimension of his
philosophical world-view is masked in L'Etre et le néant by his focus
on questions of ontology, earlier in the Carnets de la drôle de guerre
this dimension had been fully apparent and even crucial to the genesis
of the ontology itself. In the Cahiers, there is a similar absence of any
formal separation of ontology and ethics, and the conception of
authenticity which Sartre sketches out cannot be understood without
examination of the ways in which he departs from the ontological
claims of the work he was later to refer to as 'une eidétique de la
mauvaise foi' [S IV: 196]. At the basis of Sartre's ontological argu-
ment in L'Etre et le néant lay his conviction that the inalienable free-
dom of consciousness rendered impossible any lasting union with
being. Consciousness would constantly strive to achieve such a union
in an attempt to be an ens causa sui or, as Sartre put it, to be God, a
non-contingent being which was its own foundation. Sartre character-
ised this desire as inauthentic because it involved man trying to escape
his fundamental nature as a free being condemned to creative self-
definition in the existential present. In his habitually inauthentic state,
man was a 'passion inutile' [EN: 678], Sartre concluded, because
constantly hankering after a condition that could never be attained.
In the Cahiers, Sartre's idea of an ethical conversion facilitating
the passage to authenticity involves conceptual evolution on a number
192

of interlinking levels in relation to the position in L'Etre et le néant.
The failure of consciousness's attempts to ground itself is presented as
a key motivation for making the conversion. Sartre notes that the
conversion 'peut naître de l'échec perpétuel de toute tentative du
Pour-soi pour être.' [CM: 488] If Tauthenticité consiste à refuser la
quête de l'être' [CM: 492], then, it is partly because this search
repeatedly proves to be a fruitless one. The implications of this
development can hardly be overestimated as it represents nothing
short of a paradigm-shift in Sartre's account of man's ethical outlook
on the world. Concomitant with this rejection of the project to be
God is the transition which Sartre charts in the Cahiers from impure
reflection to pure reflection. In L'Etre et le néant, the mode of
thinking termed 'réflexion impure' (or 'complice') was that which
accompanied and facilitated the project to be God. It was a central
characteristic of our habitually inauthentic condition also playing an
instrumental role in our capacity to live in bad faith for most of the
time. In the first pages of the Cahiers, Sartre notes: 'je dois montrer
comment une réflexion pure est possible à partir de la réflexion
impure.' Since this transition is not automatic but requires a special
effort on the part of the subject, '[i]l ne s'agit pas de montrer comment
la réflexion pure sort de la réflexion impure mais comment elle en
peut sortir.' [CM: 13] Once the failure of the project to be our own
foundation is acknowledged, pure reflection involves our '[accep-
tation et revendication de la contingence.' [CM: 19] Rather than
attempting to evade the reality of our condition as contingent beings,
in pure reflection we are able to see this as an opportunity facilitating
our freedom [CM: 19]. In the final chapter of L'Etre et le néant,
'Perspectives morales', Sartre had evoked the possibility of freedom
coming to take itself as its own end, and he subsequently concluded a
short text of December 1945 with the claim that pure reflection
involved the 'constitution d'une liberté qui se prend elle-même pour
fin.' [CM: 578]2 For Sartre, our acceptance of contingency and free-
dom in pure reflection unavoidably implies responsibility. An authen-
tic ethical outlook, he argues, is based on the following conception of
reality: 'une contingence absolue qui n'a que soi pour se justifier par
2 'Bien et subjectivité', published as 'Appendice I' of the Cahiers.
193

assomption et qui ne peut s'assumer qu'à l'intérieur de soi' [CM:
498]. As we saw in chapter IV, the central idea here of taking entire
responsibility for one's freedom had been a key feature of Sartre's
'morale' of December 1939 in the war diaries.
Achieving authenticity for Sartre crucially involves a change of
attitude towards the ontological category of being on the part of the
individual subject. Rather than hopelessly persisting in its attempts to
achieve full coincidence with the 'en-soi', in pure reflection the 'pour-
soi' recognises that it must concern itself with self-definition through
doing rather than being. I cannot in good faith try to be courageous or
noble, Sartre argues, rather as in L'Etre et le néant he had presented
the attempt to be sincere as an instance of bad faith. Setting out with
such intentions involves my seeking to 'faire que je sois sur le mode
de l'en-soi, ce que je suis sur le mode du « n'être pas ce que je suis ».'
[EN: 102] '[L'authenticité] découvre que le seul projet valable est
celui défaire (et non d'être) [...] Le projet valable est celui d'agir sur
une situation concrète et de la modifier dans un certain sens.' [CM:
491] Doing means action and, for Sartre, action means bringing about
change so as to modify the concrete situation.
Of a piece with radical left intellectual and political commitment,
the concept of action, or praxis as he later termed it, was to take a
prominent place in Sartre's thought in the 1950s. However, his
insistence on doing does not amount to a refusal or repudiation of the
ontological category of being. On the contrary, in authentic existence
the free consciousness serves in part to unveil or reveal being. In
L'Etre et le néant, Sartre had established that although being was
antecedent to consciousness, there would nevertheless be no being,
or objective reality, for man were it not for its perception by
consciousness. In the Cahiers, this relationship between consciousness
and being is maintained except that it is no longer in the interests of
confirming the existence of being but rather in order to shed light and
meaning on it. Sartre even goes so far as to suggest that being allowed
consciousness to come into existence in order that consciousness
would then confer significance and legitimacy on it. He refers to
TEn-soi se dormant le Pour-soi pour se reprendre au lieu de se
perdre.' [CM: 499] The point is explained in more detail in the
following passage:
194

[L]e Pour-soi surgit pour que l'Etre devienne Vérité. Par là le Pour-soi a une
tâche de quasi-création puisqu'il extirpe des ténèbres de l'indifférentiation ce
qui par essence y retombe toujours. Le Pour-soi est pure clarté de l'Etre. Il
sauve l'Etre qui, en effet, ne sera jamais Pour-soi mais pour un existant qui est
pour-soi. [CM: 500]
In contrast to the inauthentic project to be one's own foundation, in
which consciousness attempted to subsume itself in being, Sartre sees
this post-conversion relationship between consciousness and being as
free of alienation:
Ce rapport, s'il est saisi dans sa pureté après la conversion, n'est ni
appropriation ni identification. L'Etre est autre que le Pour-soi et se dévoile
comme irréductiblement autre. Et le Pour-soi se saisit dans le dévoilement
comme irréductiblement en exil pat rapport à l'Etre. [CM: 500]
Neither consciousness nor being, then, sacrifices itself to the other
because neither can be assimilated to the other. Their relationship is
hence one of complementarity. In revealing being, consciousness
unveils an already existing objective reality: 'Ce dévoilement est
le dévoilement du concret' [CM: 503]. Its creative role consists
in conferring meaning on it for human reality: 'Agir c'est poser
que l'Etre a un sens: à travers l'instrumentante de l'action, l'Etre se
dévoile comme pourvu de sens [...] . Et fondamentalement on agit
pour que l'Etre ait un sens.' [CM: 502] Clearly, for Sartre, action or
doing is central to the process of revealing the meaning of objective
reality. In Qu 'est-ce que la littérature ?, a work contemporaneous
with the Cahiers, he offers the following succinct formulation of the
point: 'Pour nous le faire est révélateur de Y être' [QL: 236]. We will
examine the unity which Sartre postulates in this work between
literature's capacity to reveal the world to the reader and the project to
transform capitalist society through revolutionary political action in
chapter IX.
Once the ethical conversion has been undergone, consciousness's
rejection of the project to be its own foundation means that it stops
attempting to evade contingency by grounding itself in a fixed,
already existing self. This change of attitude not only involves a tran-
sition from impure to pure reflection but also signals a fundamental
questioning of that type of behaviour which, for the early Sartre, is
195

quintessential^ inauthentic, namely the 'sérieux'. Rather than model-
ling her thoughts and values on already existing objective realities,
values and social conventions, the authentic individual recognises
fully the creative role which her inalienable ontological freedom gives
her in relation to her situation. In the Cahiers, Sartre introduces the
concept of play ('le jeu') as a substitute for the 'sérieux', offering the
following definition: 'il est rupture avec l'esprit de sérieux, dépense,
anéantissement, passage à l'aspect fête. La fête en effet c'est la
libération de l'esprit de sérieux, la dépense des économies, la ruine de
la hiérarchie' [CM: 388]. Play involves freely creating without falling
back on existing values. The authentic individual must create her own
values in the existential present whilst and through acting, or doing.
3
The rejection of the project to be one's own foundation and of
the 'sérieux' opens up the possibility of intersubjective relationships
which are not fundamentally alienated as they were in L'Etre et le
néant. In this work, relations with others consisted in attempts to
objectify the other through the glance so as to achieve a position of
psychological dominance. With the rejection of the project to be
God, and the passage to pure reflection in the Cahiers, the impulsion
to dominate others is dispersed and relations of reciprocity become
possible. This is not to say that Sartre departs definitively from all
aspects of the view of the human condition set out in L'Etre et le
3 Linda Bell, in Sartre's Ethics of Authenticity (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1989) p. 114, rightly questions the assumption held by certain
commentators that choosing and acting are separate events for Sartre. To
choose a value is to act, in appropriate circumstances, on that choice; similarly,
to act is to make value choices', Bell argues. For Sartre, an intellectual choice is
itself, in appropriate circumstances, an act. Sartre's statements regarding this
matter in La Transcendance de l'ego confirm Bell's interpretation. Sartre
argues that just as playing the piano or writing are actions, so are doubting,
reasoning, or forming a hypothesis. In the latter cases, 'l'action n'est pas seule­
ment l'unité noématique d'un courant de conscience: c'est aussi une réalisation
concrète.' [TE: 52] This conception of intellection is indicative of the extent to
which Sartre's philosophical outlook as a whole is oriented towards action, or
'doing', and is entirely of a piece with his conviction, also expressed in La
Transcendance de l'ego, that consciousness is without interiority and is hence
by its very nature in the world. For Sartre, consciousness is constantly making
choices which impact on the world and for which it is entirely responsible.
196

néant. In many places, the ontology of the earlier work resurfaces in
paraphrases or reformulations, as for example when Sartre claims that
'on voudrait fonder tout' [CM: 157]. Yet the greater explicit focus on
questions of ethics, in conjunction with the process of intellectual and
personal evolution triggered off by his conversion to a politicised
conception of ideas and history, has clearly stimulated conceptual
developments in Sartre's thinking by the time of the Cahiers.
4
The
central ethical claim, that a conversion to an ethics of délivrance and
salvation [EN: 463] is possible, had of course been announced in
L'Etre et le néant, but its elaboration was being reserved for a future
work. In the first pages of the Cahiers, Sartre reiterates that 'Z, 'Etre et
le néant est une ontologie d'avant la conversion' [CM: 13] thereby
setting the central positions of that work apart from those he is
currently defining. Indeed, the conversion itself is presented in the
Cahiers as involving more fundamental and longer-lasting changes in
the individual subject than had been implied by the 'brusques réveils
de cynisme ou de bonne foi' [EN: 85] which, in L'Etre et le néant,
were said to halt momentarily the flow of habitually inauthentic
conduct.
Once the impulsion to dominate others psychologically subsides
following the conversion, the possibility of relations of reciprocity
4 Scanzio (op.cit.) underestimates somewhat the extent to which Sartre's
ontology itself has evolved by the time of the Cahiers. 'La Morale', Scanzio
concludes, 'ne fera [...] pas basculer l'ontologie, mais apprendra à vivre la
condition humaine une fois les résultats de l'ontologie phénoménologique
compris et acceptés'; 'l'ontologie demeure dans toute sa vérité' (p. 132).
Scanzio separates ontology from ethics to some extent, suggesting that only the
latter really evolves between L'Etre et le néant and the Cahiers. The drawback
of his reading is that it overlooks the extent to which the evolution in Sartre's
ethical claims, in conjunction moreover with his increasingly explicit adoption
of key principles of Marxist political philosophy, unavoidably also implies
conceptual development in his ontology. For instance, the considerably greater
emphasis on doing, or action, in the Cahiers ties in with his adoption of the
Marxist concept of 'praxis' at around the same time, the concept making fre­
quent appearances in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Given the importance the
concept of praxis was to take in Sartre's later philosophy, ultimately replacing
that of consciousness, it is clear that by 1947-8 Sartre's ontology itself must
have been in evolution, and not just his ethics.
197

manifests itself in a number of interlinking ways, all of which involve
recognising rather than attempting to capture the freedom of the other.
The authentic individual, rather than trying to objectify the other
through the glance, makes appeals to him and in return accepts his
appeals with the aim of entering into relations of greater reciprocity
and solidarity. Sartre offers the following definition of this key
concept of the appeal:
[L]'appel est reconnaissance d'une liberté personnelle en situation par une
liberté personnelle en situation. Il se fait à partir d'une opération proposée,
c'est-à -dire donnée par l'appelant à l'appelé, au nom de fins à vouloir et à
construire [...]. Il est appel à une opération commune, il ne s'appuie pas sur une
solidarité donnée mais sur une solidarité à construire par l'opération commune.
[CM: 285]
The act of appealing to the other, Sartre argues, involves revealing, or
unveiling, the concrete situation: 'L'appel est dévoilement d'une situ-
ation et c'est sur la base de ce dévoilement qu'il espère incliner la
volonté de l'autre à vouloir ce qu'il veut.' [CM: 285] This statement
might appear to suggest that hoping to convince the other to aid one's
project by revealing the situation to him risks being a one-sided affair
and hence the basis for a new form of ascendancy over the other's
freedom. Yet Sartre argues that this is not the case because of the
reciprocity inherent in the appeal itself: 'L'appel est [...] promesse de
réciprocité: il est sous-entendu que celui que j'appelle peut m'appeler'
[CM: 295-6] The appeal to the other is in effect a two-way process
which involves my expecting the other to understand and attempt to
facilitate my project but also presumes that I must do the same for
him. '[L]'aide est déjà contenue dans l'appel' [CM: 296] and the
appeal hence implies the 'compréhension totale des fins et de la situ-
ation de l'autre' [CM: 295] at the same time as it is itself seeking to
be understood. When appealed to, i'autre me transcende de toute sa
liberté mais vers ma fin' thus demonstrating generosity towards me.
'Mais ce don est lui-même une demande à être compris à son tour.'
[CM: 293]
For the Sartre of the Cahiers, these ideas of the appeal, under-
standing and generosity point not only to the possibility of an
ethics of reciprocity but to a genuine intersubjective solidarity. The
198

concept of solidarity has traditionally been a mainstay of left-wing
politics, and Sartre underlined its importance in the theory of revo-
lution he proposed in the second part of Matérialisme et révolution
[MR: 180, 217], In the discussions of this concept in the Cahiers,
ontology, ethics and left political theory intersect in ways which re-
veal the coherence of Sartre's overall theoretical position at this time,
as the following statement demonstrates:
[L]'appel en lui-même, tout en étant relation de personne à personne, contient
l'esquisse d'un monde où chaque personne pourrait en appeler à toutes les
autres. Souvent pourtant cette structure est masquée par la mauvaise foi, même
si l'appel est sincère; on en appelle à son égal et dans une société à castes ou à
classes, cet appel tend à renforcer les liens de caste ou de classe. Il faut donc
qu'un appel authentique soit conscient d'être dépassement de toute inégalité de
condition vers un monde humain où tout appel de chacun à chacun soit toujours
possible. [CM: 296-7]
Appeals to the other, then, are habitually obstructed by the inequality
of people's conditions of life in class society, and authentic appeals
are by their very nature part of the project to transcend this inequality.
In short, authentic ethical relationships presume and are part of the
project to bring about a socialist society. In the light of the relation-
ship which we established between inauthenticity and ideology in the
pejorative sense in chapter III, the link which Sartre makes here
between bad faith and class society is also worth noting. Making an
appeal to someone whose conditions of life are not equal to one's own
because of the structure of class society involves bad faith, Sartre
argues. In such a case, rather than uniting people the appeal only
alienates them from each other further. Sartre's remarks on this matter
clearly suggest a coherence between inauthenticity and life under
capitalist society. An authentic ethics of reciprocity and solidarity, by
contrast, is intimately connected to the socialist political project, he
argues. It is probably for this reason that Sartre strongly suggests in
the Cahiers that the underprivileged of society attain authenticity
more easily than individuals belonging to other social groups. He
opens the section devoted to the ethical conversion with the reflection
that 'elle est virtuellement possible chez tous les opprimés.' [CM:
488] The fact of being undernourished and inadequately provided for
199

materially, Sartre argues, gives the underprivileged a non-thetic
awareness of the reality of their condition as subjects in the world.
They have 'une compréhension ontologique de l'existence comme
absolue de la subjectivité' [CM: 488], that is an understanding of the
fundamental existential nature of the human condition. It was of
course the attempt to escape this existential dimension of subjectivity
which, as we saw in chapter III, was at the basis of inauthentic
tendencies such as the desire to give oneself a foundation in the world
and the 'sérieux'. Moreover, Sartre had consistently presented the
bourgeois owning class as the social group most likely to demonstrate
these inauthentic tendencies.
Historicised and Politicised Ethics:
the Influence of Merleau-Ponty and Trotsky
on Sartre's Cahiers pour une morale and Les Mains sales
Sartre's reflections on the dialectics of history and his nascent ethics
of authenticity are formulated concurrently in the Cahiers, there being
little by way of formal separation of these areas in the text. It might
ostensibly seem that Sartre is holding two largely unrelated theoretical
discussions in parallel with each other here. The question of how the
subject and history interact dialectically does not at face value appear
to be closely thematically linked with the rejection of the project to be
God and the possibility of relations of intersubjective reciprocity. In
reality, however, these two discussions are related nevertheless and an
overall coherence can be perceived in the conclusions Sartre reaches.
The link lies in the field of ethics, but can only be appreciated fully in
the light of the paradigm shift which is taking place in Sartre's
thinking during these years. By 1947-8, Sartre is progressing towards
a philosophical world-view which is politicised and historicised in the
far-reaching and foundational way that is characteristic of Marxism.
The key influence on his thinking in this regard had been Merleau-
Ponty and the work Humanisme et terreur in particular, as he later
200

acknowledged [S IV: 215]. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's reflections
in this work and other writings of the immediate postwar years lay
the question of the legitimacy of the Marxist belief in the class
struggle as the underlying motor of historical change. This Marxist
principle, with which Merleau-Ponty was undoubtedly in sympathy,
had been perceived by certain Marxist thinkers not only as a funda-
mental truth of history but also as implying an ethical stance that was
distinct from that of conventional morality. Trotsky was perhaps the
most notable advocate of this idea that the Marxist world-view was
not an amoralism, as scientistic Marxists and Marxism's liberal critics
would have it, but rather was founded on an alternative conception of
morality. He argued the point forcefully in Their Morality and Ours
(1938), and Merleau-Ponty drew heavily on this and other works of
Trotsky in Humanisme et terreur. It is undoubtedly through Merleau-
Ponty's interest in Their Morality and Ours that Sartre first encounters
and subsequently comes under the influence of the Marxist alternative
conception of morality.
In the years up until the writing of the Cahiers, the influence
of Trotsky's ideas on Sartre was more oblique than in the case of
Merleau-Ponty yet important nevertheless. Throughout the 1930s,
Sartre and Beauvoir had been aware of the Trotskyist critique of
Stalin's regime, and Trotsky himself had held some fascination for
them. 'Nous avions la plus grande estime pour Trotsky' [FA: 156],
Beauvoir would later recall, also singling out his autobiography as
having made a lasting impression on them in the first years of the
1930s: 'Parmi les ouvrages non romanesques qui comptèrent pour
nous pendant ces deux ans, je ne vois que Ma vie de Trotsky, une
nouvelle traduction d'Empédocle d'Hôlderlin, et Le Malheur de la
conscience de Jean Wahl qui nous donna quelques aperçus d'Hegel.'
[FA: 59] It is only in the Cahiers, however, that Sartre's philosophical
world-view, under the influence of Merleau-Ponty, becomes percep-
tibly aligned to the Marxist ethical outlook. Trotsky's account of this
alternative approach to ethics in Their Morality and Ours was an
exposition of a theoretical world-view shared by much of the non-
Stalinist left and hence should not be taken for his own entirely
distinctive ethical theory. Yet the sophistication and clarity of his
argument make Their Morality and Ours something of a benchmark in
201

Marxist writing on morality in this period. Sartre's Cahiers contain a
nine-page discussion of the work, but its influence on his thinking can
be perceived much more broadly in the blend of historiography, ethics
and politics which characterises his reflections throughout. Its influ-
ence is also vital to Sartre's play Les Mains sales (1948) whose central
action, the assassination of a revolutionary political leader, had in any
case been inspired by the murder of Trotsky in 1940 [FA: 209-210].
5
In what follows, analysis of Their Morality and Ours and the impact
Marxist and Trotskyist ideas had on Merleau-Ponty's Humanisme et
terreur will pave the way for an examination of the development in
Sartre's ethical thinking towards Marxism in the Cahiers and in Les
Mains sales.
Writing at a time when Stalin's dominance stood unchallenged in
the USSR and the liberal democratic western states were looking
increasingly powerless in the face of the fascist threat, Trotsky set out
in Their Morality and Ours (1938) to correct a number of common
misapprehensions about Marxist ideas and politics. First, the Stalinist
regime, far from being the heir to Bolshevism, was a political mon-
strosity bringing 'to the highest tension, to culmination [...] all those
methods of untruth, brutality and baseness which constitute the mech-
anics of control in every class society'.
6
Second, the accusation of
'amoralism' levelled at Marxism and Bolshevism by liberal democrats
was founded on a limited and historically naive conception of moral-
ity. Marxism's liberal critics, Trotsky argued, failed to see that sets of
moral values were relative to their historical context and to the stage
the class struggle had reached. The bourgeois democratic conception
of morality was that which corresponded to the era of progressive
capitalism. As this era came under threat from the rise of the working
class, however, a new type of morality came into focus which Trotsky
termed 'the morality of proletarian revolution.' [TMO: 380] This
conception, founded on the class struggle, the dialectical materialist
5 Ian Birchall, in his Sartre Against Stalinism (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004) pp. 85-
6, provides a detailed and convincing examination of the evidence substanti-
ating the link with the assassination of Trotsky.
6 Their Morality and Ours, in The Basic Writings of Trotsky (London: Seeker and
Warburg, 1964) ed. Irving Howe p.384 (hereafter TMO).
202

view of history and the goal of a future socialist revolution, was mis-
takenly charged with being an amoralism because it did not
acknowledge the principles of bourgeois morality.
Trotsky, following Marx, presented the moral norms of the
capitalist era as an indispensable part of and support to the dominant
ideology propagated by the bourgeoisie:
The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering
all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function
of official morality. It pursues the idea of the "greatest possible happiness" not
for the majority but for a small and ever diminishing minority. Such a regime
could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the
cement of morality. [TMO: 377]
Official morality, Trotsky argued, was composed of moral precepts
which, in their obliviousness to most people's real conditions of life,
were abstract and formalistic. These precepts were presented as norms
with universal applicability, but did not stand up to the challenge
posed by real circumstances. What the idea of timelessly valid moral
norms overlooked was the class-divided nature of society. Most
people identified more strongly with their social class than they did
with society as a whole. The working class was more concerned with
how to conduct itself in the face of bourgeois exploitation than it was
with a set of universal moral norms applicable to all men.
The formalism and abstraction of official modes of thought in
bourgeois-dominated society was to become a key theme in Merleau-
Ponty's Humanisme et terreur. Political liberalism, Merleau-Ponty
argued, guaranteed individuals the freedoms accorded by civil liber-
ties, but in a class-divided society such freedoms remained formal
rather than real because the concrete circumstances of the working
class obstructed their genuine exercise. The morality and humanism of
capitalist society were deceptive because they did not consider man's
condition in the real circumstances of his life:
La prétendue "morale" du capitalisme est une mystification [HT: 134]
[...] l'humanisme des sociétés capitalistes [...] ne descend pas du citoyen
jusqu'à l'homme, ne supprime ni le chômage, ni la guerre [HT: 190]
203

As citizens, then, people had rights enshrined in law but as ordinary
men and women they were prey to the limitations imposed by un-
employment, and were the victims of the wars waged by their
governments.
At the heart of Trotsky's discussion of morality in Their Morals
and Ours lay the age-old question of ends and means. More pre-
cisely, did attaining one's political ends justify employing whatever
means necessary, including those condemned by conventional
morality such as lying and violence? The importance of this question
to the Marxist conception of morality cannot be overstated as it
unites matters of ethical conduct with the historical dialectic which,
in classic Marxist thought, guides the class struggle towards the
ultimate victory of the working class over capitalism. Trotsky noted
that one of the principal reasons for Bolshevism being charged with
amoralism was its endorsement of the maxim 'the end justifies the
means'. If the working class was to succeed in its struggle for social
justice, its actions could not be limited to those condoned by the
principles of conventional morality. Such abstractions, in their blind-
ness to the working class's underprivileged condition, guaranteed
only the maintenance of the status quo, obstructing the possibility of
real change:
A society without social contradictions will naturally be a society without lies
and violence. However there is no way of building a bridge to that society save
by revolutionary, that is, violent, means. The revolution itself is a product of
class society and of necessity bears its traits. From the point of view of "eternal
truths" revolution is of course "anti-moral". But this merely means that idealist
morality is counter-revolutionary, that is, in the service of the exploiters. [TMO:
387]
For Trotsky, conventional sins such as committing acts of violence
and lying were 'an inseparable part of the class struggle' [TMO: 387].
Trotsky's justification of revolutionary violence was later reaffirmed
by Merleau-Ponty who argued that bourgeois democracies were also
violent, contrary to the principles of their professed moral code:
La révolution assume et dirige une violence que la société bourgeoise tolère
dans le chômage et dans la guerre et camoufle sous le nom de fatalité. Mais
toutes les révolutions réunies n'ont pas versé plus de sang que les empires. Il
204

n'y a que des violences, et la violence révolutionnaire doit être préférée parce
qu'elle a un avenir d'humanisme. [HT: 115-6]
Nous n'avons pas le choix entre la pureté et la violence, mais entre différentes
sortes de violence. [HT: 117-8]
However, for Trotsky as for Merleau-Ponty, it was not the case that
any moral act in the service of the future revolution was permissible:
Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means [...] which unite the
revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to
oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic
echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise
their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it
flows that not all means are permissible [...] the great revolutionary end spurns
those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against
other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or
lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it
by worship for the "leaders". [TMO: 396]
In any case, Trotsky continued, for the Marxist dialectical view of
history there was no marked separation between means and ends
because they were both part of the same historical process. Merleau-
Ponty was later to expand and elaborate on this idea in his defence of
the Marxist conception of morality in Humanisme et terreur. Explicit-
ly quoting Trotsky's claim, Merleau-Ponty argued that the very
categories of ends and means were foreign to Marxism:
Ces deux notions, en bon marxisme, sont "relativisées", fin et moyen peuvent
échanger leurs rôles [...] il y a un processus révolutionnaire dont chaque
moment est aussi indispensable, aussi valable donc que l'utopique moment
« final ». [HT: 137-8]
Marxism's claim, Merleau-Ponty argued, was that rather than con-
stantly looking ahead to an ultimate future end, the revolutionary
working class would undertake courses of action which, as long as
they did not undermine its own interests as a class, naturally con-
tributed to the dialectical progression of society towards the overthrow
of capitalism. In reality, Merleau-Ponty's account of the relationship
between means and ends in the dialectical view of history went some
205

way towards smoothing over what, in Trotsky's text, had to a degree
remained an area of theoretical difficulty. Trotsky acknowledged that
advocating a moral outlook which permitted only those moral acts
which united and furthered the cause of the revolutionary working
class did not provide a complete blueprint for moral conduct. Such an
outlook '[did] not, of course, give a ready answer to the question as to
what is permissible and what is not permissible in each separate case.
There can be no such automatic answers', he conceded [TMO: 396].
7
In effect, Trotsky was recognising that the principles of the new
proletarian morality were lacunary with respect to certain kinds of
moral conduct. And from this it implictly followed that not all kinds
of moral act, or 'means' in the terms of the Marxist debate, could be
said to be part of the historical dialectic postulated by Marxism.
Certain acts might not cohere entirely with desirable political ends in
the historical dialectic.
Trotsky's claim that means and ends were each an integral part
of the historical dialectic highlighted the fundamentally ethical charac-
ter of the Marxist view of history. Was it morally acceptable to lie?
Yes, Trotsky argued, if by this means the cause of working class in its
struggle against bourgeois dominance was advanced. The underlying
justification for this argument was the Marxist conviction that the
ultimate victory of the working class would ensure a socialist revolu-
tion benefiting the majority rather than the privileged few. This was a
profoundly moral conviction because it was founded on the idea that
the highest social good consisted in an egalitarian distribution of
wealth and opportunity.
In Trotsky's account, the dialectical movement of history,
comprising a constant interrelation of subjective and class action on
the one hand and desired political outcomes on the other, was present-
ed as an intrinsically moral affair. Although the Marxist world-view
involved rejecting conventional morality, then, it was in its own way
7
In an attempt to camouflage the difficulty, Trotsky could only add somewhat
evasively: 'Problems of revolutionary morality are fused with the problems of
revolutionary strategy and tactics. The living experience of the movement under
the clarification of theory provides the correct answer to these problems.'
[TMO: 396]
206

moral to its roots. In making these claims, Trotsky was acting as a
spokesman for much of the non-Stalinist left at the time.
8
The Bol-
shevik revolutionaries, and Lenin first and foremost, he continued,
were motivated in their political actions to a high degree by moral
considerations:
The "amoralism" of Lenin, that is, his rejection of supra-class morals, did not
hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his
whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed [TMO:
395]
In his analysis of Their Morals and Ours in the Cahiers Sartre, who
considers the work as a whole 'fort mais court' [CM: 167], singles out
this assessment of Lenin for criticism. Trotsky's statement, Sartre
argues, reveals his unwitting dependence on the criteria of bourgeois
thought. 'Quel est le bourgeois démocrate', Sartre objects, 'qui ne
félicitera pas un savant, par exemple, ou un religieux d'être resté
toute sa vie fidèle au même idéal?' [CM: 168] The remarks which
follow in Sartre's notes are at something of a tangent and his criticism
of Trotsky is insufficiently substantiated. It is a sound criticism never-
8 Under the spell of the PCF's official theoretical doctrine of diamat from the late
1930s onwards, many communists' thinking with respect to morality did not go
much further than its firm rejection. If dialectical materialism was the science
of history, so this line of reasoning went, questions of morality were entirely
superfluous. However, although the staunchly pro-Stalinist line of the PCF
at the time is beyond doubt, the temptation to view the thinking of party
intellectuals and members monolithically should nevertheless be resisted. In a
piece of 1946 entitled 'La Politique et la morale' (Les Grandes Editions
Françaises, 1947), communist deputy Pierre Hervé argued forcefully that com­
munist politics were founded on a moral world-view: 'Une grande morale nous
soutient,' he claimed echoing Trotsky, 'celle qui s'exprime aujourd'hui à
travers tous les pays et exige de nous de libérer la société du profit, de
supprimer les classes [...] celle qui quotidiennement se traduit dans la vie, la
lutte, les aspirations [...] de tous ceux qui nous font confiance.' (p.22) This
moral outlook, as Trotsky had argued, contrasted with the conventional moral­
ity of bourgeois democratic society, being characterised by its symbiotic
relationship with the historical process: 'nous n'admettons pas de système
moral supérieur à l'histoire, de morale à fondement théologique' (p.20); 'notre
morale est historique et sociale' (p.21).
207

