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PARTISAN REVIEW
of his true liberty, not his assimilation to a faceless function. Deprived
of the belief that action can be justified by the unquestioned validity
of its goal, man, in Sartre's philosophy, is returned to himself as the
final source of all value: to the agonizing responsibility of creating value
at each moment and with every choice. He cannot shirk such respon–
sibility by taking refuge in some seemingly objective imperative; or,
if
he does, he is guilty of bad faith. And while this rescues man from sub–
jugation to any determinism whatsoever, thus restoring his absolute
liberty, it also cuts away any grounds on which to decide whether one
course of action is preferable to another. With characteristic honesty and
boldness, Sartre says just this in
L'
Etre et Ie N eant: "Ainsi
r:~vient-il
au
meme de s'enivrer salitairement au de canduire les peuples"
(thus,
whether one gets drunk in private or leads the people, comes to the
same thing). But if this were Sartre's last word, he would indeed have
nothing to say against Junger's reduction of man to an instrument of
nihilistic domination.
Sartre, however, believes passionately in certain democratic and
Socialist values that so far he has not been able to integrate into the
framework of his Existentialist system. (His recent plunge into hysterical
fellow-traveling involves the
application
of such values, and is not rele–
vant in the present context.) At the end of
L'Etreet Ie Neant,
he
promises another book devoted to the problems of ethics and value; but
this has proved as elusive as the second part of Heidegger's
Sein und
Z eit,
which, according to the latest edict from the Schwarzwald, is not
going to be published-and may never have gotten itself written. The
great question is whether a philosophy whose emotional attitude goes
back to Kierkegaard's break with Hegel, and which is based on the
absolute uniqueness of each soul in its wrestling with God, can be
successfully integrated with a philosophy of social action. This question
does not arise for Heidegger, who rejects the entire realm of the social
as that of the "inauthentic" (though he made a temporary exception in
favor of National Socialism in 1933, and in his most recent book,
Einfuhrung in die M etaphysik,
he praises the "dignity and greatness"
of that regrettably misguided movement). Sartre too begins by rejecting
the social as the "inauthentic," but for him the social has always smacked
a good deal of bourgeois decadence; and he is by no means free from
traces of the Marxist romanticism that identifies vitality and authen–
ticity with the working classes.
All of Sartre's writing since the war has been an effort to bridge
this gap between the existential and the social. And Miss Iris Murdoch,
in her crisply acute study, puts her finger on the center of Sartre's
