Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

by Iris Murdoch

  VII

  THE ROMANCE OF RATIONALISM

  It is no superficial or perverse dilemma into which this thinker has got himself. As a European socialist intellectual with an acute sense of the needs of his time Sartre wishes to affirm the preciousness of the individual and the possibility of a society which is free and democratic in the traditional liberal sense of these terms. This affirmation is his most profound concern and the key to all his thought. As a philosopher however he finds himself without the materials to construct a system which will hold and justify these values; Sartre believes neither in God nor in Nature nor in History. What he does believe in is Reason; and this is what chiefly differentiates him from the positivist, whose dislike of traditional speculative metaphysics is equally vehement.

  Sartre finds traditional bonds inert and entangling; what appears to Gabriel Marcel as a rich substantial connexion with a fruitful and living tissue is for Sartre a fall into insincerity, inertia and unreason. The undivided nature which haunts him is not the totality of the perfectly unreflective, but the totality of the perfectly reflective, the spiritual tabula rasa. Sartre is a rationalist; for him the supreme virtue is reflective self-awareness. Yet this very quality of his respect for Reason sets him apart too from the rationalism of the Marxist. Sartre prizes sincerity, the ability to see through shams, both social shams and the devices of one’s own heart. He prizes Reason in itself, as a manifestation of the spirit, rather than prizing it as a means to an end. Whereas the Marxist, who can see the world as a set of practical problems to which he knows the answer, attends naturally to the activity of solving the problems and not to the preliminaries of private reflexion. The rationalism of Sartre is not geared on to the techniques of the modern world; it is solipsistic and romantic, isolated from the sphere of real operations. He shares with thinkers such as Michael Oakeshott and Marcel their distrust of ‘the scientist’. In the argument appended to L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme the communist Naville accuses Sartre of having un mépris des choses (contempt for things); and adds that existentialists ‘do not believe in causality’. The Marxist can be a confident utilitarian because he has both a clear idea of human good and an understanding of the mechanism of social cause and effect. Sartre lacks both. His Reason is not practical and scientific, but philosophical. His Evil is not human misery or the social conditions, or even the bad will, which may produce it, but the unintelligibility of our finite condition. ‘The artist has always had a special understanding of Evil, which is not the temporary and remediable isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of man and the world of Thought’ (What is Literature? p. 86).

  What Sartre does understand, the reality which he has before him and which he so profoundly and brilliantly characterises in L’Etre et le Néant, is the psychology of the lonely individual. Behind this personage lies neither the steady pattern of a divine purpose, nor the reliable constellations of Newtonian physics, nor the dialectical surge of work and struggle. The universe of L’Etre et le Néant is solipsistic. Other people enter it, one at a time, as the petrifying gaze of the Medusa, or at best as the imperfectly understood adversary in the fruitless conflict of love. What determines the form of this egocentric and nonsocial world are the movements of love and hate, project and withdrawal, embarrassment and domination, brooding and violence, fascination and awakening, by which the individual ‘takes’ his life. There is no reason why the personage portrayed in L’Etre et le Néant should prefer one thing to another or do this rather than that—unless perhaps it were to avoid the discomfort of, say, being observed, or pursuing some peculiarly fruitless end. The analyses offered in L’Etre et le Néant may increase self-knowledge, lead to a starting point—but not indicate a road. There is indeed a certain value which is implied by these studies which is not the value that is analysed. That is the value of the liberated clairvoyant disillusioned awareness of the truth. This is the ‘freedom’ of a personal liberation from insincerity and illusion, and might be the virtue of a life devoted to purely private ends.

  When we turn to the novels we find the same spectacle of a struggle towards sincerity and reflexion which can bear no practical fruits. ‘The reflective consciousness is the moral consciousness’, Sartre said, because it is the revealer of incompleteness and so of the vision of ‘value’, the whole whose shadow defines a lack. Yet the reflective consciousness of Sartre’s fictional characters is empty and their reflexion merely denuding. Sartre’s individual is neither the socially integrated hero of Marxism nor the full-blooded romantic hero who believes in the reality and importance of his personal struggle. For Sartre the ‘I’ is always unreal. The real individual is Ivich, opaque, sinister, unintelligible and irreducibly other; seen always from outside. Real personal communication is the communication Ivich has with Boris, the nature of which remains impenetrably obscure both to Mathieu and to his author. (Ivich and Boris always fall silent when they see Mathieu approaching.) The simple virtues of human intercourse become forms of insincerity. Only reflexion and freedom are desired as ends and yet these turn out to be without content. What the aspiring spirit achieves is an empty babbling; what it desires is complete stillness. ‘Its ideal is silence.’ The individual seen from without is a menace, and seen from within is a void. Yet there is a further assertion which Sartre is making in Les Chemins; a passionate ‘nevertheless’. We find this in the Schneider episode, brief, obscure and heavily charged with emotion.