theless: the permanence and stasis implied by the idea of a lifelong
fidelity to a single ethical ideal is out of keeping with a thorough-
going dialectical conception of reality in which all phenomena,
including individuals' thought processes, are subject to movement and
change.
Sartre goes on to elucidate the principal themes of Their Morals
and Ours and although, as in the above case, he sometimes complains
that Trotsky does not take his reflections far enough philosophically, it
is clear that he is sympathetic to Trotsky's argument as a whole. With
respect to the dialectic of means and ends, Sartre observes that
'Trotsky soutient d'une part que toute fin devient moyen selon le
processus dialectique [...] et d'autre part il profile une fin absolue qui
en fait est le fond sur lequel paraît chaque fin particulière.' [CM: 168—
9] Sartre sees in the idea of an ultimate end, which for Trotsky is the
goal of socialism, a reformulation of the Kantian city of ends. The
ultimate end serves as an ethical ideal for Trotsky which once
attained, Sartre perceives, will signal the end of moral wrongs. 'Dans
le cas de Trotsky', observes Sartre, ia société sans classes une fois
réalisée, c'est un fait permanent qu'on ne ment plus, parce qu'il n'y a
plus de motifs pour mentir.' [CM: 170] For Trotsky, then, lying is a
symptom of the structures of class society and will cease to be
necessary once all social classes have been abolished. Sartre's char-
acter Hoederer in Les Mains sales defends precisely this conviction
during his disagreement with Hugo over questions of political strat-
egy:
Le mensonge, ce n'est pas moi qui l'ai inventé: il est né dans une société
divisée en classes et chacun de nous l'a hérité en naissant. Ce n'est pas en
refusant de mentir que nous abolirons le mensonge: c'est en usant de tous les
moyens pour supprimer les classes.
9
Sartre goes on to argue that there is a certain idealism in Trotskyist
politics. Although Trotskyists are passionate opponents of Stalinism,
they refuse to side with the political right to hasten its overthrow in
the manner of Koestler because such a move would weaken the
political strength of the working class. And yet, in reality the majority
9 Les Mains sales p. 193 (Gallimard, 1948) (hereafter MS).
208

of the working class for whose interests they militate identify with the
Stalinist PCF. Trotskyists hence find themselves in a political no
man's land, defending a position which is out of kilter with political
realities. Sartre's observations about Trotskyist political idealism are
more a neutral statement of fact than a criticism as such. After all,
Sartre's own politics at this time were in reality very close to this
brand of political idealism. In 1948, he took an active role in the
'Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire' (R.D.R.), a newly
formed political group which responded to the escalating tensions
of the Cold War by advocating a middle way between the two super-
powers and a non-Stalinist form of left popular democracy. The
group's manifesto text of February 1948, signed by Sartre, Rousset,
Altmann amongst others, set out the R.D .R.'s alternative political
vision thus:
Entre les pourrissements de la démocratie capitaliste, les faiblesses et les tares
d'une certaine social-démocratie et la limitation du communisme à sa forme
stalinienne, nous pensons qu'un rassemblement d'hommes libres pour la
démocratie révolutionnaire est capable de faire prendre une vie nouvelle aux
principes de liberté, de dignité humaine en les liant à la lutte pour la révolution
sociale.
10
Although unambiguously critical of Stalinist communism, the authors
made it clear that the R.D .R . was not setting out to rival the base of
working class support in the PCF but rather to complement it. PCF
members, and indeed members of the S.F .I .O. could remain in their
parties and also participate freely in the R.D.R . Whatever the evils of
Stalinism, then, the PCF-supporting French working class could not
be abandoned in favour of an alliance with the political right. This
project to fight for the interests of the working class as critical fellow-
travellers of the PCF proved unworkable and the R.D.R . came to an
end in 1949. Sartre would later recount its failure and ultimate demise
in his obituary for Merleau-Ponty [S IV: 223-4]. In the polarised
political climate of the Cold War, the R.D .R. was perceived by the
PCF as a rival political group which would draw working class sup-
10 'Appel du comité pour le Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire', re­
printed in Contât and Rybalka op.cit. p . 197
209

port away from the Party. It consequently treated the R.D.R . as a
political enemy and attacked it from the outset, which led to internal
disagreements and divisions. In reality, the project of a political mid-
dle way was idealistic in the circumstances of the time. Sartre suggests
that Merleau-Ponty, who had joined the R.D .R . principally to be
supportive of him, had perceived that it was unworkable from the
start. 'Merleau découvrit-il avant moi notre erreur', ponders Sartre
rhetorically, 'et qu'une pensée politique ne s'incarne pas facilement, à
moins d'aller au bout d'elle-même et d'être quelque part reprise par
ceux qui en ont besoin ?' [S IV: 223-4] The failure of the R.D.R. lay
in its attempt to defend political ideals whilst turning a blind eye to the
concrete realities of the situation, and in its lack of a base of support
amongst the working classes who were very largely affiliated to the
PCF.
In Sartre's Cahiers, the influence of the Marxist historicised and
politicised conception of ethics is perceptible in his presentation of the
historical dialectic and the ethical ideal of socialism as aspects of a
synthetic totality: 'La morale doit être historique' [CM: 14]; 'La
morale aujourd'hui doit être socialiste révolutionnaire' [CM: 20]; 'La
fin de l'Histoire ce serait l'avènement de la Morale' [CM: 95]; 'la
dialectique est un effort pour introduire la morale dans le but concret.'
[CM: 175] Sartre, like Trotsky, is sceptical of the inherently abstract
character of traditional morality which fails to recognise individuals'
unequal conditions of life. He argues that a more concrete conception
of morality is one which considers moral acts in their situational
contexts:
11
11 Thomas C. Anderson, in his Sartre's Two Ethics pp. 44 -52, offers an in-depth
account of the more concrete view of human reality of the Cahiers than that
depicted in L'Etre et le néant, and of Sartre's insistence on a concrete morality.
However, Anderson presents the idea of a concrete as opposed to abstract
morality as a merely parallel development to Sartre's increasing sympathy with
Marxism, because he remains faithful to the commonly-held view that Marxism
and morality have little to do with each other. His apparent unawareness of the
case Trotsky and others made for Marxism's alternative conception of morality
means that he fails to see the important ways in which the idea of a concrete
morality in Sartre's Cahiers is in fact drawn directly from a debate within
Marxist philosophy itself. He is consequently also unable to perceive the vital
210

Il n'y a pas de morale abstraite. Il n'y a qu'une morale en situation donc
concrète. Car la morale abstraite est celle de la bonne conscience. Elle suppose
qu'on peut être moral dans une situation foncièrement immorale. [CM: 24]
The immoral situation to which Sartre refers is of course that
in which the working classes are exploited by the bourgeoisie.
Individuals' morality and their situation in society are fundamentally
interconnecting, he suggests, echoing Trotsky's conviction that the
only acceptable morality is that which is linked to the working class's
struggle for social justice.
Trotsky, echoing Marx, had presented official morality as a vital
component of the ideological superstructure of capitalist society which
encouraged people's acceptance of the existing power structure
[TMO: 377]. His characterisation of this type of morality as abstract in
character was consistent in particular with Marx's and Engels' view of
ideology as intrinsically abstract in The German Ideology. Sartre does
not make any explicit connection between conventional morality
and bourgeois ideology in the Cahiers. However, his references to
ideology in the contemporaneous work Qu'est-ce que la littérature?
draw considerably on the early Marxian conception of ideology, as we
saw in chapter III. It hence becomes clear that Sartre shares Trotsky's
Marxian hostility to the bourgeois tendency towards abstraction in
thought. His view of bourgeois ideology and its supporting morality
is indistinguishable by this time from that of the classic Marxist
tradition. However, if Sartre's early Marxian tendencies lie in his
connection between the idea of a concrete morality founded on the class
struggle and the historical dialectic. Given the frequency of discussions
centering on the dialectics of history in the Cahiers, these lacunae clearly
constitute a major obstacle to Anderson providing a comprehensive account
of the work as a whole. The lack of awareness of the Marxist historicised
and politicised conception of morality inevitably prevents the appropriate
connections being made between the different areas of Sartre's reflections.
Anderson's approach to the Cahiers is representative of that which has
prevailed in the criticism since the work's posthumous publication in 1983.
Indeed, there has been a mistaken tendency to see the Cahiers as an
assemblage of tangentially related areas of theoretical enquiry rather than as a
globally coherent intellectual synthesis of ethical, political, and historio-
graphical issues.
211

refusal of bourgeois abstractions, it should be remembered that this
refusal could be perceived in his early works long before he engaged
in any discussions centering explicitly on ideology or morality.
Indeed, in some of his earlier works the concept of inauthenticity, in
those instances where bad faith involved flights into abstraction,
substituted for the Marxist concept of ideology in the pejorative sense.
Let us briefly return to the scene in L'Age de raison where
Jacques pretends not to realise that the money his brother Mathieu is
requesting is to be used for an abortion and attempts to assert his own
superior position by elevating himself above the reality of the situation
[AR: 128]. In this case, Jacques' movement towards abstraction is an
instance of the 'sérieux' on the one hand, and at the same time can
clearly be read as an expression of both bourgeois ideology and
bourgeois morality. The latter two phenomena are indissociable. Prior
to feigning not to understand that Mathieu has an abortion in mind,
Jacques had responded to the news of Marcelle's pregnancy by asking
facetiously, 'Alors? A quand le mariage?' [AR: 128] We are then
informed that 'Jacques refusait d'envisager honnêtement la situation
[...] son esprit s'évertuait à trouver un nid d'aigle d'où il pût prendre
des vues plongeantes sur la conduite des autres.' [AR: 128] Here the
idea of marriage is used symbolically to represent the conventional
morality of bourgeois society to which Jacques subscribes but Math-
ieu does not. And through the act of posing his provocative question,
and hence avoiding having to offer Mathieu financial assistance,
Jacques elevates himself above Mathieu's situation thus indicating the
important and powerful idea of himself as a bourgeois which his soc-
ial status as a lawyer has allowed him to cultivate. Jacques' moral
conventionality and full identification with bourgeois ideology form a
coherent unity and a united front against the non-conformist Mathieu.
Their unity lies in the fact that they are both presented as involving a
movement towards abstraction from the real. Hence, even in as early a
work as L 'Age de raison, written some years before Sartre had given
any explicit indication of his views on ideology, in certain instances
his representations of inauthenticity apparently stand in for the classic
Marxist critique of bourgeois ideology and morality.
With respect to the rejection of bourgeois abstractions, it is also
worth recalling Sartre's search for authenticity during the first months
212

of 1940. As we saw in chapter IV, Sartre ultimately realised that even
being fully lucid about his own inauthenticity as a bourgeois was not
enough to ensure the passage to authenticity. In the absence of a
genuine adaptation of his ethical practice to his principles and an
honest recognition of his being-in-the-world, his thinking remained
trapped in the inauthentic tendency towards abstraction from the real
characteristic of his bourgeois past. Without realising it, what Sartre
was intuiting for the first time here in fact echoed the Marxian critique
of philosophical idealism and formalistic thinking. Sartre's idea that
ethical conduct and principles must accord with each other para-
phrased the classic Marxist insistence on the unity of practice and
theory. In the second of the 'Theses on Feuerbach', Marx had claim-
ed: 'The question whether human thought can attain to objective truth
is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth
[...] of his thinking in practice.'
12
It was hence not enough for Sartre
to reject his bourgeois past but continue to enjoy the material
privileges of a bourgeois. The only way to be authentic, he ultimately
realised, was to live in accordance with his principles. Principles could
not exist independently of concrete realities without falling into
formalistic ineffectualness.
By the time of the Cahiers, in 1947-8, Sartre is coming to
the view that a genuine coherence between ethical principles and
practical conduct depends on conceiving of the latter as revolutionary
political activism. He now thinks that defending ethical values of the
traditional sort whilst turning a blind eye to the blatant inequalities of
society is indefensible. He is hence sympathetic to Marxism's situ-
ating of ethics in the working class's struggle for social justice. Only
by attempting to bring class division and oppression to an end can
there be any hope of achieving coherence between ethical principles
and the realities of practical conduct. At the level of ontology, this
commitment to revolutionary politics is complemented by his convic-
tion in the Cahiers that an authentic outlook on the world consists in
engaging in action, or doing, rather than in trying to give oneself a
foundation. In pure reflection, once the attempt to achieve lasting
coincidence with being, or to be God, has proven fruitless, conscious-
12 The Portable Karl Marx (New York: Penguin, 1983) ed. Kamenka pp. 155-6
213

ness realises it must define itself through action and in so doing bring
about change in concrete worldly situations. It is consciousness's
ultimate rejection of its project to be God which is also at the basis of
the relations of reciprocity with others which are possible after the
conversion. In the Cahiers, Sartre's post-conversion intersubjective
ethics is formulated in parallel to his nascent historical dialectic and
his endorsement of the Marxist politicised and historicised conception
of ethics. The coherence between these apparently contrasting ap-
proaches to ethics principally lies in the idea of solidarity which is
central to both. In the case of the former approach, intersubjective
solidarity is implied by the the appeals one person makes to the other,
and the values of understanding and generosity which they involve. In
the case of the Marxist conception of ethics, solidarity of this sort is
indispensable to the revolutionary politics of the working class upon
which its struggle culminating in socialism is founded. Indeed, unity
of intention and aims amongst members of the working class were
traditionally always conceived by Marxists as crucial to effective
political action.
13
Sartre's ethical ideal of authenticity in the Cahiers
and the ethical ideals underpinning the Marxist politics to which he
subscribes are hence interdependent and indispensable to each other.
In effect, Sartre presents the refusal of inauthentic conduct on the part
of the subject as the basis for a conversion both to relations of
reciprocity with others and to socialist politics at the same time.
14
The overall coherence of Sartre's position does not, however,
exclude there being certain tensions notably between his fidelity to the
13 The importance of class consciousness to the working class being effective
politically was a recurring theme in Lukâcs' History and Class Consciousness.
14 Sartre's overall position in the Cahiers is thus firmly within the parameters of
left thought. Sonia Kruks rightly corrects Jeanette Colombel's erroneous claim
that the work reveals a Sartre who, whilst having broken with the alienated
ethics of L'Etre et le néant, has not yet come under the influence of Marxism.
Colombel considers this latter development regrettable. (Kruks 'Sartre's
Cahiers pour une morale: Failed Attempt or New Trajectory in Ethics?', in W.
McBride Existentialist Ethics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997). Kruks is
responding specifically to Colombel's 'post-Marxist' reading of the Cahiers in
her 'Sartre: morale et Création', presented at the Groupe d'Etudes Sartriennes,
Paris, June 1983).
214

project of formulating an ethics in the traditional sense and his
newfound awareness of the foundational Marxist conception of ethics.
These tensions, which have sometimes been misinterpreted and
exaggerated in the critical literature,
15
nevertheless problematise the
positions advanced in the work to some extent. Trotsky's Their
Morals and Ours reaffirmed the classic Marxist tendency to discard
altogether the traditional approach to ethics. Ethics were a function of
class struggle and would cease to be an issue once socialism had been
achieved. In the meantime, the only ethics of any importance were
those which underpinned the struggle of the working class against the
bourgeoisie. That Sartre continues in the Cahiers to want to conceive
of questions of ethics not just as part of the historical dialectic but also
at the level of intersubjective relationships is evidence that he is not
entirely won over to this view. His existentialist emphasis on subject-
ive responsibility leads him to feel there are ethical problems thrown
15 Kruks, in the aforementioned article, mistakenly conceives of the tensions in
Sartre's position in the Cahiers as existing principally between the ontology of
L'Etre et le néant and his qualified endorsement of Marxist historical dialectics,
rather than pertaining between traditional ethics and Marxist ethics, the latter
ostensibly challenging the former. 'Deeply fissured,' argues Kruks, 'by the still
wholly unresolved tension between Sartre's early ontology and his growing
appreciation of the significance of Marxism, [the Cahiers] oscillate between the
perspective which each implies.' (McBride p.235) What Kruks fails to recog­
nise is the extent to which there has been a development in Sartre's ontological
position, notably with respect to ethics, between L'Etre et le néant and the
Cahiers. It is true that the Sartre of the Cahiers retains some of the basic
ontological claims of L'Etre et le néant, but as often as not they appear in the
text as an expression of the inauthentic outlook against which he is now setting
his ethics of authenticity. And there is not an 'unresolved tension' between
Sartre's ontology-based authentic ethics on the one hand and his subscription to
Marxist-influenced historical dialectics and ethics on the other of such propor­
tions that the work can only 'oscillate' between the two. Although it is true that
the formal setting out of these approaches in the Cahiers suggests such a
tension, what Kruks and others do not perceive, due to a lack of sufficient
knowledge of Marxist ideas, is the global coherence of Sartre's thought at this
time. Only a knowledge of the crucial relationship between historical dialectics
and the Marxist conception of ethics permits a full and accurate awareness of
the place of Sartre's ontology-based ethics of reciprocity within the parameters
of the socialist historical, political and ethical project.
215

up by subjective agency which cannot be explained solely in terms of
the historical dialectic. His remark in the first pages of the Cahiers,
'Absurdité et nécessité d'une morale' [CM: 15], indicates the am-
biguous position that he will maintain throughout. He recognises
along with the Marxists that the project to formulate an ethics in the
traditional sense is absurd, agreeing with them that such an ethics is
impossible in a grossly unequal society. And yet he feels that their
subsumption of all ethical issues in the class struggle peremptorily
writes off questions which remain vital all the same. He had argued in
the second part of Matérialisme et revolution that retaining an em-
phasis on subjective agency and responsibility was indispensable to
the very revolutionary struggle which radicals advocate. As we saw in
chapter I, the question of classic Marxism's stance with respect to the
role of subjectivity is more complex than Sartre thinks at this time.
The vast majority of non-mechanistic, non-scientistic Marxist theorists
explicitly acknowledged the indispensable role played by individuals
in the historical process. However, the position specifically with re-
spect to ethics set out by Trotsky was largely representative of classic
Marxist theorising on the matter.
16
Hence Sartre, whilst increasingly
sympathetic to the Marxist conception of ethics, corrects its reduc-
tiveness in relation to intersubjective ethics by continuing to give
consideration to the sort of questions which had been the province of
traditional writings on ethics, such as the nature of generosity and
understanding as opposed to alienated relationships characterised by
attempts to dominate the other. What I have tried to show is that he in
fact comes up with a synthesis of the two positions, as he will later do
with respect to subjective agency and history in the Critique de la
raison dialectique. He sketches out ethical claims which harmonise
with the socialist ideal which, for Marxists, is the ethical foundation of
the working class's struggle for emancipation.
Sartre's position was to remain ambiguous with respect to ethics
for many years to come. In Saint Genet, he would remark that 'toute
16 Eugene Kamenka begins his Marxism and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1969)
with the observation that the classic Marxists neglected ethics in the traditional
sense. They 'distinguished themselves in this field', he goes so far as to argue,
'mainly by their philosophical dilettantism and consequent naïveté' (p.l).
216

Morale qui ne se donne pas explicitement comme impossible
aujourd'hui contribue à la mystification et à l'aliénation des hommes.
Le « problème » moral naît de ce que la Morale est pour nous tout en
même temps inévitable et impossible.'
17
In the late 1940s and 1950s,
however, it would seem that Sartre saw this ambiguity as fundamen-
tally debilitating to the project of writing an ethics, which may go
some way towards explaining why the Cahiers were never completed
as a published work. He was perhaps not yet able to see, as he would
later do at the time of the Critique, that the ambiguity of his position
was precisely its strength, that his points of divergence from classic
Marxism might complement and improve Marxism^rom within.
Many of the central ethical and political preoccupations of the
Cahiers are to be found in Sartre's play of the same period, Les Mains
sales. The political implications of the play were misunderstood by
many in the late 1940s and 1950s. The polarised reactions of the PCF
and the right-wing press, the former hostile and the latter favourable,
contributed to the widely-held view that Les Mains sales was an anti-
communist play. The play's politics were in reality much more com-
plex and ambiguous than this. Whilst many took Hugo, the confused
bourgeois communist convert, for the hero of the play and the mouth-
piece for Sartre's political stance, Sartre himself stated at the time that
Les Mains sales did not advocate any one political position. It was a
play about politics which highlighted the inevitable problems implied
by political action itself.
18
He was later to suggest that he was most in
sympathy with the position of the character Hoederer:
c'est l'attitude de Hoederer qui seule me paraît saine [TDS: 249]
Je m'incarne en Hoederer. Idéalement, bien sûr; ne croyez pas que je prétende
être Hoederer, mais dans un sens je me sens beaucoup plus réalisé quand je
pense à lui. Hoederer est celui que je voudrais être si j'étais un révolutionnaire,
donc je suis Hoederer, ne serait-ce que sur un plan symbolique. [TDS: 259]
Hoederer, the assassinated revolutionary political leader, was clearly
modelled on Trotsky and it is notably through his characterisation that
17 Saint Genet (Gallimard, 1952) p.212
18 Un Théâtre de situations p.248 (Gallimard, 1973) (hereafter TDS).
217

Sartre's synthesis of authentic ethics and Marxist historiography and
ethics receives its clearest formulation. Hugo attempts to give himself
a foundation in the world through embarking on the project to assas-
sinate Hoederer. Olga remarks, following his initial failure to carry out
the assassination, that 'le Parti n'a pas été créé pour te fournir des
occasions d'héroïsme',
19
an abrasive summing up of Hugo's motiv-
ations, and in particular his desire for self-affirmation, or being. By
contrast, Hoederer incarnates Sartre's conviction that authenticity is
founded on doing rather than the quest for being. He is fully aware
that his opponents in the Party are planning to have him assassinated
but remains selflessly determined to see through to conclusion the deal
with the political right he has been working for [MS: 130-1]. Politics,
he tells Hugo, is not about engaging in courses of action for the pur-
poses of self-affirmation but about getting things done because the
political situation requires it:
Tu as voulu te prouver que tu étais capable d'agir et tu as choisi les chemins
difficiles: comme quand on veut mériter le ciel [...] la Révolution n'est pas une
question de mente, mais d'efficacité; il n'y a pas de ciel. Il y a du travail à faire,
c'est tout. [MS: 218]
Hoederer's insistence on action in the context of political struggle
harmonises with the definition of generosity as a realisation of the
ends of the other set out in the Cahiers [CM: 293]. He believes that a
deal with the political right will ensure that thousands of lives are
spared and that the working class ultimately triumphs over political
liberalism. And he is willing to risk losing his own life for the sake of
the greater common good. He also demonstrates generosity in his
relations with Hugo. Hoederer understands that Hugo is an insecure
young man and, in spite of having been informed of Hugo's assas-
sination plan, he promises he will assist his passage to maturity: 'Si
j'échappe à leurs pétards et à leurs bombes,' he tells him, 'je te
garderai près de moi et je t'aiderai.' [MS: 215]
Hoederer also conforms to Sartre's vision of authentic ethics in
his refusal to give credence to political principles which are not in-
timately linked with political practice in situation. The basis of the
19 Les Mains sales p.168 (Hereafter A/S).
218

dispute between Hoederer and Hugo of 'Tableau' 5, scene 3 is the fact
that Hugo interprets Hoederer's plan to form an alliance with the
political right as a betrayal of Party principles. Hoederer retorts that
Hugo's thinking is abstract and ineffectual, trapped in an intellectual
purism which has nothing to do with the concrete realities of political
decision-making. For Hugo, the Party's sole objective is to 'faire
triompher nos idées, toutes nos idées et rien qu'elles.' [MS: 191]
When Hoederer objects that not allying with the political right will
result in the loss of thousands of lives, Hugo can only quip: 'On ne
fait pas la révolution avec des fleurs. S'ils doivent y rester...' [MS:
195] The Party's political principles, he believes, must be safeguarded
at all costs. In response, Hoederer argues that the abstract nature of
Hugo's thinking is much more an expression of the anarchism of a
bourgeois intellectual than it has anything to do with the proletarian
struggle:
Tu n'aimes pas les hommes, Hugo. Tu n'aimes que les principes. [MS: 195]
[...] tu es un destructeur. Les hommes, tu les détestes parce que tu te détestes
toi-même; ta pureté ressemble à la mort et la Révolution dont tu rêves n'est pas
la nôtre [...][MS: 196]
In the characterisation of Hugo, the abstraction of bourgeois thinking
goes hand in hand with that of the metaphysical materialist world-
view underpinning Stalinist Marxist politics which Sartre had attacked
in the first part of Matérialisme et révolution [MR: 140, 144, 166]. In
both cases, the concrete realities of individuals' situational contexts,
and hence the nature of real political decision-making, are transcended
by an idealist 'pensée de survol*. Hugo also demonstrates the 'sérieux'
which Sartre had previously attributed to revolutionaries [C: 394-5,
MR: 162] in that he subscribes to the objectivist view of history which
Stalinists derive from their mechanistic brand of dialectical
materialism. He argues that Hoederer is 'objectively' a traitor, thus
abdicating his own subjective responsibility to judge for himself.
'Objectivement,
9
he informs his wife Jessica, '[Hoederer] agit comme
un social-traître.' [MS: 177] Sartre had argued in Matérialisme et
révolution that it was just such thinking amongst communists which
hindered rather than aided the revolutionary cause, and had advanced
219

an existentialist-derived theory of revolution as an alternative for left
activists. In many ways, Hoederer incarnates this alternative approach,
accepting fully his freedom to make political decisions and taking
responsibility for them. He refuses simply to follow a pre-defined
political agenda derived from principles which, in their abstract uni-
versality, are detached from the concrete situation of the moment.
Hugo's intellectual purism leads him to cling to the tenets of
traditional morality. The idea of lying to Party comrades is un-
acceptable to him under any circumstances because he understands the
political struggle only in terms of abstract ethical ideals:
Je n'ai jamais menti aux camarades. Je [...] A quoi ça sert de lutter pour la
libération des hommes, si on les méprise assez pour leur bourrer le crâne? [MS:
192]
Hoederer's arguments and actions conversely embody the Marxist
conception of morality, based on the class struggle underpinning the
historical dialectic. He believes that it is acceptable to sacrifice the
principles of conventional morality if it is politically expedient to do
so in the interests of the proletarian struggle.
Les Mains sales hence stages in a number of complementary
ways an opposition between dialectical Marxism and Trotskyism on
the one hand and the bourgeois and Stalinist world views on the
other. However, this opposition is far from clear-cut as Sartre's
characterisations in places suffer from inconsistencies and incoher-
ences stemming from certain persisting areas of confusion in his
political thinking at the time. Although clearly modelled on Trotsky,
Hoederer advocates a political line which contrasts significantly with
the politics of Trotsky. As Ian Birchall observes, Hoederer's desired
pact with the political right amounts to an attempt to form a popular
front, that is an alliance with the political right in which communists
compromise their socialist agenda but participate in government.
Trotsky never advocated a popular front but rather a united front in
which different workers' parties join together to combat the right more
effectively.
20
Furthermore, for all that Sartre was later to insist that it
20 Birchall op.cit. p.87. However, it is not certain that Hoederer is as willing to
compromise his left political agenda as BirchalPs reading suggests. His remarks
220

was Hoederer rather than Hugo who represents his own theoretical
and political position, the fact that Hugo is the play's protagonist and
that it is through his experience that the battle of ideas takes place,
suggests that he is the real hero of Les Mains sales, not Hoederer. In
his interview with Sartre of 1964, Paolo Caruso returns numerous
times to this difficulty, arguing that the public's misinterpretation of
the politics of Les Mains sales is understandable in the light of the
play's structure and portrayal of Hugo [TDS: 257-260].
Sartre's Use of the Concept of Ideology
in the Neutral and Positive Senses
Explicit references to ideology are rare in Sartre's writings before
around 1946. We saw in chapter III that prior to this time, Sartre's
concept of inauthenticity substitutes on occasions for the Marxist con-
cept of dominant ideology, otherwise known as ideology in the
pejorative sense. When he does come to employ this concept of ideol-
ogy explicitly in the postwar years, and most notably in Qu 'est-ce que
la littérature?, it is in a way that is strongly reminiscent of the early
Marxian usage which appears notably in The German Ideology. In
Geuss' study The Idea of a Critical Theory, two other basic models of
ideology are identified in addition to the pejorative type, namely
ideology in the 'descriptive' sense (which I shall hereafter refer to as
to Hugo on the matter suggest that he considers an alliance with the right a
necessary short-term strategy which will lead ultimately to the outright victory
of the political left: 'Une minorité, voilà ce que nous devons être. Une minorité
qui laissera aux autres partis la responsabilité des mesures impopulaires et qui
gagnera la population en faisant de l'opposition à l'intérieur du gouvernement.
Ils sont coincés: en deux ans tu verras la faillite de la politique libérale et c'est
le pays tout entier qui nous demandera de faire notre expérience.' [MS: 189]
Moreover, in his account of Their Morality and Ours in the Cahiers, Sartre's
observation that Trotskyists always refuse to ally with the political right [CM:
171] demonstrates that he was not in reality as confused about Trotskyist polit­
ics as Birchall suggests.
221

the neutral sense of ideology) and ideology in the 'positive' sense.
21
We will now turn to the appearances made by these concepts in
Sartre's works of the 1940s.
On 6 March 1940, Sartre notes in his war diary, with reference
to the political situation of the time, 'nous sommes à un tournant, car
la victoire seule décidera de la valeur de notre idéologie ou de
l'idéologie nazie.' [C: 537]. A few days later, on 12 March, his
reflections on the relations between individual subjects and their
historical context lead him to assert that 'la description du développe-
ment concret d'une idéologie à partir de données politiques devrait
s'accompagner d'une monographie d'un des personnages importants
de l'époque, pour montrer l'idéologie comme situation vécue et con-
stituée en situation par un projet humain.' [C: 584] In these statements
it is apparent that for the Sartre of 1940 the concept of ideology does
not have an intrinsically pejorative character. Rather than serving to
mystify the oppressed of society, in these statements 'ideology' is
assumed to be a broad, value-neutral phenomenon somewhat akin to a
'world-view' or even a 'culture'. In Geuss's schema, such a concept
of ideology is a particular type of 'ideology in the descriptive sense'.
It is characterised by being comprised of bundles of beliefs, attitudes,
and so on, that are shared by a group or community and 'generally
have some coherency - although it is very hard to say in general in
what this coherency consists - the elements in the bundle are
complexly related to each other, they all somehow 'fit', and the whole
bundle has a characteristic structure which is often discernible even to
an outside observer.'
22
In the postwar years, and up until the Critique
and beyond, Sartre would continue in places to employ the concept of
ideology in this neutral sense, or in closely related neutral senses.
23
In
a rather tense discussion with Merleau-Ponty in 1956 at a colloquium
in Venice, for instance, he was to refer to Marxism as 'une idéologie
21 Geuss op.cit. pp . 4-12, and pp. 22 -26.
22 Geuss op.cit. p. 10
23 In his account of ideology in the 'descriptive' sense (pp. 4 -12), Geuss estab­
lishes a number of conceptual distinctions whose relationship to Sartre's use of
the concept of ideology would require more in-depth examination than is
appropriate to our discussion here.
222

culturelle', also remarking that 'les cultures sont aussi des idéol-
,24
ogies.
The use of the concept of ideology in the 'positive' sense dates
back, in left political debate, to Lenin's What is to be Done? (1902).
Lenin argued that without assistance from members of a vanguard
party (many of whom might be of bourgeois origin), the working class
would never be able to develop a form of consciousness adequate to
fight for its own interests effectively. The appropriate proletarian
world-view had to be introduced into the working class from an
external source. This argument involved positing a new form of
working-class consciousness as an ideology which would counter the
freedom-limiting effects of the existing dominant ideology. Ideology
was conceived positively as a weapon in the working class's struggle
for social justice. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukâcs was
famously to champion this positive view of ideology, presenting
working class consciousness as vital to the historical dialectic leading
towards socialism. '[T]he fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of
mankind),' he argued, 'will depend on the ideological maturity of the
proletariat, i.e . on its class consciousness.' [HCC: 70] Trotsky's view
of the historical dialectic was also an endorsement of the Leninist
view of ideology. In Their Morals and Ours, the moral dimension of
the proletarian-led dialectic crucially involved the idea of a proletarian
world-view that was battling to supplant that of the bourgeoisie.
Marxism's analysis of bourgeois ideology had always presented
the phenomenon as mystificatory in nature. Ideology was not only
insidious because it consisted of beliefs and values foisted upon the
exploited to ensure their obedience, but involved a distorted view of
reality. Classic Marxists had habitually made an opposition between
ideology and truth, the former being the illusions of bourgeois thought
whereas the latter was located in the dialectical materialist science of
history. Lenin's notion of an ideological counterforce incarnated in the
class consciousness of the working class appeared to complicate this
distinction. Was this positive type of ideology a vehicle for the Marx-
ist truth of history or, as ideology, did it too involve distortion of
reality? In his analysis of What is to be Done?, Eagleton supports the
24 Contât and Rybalka op.cit. p.301
223

former reading: 'Ideology [...] has now become identical with the
scientific theory of historical materialism', he argues with respect to
Lenin's claims. 'The 'ideologist' is no longer one floundering in false
consciousness but the exact reverse, the scientific analyst of the
fundamental laws of society and its thought formations.'
25
This read-
ing of Lenin had also been that of the Lukâcs of History and Class
Consciousness, who reaffirmed the Leninist view of ideology in his
own theory. The working class, Lukâcs argued, 'always aspires
towards the truth even in its 'false' consciousness' [HCC: 72].
26
Ideology, then, did not stand in opposition to truth because in the case
of working-class false consciousness it was the vehicle for the truth of
history.
The concept of ideology in the positive sense makes its first
appearance in Sartre's writings in the closing paragraph of Matérial-
isme et révolution. Sartre suggests that the theory of revolutionary
activism which he is proposing is not simply a theoretical but also an
ideological alternative to the PCF's reliance on the doctrine of materi-
alism. The communists cling to an outmoded theory because they are
afraid of the divisions which might result from adopting 'une idéol-
ogie nouvelle', he argues [MR: 225]. Sartre does not embark on any
discussion of the nature of ideology, but there is good reason to
suppose that he, like Lenin and Lukâcs, implicitly subscribes to a
conception of the phenomenon as a vehicle for the truth rather than as
distorting. He suggests that his brand of revolutionary humanism
might be expressive of a broader philosophical truth:
l'humanisme révolutionnaire apparaîtra non pas comme la philosophie d'une
classe opprimée, mais comme la vérité elle-même [...] et il deviendra manifeste
pour toutes les bonnes volontés que c'est la vérité qui est révolutionnaire. Non
pas la vérité de l'idéalisme, mais la vérité concrète, voulue, créée, maintenue,
conquise à travers les luttes sociales par les hommes qui travaillent à la
libération de l'homme. [MR: 224]
25 Eagleton Ideology. An Introduction p.90
26 Note that Lukâcs uses 'false consciousness' synonymously with 'ideology', in
this case proletarian ideology. Eagleton, by contrast, remains faithful to the
more common Marxist usage of the formulation 'false consciousness', taking it
to be the product of bourgeois ideological dominance.
224

