ANNIE COHEN·SOLAL
225
questions directly to Descartes, Kant, and Spinoza, borrowing from
this one or that, gathering here and there the concepts and categories
necessary to invent his own composite, but coherent, system of
thought. "Nizan, Aron, and myself were most unfair to those poor
people [the professors], who actually had the
feeling
for philosophy
but simply lacked the tools." To counter those "elegant soft
thoughts," the three place themselves "under the sign of Descartes"
and of his "revolutionary thought," which "cuts and slashes," and
suddenly no other philosopher seems to be as beneficial as this "ex–
plosive thinker. "20
One day, asked by the magazine
Les Nouvelles Litttfraires
to par–
ticipate in a survey on "today's students," Sartre contributes a
short, extremely dense text. "It is the paradox of the mind," he
writes, "that man, whose business it is to create what's necessary to
him, should be so unable to raise himself to the level of being, like
those soothsayers who can predict the future of others but not their
own. This is why I see sadness and boredom in the depths of man as
well as nature....We are as free as you want, but impo–
tent .... Otherwise, the will to power, action, life, are all vain
ideologies .. . . Everything is too weak; too mortal. Adventure is a
decoy; I am referring to the belief in necessary connections that
would really exist. The adventurer is a rational determinist who
thinks he is free . . .. We are probably unhappier, but much
nicer."21 Sartre is only twenty-four, but, in this little text, one can
detect the future themes of both
Nausea
and
Being and Nothingness.
Can one turn one's life into an esthetic creation? This is the choice of
the adventurer, the only man who lives his life like a novel. Bergson
helps Sartre anchor his philosophy in his own inner experience;
Descartes ensures the rational dimension of this subjectivism; and
Plato contributes its esthetic aspects. Sartre is creating his own
system, a form of psychological realism: at once the conceptualiza–
tion of his inner experience and the basis for his esthetic plan. For
him, philosophy is a sort of preparation for psychology and fiction .
In his reading of Karl Jaspers'
General Psychopathology,
in his visits to
the patients of the Sainte-Anne Hospital-where he goes every Sun-
20. The War Diaries,
trans . Quintin Hoare, (New York: Pantheon Books , 1985),
pp.
85-6.
2!.
Les Nouvelles iittiraires,
November 1926.
