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PARTISAN REVIEW
ically tried to reject his body . To reassure his mind that it had
nothing to fear from sibling rivalry with his maltreated body, he con–
sistently ignored all the messages it sent out. He resisted fatigue,
treated pain as if it were a challenge. To step up his productivity he
made reckless use of drugs and stimulants, taking sedatives when he
needed to relax. He resented the time he had to spend on washing,
shaving, cleaning his teeth, taking a bath, excreting, and he would
economize by carrying on conversations with Cau through the bath–
room door. He had no personal vanity, took no pleasure in buying
clothes. His shoes were bought for him by his mother - his small feet
were the same size as hers. When his smoke-stained teeth began to
decay, he refused to waste time on seeing a dentist, but even when
his face was swollen with an abscessed gum, he would stubbornly
settle down to work at his desk. He took immeasurable pride in his
intellect - "I've got a golden brain" - but the punitive attitude to his
body was based on the feeling that it could be written off. Occa–
sionally he took exercise to keep fit, but the interest flickered only
briefly, and he did not want to have his squint corrected surgically.
If
his constitution had not been exceptionally strong, he could not
have treated it so ruthlessly. Throughout his life he smoked ex–
cessively, overworked exorbitantly, ate and drank carelessly. He had
no hankering for the kind of balance W. B. Yeats craved:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Sartre went on bruising the body to pleasure mind, trying incessantly
to outpace himself. When he defines man as the creature who is not
identical with himself, he has Heidegger's philosophy as one of his
models and his own habits as the other.
Nietzsche observed that all philosophy is "the confession of its
author and a kind of involuntary unconscious memoir." With his
pronouncements the philosopher is pointing to the "relative position–
ing of the innermost drives in his nature." Sartre's declaration of war
against the idea of the self points to his hostility against the self as
represented by the body. Even his insistence on free will and his
resistance to determinism hinge on his refusal to see his own ex–
istence as conditioned by uncontrollable physical characteristics.
The body, which he had not chosen, could be disregarded: his con–
tempt for it encouraged him to believe that the individual self has no