Sartre considers his alternative theory of revolutionary activism - the
'idéologie nouvelle' - and the working class's political struggle to be
indissociable and expressive of the concrete truth. Theory and political
practice hence constitute one single movement, as they do in Marx's
philosophy. They are both constitutive of the historical dialectic lead-
ing towards the socialist revolution. And it is this progression towards
socialism founded on the idea of the class struggle which, for Sartre
now as for Marxists, is the truth of history.
In Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?, there are numerous mentions of
ideology, Sartre's usage oscillating between the Marxian concept of
dominant ideology, a neutral or descriptive sense, and the positive
sense where ideology is conceived as a weapon in the political strug-
gle. Sartre's remark that 'les idéologies sont liberté quand elles se
font, oppression quand elles sont faites' [QL: 161] marks out the basic
distinction between the positive and pejorative types of ideology as he
understands it from his existentialist and libertarian perpective. In the
case of the positive type of ideology, Sartre thinks, individual subjects
freely contribute to the construction of a new ideological world-view
which will serve their interests, whereas a dominant ideology is im-
posed on them by an external source thereby alienating them. We will
examine the conception of committed literature which lies at the heart
of Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la littérature? in chapter IX. For the pur-
poses of our present discussion, it suffices to note that Sartre's
increasing insistence on commitment from 1945 onwards was from
the outset intimately connected to his socialist politics. In Qu'est-ce
que la littérature?, Sartre explictly implicates writing in the political
struggle for socialism: 'nous devons militer dans nos écrits en faveur
de la liberté de la personne et de la révolution socialiste.' [QL: 21A]
He presents this political role which he envisages for writing as
important to the building of a new revolutionary ideology which we
can only assume is that oîMatérialisme et révolution:
Si nos souhaits pouvaient se réaliser, l'écrivain du XXe siècle occuperait, entre
les classes opprimées et celles qui les oppriment, une situation analogue à celle
des auteurs du XVIIIe entre les bourgeois et l'aristocratie, à celle de Richard
Wright entre les Noirs et les Blancs: lu à la fois par l'opprimé et par
l'oppresseur, témoignant pour l'opprimé contre l'oppresseur, fournissant à
l'oppresseur son image, du dedans et du dehors, prenant, avec et pour
225

l'opprimé, conscience de l'oppression, contribuant à former une idéologie
constructrice et révolutionnaire. [QL: 239 my italics]
For the Sartre of Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?, writing has a vital role
to play as a part of the political struggle and, as such, serves an ideo-
logical function. Its representation of society is an act which, through
revealing the world to the reader, will incite him or her to take action:
si la perception même est action, si [...] montrer le monde c'est toujours le
dévoiler dans les perspectives d'un changement possible, alors, dans cette
époque de fatalisme, nous avons à révéler au lecteur, en chaque cas concret, sa
puissance de faire et de défaire, bref, d'agir. [QL: 288]
References to ideology are curiously absent from Sartre's Cahiers,
written contemporaneously with Qu'est-ce que la littérature? The
coherence, however, between the conception of authentic ethics and
the historical dialectic leading to socialism in the Cahiers and the
positive conception of ideology in Matérialisme et révolution and
Qu'est-ce que la littérature? is evident. Sartre's rejection of the
inauthentic ontological vision of L'Etre et le néant in the Cahiers in
favour of an ethical outlook based on the ideas of doing, pure reflec-
tion and contingency opens the way for an intersubjective ethics of
reciprocity and solidarity. The ideas of doing, or praxis, and of
intersubjective solidarity prove vital both to Sartre's alternative theory
of revolution and to the view that history is progressing towards the
ultimate defeat of capitalist hegemony. For Sartre, as for Marx,
Lukâcs and Gramsci, the actions of individual subjects are vital to the
historical dialectic but they must act in a coherent, unified way in
order to succeed. This need for solidarity means that a revolutionary
theory, or class consciousness, shared by all is indispensable. Armed
with such an ideological weapon, the working class can gain the
necessary strength and unity to bring about major and lasting
change to the social and economic structure of society. Ultimately, then,
the progression in Sartre's thought towards an authentic ethics, the
struggle for socialism, and a positive concept of ideology in the post-
war years is one and the same movement. Whereas the inauthentic
ethical outlook on life charted in the ontology of L'Etre et le néant
had been of a piece with self-affirmation, intersubjective alienation,
226

and the oppressive functions of bourgeois ideology, by 1947-8 Sartre
has arrived at a global synthesis of the following theoretical positions:
an authentic ethics emphasising action and solidarity, Hegelo-Marxist
historiography, socialist politics, and a conception of ideology as a
weapon in the political struggle against bourgeois dominance.
227

Part Three:
Writing and Politics

Introduction
We will now turn our attention to Sartre's aesthetics and, more
specifically, to the political and ethical content of his literary works
and to his conception of the role of writing. My account in chapter
VIII focuses on Sartre's pre-war stance in this regard, refracting it
through the lens of his personal and textual relationship with Paul
Nizan. Chapter IX is primarily centred on explaining the relationship
between Sartre's postwar view of writing and his radical left political
commitment. However, I also elucidate in greater detail the ethical
content and political implications of the pre-war Sartre's literary
works in this chapter, emphasising the continuities between his
postwar conception of writing and literature and his pre-war literary
practice.
VIII. Les Petits camarades: Personal, Political and
Literary Issues Which Defined the Sartre-
Nizan Relationship
Many years after the period they spent together at the Ecole Normale,
Raymond Aron remarked that he could not speak about Sartre at that
time without also discussing Paul Nizan.
1
In his preface to the 1960
re-edition of Nizan's Aden Arabie, Sartre recounts that he and Nizan
were so close as to be mistaken for each other on occasions by others,
as when, in a chance encounter with the two at the Gallimard office
in 1939, Léon Brunschvicg mistook Sartre for the author of Les
1
Interview with Aron in Le Nouvel Observateur no.592, 15 March 1976, p.86
231

Chiens de garde [S IV: 141]. 'Depuis dix-huit ans qu'il durait, ce
confusionnisme,' Sartre explains, 'il était devenu notre statut social et
nous avions fini par l'accepter. De 1920 à 1930, surtout, lycéens puis
étudiants, nous fumes indiscernables.' [S IV: 142] The story of the
Sartre-Nizan relationship is one of a complex set of interrelating
issues spanning the years of their youth and the 1930s but also stretch-
ing as far as Sartre's intellectual and political positions of the 1940s
and beyond. Some have seen in Sartre's progression towards political
commitment in the postwar years an unacknowledged embracing of
positions earlier defended by Nizan.
2
It has even been suggested that
the spectre of Nizan loomed in Sartre's mind right through until old
age.
3
For all that the young Sartre and Nizan appeared indissociable to
many, in reality there were many areas of divergence between them.
From their time at the Lycée Henri IV, Sartre saw their friendship in
more exclusive terms and was more possessive than Nizan who also
maintained other close friendships. The taciturn and ironic Nizan held
a genuine fascination for Sartre at this early stage and would continue
to do so for years to come. The son of a depressive railway engineer,
the young Nizan by contrast was often too absorbed in personal
difficulties stemming from his modest and troubled family back-
ground for this fascination to be fully reciprocal. In a short story of the
period, La Semence et le Scaphandre, Sartre depicts his own feelings
of frustration and jealously in the face of the inconstancy of his
friend.
4
As he was later to explain in the aforementioned preface,
Nizan would simulate the sudden disappearances and drunken stupors
2
Walter Redfern Paul Nizan (Princeton University Press, 1972) p. 122. Each
chapter of Pascal Ory's Nizan. Destin d'un révolté (Editions Ramsay, 1980)
opens with a quotation from Sartre as an epigraph. Ory thereby suggests that
certain of Sartre's postwar positions merely echoed ideas advanced by Nizan.
3 Patrick McCarthy, 'Sartre, Nizan and the Dilemmas of Political Commitment'
pp. 191-205, in Sartre After Sartre (Yale University Press, 1985) ed. Frederic
Jameson. McCarthy's article opens with the bold claim that 'Paul Nizan haunt-
ed Sartre from the day he entered the classroom in Henri IV until the last years
of Sartre's life.'(p.191).
4
Sartre. Ecrits de Jeunesse (Gallimard, 1990) eds Contât et Rybalka, pp. HO-
IST
232

of his father, vanishing without warning for days on end only eventu-
ally to be found drunk in the company of strangers [S IV: 145, 162,
165]. Sartre makes it clear that at the time he had not understood
Nizan [S IV: 142]. He would interpret Nizan's silences and sudden
absences more as symptoms of violent mood swings than as indicative
of the profound personal crisis which Nizan was undergoing. Sartre
suggests that he was nevertheless aware of the gravity of Nizan's
plight when the latter departed for Aden. However, when Nizan
published Aden Arabie a few years later, Sartre did not take Nizan's
vociferations against the bourgeois education system seriously [SIV:
149]. They represented a challenge to Sartre's memories of their time
at the Ecole Normale, and he hence preferred to pass Aden Arabie
off as 'un tourbillon de paroles légères' [S IV: 149]. This point is
corroborated by Beauvoir in her memoirs: 'nous goûtâmes la virtuos-
ité de Nizan sans attacher assez d'importance à ce qu'il disait', she
notes [FA: 94].
Following his return from Aden, Nizan was soon married and a
father. A short while later, following their success at the 'agrégation',
he and Sartre obtained teaching posts in Bourg-en -Bresse and Le
Havre respectively and hence saw each other less frequently. How-
ever, it was principally Nizan's adhesion to the Communist Party
which drove a wedge between the two friends. Sartre explains Nizan's
decisions to get married and to join the party, both taken shortly after
his return to Paris in 1927, as symptoms of the same personal malaise.
Nizan sought an escape from the existential anguish resulting from his
unhappy childhood in the companionship and solidarity of married
and party life [S IV: 149, 173/4]. Sartre, by contrast, was not only a
resolute bachelor but had committed himself to a future of producing
literature, seeing in writing itself a means to personal salvation [SIV:
147]. There were not the kind of class conflicts in Sartre's family
background that there were in Nizan's, and Sartre hence did not feel
the urgency to participate in the political struggle as Nizan did. 'Je
détestais qu'il fît de la politique parce que je n'avais pas le besoin
d'en faire' [S IV: 147], Sartre notes. Nizan was scornful of Sartre's
belief in his fundamental and inalienable freedom, and Sartre was
disdainful of Nizan's materialist convictions seeing them as a leading
to an implacably deterministic view of the world: 'il sentait le poids
233

physique de ses chaînes, je ne voulais pas sentir celui des miennes.' [S
IV: 147] As a teenager, Sartre mistakenly believed that Nizan shared
his whole-hearted commitment to writing. Nizan, he recalls, was more
precocious than himself as a young writer but was not consumed as he
was by a sense of the magic and the all-importance of words. In Les
Mots, the mature Sartre would present his own early fixation with
language and literature in part as a symptom of his privileged social
origins and conditioning. In the preface to Aden Arabie, Sartre sug-
gests that Nizan's difficult personal history led him, whilst still a
teenager, to reject the bourgeois intellectual myth of the objectivity of
knowledge and the pre-eminence of language. Nizan's own personal
experience had taught him not only that ideas and language, although
vital, were nevertheless secondary, but also that their elevation to a
pre-eminent status was part of the social elite's apparatus of control:
4
la magnification du Verbe', comments Sartre, 'profite directement
aux grands de ce monde; on enseigne aux hommes à prendre le mot
pour la chose [...] Nizan comprenait cela: il craignait de perdre sa vie
en rassemblant des souffles de voix.' [S IV: 165] Although a talented
young writer - indeed he was to publish more prolifically than Sartre
during the 1930s - it was not long before Nizan was to find in the
anti-idealist tendencies of Marxism a world-view which vindicated his
own scepticism about the structures and intellectual discourse of
bourgeois society.
The divergences between Sartre and Nizan became increasingly
apparent in the course of the 1930s both with respect to their intellec-
tual interests and, more noticeably, at the level of their involvement in
active politics. Nizan was fully implicated in all the major left debates
and causes of the 1930s. To cite only some of the more notable of his
activités, he made a lengthy stay in the Soviet Union in 1934, attended
the International Writers' Congress of the same year in Moscow with
Gide and Malraux, was a member of the AEAR (Association of
Revolutionary Writers and Artists), and made numerous trips to Spain
during the Civil War as a war correspondent. It is well known that
Sartre's involvement with active politics and political debate during
the 1930s by contrast was minimal. He spent a politically uneventful
academic year in fascist Berlin in 1933-4 and neglected to vote in the
Popular Front elections of 1936. His intellectual interests, notably in
234

phenomenology, literature and theories of the imagination, were not
the most obvious candidates for reconciliation with political commit-
ment. Similarly, although a number of the theories which he elabor-
ated during this time shared common ground with radicalism, such as
his 'esthétique d'opposition' [FA: 93] and bad faith, their potential as
aspects of a coherent left political position was not yet sufficiently
developed to be immediately perceptible. In the 1930s, Sartre looked
upon Nizan as the model communist who represented everything the
Party stood for, contrasting this image with his own political
inactivity: 'Je le tenais pour le communiste parfait, c'était commode:
il devint à mes yeux le porte-parole du Bureau Politique.' [SIV: 181]
These contrasts notwithstanding, Sartre's and Beauvoir's retro-
spective accounts of these years tend to make too stark an opposition
between a political activist Nizan on the one hand and an apolitical
imaginative writer-intellectual Sartre on the other, as Patrick McCar-
thy rightly points out.
5
Such an opposition is distorting of both Nizan
and Sartre in the 1930s, effacing as it does both the complexity of the
relationship between ideological and aesthetic issues in Nizan's
oeuvre and also the the genuine and in many ways subtle political
awareness which Sartre did in fact possess at the time. Our examin-
ation of works by both authors in this chapter will seek to encourage a
more nuanced view of their respective positions. Nizan's La Conspir-
ation, for instance, far from being a mere vehicle for communist
ideology, demonstrates immense subtlety in its handling of political
and social issues as do works by Sartre such as L'Enfance d'un chef
and L 'Age de raison. The particular interest of analysing the Sartre-
Nizan relationship does not lie in the enumeration of the areas of
divergence between the two. It lies rather in the attempt to explain
how two thinkers whose respective positions were contrasting
throughout the 1930s nevertheless demonstrated underlying simi-
larities and shared significant areas of common ground. The fact that
the Sartre of the postwar years turned to left political commitment
with the conviction he demonstrated suggests that he was not as
distant from Nizan during the 1930s as it seemed. The temptation to
see in Sartre's progression towards political commitment during the
5
McCarthy op.cit. p. 195
235

1940s a mere reiteration of positions earlier advocated by Nizan
should be resisted however. Rather as Sartre was to become a fellow-
traveller of the communists of the PCF from 1952-1956 'en raisonnant
à partir de [s]es principes et non des leurs' [S VI: 168], his awakening
to politics during the 1940s and the particular terms in which he
formulated his various positions emanated principally from the con-
junction of his own earlier intellectual tendencies and his wartime
experience, not from any conversion, sudden or otherwise, to the ideas
of his deceased friend. Moreover, any assimilation of Sartre's left
commitment of the postwar years to the ideas of Nizan in the 1930s
overlooks the fact that, to some extent, the left politico-intellectual
stances of both writers can only be understood in relation to the
broader context of left theorising and political practice in the period.
Nizan and Sartre were each distinctive voices on the intellectual left in
the 1930s and 1940s respectively, but their various convictions and
positions did not for all that exist in a theoretical or politico-social
vacuum. Many of their positions - notably their positions in relation to
politics, but also to a lesser extent aesthetic matters, and even ethics -
can be traced to the Marxist tradition. Their work hence needs to be
situated in a broader politico-social, theoretical, and cultural context.
This chapter will open with an examination of the intertextual
dialogue about political issues which can be traced in the works of
Sartre and Nizan in the latter part of the 1930s. This examination will
initially focus on Nizan's critique of Sartre's intellectual and political
stance conveyed through the character Lange in Le Cheval de Troie.
An enquiry into the various subtle replies that Sartre offers in La
Nausée, L'Enfance d'un chef Erostrate, and L'Age de raison to
Nizan's recriminations will follow. In these works, Sartre discreetly
defends himself against Nizan's charge that his apolitical intellec-
tualism could potentially drift into reactionary and fascist political
leanings. At the same time, La Nausée and notably L 'Age de raison
contain barbs aimed at Stalinist communism which are evidently
directed at least in part at Nizan. The question arises to what extent
Sartre and Nizan each genuinely misunderstood the real import of the
stance of the other, and to what extent they were deliberately seeking
to caricature the other in the manner of a friendly intellectual rivalry.
Our examination of Sartre's and Nizan's intertextual dialogue will
236

focus in particular on the ways in which their ideas are conveyed
through characterisation, Nizan's Lange and Sartre's Brunet being the
clearest examples of the staging and caricaturing of the ideas of the
other.
Intertextual Politics in the Novelistic Writings
of Sartre and Nizan
Sartre and Nizan remained important intellectual presences for each
other throughout the 1930s, despite their relationship growing more
distant than it had been during their student years. Although Nizan's
active political commitment widened the areas of divergence between
the two, in the writings of each the powerful alter ego figure of the
other is frequently perceptible. In both Sartre's and Nizan's texts,
where reference is made explicitly to the other it is humorous and
satirical in character, as with the ridiculous 'commandant Sartre'
character of La Conspiration? and ie général Nizan' alluded to in
L'Enfance d'un chef [EC: 197]. There is however a wider-ranging
and considerably more complex intertextual dialogue between Sartre's
and Nizan's works in which the world-view of each writer is staged
and subjected to an in-depth critique. Nizan's Lange in Le Cheval
de Troie opens this dialogue and the dramatic force of his character-
isation as a solitary anarchist figure who ultimately assists the fascists
establishes the centrality of political issues from the outset. In her
memoirs, Beauvoir indicates that it was evident to Sartre at the time
that Lange was modelled on himself. However, she minimises the
impact which this event might have had on him: 'Nizan affirma d'un
ton nonchalant mais avec fermeté que c'était Brice Parain qui lui avait
servi de modèle. Sartre lui dit avec bonne humeur qu'il n'en croyait
rien.' [FA: 271] Beauvoir's brisk account suggests that Sartre reacted
to Nizan's characterisation of him as tending towards fascism with
6 Paul Nizan La Conspiration (Gallimard, 1938) p. 113
237

jocular insouciance. Jacques Lecarme has challenged this reading,
arguing that Sartre was in reality more troubled by the event than
Beauvoir suggests, perhaps even to the point of being mildly traumat-
ised.
7
For Lecarme, the publication of Le Cheval aggravated the crisis
of adulthood which Sartre was undergoing at the time. In this regard,
it is worth noting that even many years later in his preface to the re-
edition of Aden Arabie, Le Cheval is the only full length work of
Nizan's which Sartre omits to mention, perhaps wanting to avoid
highlighting an episode in his relationship with Nizan which he still
considers regrettable. Lecarme rightly sees in the protagonist of
Sartre's Erostrate, Paul Hilbert, a sort of re-writing of Nizan's Lange:
Sartre presents through Hilbert a depoliticised and more psycho-
logically troubled version of Lange. However, Lecarme's acknow-
ledgement of this intertextual relationship does not extend as far as
explaining how Sartre's characterisation of Hilbert is part of an
answer to the criticisms which Nizan had voiced through his
characterisation of Lange. It is this aspect of the intertextual dialogue
between Sartre's and Nizan's novelistic works of the late 1930s which
will constitute our initial focus. I will argue that it is through pro-
tagonists such as Paul Hilbert, Lucien Fleurier, and to a lesser extent
Antoine Roquentin and Mathieu Delarue, that Sartre replies to Nizan.
The basis of Nizan's objections to Sartre had essentially been his
rejection of the politically uncommitted stance of the liberal intel-
lectual.
8
Whilst Sartre's characterisations confirm in important ways
his lack of political commitment at the time, I will nevertheless argue
that they constitute not only an intellectual but also a political riposte
to Nizan, Sartre apparently feeling the need to answer the charges put
to him by his old friend.
Lange is the only character in Nizan's novelistic writings who
is unambiguously based on Sartre. A former student of the Ecole
7
Lecarme advanced this argument in a paper entitled 'Le crime de M. Lange.
Sartre dans le texte de Nizan', presented at the Groupes d'Etudes Sartriennes
colloquium of 23rd June 2002.
8 In On a raison de se révolter (Gallimard, 1974), Sartre describes his position
of the mid 1930s thus: 'A ce moment-là, je ne faisais pas de politique. Cela
signifie que j'étais un intellectuel libéral de cette République des professeurs'
(p.23).
238

Normale, Lange is a teacher in a provincial high school. Neither a
right-wing nor a left-wing sympathiser, he is deeply sceptical of the
humanistic basis of politics and the idea of concerted human action in
general. Since the passing of Christian certainties and the failure of
capitalism to fill the void, man must accept the fact that he is entirely
alone, Lange believes: 'Un homme d'aujourd'hui est aussi solitaire
qu'une étoile', he declares during the town Prefect's dinner gathering.
'Pascal était un enfant qui jouait à la solitude. Ce n'était pas sérieux:
quand il avait assez joué, il avait Dieu. Nous sommes plus sérieux que
Pascal: nous n'avons que le néant pour compagnie [...] . Le capital-
isme n'est pas une civilisation: une civilisation, c'est ce qui noie ou
détruit la solitude humaine [...] . Aujourd'hui, il n'y a rien que le néant
de l'homme seul.'
9
This passage sets out and caricatures certain key
Sartrean ideas and does so in a manner which is quite representative of
Nizan's critique of Sartre through the characterisation of Lange in Le
Cheval as a whole. Nizan accurately homes in on the importance of
the loss of religious faith to the genesis of Sartre's overall outlook.
10
However, he parodies Sartre's theory of i'homme seul', founded on
the idea that a clearer perception of reality is afforded to solitary
individuals [FA: 56, 172], as he also does Sartre's concepts of the
'néant' and of the 'sérieux'. Nizan's Marxist humanism leads him to
equate the 'néant' with complete nihilism. Rather than being an
ontological category, the 'néant' is tantamount to an outright rejection
of the human and social world. Hence, Lange is described as 'pareil à
une pierre, impénétrable, orgueilleux d'être une pierre, dur, distinct,
séparé'.
11
Furthermore, Nizan subverts Sartre's concept of the 'sér-
ieux' by suggesting that Lange, and hence Sartre himself, is 'sérieux'
9 Nizan Le Cheval (Gallimard, 1935) p. 101
10 Years later, in Les Mots, Sartre would present this aspect of his early develop­
ment as vital to much of his thought and wnting up until the 1950s. Having
ceased to believe in God at the age of twelve, he unwittingly transferred his
religious faith to literature which he henceforth saw as the path to personal
salvation. His faith was hence transposed and transfigured rather than rejected.
c
[L]'athéisme est une entreprise cruelle et de longue haleine' (Les Mots p.204),
he remarks, indicating that it would not be before the early 1950s that he would
finally get beyond this quasi-mystical, neo-religious world-view.
11 Nizan op.cit. p. 162
239

in his very affirmation of his solitary individuality. This suggestion is
reaffirmed in a later passage in which Lange is described in terms
which directly correspond to Sartre's concept of bad faith: '[Lange]
s'occupait moins de ses passions que de ses attitudes. Il se souciait
moins d'être que de se poser.'
12
Lange is scornful of people who gather together in groups, as is
apparent notably from his reaction to the communist meeting in the
square outside the town theatre. However, his scorn is mixed with a
voyeuristic fascination with regard to a phenomenon whose radical
otherness he cannot fully penetrate rationally but seems distantly to
sense the value of, namely human solidarity. It is difficult not to see
the following passage as a reference to Sartre's taste for spectating
large crowds without participating:
La foule était mouvante, elle avait un cœur, une vie: il la méprisait, mais il
sentait en même temps qu'il l'enviait et il la haïssait d'être enviable. Cet
univers de l'unité humaine, il en saississait l'ampleur, la simplicité, l'abond­
ance, il y était, mais ignorant ses secrets [...]. C'était comme l'eau, il n'aimait
pas nager.
13
Lange's solitary voyeurism also manifests itself in a tendency to sex-
ual perversion and flights into the imaginary. He likes to follow
women in the street and tries to imagine the lives they lead. Nizan's
narrator informs us that Lange 'ne pouvait aimer que des femmes
humiliées',
14
an unpleasant reference to his own and Sartre's contrast-
ing attitudes to sexuality.
15
In one incident, Lange stands outside his
girlfriend's bedroom window, watching her get undressed. Finally,
rather than calling in to see her, 'il s'éloigna, regardant les rues avec
sa tête pleine de livres.'
16
Parodying Sartre's preoccupations of the
12 /ta/p. 168
13 Ibidp\62
14 Ibidp .109
15 In his preface to Aden Arabie (Maspero, 1960 [1931]), Sartre notes that Nizan,
unlike himself, was only interested in young women who were virgins (S IV:
143).
16 Nizan op.cit. p. 109
240

time, Nizan's reference to books here symbolises psychological escap-
ism through the abstraction of the imaginary.
17
Pushing the parody of Sartre to the limit, Nizan presents Lange
ultimately drifting into assisting the fascists during their street fight
with the communists. Lange's wariness of the crowd of workers
originated in a deep-seated fear of identifying with a social collectivity
and of committing to any form of meaningful action. When he ulti-
mately finds himself swept away in a crowd of fleeing, defeated
fascists, he suddenly feels an actor rather than a spectator for the first
time. This development is crystallised by his happening upon a
revolver with which he proceeds to shoot at the workers. 'Je suis
sauvé', he declares, the act of shooting finally reconciling him with
action in general, and producing in him a feeling of exaltation which
the narrator describes as 'aussi forte qu'une satisfaction sexuelle.'
18
These scenes bring to an apogee Nizan's multifaceted and merciless
attack on Sartre's world-view in Le Cheval. At one fell swoop, Nizan
rejects all the principal aspects of Sartre's outlook, clearly suggesting
that they can lead to reactionary political sympathies and practices.
Lange's lack of interest in active politics is presented as concomitant
with a generalised nihilism. His tendency towards the imaginary is
portrayed as tantamount to an idealist evasion of the concrete realities
of life. Moreover, this idealist leaning is presented as symptomatic of
a rationalism and a tendency towards abstraction which the materialist
Nizan clearly judges excessive and hence erroneous. Nizan's staging
of Lange criticising Pascal is far from coincidental. Lange's wariness
of the crowd of communist workers partly originates in his rationalist
fear of real conditions and emotions. 'Il possédait les clefs des univers
bourgeois', the narrator informs us. 'Ils étaient faits d'idées, et les
idées, ils les pénétrait, les idées sont toujours déchiffrables [...] Lange
finissait toujours par parvenir au centre d'un système [...] Mais cette
17 There can be little doubt that Nizan was critical of Sartre's and Beauvoir's
tendency to extol the virtues of literature and the imaginary. In La Force de
l'âge, Beauvoir describes one of her meetings with Nizan of the early 1930s
thus: 'Nizan s'étant un jour courtoisement enquis de mes occupations, je
lui répondis que j'avais commencé un roman. «Un roman d'imagination?»
demanda-t-il d'un ton un peu narquois qui me vexa beaucoup.' (p. 173)
18 Nizan op.cit pp. 174-5.
241

foule n'était pas un système, elle vivait. Comment aborder sa force et
sa passion? L'intelligence ne servait à rien'.
19
Remaining true to him-
self, Lange refuses to sing the International with the crowd, not
wanting to compromise his independence: 'on n'est pas pascalien à ce
point-là',
20
he quips. As the events of the narrative unfold and the
characterisation of Lange develops, Nizan will strive to show the
practical impossibility such rationalist, idealist detachment. When
Lange ultimately gets swept away in the crowd of fascists, circum-
stances undermine his capacity for rational detachment to such an
extent that he 'n'avait plus une pensée dans la tête'.
21
And the
particular significance of his picking up the revolver lies in its
concrete and practical character: 'Pour un homme comme Lange qui
ne maniait guère que des livres, c'était sa réconciliation avec l'outil'.
22
When he finally shoots, it is as if he has suddenly found a sense of
plenitude which had long been repressed in him: 'Lange fut entraîné
dans le mouvement du monde, il vivait, il refaisait partie comme les
autres de la machine, des batailles, il ne contemplait plus, il connais-
sait la passion.'
23
From Nizan's perspective, however, this awakening
to the realities of life comes too late because Lange has by this time
already drifted inadvertently over to the wrong side, that of the
fascists. The sting in Nizan's attack on Sartre lies in the suggestion
that only active commitment to the communist struggle against
fascism is a sure way of preventing such a disastrous outcome from
transpiring. For Nizan, in the polarised political climate of the 1930s,
19 Ibid pp. 162-3.
20 Ibid p. 163 In this regard, it is interesting to note a significant line of filiation
from Pascal's cntique of rationalism to Marxist philosophy's critique of idealist
abstraction. In recent intellectual debate, Pierre Bourdieu's critique of the
assumption that there could be 'pure ideas' free of social determinants was
often - quite justifiably - interpreted as a Marxist line of enquiry. Bourdieu
himself, however, liked to stress that his thought was as much influenced by
Pascal as by Marx, and indeed explicitly linked his own concepts to Pascalian
thought in his Méditations pascaliennes (Seuil, 1997).
21
IbidpMl
22
IbidpMl
23 IbidpA74
242

