Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE IN OUR TIME*
What makes our pos1t10n original, I believe, is that the
war and the occupation, by precipitating us into a world in a state
of fusion, perforce made us rediscover the absolute at the heart of
relativity itself. For our predecessors the rule of the game was to
save everybody, because suffering is atoned for, because nobody is
bad voluntarily, because man's heart is unfathomable, because divine
grace is shared equally. That meant that literature-apart from the
Surrealist extreme left which simply spread mischief-tended to
establish a sort of moral relativism. Christians no longer believed in
hell. Sin was whatever was devoid of God; carnal love was love of
God gone astray.
As
democracy tolerated
all
opinions, even those which aimed
expressly at destroying it, republican humanism, which was taught
in the schools, made tolerance the primary virtue. Everything would
be
tolerated, even intolerance. Hidden truths had to be recognized in
the silliest ideas, in the vilest feelings. For Leon Brunschvicg, the phi–
losopher of the regime, who
all
his life assimilated, unified, and
integrated, and who shaped three generations, evil and error were only
false shows, fruits of separation, limitation, and finiteness. They were
annihilated as soon as one overthrew the barriers which compart–
mentalized systems and collectivities.
The radicals followed Auguste Comte in this, that they held
progress to
be
the development of order; thus, order was already
there, in power, like the hunter's cap in the illustrated puzzles.
It
was
only a matter of discovering it. That was how they passed their time;
it was their spiritual exercise. They thereby justified everything–
starting with themselves.
*
This is a fourth selection from Sartre's
Qu'est-ce que la littirature?
A trans–
lation of the entire work will be published this fall by the Philosophical Library.
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