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"bad faith." He surrenders his being as a writer to his movement, and
to the public's clamor for his books his freedom to remain withdrawn.
The writer's deepest and most difficult freedom: to take his time.
2.
Sartre is undoubtedly a philosopher first, in the sense that the best
things in his novels and plays for the most part simply supply the clothing
of imagination for some philosophical idea. His
L'Etre et Le Neant,
which has now become the bible of French Existentialism, is therefore,
despite the imposing obstacle of its 700 pages, the book by which to
approach him, if we are to understand completely what he is about.
His most imposing work in range and bulk, this book is also, alas,
after his last novel
Lc Sursis,
his poorest performance. We are shocked
that something so repetitious and verbose is the production of a literary
man. Its philosophical deficiencies are equally paradoxical: it contains
many original and extraordinary observations which show the author's
mind genuinely at work on a subject-matter, and not merely engaged in
passively transmitting a pastiche of Heidegger: but elsewhere it is so
philosophically naive, abounds
in
such bad philosophic arguments, in–
conclusive arguments offered as conclusive-that we find it difficult to
reconcile Sartre's obvious acuteness with his extreme naivete and positive
obtuseness. The paradox can be explained on the hypothesis that these
700 pages are a first draft for a good book of 300 pages. I have to
apologize for making these statements without adequate space to dem–
onstrate them in detail; but Heidegger himself is without any adequate
treatment in English-before which the whole question of existential
philosophy cannot be posed-and Sartre will have to wait his
tum.
Meanwhile, A.
J.
Ayer's long criticism in
Horizon
will do. With most of
Ayer's negative criticisms I am in agreement, but I wish he did not
leave the sneaking impression that he has not quite understood what the
book is all about.
Bracketing the question of existential philosophy, criticism may dis–
engage from this tome the main qualities of Sartre's mind. These qualities
are displayed just as clearly in nearly every one of his essays, and PR
readers familiar with his "Responsibility of Writers" will already know
what they are: with great gifts for intellectual rhetoric, intellectually
agile, with a genuine passion for the assimilation of ideas, Sartre lacks
critical balance, the ability to perceive necessary qualifications, so that
the ideas themselves seem to get the upper hand and run away with
his sense of fact, which is weak to start with.
L'Etre et le Neant
mag–
nifies these deficiencies on the scale of 700 pages.
Existentialism attempts to construct a theory of man by use of the
phenomenological method: the subtitle of Sartre's book is "Essay in