it is not possible to remain an apolitical spectator or bystander. One
must choose one's side and join the fight.
The characterisation of Lange is such a perspicacious and yet
cruel critique of Sartre that it is difficult not to imagine that it origin-
ated in some deep-seated and malicious impulsion on Nizan's part to
be done with his alter ego of old. Moreover, it is difficult to see how
Sartre, who was already in a period of personal crisis at the time, can
genuinely have reacted to Nizan's novel in as light-hearted a way as
Beauvoir suggests. Lecarme's alternative reading hence seems the
most plausible. In the following years, the protagonists of Sartre's
own novelistic writings both confirm and answer Nizan's portrayal of
Lange in a myriad of ways. First, the vast majority of Sartre's protag-
onists are solitary, individualistic male characters as Lange is, a fact
which, given their autobiographical basis,
24
confirms the basic outline
of Nizan's portrayal of Sartre. Indeed, two of Sartre's most well-
known characters, Antoine Roquentin and Mathieu Delarue, in many
ways corroborate Nizan's view of Sartre more than they offer a
response to it. Many of the themes which Nizan had incorporated
into the portrayal of Lange, and which we know to be key early
Sartrean themes, can be identified clearly in their characterisations:
existential anguish; a sense of detachment from their social contexts
and from ontological reality itself; an apoliticism which manifests
itself in quasi-anarchist libertarian tendencies; a cold intellectualism or
rationalism; a hostility towards humanism, be it of the communist or
other varieties; and a tendency towards projection into the imaginary.
Roquentin and Delarue also confirm Nizan's identification of
another central early Sartrean theme in his portrayal of Lange, namely
the extreme difficulty of committing to any meaningful form of
action. Throughout much of La Nausée, Roquentin does not see any
point in engaging with the world through action and is on occasions
scornful of those who do. Delarue similarly does not commit to any
particular cause or course of action although he conversely feels
troubled by his inability to do so. His inability to commit to the
24 Years later, in Les Mots (pp. 192-3), Sartre was to confirm that auto­
biographical basis of certain characters in his plays and novels. 'J'étais
Roquentin' (p.203), he notes.
243

pregnant Marcelle is an ongoing preoccupation throughout and is
presented as one dimension of a more general malaise which also
includes his persisting political apathy. And yet, both of Sartre's
characters ultimately find solutions to the problem which contrast
greatly with Lange's inadvertent siding with the fascists and hence can
be interpreted as a reply of sorts to Nizan's charges. In the closing
pages of La Nausée, Roquentin begins to see in the idea of writing an
imaginary work the possibility of escape from existential concerns and
inaction. Unlike his critical study of Rollebon, this work would be
'[u]ne histoire, par exemple, comme il ne peut pas en arriver, une
aventure.' [N: 250] In his review of La Nausée of 1938, Nizan not
only congratulates Sartre on an excellent first novel but sees in the
work a clear step in the direction of radical political commitment,
almost as if to atone for having misrepresented his friend's politics in
Le Cheval de troie:
[...] par ses derniers pages, La Nausée n'est pas un livre sans issue. M. Jean-
Paul Sartre qui, tout au long de son livre, fait le tableau d'une grande ville
bourgeoise, où il me semble reconnaître Le Havre, avec un humour féroce et un
sens violent de la caricature sociale, a des dons trop précis et trop cruels de
romancier pour ne pas s'engager dans les grandes dénonciations, pour ne pas
déboucher totalement dans la réalité.
25
There is nothing surprising in Nizan's identification of Sartre's acute
satirising of the bourgeoisie, nor in his evident desire to see this lead
to a fuller, more explicitly politicised realism. After all, La Nausée
contains as much anti-bourgeois sentiment as Nizan's own novelistic
writings, and Sartre's potential as a politically radical author is hence
evident. However, Nizan's suggestion that the closing pages of the
novel are part of this movement towards politics is noteworthy. For
the escape from inaction which Roquentin seeks through writing a
fictional work stages Sartre's belief in the possibility of attaining
personal salvation through producing literature [FA: 34]. Viewed from
the perspective of classic Marxism, with its scepticism of intellectual
abstractions, such apparent aestheticism is of doubtful political
25 'La Nausée de Jean-Paul Sartre', included in Pour une nouvelle culture éd.
Susan Suleiman, p.286
244

efficacity. How then is Nizan's approving reference to the last pages
of La Nausée to be explained? There can be no doubt that Nizan was
fully aware of Sartre's idea of salvation through art. Indeed, the
following passage in Le Cheval seems almost to anticipate the fic-
tional work which Roquentin plans to write:
Quand [Lange] songeait à des livres qu'il pourrait écrire, il imaginait un livre
qui décrirait uniquement les rapports d'un homme avec une ville où des
hommes ne seraient que des éléments du décor, qui parlerait d'un homme seul,
vraiment seul, semblable à un îlot désert.
26
Nizan's inclusion of the concluding pages oï La Nausée amongst the
reasons why the novel as a whole is not 'sans issue' politically is best
explained with reference to his approach to critical writing on the one
hand, and also as indicative of the subtlety of his view of the relation-
ship between aesthetics and politics. In his book reviews and criticism
of the 1930s Nizan displayed the tendency, as did Sartre,
27
to select
subjects for discussion which allowed him to explore issues which
were of particular significance for the development of his own
thought. Hence, his short piece of 1936 on the work of Eugène Dabit,
for instance, in which he applauded the idea of a 'littérature de prob-
lèmes',
28
was clearly an opportunity for him to set out his own ideas
about how committed literature should be written. In cases where
Nizan felt globally sympathetic to an author's work but nevertheless
had some reservations, he would on occasion slightly modify the au-
thor's claims in places in accordance with his own ideas. There is the
notable case of his favourable review of Louis Aragon's Pour un
réalisme socialiste?
9
remarked upon by Reynald Lahanque,
30
in which
26 Nizan op.cit. pp. 105-6.
27 Sartre's articles devoted to the American novelists Dos Passos and Faulkner, for
example, proved to be crucial elements in the development of his own concep­
tion of narrative technique.
28 Nizan 'L'œuvre d'Eugène Dabit', reprinted in Suleiman op.cit. pp . 212 -3.
29 Nizan in ed. Suleiman op.cit. pp . 176-9 .
30 Reynald Lahanque 'Aragon, Nizan et la question du réalisme socialiste',
included in Paul Nizan Ecrivain eds. Bernard Alluin and Jacques Deguy pp.
105-118. See pp. 110-112 . Lahanque points out that Nizan, whilst ostensibly
summarising Aragon's account of socialist realist literature, in reality bypasses
245

Nizan, whilst applauding Aragon's manifesto text, refrains from
assenting to Aragon's naïve optimism about the USSR and discreetly
reformulates his account of socialist literature in accordance with his
own views on literature. Nizan's interpretation of the concluding
pages of La Nausée is best seen as to some extent an example of this
kind of critical procedure. More importantly, however, his interpret-
ation is a testimony to the sophistication of his understanding of the
relationship between politics and aesthetics. Although critical of the
abstractions of philosophical idealism Nizan, like Marx before him,
31
did not hold a reductive view of the aesthetic. He accorded a high
priority to the capacity of literature to convey an ideological message
but was critical of any crude harnessing of aesthetics to politics in the
manner of certain socialist realist novels.
32
Contrary to such left
functionalist tendencies, Nizan believed that the specifically aesthetic
qualities of fictional works, such as particular narrative techniques and
the nuances of characterisation, played a vital role in the process of
politically enlightening the readership. Hence, it is ultimately not as
surprising as it at first seems that Nizan, who was in any case a
novelist himself, is not dismissive of Roquentin's resolution to write a
fictional work but rather sees in this decision a first step towards
engaging in other forms of action in the future.
As in the case of Roquentin, Mathieu Delarue's reconciliation
with action also contrasts greatly with Nizan's caricature of Sartre
through the character Lange, and a number of salient intertextual
relationships can be identified at this level between Sartre's Chemins
de la liberté and Le Cheval de Troie. Whereas Lange is disdainful of
the communist workers of Villefranche, Delarue, who is Sartre's most
autobiographical creation in Les Chemins, expresses regret about his
inability to commit himself to the communist cause. Sartre seems keen
Aragon's faith in the irrepressible optimism of socialist realism and presents a
very contrasting view of socialist literature: 'Ce qui s'oppose au pessimisme
bourgeois, c'est beaucoup moins un optimisme satisfait qu'un héroïsme tra­
gique qui voit le mal qu'ont les hommes à transformer leur réalité.' (Suleiman
éd. op.cit. p. 178).
31 Eagleton Marxism and Literary Theory pp. 1-2,45-7.
32 For an in-depth account of socialist realism, see Michel Aucouturier's Le
réalisme socialiste.
246

to make his own left political sympathies explicit and yet to explain
his reasons for remaining politically inactive: 'Je ne peux pas m'en-
gager,' Delarue explains to the communist Brunet, 'je n'ai pas assez
de raisons pour ça. Je râle comme vous, contre les mêmes gens, contre
les mêmes choses, mais pas assez.' [AR : 150] In 'La Dernière
Chance', the closing instalment of Les Chemins de la liberté, Sartre
will portray Delarue ultimately arriving at a politically limited but
authentically committed form of action, namely organising the escape
of prisoners from the prison camp. His first significant breakthrough
at the level of action is made prior to this however, during his
extremely brief involvement in military action in La Mort dans l'âme.
Interestingly, rather as Lange's departure from inaction is connected
to his picking up the revolver, so Delarue's rifle also serves as a cata-
lyst which opens up the possibility of action and permits a much
needed sense of release:
[...] il tira [...] sur toute la Beauté de la Terre, sur la rue, sur les fleurs, sur les
jardins, sur tout ce qu'il avait aimé. La Beauté fit un plongeon obscène et
Mathieu tira encore. Il tira: il était pur, il était tout-puissant, il était libre. [MA:
245]
The characterisation of Delarue hence relates rather ambiguously to
Nizan's Lange in Le Cheval de Troie. There are divergences in the
portrayal of their political leanings which are to some extent belied by
the similarity of the contexts and imagery employed to describe their
evolution towards committed action.
The theme of departing from passivity and inaction which Nizan
had so skilfully depicted in Lange is also central to the character-
isation of the protagonists of Erostrate and L'Enfance d'un chef as is
that of the subsequent difficulty of action. Paul Hilbert's planned
assassination attempt on passers-by in the street is motivated not only
by his entrenched dislike of his fellow men, but equally by the desire
to make his mark on history through an act of violence in the manner
of Erostrate.
33
In the case of Lucien Fleurier, action is similarly a form
of self-affirmation, at once a means to and a confirmation of a feeling
33 Erostrate, in Le Mur, p.88 (hereafter E).
247

of personal maturity following a long period of adolescent self-doubt
and searching for a sense of personal identity.
It is through his portrayals of Hilbert and Fleurier that Sartre
answers most resolutely the charges which Nizan put to him, these
two characters in effect constituting a multi-faceted and effective
riposte to Nizan's Lange of Le Cheval de Troie. Sartre's riposte is
subtly devised, consisting principally in reproducing and exaggerating
Nizan's caricature of himself through his portrayals of Hilbert and
Fleurier. That is, through the characterisations of these two protag-
onists Sartre presents a caricature or reductio ad absurdum of Nizan's
caricatural Lange. By staging characters who are extreme versions of
the persona which Nizan had foisted upon him, Sartre, as the author of
Erostrate and L'Enfance d'un chef succeeds in distancing himself
implicitly from that caricature. The strategy is in essence a simple one:
Sartre writes about sexual voyeurism and deviancy, misanthropy, and
misguided fascist political leanings in order to dissociate himself from
these tendencies. This process of authorial distanciation is ostensibly
complicated by the profoundly ironic character of Sartre's narrative
style in these two short stories. In neither text is the author's
disapproval of the protagonists' thoughts and actions immediately
apparent. The first person narration technique is employed in
Erostrate, and in L'Enfance d'un chef the narrator's perspective is so
close to that of Fleurier as to be almost indissociable from it. Only
close scrutiny of the texts, a knowledge of Sartre's own views at the
time, and the extreme character of some of the attitudes expressed
permit a full awareness of the fact that he is staging attitudes of which
he is himself critical. Ultimately it is this extremism exhibited by
Hilbert and Fleurier which cuts through the veneer of verisimilitude
and reveals the ironic tone of the whole, thereby dissociating the
author from his characters.
In Le Cheval, Nizan portrayed Lange tending strongly towards
sexual voyeurism. In the case of Paul Hilbert, the voyeurism of the
solitary individual seeking a means of escape through the imaginary
is inflated into a thoroughly perverted attitude towards sexuality.
Sartre portrays Hilbert's sexual perversity as a considerably more
pervasive phenomenon than that of Lange. It is closely linked in the
narrative with his misanthropy, his nihilism and his pronounced
248

tendency towards abstract violence in the interests of self-affirmation.
These themes collectively constitute the central focus of the narrative
as a whole. They are initially united in the scene in which Hilbert
forces a prostitute to parade around a hotel room naked at gunpoint.
He had purchased his revolver a short time earlier and Sartre's
description of his attitude to the weapon pushes the evident phallic
symbolism intended by Nizan in Le Cheval to its ultimate extreme.
Once in the trouser pocket, the revolver 'se réchauffait au contact de
mon corps. Je marchais avec une certaine raideur, j'avais l'allure du
type qui est en train de bander et que sa verge freine à chaque pas. Je
glissais ma main dans ma poche et je tâtais Y objet? [E: 81] Here, as
throughout Erostrate, the revolver is not simply a phallic symbol but
rather substitutes for the phallus. Sartre confirms this substitution very
clearly in the passage which follows: 'De temps en temps, j'entrais
dans un urinoir [...] je sortais mon revolver, je le soupesais [...]. Les
autres, ceux qui voyaient, du dehors, mes pieds écartés et le bas de
mon pantalon, croyaient que je pissais. Mais je ne pisse jamais dans
les urinoirs.' [E: 81] The replacement of the phallus with the revolver
places violence rather than sexuality at the heart of the narrative from
the outset. The revolver soon becomes Hilbert's principal means of
asserting himself with respect to others. But it is in essence an abstract
violence, that of an individual who, in his fear of others, chooses the
solitude of the imaginary in order to preserve a feeling of his own self-
importance. It is this fundamental need which lies at the basis of
his choosing to achieve sexual gratification in voyeuristic isolation.
Rather than physically having sex with the prostitute, he procures a
feeling of powerfulness from humiliating her whilst he remains
entirely uncompromised: 'j'étais là, tranquillement assis dans un fau-
teuil, vêtu jusqu'au cou, j'avais gardé jusqu'à mes gants, et cette
dame mûre s'était mise toute nue sur mon ordre et virevolait autour de
moi.' [E : 84 my italics] When she protests and moves to dress herself,
he pulls out his revolver: 'Alors j'ai sorti mon revolver et je le lui ai
montré. Elle m'a regardé d'un air sérieux et elle a laissé tomber son
pantalon sans rien dire.' [E: 85] What follows effectively amounts to a
symbolic rape, Hilbert's gun substituting for the phallus, and he
achieves sexual satisfaction without there being any physical contact
whatsoever. His sexual pleasure is a derivative of his asserting power
249

over the other, which is an aspect of a more broadly violent attitude
towards society.
The pervasiveness of this violent attitude is made explicit a few
pages later when Hilbert announces his intention to shoot passers-by
in the street in a letter which he sends to one hundred and two
established French writers. 'Vous avez l'humanisme dans le sang' [E:
89], he tells them rather presumptuously, Sartre seizing the oppor-
tunity to deride bourgeois humanism. Describing himself conversely
as 'un homme qui n'aime pas les hommes' [E: 90], Hilbert proceeds
to set out the reasons why he is going to commit murder. 'Voila
trente-trois ans que je me heurte à des portes closes au-dessus
desquelles on a écrit: « Nul n'entre ici s'il n'est humaniste. » Tout ce
que j'ai entrepris j'ai dû l'abandonner' [E: 91], he explains. The
exaggerated claims of this letter, the narcissistic self-importance of its
author, and the ridiculousness of it being punctiliously addressed to
precisely one hundred and two writers, clearly indicate that it is the
work of a psychologically unbalanced individual. Sartre hence pushes
the anti-social nihilism of Nizan's Lange to the extreme, thereby
implicitly distancing himself from that characterisation as a portrait of
himself.
The moment at which Hilbert finally puts his plan into action,
despite his initial abortive attempts and the ultimately botched result,
is the moment in the narrative when abstract violence situated at the
level of the imaginary is to become a reality which impacts directly on
the outside world. By actually using his revolver and committing an
act, he is to make the transition to the real. Prior to this time, he has
only fantasized about using it, regretting, for instance, the fact that he
had not shot the prostitute in the stomach while he had the chance [E:
86]. He is now to venture out of his own private world by taking
concrete action. In the event, however, this attempt fails, Hilbert
ending up shooting only one man rather than half a dozen, and he
carries out this act almost by accident and in a state of fear, not with
calm premeditation [E: 97]. This failure to make the leap to concrete
action is a metaphorical representation of the gulf which, for Hilbert,
separates the imaginary world he inhabits and real circumstances. At
this point in the narrative, a complex intertextual relationship between
Erostrate and Nizan's Le Cheval can be perceived. Sartre presents
250

Hilbert ultimately drifting into an engagement in concrete action as
Lange does. Lange had no particular intention of siding with the
fascists but ends up fleeing with them and shooting at the communists
all the same. Hilbert, conversely, is clear about his intentions but
cannot carry them out, and when he does shoot someone the act is
divorced from any particular intention.
34
Sartre hence corroborates
Nizan's critique of the solitary individual who lives in the imaginary,
implicitly acknowledging the dangers of being divorced from
concrete reality. However, Lange succeeds in making the leap from
the imaginary and private realm to that of the real, the act of shooting
reconciling him with concrete reality. The passage to action gives him
an immense feeling of satisfaction. Indeed, the force of Nizan's attack
on Sartre lies precisely in the fact that Lange does manage to escape
the confines of the imaginary, but he does so only to end up on the
wrong side politically. Sartre stages Hilbert conversely failing to make
the leap successfully. He does not emerge triumphant from the act of
shooting as Lange does, and ends up locking himself in a café toilet,
an outcome which expresses metaphorically his retreat back into the
private world of his own thoughts. In short, Sartre portrays Hilbert as
a pathetic character, a deranged, complexed, practically ineffectual
individual, thereby rewriting the end of Le Cheval de Troie. The
political significance of Erostrate as a reply to Le Cheval is conveyed
at two interrelating levels. First, by portraying Hilbert as passionately
disliking his fellow men to such an extent that he intends to murder
them at random, Sartre effectively caricatures Lange's anti-social
nihilism. Secondly, Hilbert's failure to carry out his plan and inability
to assert himself in the real world reveal him to be a psychologically
disturbed character, a fact which entirely deflates the force of the
anti-humanist and anti-social views which he has been espousing
throughout. This effect of deflation implicitly undermines the
34 Sartre was later to reproduce this type of scenario in his depiction of Hugo's
murder of Hoederer in Les Mains sales. Like Hilbert, at the moment when
Hugo commits murder, the act is severed from any particular intention. The gulf
between the imaginary and private field on the one hand and the concrete and
public field on the other is central to Hugo's act and is one of the principal
causes of the difficulty he subsequently experiences in ascribing meaning to it.
251

seriousness of Lange's expression of the same views in Le Cheval. In
both of these ways Sartre, as the author of Erostrate, succeeds at one
and the same time in dissociating himself both from his own character
Hilbert and also from Nizan's Lange.
Sartre employs the same technique to achieve an effect of author-
ial distanciation in L'Enfance d'un chef. In the case of the char-
acterisation of Lucien Fleurier, it is notably through staging the
themes of existential anguish, the need for action in the interests of
self-affirmation, and above all the dangers of drifting towards fascism,
that Sartre exaggerates the tendencies of Lange, thereby deflating
Nizan's critique of himself. In L'Enfance d'un chef Sartre depicts the
theme of existential anguish through the adolescent Fleurier's search
for a sense of identity. Fleurier's self-questioning becomes so acute
that at one point he arrives at the conclusion that he does not exist:
'"Je n'existe pas." Il fermait les yeux et se laissait aller: l'existence est
une illusion' [EC: 176]. Generalising this insight to the rest of human-
ity, Fleurier concludes that nobody else exists either and he decides to
communicate this truth through a philosophical treatise: ie monde
était une comédie sans acteurs. Lucien [...] songea à écrire un Traité
du Néant, et il imaginait que les gens, en le lisant, se résorberaient les
uns après les autres' [EC: 176]. In this passage, Sartre ironises his own
phenomenologico-ontological interests, but pushes the ridicule so far,
reducing existential questions to symptoms of a teenage identity crisis,
that they ultimately remain very largely uncompromised. In Le
Cheval, Nizan had deformed the concept of the 'néant', equating it
with an all-encompassing nihilism on Lange's part, and was elsewhere
to equate phenomenology with triviality.
35
Through self-irony, Sartre
ostensibly applauds Nizan's mocking attitude towards questions of
phenomenology and ontology, but through injecting humour into
Nizan's caricature he undermines its force. He proceeds to link this
humorous parody of Nizan's caricature of himself with a characteristic
affirmation of the importance of action and, once again, the motif of
35 In La Conspiration, an irritated Rosenthal tells Pluvinage: 'Ne tournons pas
autour de l'histoire [...]. Ni Laforgue ni moi ne t'avons demandé de venir pour
échanger des idées sur les vacances, la pluie ou la phénoménologie allemande.'
(pp. 218-9).
252

the revolver. Mme Fleurier, the narrator tells us, keeps a small
revolver in a drawer. Lucien, considering the possibility of suicide,
6
le
prit et le tourna longtemps entre ses doigts [...] On ne pouvait pas
compter sur un traité de philosophie pour persuader aux gens qu'ils
n'existaient pas. Ce qu'il fallait c'était un acte, un acte vraiment
désespéré qui dissipât les apparences et montrât en pleine lumière le
néant du monde.' [EC: 178] For Lange, as for Hilbert and Delarue,
the firearm serves as a catalyst facilitating a long pent-up desire for
self-affirmation in the world. In the case of Fleurier, the significance
of the revolver as a symbol of action is ultimately inverted so as
to caricature only more ostentatiously the equation of the 'néant'
with total nihilism. In a bout of narcissistic adolescent romantism,
Fleurier imagines
4
un jeune corps saignant sur un tapis, quelques mots
griffonnés sur une feuille: « Je me tue parce que je n'existe pas. Et
vous aussi, mes frères, vous êtes néant! » Les gens liraient leur journal
le matin; ils verraient: « Un adolescent a osé! » Et chacun se sentirait
terriblement troublé et se demanderait: «Et moi? Est-ce que j'ex-
iste? »' [EC: 178] Suicide presents itself to the fundamentally insecure
Fleurier as the only act by which he can make his mark on the world.
Sartre hence presents his protaganist asserting himself through an
entirely negative act, one which is in the service only of complete
nihilism.
As we have seen, in the case of Nizan's Lange the act of shooting
at the communists is, initially at least, as much about being reconciled
with concrete reality through the revolver as it is a political act.
Lange hence drifts into siding with the fascists rather than joining
them intentionally, Nizan wanting to show that not being actively
committed to the communist cause can have disastrous consequences.
In L'Enfance d'un chef Sartre inflates Nizan's critique by portraying
Fleurier's reemergence from existential self-doubt as coinciding with
his consciously and willingly joining the political right. Following an
episode in which Fleurier participates in a brutal physical assault on a
communist immigrant, he resolves that he must actively commit
himself to the fascist cause as his associates have done: * Je ne peux
pas continuer, pensa-t -il, à les suivre dans leurs équipées en amateur.
A présent [...] il faut que je m'engage!' [EC: 232] From this point
onwards in the text, Fleurier's fascist politics announce a newfound
253

self-confidence and mark the end of his existential doubts and self-
questioning. In this way Sartre pushes Nizan's caricature of himself
further than Nizan had done. Moreover, as with the psychologically
disturbed Hilbert, he presents a protagonist who, whilst undeniably
conveying certain of his own ideas in the text, is so evidently not an
autobiographical creation
36
that an authorial distance is maintained
throughout. Sartre hence implicitly dissociates himself both from his
protagonist Fleurier, staging his thoughts and actions as examples of
reprehensible conduct,
37
and also from Nizan's caricatural portrayal of
him inadvertently drifting towards fascism.
It is worth pausing a moment to note the considerable subtlety of
the political content of L'Enfance d'un chef, a fact which certainly
36 Fleurier is the son of a bourgeois factory owner, a mediocre student, and
ultimately proves to be fundamentally conventional in all his basic values. He
hence contrasts in a very evident way with Sartre's own biography, unlike
Roquentin and Delarue.
37 In this regard, L'Enfance d'un chef is anticipated in Sartre's oeuvre by the early
short story 'L'Ange du morbide'. In this piece of 1923 Sartre's protagonist
Louis Gaillard, a 'médiocre' (Contât and Rybalka op.cit. p .502) as is Fleurier,
turns 'tout l'élan de sa jeunesse vers le morbide' {Ibid p.502), entering into a
courtship with a woman suffering from tuberculosis. Ultimately however, when
the woman suffers physical convulsions he finds her unbearably repulsive and
definitively walks out on her. 'Il oubliait la douceur réelle de cette femme, son
vrai caractère, il lui semblait qu'un autre être, effrayant et mystérieux s'était
glissé en elle, quelque chose comme l'ange du morbide, de ce morbide qu'il
avait tant recherché.' Having checked that the woman has not contaminated
him, Gaillard 'rompit avec tous ses anciens amis et se maria avec une
Alsacienne rose, blonde, bête et saine. Il n'écrivit jamais plus et fut décoré,
à cinquante-cinq ans, de la Légion d'honneur, brevet incontesté de « Bour­
geoisie»...' (Ibid p.505). In these closing sentences of the short story, Sartre
makes no secret of his contemptuous disapproval of the actions of his
protagonist thereby dissociating himself as the author from them. L'Enfance
d'un chef mirrors the basic outline form of 'L'Ange du morbide': the mediocre
protagonist Fleurier is caught up for much of the narrative in psychologically
challenging but potentially interesting issues, only to reject them outright when
easy although thoroughly reactionary solutions present themselves. In both
stories, the outcome constitutes a dramatic reversal of sorts as the perspective of
Sartre's narrator has been closely wedded to that of the protagonist throughout.
Only at the end, then, does the full extent of the ironic tone of the narrative as a
whole become fully clear.
254

gives the lie to any easy opposition between the Nizan and Sartre of
the 1930s, the latter's lack of active left commitment all too often
being equated with naïve political unawareness. In La Force de l'Age,
although Beauvoir presents herself and Sartre as politically uncom-
mitted during the 1930s, she is keen to show that Sartre in particular
nevertheless kept well abreast of political events. Sartre's anti-fascism
is a recurring theme throughout the memoir. Beauvoir suggests that in
the early 1930s Sartre did not share the political left's complacent
dismissal of the idea of a potential war [FA: 171]. During a trip to
Italy in 1934, the presence of fascists in the streets had provoked a
strong reaction from him [FA: 178]. By 1936 Sartre, who was an
assiduous though impressionistic reader of the newspapers [FA: 168],
was openly pessimistic about the future in the light of events in
Germany and Spain [FA: 313]. The Spanish Civil War is described by
Beauvoir as 'le drame qui pendant deux ans et demi domina toute
notre vie' [FA: 315], and appears to have provoked a real awakening
in their political awareness: Tour la première fois de notre vie, parce
que nous prenions profondément à cœur le sort de l'Espagne, l'indig-
nation n'était plus pour nous un exutoire suffisant; notre impuissance
politique, loin de nous fournir un alibi, nous désolait.' [FA: 331-2]
Finally, in the aftermath of the events in Austria and Czechoslovakia,
Sartre, critical of the policy of appeasement, thought it necessary to
fight Hitler [FA: 383,407].
In L'Enfance d'un chef, Sartre's depiction of a certain right-wing
French political and social milieu of the interwar period is notable
for the acuity of observation and the thematic coherence which it
demonstrates. In the characterisation of Lucien Fleurier, Sartre brings
together the world-view of the bourgeois owning class, extreme right-
wing, anti-semitic and racist politics, reactionary French nationalism,
and the bourgeois democratic affirmation of individual rights. These
characteristics are presented as constituting a coherent unity and are
also synthesised with certain specifically Sartrean antipathies such as
bad faith and the belief in personal maturity as a value in itself. The
deftness with which Sartre interweaves these themes in the text is a
testimony to his perspicacity as a political observer. Fleurier's father
serves not only as a role model for him with respect to bourgeois
leadership in industry, but also more discreetly as a vital ideological
255

support to his right-wing politics. M . Fleurier voices support for his
son's involvement in the activities of a nationalist group [EC: 229],
and Lucien is subsequently appreciated by his associates for his
'histoires juives qu'il tenait de son père' [EC: 230]. It is under the
influence of André Lemordant, Fleurier's other important role model,
that he gets actively involved in politics. Lemordant awakens Fleur-
ier's interest and admiration as much by his personal gravitas as by
his political ideas. To Fleurier, who feels insecure and without a defin-
ite sense of identity, Lemordant seems 'mûr' and 'un adulte de
naissance', just as Fleurier would like to appear himself [EC: 217].
Lemordant directs Fleurier to reading the right-wing nationalist
writings of Maurice Barrés [EC: 224] and invites him to political
gatherings. The 'sérieux' which Fleurier admires in Lemordant is of
the same type as that which his father displays as factory boss and in
his relations with the workers. M. Fleurier demonstrates the tone of
voice he affects when addressing employees [EC: 164] and, in a
fine example of Sartrean bad faith, justifies his ownership of the
factory with the evidently suspect claim that the workers depend
on him for their well-being. 'Voilà ce que j'appelle, moi, la solidarité
des classes', he concludes, explicitly dismissing the idea of the class
struggle [EC: 210]. In these passages, Sartre is keen to suggest that
socio-economic dominance and inauthenticity go hand in hand.
There is an explicit thematic link in the text between the
'sérieux' which Fleurier admires in his father and the newfound
strength of his own anti-semitic convictions. Just as he had been
intimidated as a child by the idea of his father working in his office,
he thinks his dislike of the Jews would similarly belittle others. He
imagines that '[o]n disait en baissant la voix: "Lucien n'aime pas les
juifs", et les gens se sentaient paralysés, les membres transpercés
d'une nuée de petites fléchettes douloureuses.' [EC: 242] It is hence
through his anti-semitism and political activism that Fleurier gradually
begins to find the maturity, 'sérieux', and sense of personal identity he
has been searching for throughout the narrative. Both of these
commitments are entirely supported by his bourgeois father. More-
over, Sartre presents Fleurier's passage to maturity as involving a
reverence for the idea of legal rights. Trying to persuade him to sign a
petition, Lemordant insists that he should have his say. 'Quand il
256

entendit "tu as le droit de dire ton mot", Lucien fut traversé par une
inexplicable et rapide jouissance.' [EC: 223] Later, when he has
finally come to understand what it is to be a bourgeois leader, we learn
through Sartre's use of free indirect discourse that '[d]es générations
d'ouvriers pourraient [...] obéir scrupuleusement aux ordres de Luc-
ien, ils n'épuiseraient jamais son droit à commander; les droits, c'était,
par-delà l'existence, comme les objets mathématiques' [EC: 243]
Here, as throughout much of L'Enfance d'un chef the perspective of
Sartre's narrator is so close to that of the protagonist as to render
deeply ironic the tone of the narrative. Indeed, the irony is on occa-
sions so deep-seated and deceptive that the reader, if unaware of
Sartre's left political sympathies and not particularly astute politically,
can easily overlook the real point that Sartre is making. Consider the
following passage which immediately follows the moment at which
Fleurier commits himself actively to Lemordant's group:
-
Ça y est, dit Lucien en souriant. Maud parut flattée; personnellement, elle
était plutôt favorable aux idées de gauche, mais elle avait l'esprit large. « Je
trouve, disait-elle, qu'il y a du bon dans tous les partis. » [EC: 233]
At face value, the reader might simply take Maud's position as an
expression of an apolitical attitude to life. However, were Sartre's
authorial stance with respect to her views to be assumed to be neutral
or uncritical, the reader would have fallen prey to the deeply ironic
tone of the passage. In reality, Sartre indirectly characterises Maud as
a fool in this passage, because she apparently believes that it is pos-
sible to set aside political tendencies and commitments completely.
People's qualities, she believes, can be judged entirely independently
of their politics. Sartre conversely wishes to communicate precisely
the opposite message to the reader: it is simply not plausible to
support left-wing ideas and at the same time tolerate the politics of the
extreme right. In this, Sartre adopts the left stance of Nizan but his
oblique voicing of such a view, through the use of irony, allows him
to avoid actively committing to it. In fact, Sartre's use of a palpably
platitudinous expression, 'elle avait l'esprit large', guarantees him the
authorial distance from his character which is sufficient to com-
municate the ironic tone of the passage as a whole. Elsewhere in
257

