RONALD HAYMAN
457
existence. Throughout his career he would find various ways of
escaping from the first person singular into a partnership, into fic–
tional characters, into groups, into political movements, into theories
about the collective, into the self-oblivion induced by alcohol or
drugs or extreme fatigue. In
1956-57
he made his most extremist
pronouncements against the individual ego, praising Soviet man for
subordinating his identity to the group and questioning whether
anyone can ever accurately say: "I did it." Sartre's fanatical faith in
the powers of the conscious intellect and his resistance to Freudian
ideas about the unconscious are equally rooted in the same inner
drive. Needing to believe that the human mind was capable of any–
thing and everything, he was irked by the notion that it might be in–
capable of coming fully to grips with itself.
Privately he was more interested in dominating a group than in
subordinating himself. Almost invariably friendly, he liked the
ef–
fects he could have on other people more than he liked other people,
and in conversation he took pleasure in pleasing. With his musical
voice and his quick mind he had a genius for the chats that ranged
among fantasy, gossip, and practical suggestions. As a companion
he was charming, droll, endlessly entertaining. He talked rapidly,
trying to catch up with his racing thoughts. With new acquaintances
he seldom failed to make a favorable impression, but in a foreign city
he was reluctant to ask a stranger the way, wanting neither to be
seen as a middle-class tourist nor to "inflict a disagreeable presence"
on anyone in the street.
(La Ceremonie dex adieux
by Simone de
Beauvoir).
Though the drug-taking habit had its origins in a campaign to
increase output, he began to take pleasure in the violence he was do–
ing to himself. For about tweny years he "abused drugs a great deal"
(as he put it) but never so much as while writing the
Critique.
He was
taking corydrane and orthedrine. The unpublished Part Two, which
was more ambitious, could hardly have failed, had he completed it,
to be his most important philosophical work, but not content with
sabotaging his chances of writing in a lucid and organized way, he
was deliberately putting his life at risk: "As soon as one passed a cer–
tain point, one began to be destroyed, and the risk was a reality.
One liked having blurred ideas which were vaguely interrogative
and which then disintegrated. It also meant one could drop dead,
but there was no knowing when."
Like Nietzsche, Sartre took an almost religious pleasure in the
