PARIS LETTER
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hammering out his own morality, has to forget about it in order
to
take part in the struggles of the working class? I must confess that
I don't know, and I hesitate to attribute any such view to Sartre, for
whose personal honesty I have a great deal of respect. But the Stalinists
have for years been preaching this necessary self-immolation of any
independent viewpoint "in the interests of the working class," and I
can't think that Sartre has done the cause of
La Liberti
(Existentialist
or otherwise) any service by an ending that allows for such an appalling
interpretation.
It's no secret that Sartre wrote the ending for his play under very
high pressure, and that rehearsals started before he had finished the
final pages of the script. This certainly didn't help him to work out a
satisfactory climax, but I believe that his failure can be traced to much
deeper reasons. These reasons inhere in the peculiar potpourri of Marx,
Heidegger and Trotsky that Sartre has tried to combine into a social
philosophy; and they are likely to stymie his future efforts to create
artistic symbols that are more than merely negative, or which try to
get beyond the well-meaning banality of
Les Mouches.
For one thing, in the great works of Western literature, such
positive symbols have usually come from the reconciliation of man
with Nature or God; with some forces, in short, that man was
willing to recognize as transcendent to himself. Sartrian Existentialism
refuses to recognize any such transcendence, and so this source of
metaphysical symbols has dried up for Sartre. Nor can such a symbol
be merely individual or personal, since man for Sartre is immitigably
bound up with others (this is the meaning that both Heidegger and
Sartre give to the term "transcendence"). Sartre's symbol, therefore,
can only be social if it is to be concrete; and this is precisely the kind
of symbol that he tried to create in Goetz. But here again, the presup–
positions of Sartre's philosophy severely limit the range of possibilities.
It is not only that Sartre has chosen to identify his Existentialist
liberti,
as an ontological description of man in general, with the economic
emancipation of the working class; there is the additional fact that any
harmonious vision of the future is automatically barred from the Sartrian
scheme of things.
Simone de Beauvoir brings this out .quite clearly in
Pour une
morale de l'ambiguiti.
The future, she explains, may be regarded in
two different ways. We may look on it as an indefinite prolongation
of the individual present: and this means that we shall continue to
throw ourselves into the future after some goal which, when we have
reached it, becomes the starting point for a new plunge: it means that
the
future will be nothing but a repetition of the never-ending rat-race