L'Enfance d'un chef however, the irony is more oblique still and
therefore harder to detect. It hence operates in such a way as to put the
reader to a sort of test: the reader is drawn into the mental world of
the protagonist Fleurier, but must constantly see beyond it in order to
draw the appropriate conclusions.
The Politics and Aesthetics of Nizan
Sartre's riposte to Nizan's cruel caricature of him in Le Cheval de
Troie is not limited to these self-defensive characterisations in
Erostrate and L'Enfance d'un chef In the novels comprising Les
Chemins de la liberté?* and briefly in La Nausée, he goes on the
offensive pointing up the failings of Stalinist Marxism. The following
statement is drawn from Roquentin's tirade against humanism in La
Nausée. It is difficult not to interpret it as an attack which is aimed at
least in part at Nizan:
L'écrivain communiste aime les hommes depuis le deuxième plan quinquennal;
il châtie parce qu'il aime. Pudique, comme tous les forts, il sait cacher ses
sentiments, mais il sait aussi, par un regard, une inflexion de sa voix, faire
pressentir, derrière ses rudes paroles de justicier, sa passion âpre et douce pour
ses frères. [N: 167-8]
There is no doubt that Nizan definitely had something of the terse
sobriety of this description, and Sartre's specific designation of the
38 My analysis of Les Chemins de la liberté in this regard will be restricted to
L'Age de raison (Gallimard, 1945). In my view, only this first novel of the
series can genuinely be interpreted as including a direct critique of Nizan's
politics. Written in 1939-40, it is the only novel of the series which was
produced prior to Nizan's death, and before Sartre's now legendary awakening
to history and politics. Although Sartre continued to stage and problematise
communist ideas notably in La Mort dans l'âme and Drôle d'amitié, I think it
less likely that during the war and postwar years, when these later novels were
written, the political and intellectual tensions that characterised his relationship
with Nizan remained as acute for him as they had been up until 1940.
258

communist writer, rather than the communist humanist tout court,
only confirms the implied association. Roquentin's remarks on
4
[1]'humaniste dit "de gauche'" concludes with a snide comment
which would equally seem too close for Nizan's comfort: 'c'est aux
humbles qu'il consacre sa belle culture classique.' [N: 167] It is
through the characterisation of the PCF activist Brunet in Les Chemins
de la liberté, however, that Sartre offers his most direct riposte to
Nizan.
39
With Mathieu Delarue evidently being an autobiographical
creation, his waning friendship with the communist Brunet reproduces
the basic structure of Sartre's friendship with Nizan. In L'Age de
raison, Delarue's reservations about committing himself politically
and his inability to engage in meaningful forms of action are presented
as matters of personal regret, Sartre offering an auto-critique of sorts.
However, in comparison to the characterisation of Brunet, the portray-
al of Delarue is a sympathetic one. Through Brunet, Sartre points the
finger at Nizan via a character portrait which, whilst not as unambigu-
ously derisive as Lange in Le Cheval de Troie, is nevertheless
caricatural. Brunet, who has adopted communist ideology without
reservation, is sectarian, 'sérieux', at times condescending, and
demonstrates on occasions a tendency towards a certain anti-intellec-
tualism in the manner of vulgar leftism.
In view of Sartre's limited knowledge of Marxist philosophy in
the 1930s which, as we saw in chapter I, hardly extended further than
its assimilation to Stalinist doctrine, it is interesting to ponder to what
extent he was able to separate accurate depiction from caricatural
distortion in this staging of Nizan's ideas and character. Apparently
making an over-simple opposition between real conditions and pol-
itical practice on the one hand and non-committed intellectual
pursuits on the other, Brunet is portrayed perceiving Mathieu as an
'abstrait' [AR: 146]. Mathieu seems only to confirm this dichotomous
separation of base and superstructure first by accepting Brunet's
criticism, and secondly by repeatedly associating Brunet with concrete
reality. 'Toi tu es bien réel,' Mathieu tells him. 'Tout ce que tu tou-
ches à l'air réel.' [AR: 146] The narrator communicates in more detail
39 William Redfern, in his Paul Nizan (1972) p.207, considers Brunet to have
been inspired by Nizan.
259

Mathieu's perception of Brunet: 'un homme droit, fermé, sûr de soi,
terrestre, réfractaire aux tentations angéliques de l'art, de la psy-
chologie, de la politique, tout un homme, rien qu'un homme.' [AR:
147] As we shall see, the complexity of the relationship which Nizan
posits between the aesthetic and the political is evidence of the
inaccuracy of this portrait, and Sartre must surely have realised that he
was caricaturing his friend's world-view and character in this passage.
Yet, elsewhere he occasionally draws on personal characteristics of
Nizan as if deliberately to establish a direct link between the latter and
his character Brunet. When Mathieu invites Brunet to have a seat in
one of his armchairs, for instance, Brunet declines the offer retorting
that 'tes fauteuils sont corrupteurs' [AR: 142]. This idiosyncratic use
of the adjective 'corrupteur' is in fact drawn directly from Nizan's
idiolect. In her memoirs, Beauvoir recalls that upon his return from
the USSR in 1934, Nizan described his stay there as 'extrêment
corrupteur' [FA: 236].
All the evidence points to the conclusion that although Sartre
stages Nizan's ideas and personality in L'Age de raison in a know-
ingly and deliberately caricatural way, he nevertheless had not accur-
ately understood what Nizan represented and stood for at the time.
Years later, in his preface to Aden Arabie, Sartre reflects on the
growing distance between the two during the 1930s and the opacity of
Nizan for him: 'Nos chemins n'ont cessé de s'écarter l'un de l'autre,
voilà le vrai; il aura fallu beaucoup d'années et que je comprenne
enfin ma route pour que je puisse aujourd'hui parler sans erreur de la
sienne.' [S IV: 150] In his review of La Conspiration of 1938, Sartre
identifies the novel's basic political dynamics, detecting the critical
attitude of its author towards his leading characters,
40
but either does
not perceive or refuses to accept the relationship between the political
and the aesthetic which lies at the heart of Nizan's novelistic writing.
In La Conspiration, Sartre thinks, Nizan's communist ideological
message intrudes on and ultimately vitiates his novelistic writing,
40 'Je crois voir quelle grande sincérité de l'effort, de la souffrance physique, de la
faim, Nizan opposerait à leurs parleries' [S 1: 28], writes Sartre, perceiving the
Marxist grounds on which Nizan feels distaste for the bourgeois character of
RosenthaPs and Laforgue's rebelliousness.
260

rather than being conveyed by it. 'Je ne pense pas que Nizan ait voulu
écrire un roman', he goes so far as to claim. 'Un communiste peut-il
écrire un roman? Je n'en suis pas persuadé: il n'a pas le droit de se
faire le complice de ses personnages.' [S /: 29] Nizan's writing in La
Conspiration, Sartre continues, is not a 'style de romancier, sournois
et caché', but is rather 'un style de combat, une arme' [S I: 30]
Sartre's remarks are misguided for a number of reasons. As Cohen-
Solal argues,
41
his interpretation of the politics of La Conspiration
apparently works on the assumption that Nizan is a thoroughly
conformist communist. What Sartre does not perceive is the develop-
ment that has taken place in Nizan's political thinking by this time. He
fails to see that La Conspiration is not a politically militant novel in
the way that Le Cheval de Troie had been. Moreover, the politics of
La Conspiration are expressed in a more oblique and indirect way
than in Nizan's other novels, which means that Sartre's claim that
Nizan's prose is a weapon rather than a novelistic prose style is
undoubtedly an exaggeration. In fact, ironically, the 'sournois et
caché' character which Sartre attributes to novelistic style character-
ises Nizan's approach very well in La Conspiration. Sartre's claim
that Nizan's communist politics lead him to maintain too great a
distance from his characters is clearly an indictment of the way Nizan
employs the narrator. McCarthy argues that Sartre's assessment is
untenable, Nizan's inclusion of frequent shifting points of view in La
Conspiration, as in Le Cheval de Troie, clearly pointing towards the
'complice' concept advocated by Sartre himself.
42
If Nizan's prose
style does remain in some sense a weapon in the ideological battle, it
is hence not in the direct and unmediated way that Sartre implies.
The basis of Sartre's hazy grasp of Nizan's politics and inability
accurately to judge Nizan's novelistic writings lay principally in his
limited knowledge of Marxism during this period. Far from being the
model Stalinist communist, as Sartre perceived him during these
years, Nizan followed a political trajectory which is in fact best under-
stood as a complex process of continuous development and change
41 Cohen-Solal, A. Paul Nizan: communiste impossible (Grasset et Fasquelle,
1980)p.226
42 McCarthy op.cit. p. 199
261

from the late 1920s when he joined the PCF until his resignation from
the Party following the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. In the latter years of
the 1920s through until around 1933, Nizan's position was character-
ised principally by his aggressive denunciations of bourgeois society
and ideas, as his Aden Arabie (1931) and Les Chiens de garde (1932)
attest. However, although ostensibly aligned with the sectarianism of
the PCF, these works were greeted with some scepticism by Party
intellectuals who saw them as lacking in theoretical weight. Nizan's
trip to the USSR of 1933-4 was a turning point for him in many ways.
Upon his return he no longer subscribed to the idealistic left-wing idea
that a new and indomitable kind of humanism had been born in the
USSR. Existential uncertainties and the solitude of death were the lot
of Soviet citizens just as they were for people in western capitalist
countries. His remarks about the USSR would henceforth be much
more reserved than they had been previously. During the Popular
Front period, a collaborative political attitude was the order of the day
on the left, and Nizan's statements blended conciliatory discourse with
his earlier politics of denunciation and sectarianism. From 1935 on-
wards, the necessity of mounting effective resistance to the spread of
fascism was Nizan's central political preoccupation. In 1935-6, he
was confident that neither the German nor Spanish fascist movements
were strong enough to prevail. The events of 1937-9, from the
dashing of Republican hopes in Spain to the Nazi-Soviet pact, proved
this optimism ill-founded, Nizan's disillusionment growing from year
to year. It is a testimony to Nizan's integrity and independence from
the PCF's predominantly Stalinist mindset that he had the courage to
resign from the Party after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
If Sartre tended to view Nizan reductively as an orthodox Stalin-
ist communist, it is because his knowledge of Marxist thought was not
adequate to perceive accurately the ways in which Nizan often set
himself apart from the party line, whilst all the while remaining
faithful to the Marxist outlook.
43
In his journalistic writing, Nizan
43 The question of Nizan's communist orthodoxy or marginality has long been the
subject of disagreement. Critical opinion has remained divided even in recent
years, albeit without the polemical fire of earlier debates. Whereas such as
McCarthy, Lahanque, and notably Cohen-Solal support the marginality thesis,
262

supported the party line on the whole, but his literary criticism and
above all his novelistic writings reveal a distinctive and in many
ways divergent vision. A good point of departure for an appraisal of
this vision is Nizan's article of 1932 entitled 'Littérature révolution-
naire en France'.
44
In this piece, the 'revolutionary literature' which
Nizan advocates is favourably contrasted with 'proletarian literature',
a conception of writing originating in the Soviet Union some years
earlier which was explicitly workerist, that is to say by workers for
Michael Scriven is wary of what he sees as a 'tendency to overstate Nizan's
implicit criticisms/disavowals of the Soviet Union. There is little evidence', he
continues, 'to support the view that Nizan was anything other than a faithful,
orthodox party member; a Stalinist in short.' (Scriven Paul Nizan: Communist
Novelist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) p.40) Scriven acknowledges that
Nizan was less idealistic about the USSR after 1934, but he points out that
Nizan nevertheless continued to 'believe in the moral justice of the Soviet
cause.' (p.36) In this latter observation Scriven is undoubtedly accurate, but
when he infers from it that Nizan was hence an 'orthodox party member', he
appears to underestimate the potential for questioning and doubt which such a
position allowed. In the context of the PCF of the 1930s, for Nizan to
publish even 'implicit criticisms/disavowals of the Soviet Union' indicates
that privately he had strong reservations. Moreover, his 'implicit criticisms/
disavowals' were in fact indicative not of a departure from the French
communist admiration for the USSR as such but of a clear divergence from
elements of party doctrine which were in some cases central to the Stalinist
vision. This divergence is nowhere clearer than in his conception of the
relationship between aesthetics and politics which contrasts greatly with that
espoused by Zhdanov at the Moscow conference of 1934. Novels such as Le
Cheval de Troie and, in particular, La Conspiration were far from meeting the
norms of socialist realism. Scriven acknowledges the particularity of Nizan's
position on this matter {Ibid pp. 100-111), which makes his categorisation of
Nizan as an orthodox communist difficult to understand. However, Scriven's
reading does have the merit of implicitly defending the PCF of the 1930s
against the now all too common dismissive and reductionist view that there was
no room whatsoever for divergences and differences of opinion within the
party. If Nizan was an orthodox PCF member, as Scriven claims, then the party
must have been a broad church. Scriven seems to want to rehabilitate the image
of the PCF to some extent in the light of a generalised tendency over many
decades to associate its positions with only the most implacable and rigid
aspects of Stalinist doctrine.
44 Nizan in ed. Suleiman Pour une nouvelle culture p.34
263

workers. Revolutionary literature, Nizan points out, can be written by
workers or by writers of bourgeois origin. What matters is not the
social origin of the author nor that the working class be the sole focus
of his attention, but that he writes 'du point de vue du prolétariat
révolutionnaire.'
45
This means that his depictions of social reality
should accord with and encourage the development of proletarian
class consciousness. As such, his works will be part of the working
class's struggle against the bourgeoisie. 'Toute littérature est une
propagande',
46
Nizan declares. What he terms 'les traditions spiritu-
elles et formelles de la littérature bourgeoise'
47
serve as a support to
bourgeois hegemony, although their ideological function is often
masked. Revolutionary literature counters this tendency, he argues,
acting as an ideological weapon in the struggle against the bour-
geoisie. In his review of Aragon's Pour un réalisme socialiste (1935),
he would add that whereas bourgeois literature flees reality, revo-
lutionary literature embraces it fully and attempts to depict it as it is.
48
The revolutionary writer is not a supposedly neutral observer in the
manner of the bourgeois critical realist, but is himself part of the
political struggle. His depiction of the intolerable aspects of social
reality is the first step towards taking cognizance of the possibilities
for positive change.
49
The conception of literature formulated by Nizan in articles such
as these of the early to mid 1930s diverges considerably from the
official communist conception of the time, namely socialist realism.
However, it must be conceded that there is nevertheless little in the
above claims which is constitutive of a distinctively Nizanian concep-
tion of literature. The distinction between proletarian and revolution-
ary literature had been a subject of debate amongst Soviet thinkers
during the 1920s. Nizan's conception of revolutionary literature, and
preference for it over the 'proletarian' type, echoes in many ways the
in-depth and detailed discussion of the matter undertaken by Trotsky
45 Ibidp36
46 Ibid p.34
47 Ibidp33
48 IbidpA76
49 Ibidp .177
264

in his Literature and Revolution (1925). Trotsky dismissed the idea
of proletarian art, arguing that the working class was not in a position
to initiate a new kind of culture alone as it was too uneducated.
51
Revolutionary literature would require the participation of individuals
who had assimilated the old bourgeois culture and were supportive of
the proletarian struggle. Its role was to ensure 'the consolidation of the
workers in their struggle against the exploiters.' [LR: 259] Nizan's
claim that literature is propaganda is essentially a polemical formu-
lation which is based on the well-established Marxist concepts of
ideology in the pejorative and positive senses. Formulated in the
language of ideology, Nizan's point is simply that bourgeois literature
is a constitutive element of the dominant ideology upholding the
social structure of capitalist society, whereas revolutionary literature
contributes to the proletarian ideology which seeks to overturn that
social structure. Nizan's concomitant idea that the revolutionary writer
is an active participant in the political struggle reinforces the notion
of a proletarian ideology, thereby showing the influence of Lenin
and the early Lukâcs. Finally, Nizan's reference to 'les traditions
spirituelles et formelles de la littérature bourgeoise'
52
clearly involves
characterising bourgeois literature and ideology as abstract and unreal
in the manner of the Marx of The German Ideology.
In these articles, Nizan was hence taking up the terms of an
already established theoretical debate. His own distinctive vision at
this time lies notably in the emphasis he places on novels showing
the sombre and tragic sides of life prior to subtly leading the reader to
see how such adversity can be overcome through a politics of
communist solidarity. Revolutionary writers should describe reality
50 My intention is not thereby to suggest that Nizan was in reality some sort of
covert Trotskyist. He was, after all, an active member of the PCF which took its
lead principally from the Stalinist USSR. Publicly at least, Nizan's political
statements did not extend further than indirect or implicit criticisms of Stalinist
communist policy. I rather seek to show that his views on literature and aesthet­
ics nevertheless link up in important ways with those of non-Stalinist Marxist
thinkers, Trotsky being amongst the most significant of them in this period.
51 Leon Trotsky Literature and Revolution (London: Redwords, 1991 [1925])
chapters VI and VIII (hereafter LR).
52 Nizan ed. Suleiman op.cit.p .33
265

'de telle façon qu'elle apparaisse enfin telle qu'elle est, c'est-à-dire
intolérable',
53
Nizan argues. This emphasis is one of Nizan's main
points of departure from the socialist realist approach which involved
principally depicting scenes of contented and industrious communist
citizens in a post-revolutionary situation. He re-joins the socialist
realist conception, however, when he insists on revolutionary art being
'orienté sur l'avenir'
54
and on its 'capacité de perspectives',
55
that is
its potential to show the way towards reaching a socialist solution. Yet
Nizan does not believe that the revolutionary writer should convey to
the reader the idea of the need for and value of socialism in any simple
or direct way. At the Moscow conference of 1934, Zhdanov argued
that the merit of literary works would be judged on the basis of their
ideological 'correctness' rather than on their aesthetic qualities which
were of secondary importance. Good literature was that which in-
spired the masses to believe in the superiority of socialist society over
any other and induced in them patriotic feelings for the USSR. For
Nizan, on the other hand, the revolutionary writer should not have to
sacrifice aesthetic value to the political message. In his article of 1936
devoted to the œuvre of Eugène Dabit, Nizan claims that Dabit had
correctly perceived 'le grand problème, qui consiste à faire passer la
révolte dans l'art, sans détruire l'art.'
56
Nizan considers that Dabit
successfully overcame this difficulty in his problem-centred novels.
Rather than merely alternating descriptive and didactically judge-
mental passages, 'Dabit avait recours à la ruse, qui consiste à conduire
le lecteur à des conclusions qu'on ne lui a point expressément énon-
cées. Cette ruse est un autre nom de l'art.'
57
Nizan clearly finds in
Dabit both a source of inspiration and a kindred spirit as his own
novels similarly lead the reader to political conclusions indirectly. In
Nizan's novels, the aesthetic dimension becomes part of the political
message he is trying to convey rather than being merely subordinated
to it. The two fields work together in such a way that the reading
53 IbidpMÔ
54 Ibidp.252
55 Ibidp .177
56
Ibidem
57
Ibidp.in
266

process ensures the gradual enlightenment of the reader to the needs
and subtleties of the political situation. As Scriven puts it, 'Nizan's
novels are not faithful mirrors of ideological correctness, but rather
refracted and distorted artistic representations of a complex socio-
political context. They are, in short, a fusion of ideology and aes-
thetics in a constantly evolving synthesis.'
58
Of Nizan's novels, La Conspiration offers the best examples of
this complex interdependency of aesthetics and politics which Nizan
proposes as an alternative to the artistic banality of socialist realist
fiction. In Le Cheval de Troie, its predecessor, Nizan had already em-
ployed the Dabit-style 'ruse' to good effect: his thematic juxtaposition
of gradually developing relations of solidarity amongst the workers
against a background of existential uncertainty, with the characteris-
ations of the bourgeois leaders of Villefranche and of Lange, and with
his neutral description of police brutality in response to the communist
demonstration - all these elements combined lead the reader to accord
the moral victory to the political left by the time she reaches the end of
the novel. Though in reality defeated by the police, Bloyé and his
associates have learnt the value of collective struggle against the
forces of social oppression. Even the idea of death itself, symbolic of
existential doubt throughout Nizan's fiction, is finally presented as
bearable in the context of socialist struggle. In the closing pages of the
novel, Bloyé suggests that it is not dying itself that is to be feared but
dying without having committed one's life to a valuable cause: 'On
peut détruire d'abord toutes les façons injustes de mourir, et ensuite,
quand on n'aura plus affaire qu'à la mort dont personne n'est respon-
sable, il faudra essayer aussi de lui donner un sens. Ce n 'est pas de
mourir en se battant qui est difficile, c 'est de mourir seuV
59
[my ital-
ics]. In La Conspiration, Nizan takes the 'ruse' of camouflaging his
authorial position through fictional technique to a new level of
sophistication. Indeed, the brilliance of this novel lies partly in the fact
that, as a consequence, its political message ultimately remains am-
biguous throughout much of the narrative. It is some time before the
reader takes cognizance of the narrator's critical attitude towards
58 Scriven op.cit. p. 94
59 Le Cheval de Troie p.207
267

Rosenthal's and Laforgue's plans to initiate a revolution. By changing
narratorial focus periodically, in a similar albeit less marked manner
to Sartre's technique in Le Sursis a few years later, Nizan creates a
multi-perspectival effect casting personalities and events in a new
light. Hence, the mature voice of Régnier's 'carnet noir', written in the
first person, allows Nizan to pour scorn on Rosenthal's misguided-
ness, arrogance and naivety for the first time. 'Rosen me parle de son
"plan"', Régnier notes. 'Stupide, inefficace, toujours improvisé, mais
comme il faut que ces jeunes gens s'ennuient!'
60
Prior to this, the
narrator's outlook had been allied so closely to that of Rosenthal and
Laforgue that only the occasional passing remark had permitted Nizan
to dissociate himself from his characters.
61
Similarly written in the
first person, there is also Pluvinage's notably revealing account of the
reasons which contributed to his betrayal of Carré. He describes in
detail the frustration and enviousness he had long felt towards Lafor-
gue and the now dead Rosenthal in such a way that the reader feels
impelled to reassess the significance of all his previous appearances in
the narrative.
The ambiguities which are created by Nizan's fictional technique
are complemented and emphasised by his evident desire to complicate
the thematic contrasts of the novel and thwart any attempt on the part
of the reader to draw easy conclusions. Indeed, the formal and
thematic ambiguities of La Conspiration form a complex synthesis.
When the odious Rosenthal embarks on an affair with his sister-in-law
Catherine and is consequently spurned by his bourgeois family,
Nizan's portrayal of him becomes subtly more sympathetic, despite
his having grown indifferent to the ideal of political revolution by this
time. Equally, whereas the reader might well have expected the
embittered Pluvinage to be portrayed as a working-class hero figure
who pulls the rug from under the feet of the young bourgeois
charlatans, Nizan carefully avoids any such facile opposition.
Although from a less prosperous and socially advantaged background
60 La Conspiration p. 124
61 The closing sentence of chapter IV subsequently became the best known of
them: 'Rosenthal publia dans la Guerre civile des pages qui n'avaient pas de
chances sérieuses d'ébranler le capitalisme.' (p.64)
268

than Rosenthal and Laforgue, Pluvinage is petit bourgeois rather than
working class and is portrayed in many respects rather negatively. He
had been constantly possessed by an all-consuming jealousy with
regard to Rosenthal and Laforgue to such an extent that even his
decision to join the PCF had been motivated purely by the desire to
assert himself against them. Moreover, taking his obsessiveness to the
ultimate extreme, he ludicrously interprets Rosenthal's suicide as an
act of provocation towards himself: 'Le suicide même de Rosen [...]
m'a paru le dernier défi qui pouvait me venir de vous, le dernier acte
inimitable que l'un de vous me proposait [...] .'
62
In these ways, Nizan complicates greatly the transmission of
any particular ideological message in La Conspiration. Although
revolutionary and left-wing politics are frequently subjects of dis-
cussion in the narrative, Nizan's own Marxist convictions are hardly
detectable in any obvious or unambiguous way. Indeed, as McCarthy
points out, in La Conspiration, 'the Marxist awareness is most
obviously present as irony.'
63
When the reader sees beyond the nar-
rator's predominantly neutral account of Rosenthal's and Laforgue's
political projects thanks to the changes of focus and thematic contrasts
in the text, this neutrality appears suspect and the narrator's tone
ironic. This use of irony, by which Nizan dissociates himself from the
naive, unrealistic, abstract and self-affirmatory political ambitions of
Rosenthal and Laforgue, is in fact very similar to the technique
employed by Sartre in Erostrate and L'Enfance dun chef. By staging
the egotistical rebelliousness of bourgeois 'normaliens', Nizan suc-
ceeds in distancing himself from such an image of left political activ-
ism. Rather as Sartre had felt the need to defend himself indirectly
against the charge that his non-committed political stance might lead
him to fascism, it would seem that Nizan, as the author of powerfully
denunciatory texts like Aden Arabie and Les Chiens de garde, felt it
important to indicate that his own political stance was not that of a
certain youthful intellectual rebelliousness.
Ultimately, it is Nizan's subtle and pervasive use of irony in La
Conspiration which constitutes the 'ruse' at once masking and reveal-
62 La Conspiration p.280
63 McCarthy op.cit. p . 198
269

ing his own ideological stance. It is irony which permits him to
present political themes in a questioning and unresolved manner such
that they do not encroach debilitatingly on the aesthetic qualities of
his fictional writing. Indeed, La Conspiration is successful in aesthetic
terms precisely because of the political open-endedness which the
ironic tone of the narrative permits. Sartre's similar use of irony,
notably in the politically-oriented L'Enfance dun chef, places his
writing, in this short story at least, in the 'problem-centred' category
in the manner of Nizan and Dabit. Sartre conveys an anti-fascist polit-
ical message in an oblique way, and it is this subtlety of narrative style
which ensures that he, like Nizan, avoids falling into a political
didacticism which would intrude on the aesthetic qualities of the
writing.
Sartre's and Nizan's use of irony is a feature of their novelistic
writings which invites comparison with the conception of the novel
articulated by the early Lukâcs in his Theory of the Novell In this
work, Lukâcs argues that irony, which he considers the highest affirm-
ation of freedom on the part of the atheist writer,
65
is integral to
novelistic structure because the writer inevitably knows more than his
protagonist who is fundamentally a 'problematic individual'.
66
There
is a radical opposition between the protagonist's outlook and the
world in which he finds himself, and a fundamental characteristic of
the novel is its charting of the protagonist's journey to greater lucidity
and self-knowledge. Lukâcs characterises the outlook of the protag-
onist as 'demonic' because he is on a quest for values which he can
never attain fully. Amongst the texts we have discussed, the character-
isations of Sartre's Lucien Fleurier and Nizan's Rosenthal in particu-
lar illustrate this conception of the novelistic protagonist well. Neither
are positive heroes but are rather problematic characters in Lukâcs's
sense: there is a disjunction between their perspective on the world
and the view of it which the narrative induces the reader to constitute
64 In La Force de l'âge, Beauvoir makes a brief allusion to the affinity between
Sartre's fictional practice and the early Lukâcs's literary theory (p. 163).
65 Georg Lukâcs The Theory of the Novel (MIT Press, 1971 [1920]): 'Irony [...] is
the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God' (p.93).
66 Ibidp.1%
270

for herself. Both Fleurier's adoption of extreme right anti-semitic
politics and Rosenthal's urgings to revolution are of a fundamentally
ironic character because Sartre's and Nizan's narratives otherwise
show how misguided they are in their pursuit of such projects.
271

IX. Committed Writing
It is widely accepted in the critical literature that Sartre's growing
awareness of his own historicity and developing political thought
during the war and its aftermath stimulated major changes in his views
on aesthetics. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Sartre's conception
of committed writing in particular evolved in important ways during
this period. Yet, some commentators, taking their lead from the later
Sartre's disparaging assessments of his pre-war political inactivity,
have gone so far as to consider Sartre's insistence on commitment
after the Liberation as evidence of a sort of paradigm-shift in his
thought involving a rejection of his pre-war views on aesthetics, and
in particular his conception of writing.
1
LaCapra, for example,
observes that whereas Sartre claimed in the closing pages of
L'Imaginaire that 'il est stupide de confondre la morale et l'esthé-
tique' [/: 371], in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? he expresses the wish
'que la littérature entière devienne morale et problématique' [QL:
290].
2
It is tempting to take the latter statement, as LaCapra does, as
evidence that Sartre has done a theoretical about-face in the years
separating the two works. Developing and expanding on my claims of
chapters V and VIII, I would like to propose a reexamination of this
area. Whilst I would not dispute that a significant change had taken
place in Sartre's thinking by the end of the war period, I feel that this
assessment can nevertheless lead us to make an overly schematic
opposition between an 'apolitical' pre-war Sartre and the politically
committed writer of the postwar years.
1
See for example Dominick LaCapra's A Preface to Sartre pp.56 -7 and pp.59-
60, Ronald Aronson's Jean-Paul Sartre : Philosophy in the World p. 142, or
Andrew Leak's 'Les Enjeux de l'écriture dans Les Carnets de la drôle de
guerre: prolégomènes à une théorie de l'engagement', in Etudes Sartriennes
F///(Publidix, 2001).
2
LaCapra op.cit. p .59
273

The Ethical Dimension of the Imaginary
Sartre's pre-war attitude towards aesthetics, and hence his literary
output during the 1930s, cannot be properly understood without
consideration of L'Imaginaire. It is in this theoretical work that he
proposes an account of the nature of the work of art on the basis of a
lengthy examination of the imaginary field. In the critical literature,
there has been a tendency to take the claims of this work as evidence
not only that literary writing, for Sartre, had little to do with the real,
and hence with morality and politics, but also that Sartre at this time
strongly favoured the former sphere - the aesthetic - over the latter.
3
I feel that Sartre's attitude towards the imaginary is globally more
ambiguous than this reading suggests. On the one hand, in the
'Conclusion' to L Imaginaire Sartre does indeed present the imagin-
ary as vital not only to the aesthetic sphere but also to the very
freedom of consciousness itself. The disjunction of the imaginary
from the real is the common ground upon which these claims stand.
Yet, in the long fourth part of L'Imaginaire, entitled 'La vie imagin-
aire', Sartre presents the imaginary field much more negatively as an
evasion of the real which conversely leads to an impoverished
experience of life. Sartre argues that those who choose to live in the
imaginary are opting for a mental world which is limited and safe
because insulated from the unpredictability of the real. It is a world
which, 'contrairement à ce qu'on pourrait croire [...] se donne comme
un monde sans liberté: il n'est pas non plus déterminé, il est l'envers
de la liberté, il est fatal.' [/: 327-8] Examination not just ofL'Imagin-
aire but also of Sartre's literary works of the 1930s themselves reveals
the crucial importance of this negative dimension of the imaginary
field. In what follows, I will establish a link between negative repre-
3 In the relatively recent volume Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics (New
York: Garland, 1997) edited by William McBride, for example, discussions of
Sartre's pre-war novelistic works and novel cycle Les Chemins de la liberté do
not involve consideration of his developing political thought during the same
period. There is hence the implication that aesthetic issues need not be related
to politics.
274

sentations of the imaginary, notably in the short stories of Le Mur and
in La Nausée, and the early Sartre's evident preoccupation with
inauthenticity in those same works, thereby questioning the supposed
separation of the imaginary and ethics in Sartre's pre-war thought.
Moreover, building on this, I will subsequently go on to argue that this
conceptual association of the negative view of the imaginary with
inauthenticity problematises the more positive view of the imaginary
also set out in L'Imaginaire, and perhaps even Sartre's theoretical
exposition of the nature of the aesthetic to some extent also.
We saw in chapter II that in L'Imaginaire Sartre misleadingly
suggests in places that consciousness's realisation of its own freedom
and imaginative creation of aesthetic objects involve abstraction from
the real in the manner of philosophical idealism. His use of the term
'transcendantaP appears to imply relations of verticality which he in
reality does not wish to invoke, as does his arguing for a strict separ-
ation of the aesthetic object from its material analogon. In fact, for
Sartre, our apprehension of say a painting or a symphony does not
involve actually denying the physical qualities - the canvas and
paints, or the musical instruments - which made those aesthetic
constructions possible. He gives the example of looking at a portrait of
Charles VIII [/: 351-2]. In order to see the picture as a portrait of
Charles VIII, Sartre argues, I must cease to consider it as an object in
the real world. The picture becomes a portrait of Charles VIII for me
only through the imaginary. Yet, my capacity to see the picture as a
portrait is nevertheless dependent on the physical object produced by
the painter.
4
Imagining for Sartre hence does not involve abstracting
4 Interestingly, as the portrait of Charles VIII is dependent on the painter's
physical creation, a loose conceptual homology can be identified here with the
classic Marxist base/superstructure model. Sartre conceives of the imaginary
aesthetic object as enjoying considerable autonomy from the real-world object
on which it is nevertheless entirely dependent, rather as Marxists speak of the
relative autonomy and yet reliance of the superstructural, or cultural, field in
relation to the economic base. Sartre is hostile to the idea of causal determin­
ation in the aesthetic field in particular, placing 'a great deal of interpretive
weight on the analogon as a feeble point zero of contact' (LaCapra op.cit. p .57).
However, his apparent intention to preserve the sanctity of the aesthetic field in
relation to the real in L'Imaginaire is undercut by his philosophical realism in
275

as such from reality but rather permits consciousness to confer
meaning on the physical phenomena it encounters [/: 360-1]. In the
case of the artwork, it is only through the imaginary that the subject
gains an awareness of the work's aesthetic qualities because the phys-
ical properties of the analogon cannot, in and of themselves, Sartre
contends, convey such qualities.
Regarding the more negative dimension of the imaginary also
discussed in L'Imaginaire, Sartre's focus is turned in particular to
people, such as schizophrenics and people who daydream, who
have opted to live in the imaginary as opposed to the real world.
These people choose to escape from the real, fleeing into a more
limited and private mental sphere which they can control. What such
people find difficult about the real is 'son caractère de présence, le
genre de réaction qu'il demande de nous, la subordination de nos
conduites à l'objet, l'inépuisabilité des perceptions, leur indépend-
ance, la façon même que nos sentiments ont de se développer.' [/:
282] To these uncertainties they prefer a life which Sartre describes as
'factice, figée, ralentie, scolastique' [/: 282]. Sartre stages this type of
limited life confined to the imaginary most notably in his portrayals
of Pierre and Eve in the short story La Chambre, and in his depiction
of Hilbert in Erostrate. Pierre's psychological condition has led him to
confine himself to his room where he claims to be prey to such
phenomena as flying statues. He undoubtedly lives very largely in the
sphere of a limited range of imaginary objects. It is Eve, however,
who is ultimately the more central and interesting character of the
story because she makes a much more perceptibly deliberate choice to
abandon reality for the imaginary in an attempt not to lose contact
with Pierre. She claims no longer to be able to endure the company of
normal people: 'J'ai besoin de vivre là-bas, de l'autre côté de ce
mur',
5
she reflects, referring to Pierre's room. In this formulation, the
matters of ontology. His acknowledgement of the painting both as an object in
the world and as an indispensable condition of possibility for the aesthetic
experience means that a causal relationship between the real and imaginary
fields cannot be denied. '[U]ne image', Sartre writes,
c
ne peut jamais apparaître
que sur un fond de monde et en liaison avec le fond.' [/: 356]
5 La Chambre, in Le Mur, p.62
276

'mur' evidently designates the physical wall separating Pierre's room
from the rest of the flat but it also metaphorically represents the
radical disjunction of the imaginary sphere from that of the real for
Sartre.
6
Eventually, when Pierre's statues supposedly appear, Eve
decides to make the leap into the imaginary: '"J'ai peur des statues",
pensa-t -elle. C'était une affirmation violente et aveugle, une incan-
tation: de toutes ses forces elle voulait croire à leur présence [...] Dans
son bras, dans son flanc et son épaule elle sentait leur passage.'
7
How-
ever, Sartre lets it be understood through the narrator's comments that
Eve's attempt to experience the statues as Pierre does is not particu-
larly successful: 'elle se les représentait mal'; 'Eve ne pouvait pas voir
tout cela'.
8
The weakness of the images Eve forms accords with
Sartre's conviction m L'Imaginaire there is a 'pauvreté essentielle des
images'
9
in comparison with perceptions of real objects.
The weakness of the images also underlines the fact that Eve is
deliberately deluding herself about the presence of statues in the room.
In L'Imaginaire no explicit link between the imaginary and the
concept of bad faith is established, but we know from Beauvoir's
account that Sartre devised the concept of bad faith some years before
L'Imaginaire was written.
10
The concept can, I believe, be valuably
introduced into the present discussion to illuminate further the
negative dimension of the imaginary which Sartre discusses in
6 Indeed, Sartre's apparent desire to employ the term 'mur' both literally and
metaphorically in La Chambre itself conveys, or at the very least closely
parallels, the real/imaginary opposition upon which he insists. By its very
nature, metaphoricity implies a rejection of real objects designated by the literal
meaning of signifying terms in favour of a semantic construction in which there
is an often radical disjunction of the signifier and the signified. The sphere of
the signified in metaphors can be seen as closely resembling Sartre's concept­
ion of the imaginary: the metaphorical sense of a term requires the creative
work of the imagination, but its point of departure is the literal sense -
designating the real - which serves as the analogon.
7 Ibidp13
8 Ibid p.74
9
Ibidp.281
10 According to the chronology established by Beauvoir, Sartre elaborated the
concept of 'mauvaise foi' in the early 1930s [FA: 149]. L'Imaginaire was
written in 1935-6.
277

L'Imaginaire and instantiates in his fiction. It is clear from Sartre's
discussion in L Imaginaire that he is critical of those who deliberately
opt to live most of the time in the imaginary rather than the real. Not
only are their images more limited and weak than perceptions, but
such people are described as 'fleeing' reality, a term which Sartre
would later employ to describe bad faith.
11
In both cases, that of the
imaginary and that of bad faith, the subject flees the reality or truth of
the situation. This common ground would clearly seem to suggest that
bad faith and the negative dimension of the imaginary are closely
concomitant concepts in Sartre's thought. Eve's deliberate attempt
to enter Pierre's imaginary world hence proves to be an instance of
bad faith on her part. Moreover, despite not really being able to see
the statues, she manages to convince herself briefly that she is
experiencing their passage and is left trembling uncontrollably even
after Pierre indicates that they have gone. What she momentarily
achieves here is what Sartre calls in L'Etre et le néant 'la "foi" de
la mauvaise foi' [EN: 104]: Sartre explains that although we have
ourselves devised the lie with which we deceive ourselves about the
reality of the situation, it is a lie which we nevertheless believe.
There is a largely unarticulated conceptual link in Sartre's
thought between this idea of 'la "foi" de la mauvaise foi' discussed in
L'Etre et le néant and the idea of 'croyance' in the Esquisse d'une
théorie des émotions. In the latter work, Sartre argues that we often
undergo emotional reactions which we have ourselves generated in
response to the specific situations that we are in. Our emotional reac-
tion to a given stimulus is a sort of game but it is a game in which we
nevertheless believe.
12
When I tell myself that a bunch of grapes I am
unable to pick is 'too green', or when I faint at the sight of a fierce
animal approaching me, I experience an emotional response to my
immediate situation which I have chosen in order to escape having to
face an unpleasant truth. Sartre describes this type of response as a
11 In Matérialisme et révolution, for instance, Sartre was to describe materialism
as 'une des formes de l'esprit de sérieux et de la fuite devant soi-même.'
(p. 162)
12 Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions p.82
278

'conduite d'évasion' and as a 'fuite',
13
which are precisely the terms
he employs in L'Etre et le néant to describe bad faith. Later, in
Matérialisme et révolution, Sartre will pour scorn on the Stalinist
Marxist's blind faith in communist ideology. 'Mets-toi à genoux et tu
croiras, dit Pascal' [MR: 173], he quips. In this case, the 'foi' of
the political activist is similarly, for Sartre, an instance of bad faith
because he has chosen it in order to avoid shouldering the personal
responsibility which honest and free critical reflection about the
political situation in hand places on him. He has adopted the com-
munist world-view as his own without sufficient critical examination
of its premises and then, in an emotional élan, induces himself to
believe in it. It hence appears that there is a homology between
Sartre's conceptions of emotional response and of subscription to
ideologies respectively. In both cases, Sartre thinks that if the indi-
vidual implicates himself too greatly he will be in bad faith because he
will be attempting to deny his own freedom of thought. Rather than
facing up to the reality of his situation and accepting full respon-
sibility for his inalienable existential choices, he will have chosen to
invest his free thought in a deterministic causal process. Emotion and
ideology, then, for the early Sartre, both constitute potential obstacles
to free rationality.
The case of Paul Hilbert in Erostrate is similarly best understood
when the link between the imaginary and the concept of bad faith is
established. We saw in chapter VIII that Hilbert's mental world is
very largely an imaginary one and that he fails to make the leap to
concrete action. In his account of the negative dimension of the im-
aginary in L'Imaginaire, Sartre gives the example of a type of person
who he describes as a 'rêveur morbide'. The 'rêveur morbide' with
illusions of grandeur ('qui s'imagine être roi') constructs an imaginary
world for himself in such a way as to guarantee a feeling of complete
control over his life [/: 282^4]. Hilbert is undoubtedly an illustration
of this type of individual. He has chosen from the outset to flee the
real world into a private mental sphere which allows him to sustain a
deluded view of his real situation in the world. As such, he is clearly
inauthentic according to Sartre's ethical theory. Hilbert's ultimate fail-
13 Ibid pp. S3-A.
279

ure to make the transition to the real underlines the conceptual
association of the imaginary and inauthenticity because, in fact, his
planned assassination attempt paradoxically points obliquely towards
Sartre's ethics of authenticity and commitment of the postwar years.
We saw in chapters VI and VII that for the Sartre of the 'Présentation
des Temps modernes' and the Cahiers the concept of action, the
rejection of the inauthentic project to be God, and the concept of
authenticity form a unity. Had Hilbert managed to carry out his assas-
sination plan, he would, like Nizan's Lange, have broken out of his
private imaginary world and into the sphere of action and com-
mitment. He would have attained a form of authenticity. When he
ultimately takes refuge in the café toilet, by contrast, he symbolically
returns to his private, essentially inactive world.
Lucien Fleurier marks a departure from the characters we have
discussed in that he succeeds in making the transition from passivity
to action although, when he does commit himself, it is to fascism like
Lange. At no point in L'Enfance d'un chef is Fleurier entirely lost in
the imaginary sphere in the way that Pierre or Hilbert are. Yet the
descriptions of his childhood and growing pains, which constitute the
centrepiece of the narrative, reveal a tendency towards an imaginative
attitude which aestheticises surrounding phenomena of the real world
in diverse ways. For instance, at one stage Fleurier comes to believe
that he and everyone around him are merely playing out roles. 'Papa
et maman jouaient à être papa et maman', and Fleurier is in the habit
of pretending to be an orphan called Louis [EC: 155]. When looking
at his mother on one occasion, her real appearance becomes the basis
for an imaginative aesthetic substitution: 'il avait l'impression qu'elle
allait se transformer sous ses yeux en une bête horrible' [EC: 155].
The ironie tone of the narrative throughout L'Enfance d'un chef is
such that the young Fleurier's aestheticisation of the real often reads
like a send-up of the privileged social condition of the bourgeois child
(Sartre's account of his own childhood years later in Les Mots would
be to some extent reminiscent of this text in this respect). As he
approaches adulthood and comes of age politically Fleurier begins to
participate in right-wing antisemitic acts and his identification with
the ideas of Barrés leads him to a nationalistic brand of no-nonsense
realism which quells his earlier existential uncertainties.
280

We saw in chapter III how the example of the petit bourgeois
couple admiring the portraits of the bourgeois leaders of Bouville in
La Nausée was an illustration of Sartre's concept of bad faith. The
socio-political dimension of this example led us to establish a parallel
with the Marxist concept of ideology in the pejorative sense: the
couple's bad faith, we argued, could also be seen as an instance of
false consciousness. Returning to this example and reconsidering it in
the light of L Imaginaire, it becomes apparent that the imaginary
plays a vital role in the couple's bad faith. When the couple observe
the portraits, rather than simply interpreting them as depictions of a
number of middle-aged men, their imaginary projections induce them
also to intuit a whole cluster of social values and to draw the appro-
priate conclusions from them: the men are socially important because
bourgeois, and are therefore superior to themselves, and so on. The
couple are in bad faith because they are deluding themselves about the
real nature of the situation, namely the fact that the bourgeois class
depicted in the portraits enjoyed unjustified power and influence over
their own social class. But it is their projection into the imaginary
which facilitates their self-delusion because it effects a disjunction
from the real: projecting beyond the portraits which they perceive, the
man and woman each end up forming a distorted mental picture of
the actual situation. Hence, there would appear to be the potential
for a cross-fertilisation of Sartre's concept of the imaginary with his
representations of ideology in his literary works. The imaginary and
ideology are concomitant concepts in early Sartrean thought, and they
both can also be clearly linked with his ethical concept of inauthen-
ticity.
Turning once again to the concept of ideology in the pejorative
sense, it is worth noting that the Marxist theoretical schema would be
more charitable to the couple than is that of Sartre. According to
Sartre's ethical world-view, the couple are in bad faith and believe
their self-delusions, but fundamentally they must be aware that they
are lying to themselves and are hence responsible for interpreting the
portraits the way they do. The Marxist schema, by contrast, would
encourage the identification of the ways in which the petit bourgeois
couple are induced to react to the portraits in the way that they do by
the bourgeois world-view, and would hence blame the bourgeoisie for
281

the couple's distorted ideas about class relations. Setting aside this
area of divergence, a parallel can nevertheless be established between
the role Sartre attributes to the imaginary (and his instantiation of it in
this example) and the concept of false consciousness which Marxists
would use to explain the couple's reaction. The concept of false
consciousness involves an appearance/reality distinction which paral-
lels closely Sartre's imaginary/real distinction. The Marxist idea of
ideological incorporation, like the Sartrean conception of the imagin-
ary, entails the claim that social and class relationships do not appear
to people as they really are. The couple's assumptions about the
relations between the social classes are nothing short of profoundly
mystified. Viewed from the perspective of Sartre's imaginary/real
opposition, a '"néantisation" du monde' [/: 354] has taken place, the
couple implicitly rejecting the real at the moment that they confer
signification on the portraits. What is common to both interpretive
schémas is the insistence that the mistaken ideas of the couple
constitute a kind of fiction.
Analysis of the closing pages of La Nausée from the standpoint
of the imaginary and its ethical dimension reveals Roquentin's
decision to write a fictional work to have profoundly ambiguous
implications. On the one hand, Roquentin's 'autre espèce de livre' [N:
249] instantiates the thematic association of the freedom of conscious-
ness and the work of art established in L'Imaginaire's
'Conclusion'.
Roquentin admires the songwriter of Some of these days and its
vocalist because they have, he believes, ensured their personal salvat-
ion through the creation of an artwork. Although '[i]ls se sont peut-
être crus perdus jusqu'au bout, noyés dans l'existence', through
creating this piece of music 'ils se sont lavés du péché d'exister.' [N:
249] Roquentin hopes that writing a literary work will do the same for
him. However, his planned work is also a form of 'évasion' or 'fuite'
from the unpleasant reality of his situation, namely the all-pervading
contingency of the world around him. In an entry of December 2nd
1939 in the Carnets, Sartre indicates that he had abandoned his theory
of salvation through art around the time that he gained a better grasp
of ethics, under the influence of Scheler [C: 288]. Ethics, in other
words, had come into conflict with aestheticism. Roquentin's project
stages this conflict, the literary work both symbolising the freedom of
282

aesthetics and being an expression of a new type of bad faith on his
part.
What are the implications of our discussion of the negative
dimension of the imaginary in L'Imaginaire for Sartre's conception of
literary writing? Are we suggesting that, contrary to the account of the
work of art expounded in L Imaginaire, the real and its corollary,
ethics, were in fact central to Sartre's conception of literary writing in
the late 1930s? Such a conclusion would be a simplification. After all,
in the examples of the negative dimension of the imaginary in Sartre's
works which we have highlighted, individual characters have been our
focus, not the literary work as aesthetic object. The fact that Eve's
imaginary projections, for example, are a case of bad faith on her
part does not entail the claim that the reader's imaginary construction
of La Chambre is an instance of inauthentic conduct. Nor that Sartre's
writing oï La Chambre was an act intrinsically carrying ethical impli-
cations by dint of the fact that he was producing an aesthetic object. I
hence do not wish to put into question Sartre's account of the work of
art in L'Imaginaire, I do, however, believe it to be significantly
problematised. First, for all that Sartre conceives of the aesthetic
object as outside of the sphere of the real, he nevertheless infuses a
considerable amount of ethical and even political content into his
literary works of the late 1930s. There is hence a tension between
Sartre's aesthetic theory and his literary practice. Moreover, one need
only note the intense physicality of the descriptive content of a short
story such as Intimité to detect the paradoxical nature of the assertion
that the aesthetic is divorced from the real. One question begging is
whether for the Sartre of L'Imaginaire the literary work is, as a text,
just an aesthetic object. After all, his discussion of the work of art is
very brief and the examples he gives concern painting and music, not
writing. In Qu'est-ce que la littérature? he was to insist on the
connection which signification ensured between prose writing and the
real [QL: 25]. It may be that the account of the work of art in
L'Imaginaire, if taken to include the literary work, distorts Sartre's
actual view of the latter at the time. Sartre's strong tendency towards
realism in matters of ontology during the 1930s would certainly
harmonise with a conception of literary writing which was less purely
aestheticist than the conception of the work of art expounded in
283

L'Imaginaire. I will return to this matter later and defend nevertheless
the interpretation that the literary work is and remains for Sartre
primarily an aesthetic object.
Second, the conclusion to La Nausée is a different type of
example from the others we have discussed, its implications for
Sartre's conception of literary writing being further reaching. The
particularity of Roquentin's planned escape into the imaginary is that
he is the only character in Sartre's fiction who is actually a writer
himself. He had initially been writing a historical study of Rollebon,
and now, having long since abandoned that work, he is to embark
on a work of fiction. In his case, the connection which we established
between the imaginary and the ethical concept of inauthenticity
also has direct implications for Sartre's view of literary writing: the
planned literary work is itself the imaginary construction which will
enable Roquentin to flee the real, and as such can be seen as an
intrinsically inauthentic project.
These paradoxes are indicative of the fundamental ambiguity of
Sartre's position with respect to writing, ethics, and politics in the
latter half of the 1930s. In short, there is a tension between Sartre's
ontological realism, developing ethical theory, and growing political
anxieties on the one hand and a certain aestheticism on the other
which had carried over from his childhood and, as he explains in the
Carnets, from the unhappy period following his departure from the
Ecole Normale [C: 113]. In the closing pages oï La Nausée Sartre
seems to be clinging onto his youthful hope that writing literature
could counteract the absurdity and pointlessness of human life. The
pre-war anxieties which form the subtext to L'Enfance d'un chef,
however, suggest that even in 1938 Sartre sensed the inadequacy of
such a vision. With concrete reality threatening to metamorphose from
mere contingency and absurdity into totalitarian political domination,
the need for a more ethically resolute stance was evident, and in
December 1939 Sartre was to bury the idea of personal salvation
through art once and for all in the Carnets [C: 114]. From that time
on, he would see authenticity and reality-denying aestheticism as
mutually exclusive.
284

Towards Greater Commitment and Authenticity
We have already examined Sartre's preoccupation with attaining the
ethical ideal of authenticity throughout the Carnets. But what is to be
said of the Carnets from the standpoint of Sartre's developing concep-
tion of writing? The particularity of this work lies in the way the diary
form sets up a constant dialectic between the diverse events taking
place in Sartre's daily experience and the general progression in his
thinking. Sartre's documentation of and remarks about camp life with
the other conscripts are interspersed with ethical, historio-graphical,
and autobiographical reflections, the former, more practical field
acting upon and influencing the latter conceptual field. The consider-
able influence of Sartre's interactions with fellow conscript Pieter on
his developing conception of authenticity, for example, illustrates this
dialectical relationship. Throughout the Carnets Sartre exploits the
diary form to the full, this creating the impression that the act of
writing has drawn closer to concrete reality than hitherto. Writing now
seems to be a thoroughly worldly activity, and no subject is con-
sidered unsuitable or too insignificant for discussion. Writing, for
Sartre, now takes on a multiple function. He writes to document,
analyse, set out his ambitions, assess and criticise his own thinking
both past and present, and urge himself on to attain his goals.
In chapter VIII we looked at the way that Sartre's anti-fascist
political commitment, although indisputable, was veiled to some
extent by the pervasive use of irony in L'Enfance d'un chef. In the
case of Sartre's two wartime plays Bariona and Les Mouches there is
similarly a clear dimension of political commitment but it is camou-
flaged, now to escape censorship, by the use of allegory. In the
context of the French defeat of 1940, however, the real significance of
the calls to resist the oppressor which constitute the central action of
both these plays was perfectly evident.
14
It is from this time on that
14 In his review of Les Mouches in the clandestine resistance journal Les Lettres
françaises Michel Leiris suggested that spectators of the play should follow
Oreste's example by affirming their own freedom and committing themselves.
("Oreste et la cité", Les Lettres françaises, 12 December 1943)
285

writing for Sartre takes on the dimension of being a political act.
Bariona is the first of Sartre's texts which actively encourages
commitment to a political project to change the world. It is the first
tentative expression of the conviction that Sartre will articulate
after the war that writing is intrinsically a form of action, and his
first direct implication of the act of writing in the ideological battle.
From 1943 Sartre participated in the 'Comité national des écrivains'
(CNE) which was led by the communists, and the vociferousness of
the anti-collaborationist articles which he penned that year for Les
Lettres françaises leaves in no doubt the force of his political
commitment during this period.
15
It also reveals his developing
dialectical cast of mind with respect to writing: from the outbreak of
war onwards, Sartre conceives of writing as an activity taking place
not only in a situational context but crucially in relation to it. His
writing increasingly comments on and seeks to act upon that context,
the political dimension of which is increasingly acknowledged.
Réflexions sur la question juive, written shortly after the Liberation
in 1944, develops the explicitly committed trajectory of Sartre's
clandestine resistance articles. Sartre paints an unremittingly nega-
tive portrait of the anti-semite suggesting that he is guilty of the
worst kind of inauthenticity: afraid of accepting his real nature as a
free being in the world, '[1]'antisémite est l'homme qui veut être
roc impitoyable, torrent furieux, foudre dévastatrice: tout sauf un
homme.' [RQJ: 64]
In the 'Présentation des Temps modernes' Sartre theorises ex-
plicitly for the first time his growing insistence on the dialectic
between writing and the writer's situation in the world. He rejects
the 'héritage d'irresponsabilité' [P: 10] of bourgeois writers which
he presents as a corollary of the analytic mode of thinking [P: 19].
The writer, he argues, is not abstracted from reality but is '"dans le
coup'", a phrase which he had used in March 1940 to describe the
type of authenticity to which he was aspiring [C: 393]. 'L'écrivain',
he continues, 'est en situation dans son époque: chaque parole a des
15 There is the notable example of his polemical dismissal of Drieu which
combines intellectual critique and personal slander. ('Drieu la Rochelle ou la
haine de soi', Les Lettres françaises, no.6, April 1943)
286

retentissements. Chaque silence aussi.' [P: 13] It is evident from
this claim that the responsibility which Sartre attributes to the
writer is total, writing now being a corollary of the conception of
subjective freedom which he was to expound a few months later
in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. Ethics is centre-stage once
again, having been ostensibly sidelined in L'Etre et le néant, and the
responsibility of the writer, like that of the non-writer, is vital to
the shaping of the course which society will take. The writer, like
non-writing subjects, is at once acted upon and acts upon society and
as such is a part of the existentialist dialectic of history, the first
clear signs of which can be glimpsed in this text and which will
ultimately reach theoretical maturity in the Critique de la raison
dialectique.
Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? groups together and develops many
of the aforementioned preoccupations. A lengthy and complex work,
it is here that Sartre offers the most detailed exposition of his views of
the immediate postwar years on prose writing, criticism, the changing
function of literature throughout history, and the writer-reader
relationship. The work culminates in an extended discussion of the
role Sartre thinks writing should play in contemporary society. The
global significance of the case Sartre makes lies in his extension of
the ontological, ethical, and political synthesis in the contemporaneous
Cahiers pour une morale to prose writing and its aesthetic appre-
ciation. In Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? writing is presented as con-
comitant with the ideal of authentic ethical conduct sketched out in the
Cahiers. Sartre also conceives of writing as a vital contribution to
the political struggle for socialism which, for reasons which we will
examine shortly, harmonises with the Marxist conception of ethics
which we discussed in chapter VIL
Sartre initially advances the claim that the signifying character of
language ensures that, in the case of prose writing at least, it has a
strongly utilitarian dimension and draws us closer to the objects of the
real world. The prose writer uses language to designate objects and 'la
nomination implique un perpétuel sacrifice du nom à l'objet nommé
[...] le nom s'y révèle l'inessentiel, en face de la chose qui est essen-
tielle.' [QL: 18] In the Cahiers, Sartre argues that the post-conversion
consciousness which has rejected the project to be God confers
287

meaning on, or 'unveils' being [CM: 502-3]. In Qu'est-ce que la
littérature? signifying prose language becomes an instrument in this
process, allowing the writer to 'dévoiler le monde' [QL: 29]. The
designation of objects is in no sense innocent, however, because
nomination necessarily affects the way we understand the object. The
prose writer is necessarily engaged in a form of action because he acts
upon the reader's understanding of the world: 'Parler c'est agir: toute
chose qu'on nomme n'est déjà plus tout à fait la même' [QL: 27].
Action for Sartre necessarily implies responsibility and commitment:
'à chaque mot que je dis, je m'engage un peu plus dans le monde'
[QL: 28] His expression 'l'écrivain « engagé »' [QL: 28] implicitly
suggests a distinction between the writer who willingly shoulders his
commitment and the writer who in bad faith tries to ignore it, not a
distinction between the politically committed writer and the supposed-
ly apolitical writer. All prose writers are unavoidably committed by
the very nature of the activity in which they are involved, Sartre
believes, hence his reference to ie rêve impossible de faire une pein-
ture impartiale de la Société et de la condition humaine.'[QL: 28] It is
worth noting, however, that Sartre discreetly amalgamates two distinct
dimensions of the concept of commitment here, namely the unavoid-
able commitment resulting from the nomination of objects in language
on the one hand, and explicit commitment to a political cause on the
other.
It is not only writing that involves action in Sartre's view but also
reading [QL: 67]. Reiterating the description of the work of art in
L'Imaginaire, he defines reading as 'la synthèse de la perception et de
la création' [QL: 50]. Reading involves both unveiling the objects
designated in the text, and creating the 'totalité organique' [QL: 51] of
the text in the imagination. Ultimately, the completed literary work is
a collaboration between writer and reader and Sartre's account of the
way the two relate to each other in the process of its creation is
entirely coherent with his account of relations of reciprocity in the
Cahiers. The writer's text, Sartre argues, is an appeal to the reader:
'l'écrivain en appelle à la liberté du lecteur pour qu'elle collabore à la
production de son ouvrage.' [QL: 53] The reader's free participation
in the creation of the work in response to this appeal is an act of
generosity. It also involves implicitly recognising the creative freedom
288

of the writer. The writer-reader relationship is hence characterised by
the mutual acknowledgement of the freedom of the other: 'plus nous
éprouvons notre liberté, plus nous reconnaissons celle de l'autre; plus
il exige de nous et plus nous exigeons de lui.' [QL: 58] The writer-
reader collaboration means that both carry responsibility for the
work's creation and for the place it occupies in the world. Moreover,
as it involves a mutual recognition of freedoms, the work itself
becomes a demand for human freedom in general, Sartre argues, and
hence by its very nature carries ethical implications: 'bien que la lit-
térature soit une chose et la morale une tout autre chose, au fond de
l'impératif esthétique nous discernons l'impératif moral.' [QL: 69]
In the above thesis, Sartre suggests that the completed literary
work is the highest expression of the ideal of an ethics of authen-
ticity.
16
His account presents the work as the optimum site of relations
of reciprocity between individual subjects, and hence as a model for
the mutual recognition of subjective freedoms in general. As such, it is
also the basis for the broadening of intersubjective solidarity indis-
pensable to the socialist project. The creative writer is thus portrayed
as the epitome of authentic conduct, but the critic by contrast is
presented as engaged in a thoroughly inauthentic project. The critic,
16 However, there does nevertheless remain a fundamentally inauthentic dimen­
sion to writing as Sartre describes it. We saw in chapter VII that Sartre argues
in the Cahiers that, after conversion, consciousness confers meaning on being.
Apparently pushing this claim one step further in Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?,
Sartre argues that the writer appeals to the freedom of the reader in order to
render himself essential to being: 'Ecrire [...] [c]'est recourir à la conscience
d'autrui pour se faire reconnaître comme essentiel à la totalité de l'être; c'est
vouloir vivre cette essentialité par personnes interposées' [QL: 67]. Hence,
through writing, consciousness seeks to gain an essentiality which it otherwise
lacks. The objection has often been made to Sartre's philosophy that for all he
is critical of the tendency towards the 'sérieux', his own project as a writer was
itself 'sérieux', whether it be his early desire to ensure himself personal
salvation through literature or his later conviction that he could act on the world
politically through writing. It is here in these passages of Qu 'est-ce que la
littérature? that an explanation can perhaps be found for Sartre's lifelong
project to write. When he claims that the writer seeks to 'se faire reconnaître
comme essentiel à la totalité de l'être' [QL: 67], he suggests that when a person
writes he is trying to establish for himself a foundation in the world.
289

Sartre suggests, takes refuge from his own life in the contemporary
world through studying the great literature of the past. Shying away
from real passions and conflicts, his predilection for dead authors
allows him to avoid taking sides in intellectual disputes. First, the
matters on which those writers disagreed are no longer current and
there hence appears to be no urgency to take a stand one way or the
other. Second, the activity of the critic has a taming and domesticating
effect both on the ideas discussed and on the critic himself who
becomes as docile as his prose. He will tell us that ia pensée française
est un perpétuel entretien entre Pascal et Montaigne', Sartre remarks.
'Par là, il n'entend point rendre Pascal et Montaigne plus vivants,
mais Malraux et Gide plus morts.' [QL: 39] Dealing with contem-
porary writers might prove problematic as the critic would be obliged
to implicate himself personally in currently controversial debates,
so he prefers to limit his critical attentions to the great canonical
writers. Although the concept of bad faith is not mentioned explictly
in this discussion, Sartre's portrait of the literary critic bears all its
hallmarks. The critic's conduct clearly exemplifies the idea of a 'fuite'
or 'évasion' of the truth of the situation which Sartre sees as
characteristic of bad faith. In this context, the truth in question for
Sartre is the idea that writing inevitably involves the writer in a
dialectic with his present situation. Sartre believes that the major
writers of literary history demonstrated an awareness of this truth, but
that the critic's own approach to writing is founded on a refusal of it,
the prose he produces being alarmingly innocuous in its pseudo-
impartiality. In short, the critic is lying to himself about his own
situation in the world: he tries to hide behind intellectual history rather
than accepting total responsibility for himself in his present situation,
and he constructs a distorted view of the great writers of the past in an
attempt to legitimate his own inauthentic project. In Sartre's account,
it is as if the critic, like the 'rêveur morbide' [/: 283] described in
L'Imaginaire, refuses the real world in the existential present, in
favour of a timeless sphere which he has created for himself in which
he can feel secure. His attentions are so exclusively centred on the
past that he succeeds in insulating himself from the existential
uncertainties of the present. By the same token, however, he also cuts
himself off from the possibility for meaningful action.
290

The implications of Sartre's objections to critical writing are far-
reaching. They are part of a rejection of intellectual liberalism, a
tendency in Sartre's own critical writing of the late 1930s, and which
he had first explicitly distanced himself from in 'Présentation des
Temps Modernes'. Many years later, in On a raison de se révolter,
Sartre would link his lack of political commitment during the 1930s to
the fact that he was an 'intellectuel libéral de cette République des
professeurs' [ORR: 23] at the time. The German victory of 1940 had
'mis en déroute toutes mes idées qui s'inspiraient encore du libéral-
isme.' [ORR: 24]17 In Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Sartre, armed with
a newfound sense of the importance of political commitment, is keen
to show that this pre-war tendency has been exorcised from his
thought. Moreover, his disparaging view of critical writing is of a
piece in this regard with his rejection of the non-committed stance of
nineteenth-century writers, whose world-view had also exerted a
determining influence on his thinking during his youth. Sartre argues
that despite a sometimes tense relationship with bourgeois society, the
vast majority of nineteenth-century writers ultimately continued to
address the bourgeois reading public. Many catered to the 'idéalisme,
psychologisme, déterminisme, utilitarisme, esprit de sérieux' which
the bourgeoisie expected of them and their works reflected and served
to legitimate bourgeois dominance [QL: 123-4]. The best writers
refused to do this and claimed to sever all contact with the bour-
geoisie, and yet this refusal ultimately only amounted to an evasion
into solitude: '[l'écrivain] invente qu'on écrit pour soi ou pour Dieu,
17 Sartre nevertheless exaggerates somewhat the extent to which his thinking
during the 1920s and 1930s acccorded with the dominant liberal tendencies of
the time. Like Nizan's literary criticism, Sartre chose as subjects for explicative
criticism only those works by others which would allow him to further the
development of his own philosophical and aesthetic vision at the time. Be it his
approving articles devoted to Dos Passos, Faulkner, or Husserl's concept of
intentionality, or his savage critique of Mauriac, Sartre wrote articles only on
topics which enabled him to articulate his own tendencies, and his tone is rarely
neutral. On this matter, Michel Contât has rightly remarked (during a paper
entitled 'Sartre, la philosophie et l'université', at the 2005 'Groupe d'Etudes
Sartriennes' conference) that the young Sartre did not read the works of others
in order to explicate or teach their ideas but solely as a means to think and
develop his own ideas.
291

il fait de l'écriture une occupation métaphysique' [QL: 130]. The
writer's rupture with the bourgeoisie hence remained only symbolic
[QL: 129]. Moreover, his refusal to serve the bourgeoisie did not
extend as far as political contestation. The writer 'est si loin de vouloir
du mal à la bourgeoisie qu'il ne lui conteste même pas le droit de
gouverner.' [QL: 130] Ultimately, Sartre argues, echoing Marx and
Engels in The German Ideology, literature, 'du sein de sa révolte,
reflète encore les classes dirigeantes dans ses structures les plus
profondes et dans son « style ».' [QL: 150] Absent in literature from
the nineteenth century onwards was the radicalism of the preceding
century and Sartre laments the fact that the writer in bourgeois society
never managed to 'faire passer la littérature de la négativité et de
l'abstraction à la construction concrète' [QL: 151-2].
18
In Sartre's
view, the majority of nineteenth-century writers were hence political
reactionaries because they refused to commit to the struggle against
bourgeois dominance. Like the literary critics he lambasts, they were
not willing to implicate themselves personally in the pressing social
and political issues of their day.
From Inauthenticity, Intellectual Liberalism, and
Abstraction to Contingency and Existential Uncertainty:
the Case of Antoine Roquentin
I will now return briefly to La Nausée and examine more extensively
the implications of Roquentin's attitude with respect to writing as I
believe that Sartre's portrayal of Roquentin the writer lays the ground
for and subtly anticipates certain key aspects of the aforementioned
18 The Marxian overtones implied by Sartre's opposition between abstraction and
the concrete here is worth noting: whereas the non-committed writer whose
works indirectly lent support to the bourgeoisie (and hence the 'esprit d'ana­
lyse') was involved in an 'occupation métaphysique' [QL: 130], committed
writing (which Sartre had associated with the 'esprit de synthèse' and left
politics in 'Présentation') is linked with 'la construction concrète' [QL: 151-2].
292

arguments in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? My analysis will focus
notably on the pages prior to and following the famous portrait gallery
scene in the centre of the novel. This scene constitutes a crucial turn-
ing point in La Nausée as the experience of observing the portraits of
the bourgeois leaders catalytically triggers the change in Roquentin
which he has been gradually feeling his way towards for some time.
Subsequent to his departure from the Bouville museum, Roquentin
adopts a new course on which he will remain until the final pages of
the novel, the basis of which is his abandonment of the critical project
he is working on and his rejection of bourgeois ideology.
Throughout the first half of La Nausée, Roquentin's principal
activity is the preparatory research he is undertaking for a critical
work about the marquis of Rollebon. Sartre's portrayal of this critical
project is ironic in tone, and his depiction of Roquentin's intention to
write a book of this sort indirectly conveys the uncreativity and
ineffectualness of the critic who he would later castigate in Qu 'est-ce
que la littérature? The subject of Roquentin's study is presented as
innocuously arcane to a degree bordering on the ridiculous: the mar-
quis was such a relatively unnoteworthy figure in his day that
Roquentin had first learnt of him only in a footnote buried away in a
book on Mirabeau-Tonneau, and the majority of the documents relat-
ing to him are to be found in Bouville municipal library rather than in
Paris [TV: 28-9]. There are clear indications that Roquentin's project is
a fundamentally inauthentic one. He tries to hide behind the personage
of Rollebon and the idea of writing a critical work in an attempt to
stave off his existential uncertainties in the temporal present. He
attempts, in other words, to escape having to face his real situation in
the world:
Au fond, qu'est-ce que je cherche ? Je n'en sais rien. Longtemps l'homme,
Rollebon, m'a intéressé plus que le livre à écrire. Mais maintenant, l'homme...
l'homme commence à m'ennuyer. C'est au livre que je m'attache, je sens un
besoin de plus en plus fort de l'écrire [N: 29-30]
M. de Rollebon représente, à l'heure qu'il est, la seule justification de mon
existence. [N: 106]
293

The period of Roquentin's study of Rollebon is one during which he is
characterised by what Joseph S. Catalano has described as 'bad faith
in the strong sense'.
19
Indeed, his critical project is partly constitutive
of this strong form of bad faith because he is not simply playing out a
role, as Sartre thinks that we always inevitably do,
20
but is using this
role to hide from his freedom.
21
In Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Sartre
comments that 'la plupart des critiques sont des hommes qui n'ont pas
eu beaucoup de chance et qui, au moment où ils allaient désespérer,
ont trouvé une petite place tranquille de gardien de cimetière. Dieu
sait si les cimetières sont paisibles: il n'en est pas plus riant qu'une
bibliothèque. Les morts sont là' [QL: 33]. This comment is part of the
portrait which Sartre paints of the bad faith of the critic and is
anticipated a decade earlier by the portrayal of Roquentin in La
Nausée. The Bouville library is the site of Roquentin's enquiries into
the life of Rollebon but also becomes a refuge when his existential
uncertainties and the contingency of the world outside grow too acute:
Je suis entré dans la salle de lecture et j'ai pris, sur une table, La Chartreuse de
Parme. J'essayais de m'absorber dans ma lecture, de trouver un refuge dans la
claire Italie de Stendhal. J'y parvenais par à-coups, par courtes hallucinations,
puis je retombais dans cette journée menaçante. [N: 119]
As the closing sentence of this quotation indicates, Roquentin's
attempt to shelter himself from the contemporary world behind the
reassuring presence of intellectual history is not entirely successful.
As such, it prefigures Sartre's claim in L'Etre et le néant that although
many people habitually live in bad faith they are nevertheless subject
to 'de brusques réveils de cynisme ou de bonne foi' [EN: 85]. Indeed,
as the narrative develops it becomes apparent that Roquentin, despite
seeing the library as a refuge, is growing increasingly frustrated with
his critical project devoted to Rollebon: 'Rollebon m'assomme'
19 Joseph S. Catalano 'Good and Bad Faith: Weak and Strong Notions', re-printed
in W. McBride Existentialist Ethics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997)
p.125
20 Sartre argues that 'il est indifférent d'être de bonne ou de mauvaise foi, parce
que la mauvaise foi ressaisit la bonne foi et se glisse à l'origine même de son
projet' [EN: 107].
21 Catalano op.cit. p. 125
294

[N: 33]; 'ce Rollebon m'agace. Il fait le mystérieux dans les plus
petites choses' [N: 89]. This frustration ultimately culminates in a
rejection of critical writing as such in favour of literary writing: 'il
fallait plutôt que j'écrive un roman sur le marquis de Rollebon.'
[N: 90]22
This movement towards greater authenticity on Roquentin's part
is paralleled and ultimately facilitated by his rejection of bourgeois
values and dominance. In the first half of La Nausée, an ill-defined
feeling of alienation with respect to the bourgeoisie on Roquentin's
part is perceptible. There is his notable encounter with Dr. Rogé,
for example, who he perceives as the epitome of middle-aged self-
satisfaction, experience, and social superiority. Rogé accords himself
the right to categorise Achille as 'un vieux toqué' [N: 101]: 'Le
docteur a le droit de parler: il n'a pas manqué sa vie; il a su se rendre
utile', Roquentin notes. 'Il se dresse, calme et puissant, au-dessus de
cette petite épave; c'est un roc' [N: 105]23 It is in the portrait gallery
scene in the Bouville museum, however, that Roquentin's animosity
towards the bourgeoisie comes to a head. We have already discussed
at some length in chapter III the ways in which Sartre's depiction of
the portraits of the leaders of Bouville interweaves his concept of
inauthenticity with bourgeois values. We also suggested that the por-
trait gallery scene can be read as instantiating the Marxist concept of
ideology in the pejorative sense: the bourgeois 'sérieux' can be
profitably interpreted as a textual representation of the concept of a
dominant ideology, and the bad faith of the petit bourgeois couple can
22 Years later, Sartre would describe his lengthy study of Flaubert L 'Idiot de la
famille as a 'roman vrai', thereby implicitly distancing his approach from the
style commonly employed in biographical and critical studies. His formulation
suggests that the approach he has taken involves a marriage of the aesthetic
field (the 'roman') and the truth-seeking philosophical/theoretical field (the
'vrai'), both of which Sartre distinguishes from the sphere of criticism. I will
discuss this distinction in the final subsection of this chapter.
23 Clearly, Rogé personifies the bourgeois 'sérieux'. Roquentin's closing remark
here is a noteworthily rare example of Sartre portraying the 'sérieux' as ai one
and the same time characterised by a tendency towards abstraction from the real
and towards substantiality: Rogé 'se dresse [...] au-dessus' and yet is also 'un
roc'.
295

be usefully read as an instantiation of the concept of false conscious-
ness. When Roquentin leaves the portrait gallery, his parting 'adieu,
Salauds' [N: 138] marks his definitive rejection of bourgeois values,
ideology, and inauthenticity.
24
It signifies at the same time a casting
aside once and for all of the bad faith and false consciousness induced
in the socially inferior classes.
Roquentin's rejection of the bourgeois world-view, like his
decision to abandon his critical project, is an important step in the
direction of greater authenticity. What is of particular interest is the
way in which these two watershed moments in Roquentin's experi-
ence coincide in the text such that there is a strong suggestion of
thematic interdependency and coherence. Roquentin's final decision
to abandon Rollebon is taken immediately after his rejection of the
bourgeoisie:
J'ai traversé le salon Bordurin-Renaudas dans toute sa longueur. Je me
retournai. Adieu, beaux lys tout en finesse dans vos petits sanctuaires peints,
adieu, beaux lys, notre orgueil et notre raison d'être, adieu, Salauds.
Lundi
Je n'écris plus mon livre sur Rollebon; c'est fini, je ne peux plus l'écrire.
Qu'est-ce que je vais faire de ma vie? [N: 138]
It is as if the two forms of bad faith in the strong sense, namely that
induced by critical writing and that encouraged by the bourgeois
social paradigm, constitute a coherent whole in Roquentin's experi-
ence. Once Roquentin begins to question his own freedom-limiting
docility with regard to intellectual endeavour and bourgeois domin-
ance, his increasingly subversive attitude towards the one is encour-
aged by his questioning of the other and vice versa. There is, in other
words, a sort of deconstructive dialectic at work in Roquentin's
24 Such thematic overlaps implicitly problematise the commonly held view that
there is little connection between La Nausée and Sartre's growing Marxist
sympathies of the postwar years. Geneviève Idt, for example, in her study of La
Nausée (Hatier, 1971, pp. 12-3), suggests that Sartre's negative portrayals of
the bourgeoisie have 'rien de commun avec la lutte des classes'. This
formulation is excessively forceful, foreclosing as it does on the possibility of
identifying common ground with Marxist ideology theory.
296

gradual awakening to a more authentic type of existence. Moreover,
Roquentin's dual rejection constitutes more than a paradigm-shift in
his ethical outlook on the world as it also carries political implications
which subtly link Sartre's world-view of the 1930s with radical
thought. First, the implied rejection of the methodology and practice
of the liberal intellectual writer shares important common ground
with the Marxist world-view and approach to writing. Roquentin's
paradigm-shift does not of course lead him to any form of political
commitment but it does take him beyond an undialectical conception
of writing characterised principally by the inactivity-in-the-world of
the writer. As such, it opens the way for Sartre's postwar view that
writing is a form of action carrying intrinsic political implications. For
the post-Rollebon Roquentin, ideas can no longer be compartment-
alised in the manner of the erudite intellectual historian because the
writer is in situation in the world and his ideas must be part of an
interactive process with the world in the existential present. Second,
the implication of a coherence between the bourgeois world-view and
the liberal intellectual itself carries Marxist overtones. Classic Marx-
ists traditionally saw the lack of political commitment of the liberal
intellectual as an attitude which, at the very least, lent implicit support
to the bourgeois-run capitalist order. For Marxists, liberal writing,
rather like idealist philosophy,
25
involved the erroneous assumption
that the sphere of knowledge enjoyed an independence from real
conditions and practical activity. It was on this basis that liberals did
25 As we have already seen in previous chapters, for the early Marx these
tendencies were characterised by their abstraction from the real which was
concomitant with the bourgeois condition. In Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? (pp.
120-130) Sartre was similarly to describe the bourgeois condition and mindset
as divorced from practical realities. Viewed in a Marxian light, Roquentin's
simultaneous rejection of intellectual liberalism and the bourgeois mindset can
in fact be seen as a distant descendant of Marx's assimilation of idealist
philosophy and bourgeois ideology to each other in The German Ideology.
Marx had similarly rejected both at once in the name of an insistence on the
unity of theory and practice, which he articulated notably in the 'Theses on
Feuerbach'. In so far as Qu'est-ce que la littérature? explicitly adopts the
Marxian position, La Nausée is best understood as subtly anticipating Sartre's
postwar stance.
297

not see the need to commit to socially and politically progressive
tendencies in their writings.
What follows Roquentin's double rejection is nothing short of a
rebirth as he reawakens to the world around him and to his place in it.
Radical political implications notwithstanding, Roquentin does not
veer suddenly towards left political commitment however, but rather
towards a fuller recognition of the contingency of the phenomena he
perceives and an acute awareness of the existential present. In a war
diary entry of 22
nd
September 1939, Sartre was to state that '[v]is-à-
vis de Gauguin, Van Gogh et Rimbaud j'ai un net complexe d'infér-
iorité parce qu'ils ont su se perdre. Gaughin par son exil, Van Gogh
par sa folie et Rimbaud, plus qu'eux tous, parce qu'il a su renoncer
même à écrire. Je pense de plus en plus que, pour atteindre l'authen-
ticité, il faut que quelque chose craque.' Ironically Sartre, who lam-
ents the fact that he by contrast is 'ligoté à mon désir d'écrire' [C:
214], had in fact staged precisely this passage to greater authenticity in
Roquentin's decision to abandon the Rollebon project. Once Rollebon
is cast aside, Roquentin becomes acutely aware of the temporal
present and of its relationship with existence: 'du présent, rien d'autre
que du présent [...] La vrai nature du présent se dévoilait: il était ce
qui existe, et tout ce qui n'était pas présent n'existait pas. Le passé
n'existait pas.' [N: 139] He now realises that Rollebon had served as
an alibi, a convenient excuse for not facing up to the reality of existing
in the contemporary world: 'il avait besoin de moi pour être et j'avais
besoin de lui pour ne pas sentir mon être'; 'Je ne m'apercevais plus
que j'existais, je n'existais plus en moi, mais en lui' [N: 143]. 'Jamais
plus', Roquentin notes, 'je ne me rendrai à la bibliothèque pour y
consulter les archives.' [N: 142] As he grows acutely sensitive to the
nature of existence, the phenomena he perceives appear increasingly
contingent in character:
[...] ce journal est-ce encore moi? tenir le journal existence contre existence,
les choses existent les unes contre les autres [...] La maison jaillit, elle existe
[N: 147]
298

Taking cognizance of the real nature of existence is also presented as
involving a movement away from abstraction,
26
as the famous chest-
nut tree scene reveals:
[...] l'existence s'était soudain dévoilée. Elle avait perdu son allure inoffensive
de catégorie abstraite: c'était la pâte même des choses [N: 182]
Cette racine, avec sa couleur, sa forme, son mouvement figé, était [...] au-
dessous de toute explication. [TV: 185]
Roquentin now opposes things to words, preferring the former, and a
rejection of the implicitly rational nature of language is suggested:
'Absurdité: encore un mot; je me débats contre des mots; là-bas, je
touchais la chose'; 'le monde des explications et des raisons n'est pas
celui de l'existence'; 'Cette racine [...] existait dans la mesure où je
ne pouvais pas l'expliquer.' [N: 184] The more Roquentin observes
the tree root, the more he has the sensation of being consumed by his
awareness of it, almost as if he were one with the object itself: 'J'étais
la racine de marronnier. Ou plutôt j'étais tout entier conscience de son
existence' [N: 187] If, as Sartre was to claim in 1939, the possibility
of 'losing oneself involves being able to give up writing after the
fashion of Rimbaud, Roquentin undoubtedly succeeds where Sartre
feels that he has not.
In the closing pages of La Nausée, however, Roquentin returns to
the project to write when he intends to set to work on a literary
project. I have already argued that this conclusion can be read both as
an affirmation of freedom and as a new type of inauthentic flight from
the reality of the situation, there being both positive and negative
dimensions to Sartre's conception of the imaginary. Elaborating on the
implications of this ambiguity, we can see that on the one hand, the
production of the literary work is a form of action which is more
authentic than the Rollebon project. It does not involve Roquentin
26 This suggestion that a movement away from abstraction is central to a correct
perception of the real lends credence to the link we made tentatively in footnote
24 between La Nausée and Marx's early thought. Although Sartre's rejection of
the bourgeoisie in La Nausée does not extend as far as actual political
contestation, the Marxian theoretical leanings which would be so evident in his
postwar political writings can be clearly perceived even at this early stage.
299

attempting to hide behind and justify his existence through intellectual
history and, as an aesthetic project, it will imply much greater rela-
tions of reciprocity between himself as author and his readers. It is for
these reasons in all probability that Nizan saw in the closing pages of
La Nausée the potential for future political commitment, as we noted
in chapter VIII. Roquentin's planned fictional work represents a
reaffirmation of the possibility for meaningful action which his
awakening to his situation in the world and in the existential present
had opened up. On the other hand, there is also undeniably an escapist
dimension to Roquentin's recourse to the imaginary which distances
him only further from politics. It is as if Sartre, in his depiction of
Roquentin's trajectory in La Nausée, felt able to go some way in the
direction of conceiving of greater ethical and political freedom but
was unwilling at this stage to advocate active commitment to any
particular cause. Roquentin's rejection of the bourgeois world-view
and of the Rollebon project are an affirmation of subjective freedom
with respect to a dominant ideology and his own bad faith. Yet Sartre,
still taken at this stage with the phenomenological world-view, does
not seem to know what to do with that freedom once it has been
acquired, rather as his character Mathieu does not throughout much
of Les Chemins de la liberté. Hence Roquentin, having made his
existential discoveries, ultimately retreats back into the safer sphere of
the imaginary like Hilbert at the end of Eros trate.
Sartre's conception of contemporary writing
in Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?:
writing in support of the socialist revolution
My analyses of Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?', both earlier in this chap-
ter and in preceding chapters, have included the identification of ways
in which Sartre's theoretical claims either directly descend from
Marxist principles or share significant conceptual common ground
with the Marxist defence of the socialist ideal. In this section I will
300

explore this area further, advancing the claim that the case Sartre
makes for committed contemporary prose writing is better understood
when considered in the light of a specific Marxist school of reflection
on matters pertaining to writing and art, namely that which came to
prominence under the Bolsheviks. In chapter VII, we examined the
ways in which Sartre's burgeoning ethics of authenticity in the Cah-
iers formed a coherent whole with the Marxist conception of morality
founded on the class struggle and the historical dialectic. The Cahiers
of course remained unpublished until after Sartre's death and, for his
readers of the late 1940s, it was in fact Qu'est-ce que la littérature?,
written a short time before the Cahiers, that offered the only sustained
exposition of the synthesis of ethics, ontology and left politics which
Sartre was working towards. However, with literature being the focus
of this work, the aesthetic field was introduced into this complex
synthesis: the matter of the role that prose art, and its production by
the writer, could play in the historical process came to the fore in
Sartre's global position.
The account of the role of writing and literature in the
contemporary context which Sartre offers in the long closing chapter
of Qu'est-ce que la littérature? is of an essentially prescriptive
character. Sartre's primary objective in this chapter is to advocate an
approach to writing which he believes is needed in the immediate
postwar French context, not to offer a critical account of existing
literary tendencies. This prescriptive approach itself exemplifies and
emphasises the political dimension of the case Sartre makes for
committed writing, his prose often reading like a manifesto for
political action. Citing Malraux and Camus as possible models, and
referring at length to the prose technique he employs in his own
novels, Sartre advocates a 'littérature des grandes circonstances' [QL:
223]. By this, he has in mind an approach to prose fiction which
stages the relationship between the individual, society and the histor-
ical process. The writer's technique, Sartre thinks, should reflect and
convey this problematic, and he should implicate himself in it and the
ethical questions it throws up through the very act of writing. The
writer is himself historically situated and hence cannot abstract
himself from his social context when he writes. The novels he writes
should be 'romans de situation' [QL: 224] devoid of omniscient
301

narrators and predictable certainties. They should 'laisser partout des
doutes, des attentes, de l'inachevé et réduire le lecteur à faire lui-
même des conjectures' [QL: 224-5]. Any event depicted should retain
'sa brutale fraîcheur, son ambiguïté, son imprévisibilité' for the reader
who the writer should 'prendre à la gorge: que chaque personnage
soit un piège, que le lecteur y soit attrapé' [QL: 226]. Ultimately, the
reader should have the sensation of being thrown into the world and
into history by words which are 'des tobbogans déversant les lecteurs
au milieu d'un univers sans témoins, bref que nos livres existent] à la
façon des choses, des plantes, des événements et non d'abord comme
des produits de l'homme' [QL: 228].
In this final statement, the ultra-realist philosophical tendency of
the early Sartre is clearly perceptible. This is evidently the same Sartre
who, fifteen years earlier, had been drawn to phenomenology after
Aron told him that it would allow him to philosophise even about the
cocktail he was drinking [FA: 157]. And also the same Sartre
who then proceeded to re-write Husserl's philosophy, postulating a
transcendant rather than transcendental ego, in the interests of
reaching a greater degree of realism free of idealist abstraction. The
Sartre of 1947, whose central concept of situation now incorporates
the historical, social and economic fields, wants readers to be
confronted with the world they inhabit directly in all its complexity
and take responsibility for themselves in it. This position marks a new
conception of realism in Sartre's thinking - the Marxist paradigm
having supplanted that of phenomenology - but a persisting belief in
the fundamental truths which the external objects of the world can
yield remains a common thread linking the two in Sartre's thinking.
Just as the existential truth of the tree root in La Nausée could not be
explained because it was beneath the rationality of language, Sartre
now envisages conceiving of books themselves as objects in the
world, that is as phenomena situated beneath the civilising rationality
of language ('que nos livres existent] à la façon des choses' [QL:
288]). Books, Sartre believes, can only express the truths of the world
by ceasing to be civilised documents of human culture. They must
become one with the objects of the world, they must themselves take
on the status of objects and be themselves part of the composition of
the world in all its rawness and uncertainty. This conviction would
302

appear to be a case of Sartrean 'penser contre soi-même', however,
because Sartre's mention of books here is evidently not a reference to
books as actual physical objects in the world (the claim would be
thuddingly banal) but rather to the discourse they contain.
It would be a mistake to exaggerate the extent to which
Sartre's politico-historical attitude towards writing in Qu'est-ce que la
littérature? represents a radical departure from the position articulated
in L'Imaginaire, at least with regard to the aesthetic dimension of
literary writing specifically. In the later work, both writing and read-
ing are presented as thoroughly worldly activities and yet, on the
occasions that Sartre discusses the artwork as such, it is presented in
very similar terms to those used in L'Imaginaire, The aesthetic object
remains an imaginary construction which lies beyond the language
that composes it on the page: i'objet littéraire, quoiqu'il se réalise à
travers le langage, n'est jamais donné dans le langage; il est, au con-
traire, par nature, silence et contestation de la parole [...] le sens n'est
pas la somme des mots, il en est la totalité organique.' [QL : 51] The
text as work of art is gratuitous and an end in itself. In L'Imaginaire
Sartre had cordoned ethics off from aesthetics. In Qu 'est-ce que la
littérature? the act of writing carries ethical implications which subse-
quently come back into the equation in the act of reading because the
text, by its very nature, induces the reader to take cognizance of his
own freedom: 'L'œuvre d'art est gratuite parce qu'elle est fin absolue
et qu'elle se propose au spectateur comme un impératif catégorique.'
[QL: 233]
There is an important area of conceptual coherence in early
Sartrean thought between the beyond-language character of the work
considered as an aesthetic object and the beyond-language character
of the existential dimension of objects of perception. Just as the
rationality of language is an obstacle to the apprehension of objects
such as the tree root in La Nausée, so a rejection of merely signifying
language is among the necessary conditions for the literary work
as aesthetic object to come into being. In both cases, it is the posi-
tivistic implications
27
of the designation of objects by words which is
27 Simont op.cit. p .86 reminds us that positivism was an 'objet d'aversion pour
Sartre dès ses premiers écrits.'
303

in question. In Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?, on the one hand Sartre
fully recognises this dimension of linguistic usage, attributing to prose
writing a utilitarian function which he considers valuable to a realist
understanding of the world. And yet he neverthless also favours the
kind of writing in which this dimension of language is flouted or
problematised. At this level, the aesthetic field and the sphere of the
existential reality of objects in the world are coordinate in Sartre's
thought. Both literary works and the attempt to explain existential
truth inevitably involve language, and yet the object sought is non-
linguistic. There is hence an important sense in which novels and
philosophical treatises are of similar status for Sartre
28
and are
qualitatively different from, and preferable to, non-aesthetic (i.e.
non-literary) and non-truth seeking (i.e. non -philosophical) prose dis-
course. The latter type of discourse - employed by such as critics -
remains caught in the positivist trap of prosaic language whereas
literary and philosophical discourse invite the reader to adopt a
pyschological attitude characterised by greater freedom of the imagin-
ation or by a greater ability to intuit fundamental truths about the
world. Two further points are worth noting in this regard. First, what
initially inspires Roquentin to seek solace in the imaginary at the end
of La Nausée is not a book but music. Indeed, a passage of some
length is devoted to discussion of the recording of 'Some of These
28 In this regard, a link can also be established, moreover, between these two types
of prose discourse and Sartre's conception of poetry. Sartre's famous dis­
tinction between poetry and prose involves the key claim that the utilitarian
dimension of prose writing distances it further from the imaginary/aesthetic
sphere than in the case of poetry. However, when the prose work is considered
as an aesthetic object, it too becomes an imaginary construction according to
Sartre's theory. Ultimately, the question is whether, for Sartre, literary prose
works are qualitatively closer to non-literary prose works than they are to
poetry or vice versa. The matter of the status of prose writing for Sartre lies at
the heart of this question. Our discussion has highlighted the ambiguity of
Sartre's position. I have sought unconventionally to develop the case for inter-
peting Sartre's conception of literary prose writing as tending towards poetry.
That is, I have suggested that in the case of prose writing which constitutes a
work of art and only in that case, there is the suggestion in Qu 'est-ce que la
littérature? that the completed work as aesthetic object exists as an organic
totality which is beyond the signifying language which composes it.
304

Days' which he is listening to for the final time in the café. It is only
when he realises that he cannot escape reality in the manner of the
songwriter and the singer that Roquentin falls back on the idea of
writing a book, albeit it '[u]ne autre espèce de livre '[N: 249]:
Est-ce que je ne pourrais pas essayer.. .Naturellement il ne s'agirait pas d'un air
de musique...mais est-ce que je ne pourrais pas, dans un autre genre... ? Il
faudrait que ce soit un livre: je ne sais rien faire d'autre. [N: 249]
Sartre suggests that our passage to the imaginary is easier and more
direct in the case of a non-linguistic and non-signifying artform like
music than in the case of literary writing. Prose writing by its very
nature inhibits our passage to the imaginary and hence complicates
our aesthetic appreciation of the text.
Second, when Sartre argues that books - ie. prose discourse -
should take on the status of things in the world ('que nos livres
existent] à la façon des choses' [QL: 228]), what is implied is the idea
that philosophical discourse seeking to explain the phenomena of the
world might have the capacity to be one with the world itself. The
prose discourse of philosophy is employed to construct theories
which, as conceptual totalities, can be considered beyond the signi-
fying language employed to compose them. The 'truths' of philosophy
hence can (rather idealistically) be seen as untrammelled by the
mediating interface of language. When an attempt to explain the phe-
nomena of the world in philosophy is considered to be successful, that
is when a 'truth' is ascertained, it can hence be seen as a direct and
unmediated intuition of the reality of those phenomena. Such a 'truth'
is in a sense one with the phenomena themselves.
The common ground shared by the text as aesthetic object and
the text as opening onto the phenomena of the world is revealing of
Sartre's approach to writing in general. For Sartre, a contemporary
novel should at one and the same time invite the reader to take full
cognizance of his freedom by inviting him into the imaginary sphere,
and plant him squarely and inescapably in the world. Moreover, it is
perhaps here in this paradoxical juxtapostion of the imaginary and the
concrete that the idiosyncrasy of Sartre's left political writings of the
1940s (and indeed early 1950s) lies. The aesthetic dimension of prose
305

writing remains an implicit premise for Sartre even in his non-literary
texts. Hence, even in works with a specifically political focus, such as
the second part of Matérialisme et révolution and later Les Com-
munistes et la Paix, there is a propulsive élan in Sartre's prose style
which betrays a persisting leaning towards the imaginary on his part.
It is this dimension of such works which ensures that, regardless of
their political subject matter, they seem to retain some sort of
idealistic character. Sartre's broad lines of argument often seem
somewhat removed from the mundane practical concerns typically
addressed by political discourse.
29
And yet, there is nevertheless a
kind of purity to Sartre's dual impulsion towards the imaginary and
the concrete phenomena philosophy seeks to explain which, in its
transcendence of constraints, is of a piece with the violence of revolu-
tionary left politics. In Sartre's political writings, the Utopian drive to
transcend the constraints imposed by signification is concomitant with
and indeed facilitates the expression of a somewhat idealistic belief in
the possibility of radical political change.
The coincidence of the imaginary and the concrete is part of the
role Sartre attributes to writing in the political struggle. For Sartre,
psychological movement towards the imaginary sphere via the text is
29 This disjunction in Sartre's political writings clearly constitutes one of the
key motivations for Merleau-Ponty's attack on Sartre in the final chapter of
Les aventures de la dialectique, entitled 'Sartre et Fultra-bolchevisme'. When
Merleau-Ponty objects that Sartre conceives of Marxist activism as 'création
pure' (AD: 140), as 'tout volontaire' (AD: 142), and that he thinks 'en pur
rationaliste\AR: 164), it is in part Sartre's persisting tendency towards the
imaginary sphere and a certain resulting aestheticisation of political discourse
that he is opposed to. Sartre's political activism bears little relation to actual
political realities, Merleau-Ponty argues, because it is limited to 'l'action imag­
inaire' (AD: 248). For the Bolsheviks, violence was not pure but in the service
of the truth, but this is not the case in Sartre's political writings: 'la vérité et la
raison sont pour demain, et l'action d'aujourd'hui doit être pure.' (AD: 228)
Merleau-Ponty hence concludes that Sartre's position is an 'ultra-bolchevisme'.
In opposition to Sartre's tendency to synthesise the political and the aesthetic,
Merleau-Ponty argues conversely that the two fields are best seen as separate:
'Reconnaître la littérature et la politique comme des activités distinctes, c'est
peut-être enfin la seule façon d'être fidèle à l'action comme à la littérature'
(AD: 279).
306

a precondition for the mutual recognition of freedoms on the part of
writer and reader, and the relationship between writer and reader sets
the example for ethical relations in general. The worldly dimension of
the text, by contrast, reminds the reader of his social, historical and
political situation. Sartre believes, in short, that through the act of
reading the subject is reminded of being a freedom in situation.
Sartre's ontological and ethical positions lead him to urge the reader
to accept full responsibility for this freedom, and literature hence
becomes an encouragement to the reader to take action. As such, it
sets the example for all forms of struggle for greater freedom in
society. Sartre argues that in the contemporary context of class-
divided society, it is not possible for literature to play its full role as
purveyor of freedom because the majority of people are too pre-
occupied with battling against oppression. He concludes that the
future of literature is dependent on the overthrow of the structures of
bourgeois society and the political liberation of the working class: 'il
ne faut pas hésiter à dire que le sort de la littérature est lié à celui de la
classe ouvrière.' [QL: 251] Socio-political freedom and the future of
literature are hence interdependent, Sartre thinks. A socialist revolu-
tion overthrowing the oppressive structures of bourgeois society is
what is needed to ensure their flourishing. In the immediate absence of
such a revolution, writers should produce works which contribute to
the revolutionary left struggle.
It is Sartre's belief both in the interdependence of literature and
the socio-political sphere and, above all, in the possibility of writing
and culture to bring about positive social change which invites paral-
lels between his literary theory and the Marxist view of literature
which came to prominence at the time of the Bolsheviks. In his Marx-
ist Literary Theory, Eagleton identifies four broad categories of
Marxist theorising on art and literature which he labels 'anthropo-
logical, political, ideological and economic'.
30
He places Sartre along
with the other thinkers of the Western Marxist lineage in the third
category, namely the ideological' one, arguing that they 'grant a
remarkably high priority to culture and philosophy, and do so in part
30 Eagleton, Marxist Literary Theory p.7
307

as a substitute for a politics that has failed.'
31
Whilst this categor-
isation of Sartre is broadly speaking a fair one with respect to his
attitude towards culture notably in the 1960s, it is clearly unsatis-
factory in relation to his work of the 1940s. Be it the political
commitment of works such as Bariona and Matérialisme et révolution
or the theoretical case Sartre makes for contemporary writing in
Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?, it is clear that Sartre does not think that
the political struggle has failed at all. On the contrary, he believes that
everything is still to be fought for and that cultural production has a
vital role to play in bringing about positive change. In fact, the 1940s
Sartre would be much more accurately placed in Eagleton's second
category, namely that of the 'political' view of art and literature. Of
this tendency, Eagleton notes the desire 'to shape state cultural policy
or confound some opposing cultural-political tendency [...]. Cultural
questions become, in part, code for much deeper political matters;
where your stand on art reflects your position on the working class, on
bourgeois democracy'.
32
One of the major works of this tendency in
Marxist theory is Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, written in
1922-3. Wide-ranging in its subject matter, clear parallels can be
identified between, in particular, the argument of the work's closing
chapters, entitled 'Communist policy towards art' and 'Revolutionary
and socialist art', and the lengthy closing chapter of Qu'est-ce que la
littérature?
Literature and Revolution was of course written in post-
revolutionary Russia, but Trotsky's belief that '[t]here is no revolu-
tionary art as yet',
33
and his desire to see it develop, invite comparison
with Sartre's argument for which it is an important precursor. The
category of 'revolutionary' art, for Trotsky, covers art which directly
touches on matters pertaining to the revolution but it also includes
'works which are not connected with the Revolution in theme, but are
thoroughly imbued with it'.
34
Trotsky makes a distinction between
revolutionary art and what he terms 'socialist' art, the former being a
31 IbidpAO
32 Eagleton op.cit. p .9
33 Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (London: Redwords, 1991 [1925]) p.258
34 Ibid $251
308

temporary but necessary phase whilst a socialist society is developing.
Revolutionary literature, he argues, will necessarily involve an
expression of animosity towards the exploiters of the working class
whereas, '[u]nder Socialism, solidarity will be the basis of society.
Literature and art will be tuned to a different key [...] . Art then will
become more general, will mature, will become tempered, and will
become the most perfect method of the progressive building of life in
every field.'
35
Trotsky hence envisages socialist art as the expression
of the flowering of humanity under socialism, although not as a static,
complacent phenomenon: socialist art will also contribute to the
continuing work of socialist construction.
Sartre's politicised concept of committed writing is a close rela-
tion of Trotsky's idea of revolutionary literature. Trotsky's claim that
'[a]t present, one has to carry out great aims by the means of art'
36
is
undoubtedly echoed by Sartre's conviction that contemporary writers
should work to raise the reader's awareness of the need for socialism:
'nous devons transformer sa bonne volonté formelle en une volonté
concrète et matérielle de changer ce monde-ci par des moyens
déterminés, pour contribuer à l'avènement futur de la société concrète
des fins.' [QL: 273] Like Trotsky, who rejects the concept of 'prole-
tarian' literature, Sartre is not in favour of the concept of literature
written by the working class for the working class. He nevertheless
regrets the fact that bourgeois literature has traditionally excluded the
working class readership and advocates an approach which gives
voice to the working class person's experience and political struggle:
'Opprimé, la littérature, comme négativité, pourrait lui refléter l'objet
de ses colères; producteur et révolutionnaire il est le sujet par
excellence d'une littérature de la praxis.'
[QL: 250] Interestingly,
Sartre explicitly cites the example set by the Soviets in this regard,
probably harking back to the pre-Stalinist era: 'Nous savons [...]
qu'il [l'ouvrier] discute, en Russie, avec l'écrivain lui-même et
qu'une nouvelle relation du public avec l'auteur est apparue là-bas'
[QL: 251]. Literature for Sartre, then, should inspire readers to take
action to change society and should involve relations of collaborative
35 Ibidp.259
36 Ibidp.213
309

reciprocity between writer and reader. As such, it is not only the
ultimate expression of an ethics of authenticity but is also a vital part
of the historical dialectic taking the class struggle as its basis. We
discussed in chapter VII the influence which the Marxist conception
of morality exerted on Sartre's thinking from 1947 onwards. In the
closing chapter of Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?, writing is presented as
a thoroughly moral affair ('morale et problématique' [QL: 290]) in
part because it is now to be an indispensable part of the proletarian
struggle. Sartre believes, like Trotsky before him, that the future
socialist revolution should be the implicit premise underlying con-
temporary writers' literary projects. Writing, then, like ethics in the
Cahiers is to take the route of the historical dialectic. '[I]l faut
historialiser la bonne volonté du lecteur' [QL: 273], Sartre argues,
meaning that the reader should be induced to take cognizance of the
fact that appropriate ethical conduct towards others is not possible in
the present socio-historical conjuncture. Only when the long-fought
struggle for greater social equality culminates in a post-revolutionary
socialist society will the reader be able to enjoy non-alienated ethical
relationships with others.
Trotsky's concept of revolutionary literature, like Sartre's, is
prescriptive seeking as it does to encourage writers to join in the
political fight. To extend our discussion of ideology in the positive
sense included in chapter VII, it is this political role which the two
theorists ascribe to contemporary writing which gives it a marked
ideological dimension. In effect, they wish to integrate literature into
the armoury of the proletarian class consciousness which Lenin and
the early Lukâcs had argued was the motor for social progress.
However, the subtlety of both Trotsky's and Sartre's conceptions of
committed writing lies in their avoidance of any crudely functionalist
view of literature nevertheless. Trotsky discusses at some length the
matter of party policy with respect to cultural production. He is clearly
aware of the difficulties inherent in attempts to subordinate aesthetics
to political objectives, and adopts an ultimately ambivalent position on
the question. On the one hand, he argues that literature which is perni-
cious to the revolutionary cause should not be tolerated by the party.
And yet, he nevertheless insists that the aesthetic sphere cannot be
reduced to the political and that the party should play only a limited
310

role in influencing cultural production: 'The domain of art is not one
in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect
and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly.'
37
Art, then, is not
politics, and cannot be judged according to the same criteria, or at
least by no means exclusively so. Trotsky concludes that 'we ought to
have a watchful revolutionary censorship, and a broad and flexible
policy in the field of art, free from petty partisan maliciousness.'
38
The
objection might understandably be raised that such an ambivalent
position on art could not realistically be taken as the basis for govern-
ment policy in practice, but Trotsky's argument, though problematic,
is not debilitatingly paradoxical. He simply means to stress that artists
should align their global outlook to the revolutionary cause in its
broad outlines, but that once they have adopted this basic premise the
process of artistic production should be free and unpartisan. The ideo-
logical orientation of novels, for example, should be broadly speaking
left-wing and progressive but their composition and formal construc-
tion is otherwise an aesthetic rather than political matter.
Sartre's conception of committed writing is a skilful synthesis of
aesthetics and politics which largely escapes the pitfall of reduction-
ism, although at the cost of being rather ethically and politically ideal-
istic.
39
Sartre argues that the very nature of literature precludes the
possibility of it being viably adapted to serve utilitarian ends. Litera-
ture is an affirmation of freedom on the part of writer and reader and
37 Ibid p.246
38 Ibid p.248
39 Certain observations which Sartre was to make in an interview of 1960 with
Madeleine Chapsal confirm his idealistic tendency of the postwar years. When
asked whether he undervalues literature, now prioritising politics, Sartre retorts
that it would be 'plus logique qu'on m'accuse de la surestimer.' (Situations IX
p. 15) After the war, he subsequently explains, 'on a pensé que aussi bien que
les livres, les articles, etc., pourraient servir. Ça n'a servi à rien du tout.''(Ibid
p.25) What is suggested here is that Sartre believed in the postwar years that
writing could have a concrete impact on society. It was not that he under­
estimated the specificity of cultural production in relation to politics but rather
the exact opposite. He thought that writing, by its very nature as an appeal to
the readership, could genuinely influence the course which society would take.
With the benefit of hindsight, he now realises that he had placed too much store
by the capacity of literature to act on social and political problems.
311

is 'par essence hérésie' [QL: 256]. The work of art is an end in itself
and resists instrumentalisation in the hands of those who might try to
use it for their own purposes, be it the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth
century or the PC apparatchiks of the postwar years. Sartre's preoccu-
pation with the challenges facing the contemporary writer leads him
to devote many pages in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? to the ills of
communist party ideology and policy. From the point of view of
aesthetics specifically, what troubles Sartre is not just the reigning
dogmatism in the party but also the fact that many of the positions it
adopts are conservative and reactionary. The party has ceased to be a
revolutionary organisation, he objects, and has allowed itself to
stagnate and congeal intellectually and politically. As such, it stands
diametrically opposed to the project of the writer which is intrinsically
to challenge such monolithic thinking by appealing to and encour-
aging the freedom of the reader.
40
'[L]a politique du communisme
stalinien', Sartre insists, 'est incompatible avec l'exercice honnête du
métier littéraire' [QL: 254]. The writer's production of literary works
necessarily involves contestation and is hence, for Sartre, a close
relative of the revolutionary project: 'Dans un parti authentiquement
révolutionnaire,' he argues, 'elle [l'œuvre d'art] trouverait le climat
propice à son éclosion, parce que la libération de l'homme et
l'avènement de la société sans classes sont comme elle des buts
absolus, des exigences inconditionnées qu'elle peut refléter dans son
40 Sartre's objections to the communists are strong and in many ways well-
founded ones, although the commonly held assumption that PC cultural policy
during the Stalinist period was never more than crudely Zdhanovist never­
theless requires re-examination. In a speech of June 1947 entitled 'Le
Communisme, la pensée, et Tart', presented at the PCF annual conference, the
party's cultural spokesperson Laurent Casanova discussed the role of intel­
lectuals and writers within the movement. The extent to which ideological
considerations limited the freedom of communist writers had been exaggerated,
he argued, replying indirectly to Sartre's charges (pp. 5-6). The position with
regard to cultural production which Casanova proceeded to set out was far from
naively functionalist, in fact being in reality much closer to that of Qu 'est-ce
que la littérature? than the polemical debates of the time would seem to
suggest. Although the PCF clearly did have an ideological agenda it wished to
promote, Casanova argued, it recognised that artistic expression was the
province of the specialists and could not be reduced to political objectives (p.8).
312

exigence' [QL: 261]. Producing literature and fighting for political
liberation are hence concomitant, even mutually dependent, projects.
The relationship between writer and reader sets the example for the
type of ethical relationships which the political revolutionary is fight-
ing for, and the revolutionary project offers literature the possibility of
playing its true role as a purveyor of freedom to the full.
It is Sartre's perception of such relations of interdependence
which leads him to advocate that writers should militate in favour of
the socialist revolution in their writings. That is, they should commit
not just through the act of writing itself but also by voicing explicit
political support for the revolutionary cause in the content of their
works. It is at this point in his argument that Sartre himself harnesses
aesthetics to political objectives. But he does so, like Trotsky, precise-
ly not to limit aesthetic freedom but rather in the interests of bringing
about a socialist society in which aesthetic freedom would flourish as
never before and would act as guide to all other kinds of human
freedom. Sartre's and Trotsky's conceptions of committed or revo-
lutionary writing can hence only be considered functionalist in a
highly qualified sense. Moreover, their belief in the ultimate pre-
eminence of aesthetic freedom reveals them to be faithful descendants
of Marx. Eagleton rightly argues that Marx's vision of a vast
unleashing of human capacities after the socialist revolution is in
many ways an aesthetic ideal.
41
For Marx, post-revolutionary social
life will be a realm of freedom, or what Eagleton terms 'an aesthetic
existence'
42
in which individuals are in a position to realise their full
creative potential.
Conversely, Sartre and Trotsky also share with Marx a scepti-
cism of reality-denying aestheticism during the revolutionary period
prior to socialism's full flowering. What Trotsky's attack on
Shklovsky's formalist theory [LR: 191-212] and Sartre's criticisms of
the surrealists [QL: 185-194] have in common is the conviction that
such conceptions of literature which do not accord it the capacity to
act meaningfully upon the contemporary world are unprogressive. The
ethical and aesthetic ideal of a future socialist society cannot be real-
41 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) p. 202
42 Ibid ?211
313

ised if writers fall prey to the escapist (and - for Sartre - inauthentic)
temptation prematurely to divorce their writing from the historical
dialectic. In the pre-revolutionary context, literature should continue,
both in content and form, to express the need for political struggle. We
have already seen in chapter VIII the subtlety with which Nizan, in his
'problem-centred' novels, conveys this ideological message to the
reader. Sartre's own literary writings of the late 1930s, we concluded,
though not politically committed in any obvious way, nevertheless in
certain cases constituted a reply to the charge of apoliticism which
Nizan had levelled at him. In reality, however, works such as La
Nausée and L'Enfance d'un chef speak more loudly politically than
this. As Nizan observed in his review of La Nausée, through the social
critiques that they contain, these works take on a politically radical
character themselves. To cite a further example, there is the episode in
L'Enfance d'un chef where M. Fleurier explains to Lucien that he
should learn the names of his employees. 'Lucien fut profondément
remué', the narrator informs us, 'et, quand le fils du contremaître
Morel vint à la maison annoncer que son père avait eu deux doigts
coupés, Lucien lui parla sérieusement et doucement, en le regardant
tout droit dans les yeux et en l'appelant Morel' [EC: 165]. Here in this
brief passage, the 'sérieux' of the bourgeoisie and their social and
economic dominance in relation to the working class are represented.
Sartre suggests that for the young bourgeois Lucien, the significance
of the foreman's accident is limited to the fact that it provides an
opportunity to rehearse his future role as a factory boss. Lucien, in
other words, is not socially conditioned to apply the rules of normal
moral conduct to social subordinates, there being no indication that he
is genuinely emotionally affected by or sympathetic to Morel's
distressing news.
Sartre's radicalism in such works is toned down by two principal,
interlinking factors: his pervasive use of irony and his persisting
tendency in the late 1930s to an aestheticism which corresponds to the
positive dimension of the imaginary set out in L'Imaginaire. Sartre's
use of irony in his works of the pre-war period is symptomatic of his
hesitation to commit himself actively at this stage to a clearly defined
political position. In the above example, rather than express his dislike
of bourgeois dominance in a direct way, Sartre conveys his awareness
314

of unequal and ethically unjustifiable class relationships discreetly.
First, he integrates revealing information about these relationships into
a passage which is ostensibly focused on a different matter, namely
Lucien's simulation of personal maturity. Second, the narrator's
perspective is wedded to Lucien's such that we have to read beyond
what is stated in the passage in order to understand its political
significance. Such a use of irony allows Sartre to soften the force of
the political content of his text because it encourages semantic
ambiguity about the real implications of what is stated. And yet, it is
paradoxically the irony itself which, as in Nizan's La Conspiration, is
where the political awareness of the text lies: it is only when the
reader takes cognizance of the gap separating what is stated from what
is meant that she becomes aware of the radical political tendencies of
the author.
Sartre employs irony pervasively in works like La Nausée and
L'Enfance d'un chef not only to avoid more explicit political
commitment but also for aesthetic reasons. At this stage, he does not
believe that he can express ethically defensible political views directly
in his literary works without adversely affecting the aesthetic quality
of the writing. Moreover, the aesthetic field retains for him an
independence from the wordly concerns of ethics and politics at this
time. At least, his theoretical account of the aesthetic field in L'Imagi-
naire clearly suggests such an independence, although two points
should be noted in this regard. First, L'Imaginaire was written in
1935-6 and there is good reason to suppose that, in the light of the war
in Spain and the looming menace of Nazism, Sartre's position on this
matter had developed by 1937-9 . Certainly, the anti-fascist import of
L'Enfance d'un chef the work's ironic tone notwithstanding, is hard
to reconcile with a conception of art which divorces aesthetics from
the real and from morality. Second, Sartre's evident concern that
aesthetic qualities should not be sacrificed to political and moral
convictions - clearly one of the many ways in which he sets himself
apart from the socialist realist writers of the era - was shared by
Nizan, as we saw in chapter VIII. Sartre's avoidance of direct expres-
sions of radical left political views in his literary works is hence not,
in and of itself, enough to set him apart from Marxism. Ultimately,
what does set the pre-war Sartre apart in this regard is the absence of
315

active encouragement to the left political struggle in his literary
works. In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky argues that revolutionary
literature 'cannot but be imbued with a spirit of social hatred' and
should 'encourage the workers in their struggle against the
exploiters'.
43
Whereas both of these tendencies are subtly expressed in
the novels of Nizan, only the former is present in Sartre's literary
texts.
In Qu 'est-ce que la littérature?, as in Literature and Revolution,
the triumph of socialism is envisaged as a victory both for humanity as
a whole and, more specifically, for literature which will have
contributed to its advent and will henceforth be allowed to flourish as
never before. In his analysis of Their Morals and Ours in the Cahiers,
Sartre reads Trotsky's vision of socialism as a reiteration of the
Kantian ideal of the city of ends [CM: 169]. Sartre is clearly in
sympathy with this view of socialism, synthesising in Qu 'est-ce que la
littérature? Kant's ideal with the Marxian emphasis on material
conditions of possibility and the historical dialectic. Contemporary
writers' output should, he argues, 'contribuer à l'avènement de la
société concrète des fins' [QL: 273]. The true realisation of the Kant-
ian ideal is dependent on altering the concrete historical situation: 'Si
la cité des fins demeure une abstraction languissante, c'est qu'elle
n'est pas réalisable sans une modification objective de la situation
historique.' [QL: 272] Once socialism is achieved, a literature that is
in constant dialogue with its readers will be possible. Sartre describes
this literature as 'le monde présent à lui-même', 'la présence à soi
reflexive d'une société sans classes', and 'la subjectivité d'une société
en révolution permanente' [QL: 162-3]. In speaking about himself,
the writer would also be speaking about his readers and vice versa,
because literature would encapsulate all that was universally human.
Such literature, which Sartre also claims would '[faire] la synthèse de
la praxis et de Vexis, de la négativité et de la construction, du faire, de
l'avoir et de l'être'. It would be a 'littérature totale' [QL: 238-9].
Rather as Sartre, like Trotsky, sees aesthetics and politics to be
interactive and interdependent during the period of revolutionary
struggle, he shares Trotsky's vision of a post-revolutionary society in
43 Trotsky op.cit.p.259
316

which political, aesthetic and ethical freedoms form a coherent whole.
The emphasis in Trotsky's account is weighted towards the ways in
which socialist art and literature would contribute vitally to the ever
higher levels of coordination and internal harmony that man would
achieve under socialism. However, these achievements rebound on the
aesthetic in turn because they facilitate the development
4
of all the
vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point'.
44
The vision
of socialist society adumbrated by Sartre makes of political, aesthetic,
and ethical freedoms a conceptual totality within which each type of
freedom is an expression of the other types and vice versa. Literature
becomes for Sartre the highest expression of an ethics of authenticity,
and this type of intersubjective reciprocity is facilitated by the socialist
revolution; the revolution was itself the outcome of the historical
dialectic whose course literature, as a quintessential expression of
freedom, helped to influence, and so on. Ultimately, it is not that
Sartre's vision is simply reminiscent of Trotsky's specifically in this
regard because both thinkers' socialist ideal is evidently derivative of
that of Marx in the following key respect: Sartre and Trotsky share
with Marx the fundamental belief that in an equal society free of
deprivation man will be in a position to realise his full potential as an
active, creative being.
As Sartre's Cahiers pour une morale were not published in the
late 1940s, Qu'est-ce que la littérature? represents a culmination point
in his thinking at the time, uniting as it does the ethical, political, and
aesthetic dimensions of his theoretical world-view. In many ways, it is
entirely appropriate that this moment of global intellectual synthesis
should take place in a work devoted to writing as it is clear that for
Sartre, whose life revolved primarily around the project to produce
books, the act of writing and the all-important writer-reader relation-
ship were both the site of and the model for desirable ethical and
political values in general. The written text, for the Sartre of Qu 'est-ce
que la littérature?, is the place where the concrete and the imaginary
meet, and the act of writing, as an encouragement to the greater
freedom of the readership, contributes vitally to the forward move-
ment of the historical dialectic. The writer-reader relationship sets the
44 Ibidp.284
317

example for ethical relationships based on the mutual respect of
subjective freedoms, being for Sartre the highest expression of the
ideal of authentic conduct. It is for these reasons that, in Sartre's
conception of the nature and role of writing, the production of
literature is presented as entirely coherent with and necessary to the
achievement of intersubjective solidarity and the realisation of the
political goal of socialism. We have seen, however, that the synthetic
unity in Sartre's thinking that Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? conveys is
not just a postwar development because it is in fact the outcome of
developments in his thinking dating back certainly to 1940 and, in
certain respects, to his intellectual positions of the 1930s. Sartre's
early interest in depicting inauthentic conduct which was, in certain of
its manifestations, a support to oppressive capitalist social relations,
masked a developing global vision which, in its breadth and content,
was in many ways harmonious with that of Marxism.
318

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(Gallimard, 1970) pp. 501-505
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La Transcendance de l'ego (Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 1965 [1936])
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La Nausée (Gallimard, 1938)
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Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Hermann, 1939)
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319

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L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Nagel, 1946)
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L'Age de raison (Gallimard, 1945)
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Morts sans sépulture (Lausanne: Marguerat, 1946)
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Cahiers pour une morale (Gallimard: 1983)
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-
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'Portrait de l'aventurier' [1950], 'Faux savants ou faux lièvres' [1950],
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-
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-
Les Mots (Gallimard, 1964)
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Sartre par lui-même (televised interviews. Paris: 1972)
320

-
Un Théâtre de situations (Gallimard, 1973)
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On a raison de se révolter (Gallimard, 1974) with P. Gavi and P. Victor
-
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-
Lettres au Castor 1:1926-39 (Gallimard, 1983)
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Index
Althusser, Louis, 19, 110, 159
Alienation, 100-1, 158-9,162
Authenticity, 85, 122-136, 192-200,
214, 219, 283-291, 295-9, 306,
316-7
Bad faith, 92, 97-9, 103, 105, 107,
108,276-9,292-5
Beauvoir, Simone de, 25, 56, 127, 181,
241,255,270
Being (En-soil 27, 28-9, 30, 87, 95-6,
149,194-7
Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 29,
30, 33, 72-6, 82, 89-92, 96, 98,
117, 119-120, 123-136, 145-8,
272,281,283,284,297
Cahiers pour une morale, 92, 125,
171, 179-189, 192-201, 207-8,
210-1, 214-6, 279, 286-8, 300,
315-6
Choice, 61-3,69
Class consciousness, 36
Class struggle, 35-6
Commitment, 114, 137-8, 140-1,
143-154,283-291
Conditioning, 66-70, 74-5,
Consciousness (Pour-soi), 26-35, 42,
59-1, 69-72, 75, 79, 96, 101,
149,167,193-5
Conversion: ethical, 95, 193-4
Critique de la raison dialectique, 47,
67, 72-3, 131, 142, 170, 187,
222-3
Determinism, 34; social determinism,
36,69
Diamat (scientisitic Marxism), 37, 43-
6, 48-9, 54
L'Enfance d'un chef, 82, 91, 94, 247-
8, 252, 253, 254, 255-8, 269,
279,283,313^,313
Ends and means, 204-6,208
Engels, Friedrich, 43, 46, 50, 72, 107,
156,211,291,296
Essentialism, 34, 65, 151, 164-7
L'Etre et le néant, 30, 49, 60-4, 74,
76-8, 86, 94-8, 100-2, 111,
123-7, 124, 139, 148-9, 160-1,
184,192-3,277,293
False consciousness, 69, 104-110,
120,280-1. See also: Ideology
Facticity, 29, 30,32, 95,
Freedom, 53, 59-70, 72, 74-5, 77, 79,
96, 101, 125, 133, 149, 153,
157-161,198,304,311
Generosity, 196-9
Gramsci, Antonio, 41, 47-9, 71-2,
109-110
Hegel, G.W.F . 42, 47, 50, 52, 182,
184-6
Heidegger, Martin, 89, 120, 136
Historical Materialism, 32, 33, 43, 44,
53, 159
Humanism: Marxist, 154, 158-9;
Sartrean, 144, 148, 151, 160,
250
Husserl, 26-7,48, 79, 301
Idealism, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 37,43, 76,
79-83,156,296
329

Ideology: pejorative sense (bourgeois),
38, 69, 86, 102-116, 212-3,
222-3, 225, 265, 280-1; neutral
sense, 73, 222-3; positive sense
(proletarian), 222-7
L'Imaginaire, 34, 35, 60, 80-1, 272-5,
281-2, 287, 289, 302, 313^
Inertia, 42,49, 53, 158, 165
Intentionality, 26,27, 28
Inauthenticity,
86-7,
89-102,
102-110, 272-283, 291-299.
See also: Bad faith and Le
sérieux.
Les Jeux sontfaits, 35-6
Lefebvre, Henri, 37, 38, 50-4, 159,
173,
Look (le regard), 100-1, 105, 198
Lukâcs, Georg, 37, 46-7, 70, 71, 159,
166, 176, 186-9, 214, 224,
270-1
Les Mains sales, 202, 208, 217-221
Marcuse, Herbert, 38, 163
Marx, Karl, 34, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45-6,
50-5, 72, 107, 116, 122, 156,
158-168, 176, 203, 211, 213,
225,265,291,296,312
Materialism, 25, 30-1, 32, 33-42, 46,
79; dialectical, 38, 39, 42-6, 52-
4
Matérialisme et révolution, 33, 38, 53,
54-7, 68-9, 82, 113, 155-163,
165,168,199,216,219,305
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 47, 144,
171-180, 201-3, 205-6, 210,
305
Les Mouches, 108-110, 150-1, 284
La Nausée, 28, 33, 81, 89, 104-9, 113—
4, 123, 144-5, 156, 243-6,
258-9, 279-283, 291-299, 301-
4
Neoliberalism, 10-1
Nizan, Paul, 231-255, 258-270, 313-
4,313-4
Parti communiste français (PCF), 25,
37, 130, 207, 209, 224, 262-3,
265,311
Positivism, 31,41
Postmodernism, 9, 11-12
Praxis, 48,157, 194
Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? 27, 111-
114, 195, 197, 272, 286-293,
296,299-317
Rassemblement Démocratique Révo­
lutionnaire (R.D .R.), 130, 209-
210
Realism: philosophical, 79, 132-6, 301
Reciprocity, 87,
Reification, 165-6
Responsibility, 49, 75, 126-7,153
Rights, 91, 97, 99
Revolution: political, 44, 68, 155-8,
160, 163, 203-6, 208, 218, 306-
317
Le sérieux, 34, 91, 96-8, 103-6, 108,
134-5,196,256
Situation, 59-70, 74-7, 98, 131, 133-
6,171,285
Spontaneity, 42, 165
Stalin, Joseph, 43-5, 202
La Transcendance de I 'ego, 29, 32, 80,
86, 133
Trotsky, Leon, 176, 183, 201-210,
215-6, 218, 220, 221, 265, 307-
310, 312, 315-316; Sartre's
interest in, 56, 201, 208-9,218
330

Modem French Identities
Edited by Peter Collier
This series aims to publish monographs, editions or collections of
papers based on recent research into modern French Literature. It
welcomes contributions from academics, researchers and writers in
British and Irish universities in particular.
Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone
writing of the twentieth century, whose formal experiments and
revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of
literary forms, from the thematic autobiographies of Michel Leiris and
Bernard Noël to the magic realism of French Caribbean writers.
The idea that identities are constructed rather than found, and
that the self is an area to explore rather than a given pretext, runs
through much of modern French literature, from Proust, Gide and
Apollinaire to Kristeva, Barthes, Duras, Germain and Roubaud.
This series reflects a concern to explore the turn-of-the-
century turmoil in ideas and values that is expressed in the works of
theorists like Lacan, Irigaray and Bourdieu and to follow through the
impact of current ideologies such as feminism and postmodernism on
the literary and cultural interpretation and presentation of the self,
whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, gender, autobiography,
cinema, fiction and poetry, or in newer forms like performance art.
The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists,
comparative studies, and interdisciplinary projects, including those
where art and cinema intersect with literature.
Volume 1 Victoria Best & Peter Collier (eds.): Powerful Bodies.
Performance in French Cultural Studies.
220 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-56-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4239-9
Volume 2 Julia Waters: Intersexual Rivalry.
A 'Reading in Pairs' of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
228 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-74 -9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4626-2