  George Lukacs praises Simone de Beauvoir for seeing that in this age there is only one moral problem: what to do about Communism. (Her two philosophical essays, Pyrrhus et Cinéas and Pour une Morale de l’Ambiguité deal largely with problems of political belief and action.) This is the problem which obsesses Sartre also; and it is his guilt-stricken obsession with this either/or which seems to daze his ethical sensibility in other respects and permits him to treat personal relations at the level of the psychological casebook. Under the pressure of this enormous choice ordinary moral distinctions lose their interest. In Simone de Beauvoir’s writings the distress receives a kind of answer. The hero of Le Sang des Autres painfully discovers his moral involvement with other people; his lightest move, his very existence, bruises another, in love and politics alike. He leaps from simplicity to a state of metaphysical neurosis where it seems to him impossible to draw any limit to his responsibility. But later he discovers that the ‘solution’ lies in the struggle for the society of free beings where a mutual respect for personality, for the claim of each to choose his own way, shall end our violences to each other or at least render them innocent.

  Sartre is less naïve and less optimistic about the possibility of our ever managing to be ‘as free as before’. The innocence which stands to Simone de Beauvoir as a serious ideal1 appears in Les Chemins as Mathieu’s fleeting vision of the earthly paradise. The romantic answer emerges without social democratic trimmings, and is given in all its crudeness in the climax on the bell tower. Sartre dissociates himself from this piece of gratuitousness, but not with the conviction of one who clearly envisages another way. Seule la révolte est pure2 is something which Sartre feels, but to which he does not deceive himself into imagining he can give the form of a practical programme.

  What Sartre does attempt to assert is the absolute value of the person and the moment, the individual in the moment; that all moments are equidistant from eternity. But he has to make this assertion without the support of any background faith, religious or political. Simone de Beauvoir reduces the moral commandments, whether social or personal, to one: respect freedom. Sartre, though he makes a theoretical use of this ideal, does not give it flesh in Les Chemins. Here his defence of the moment appears naked and desperate and unavoidably ambivalent. The moment can wear the secretive selfish face of Ivich as well as the tragic face of Schneider. Its autonomy can be that of a non-rational egoistic will. At best it is the lonely unjustified individual who stands before the Grand Inquisitor; the scapegoat Vicarios, uncertain and shadowy, bitter and ineffectual, on
e of those who is but too conscious of having fallen out of History, and who is aware of this as an inevitable yet crushing moral failure. The value of the person is detected by Sartre, not in any patient study of the complexity of human relations, but simply in his experience of the pain of defeat and loss. In cool moments the individual is mercilessly analysed; his preciousness is apprehended only in the emotional obscurity of a hopeless mourning. (‘No human victory can efface this absolute of suffering.’) It is as if only one certainty remained: that human beings are irreducibly valuable, without any notion of why or how they are valuable or how the value can be defended.

  ‘If the Party is right, I am more lonely than a madman; if the Party is wrong . . . the world is done for.’ Sartre does not think that the Party is right and does not want to think that the world is done for. His explicit intention is to make more real to us the possibility of a political middle way; to render us more conscious of our freedom to make a destiny that is other than the two crushing alternatives which appear to be offered; to emphasise the value of an innocent and vital individualism which is menaced from both sides. Yet as a theoretician of the third way Sartre has nothing more positive to cling to than this last fragment of faith in the preciousness of the human person, stripped at last of its traditional metaphysical ramifications. On the one hand lies the empty reflexion of a reason which has lost faith in its own power to find objective truth, which knows its idea of an unprecarious liberty to be contradictory, and which finds human suffering a scandal and a mystery. On the other lies the dead world of things and conventions, covering up the mute senselessness of the irrational, where the other person is a Medusa and the only escape is in ‘going away’ or in ‘losing oneself’. (For Roquentin, both social conventions and linguistic conventions are there, like the green surface of the sea, to cheat us.) The empty consciousness flickers like a vain fire between the inert petrifying reality which threatens to engulf it and the impossible totality of a stabilised freedom. There is total freedom or total immersion, empty reflexion or silence.

  The deadening civilisations of capitalism and communism are alike rejected and the perfect society where complete stability combines with complete individual awareness, social security with civil liberty, seems less and less possible. So when one is caught between the intolerable and the impossible nothing is justified except a state of rebellion, however vain. When in insuperable practical difficulties a sense of ‘all or nothing’ is what consoles. Sartre, who rejects the comfort of the appeal to tradition and unreason, seems to take refuge instead in a deliberately unpractical ideal of rationality. The solipsistic psychology of reflexion mirrors what Lukacs (in almost the same words as Oakeshott uses to describe the Marxists) has called the politics of adolescence.8 According to this critic, Western man is indeed vis-à-vis de rien; he desires nothing but freedom, yet freedom is an empty ideal. The general impression of Sartre’s work is certainly that of a powerful but abstract model of a hopeless dilemma, coloured by a surreptitious romanticism which embraces the hopelessness.

  It is patent that what many readers of Sartre find in his writings is a portrait of themselves. A likeness is always pleasing, even if one is not handsome; and to be told that one’s personal despair is a universal human characteristic may be consoling. But this is not to say that what we are offered here is nothing but an irresponsible caricature of a modern mood. Sartre’s great negatives are not the negatives of cynicism, but of an obstinate and denuded belief, which clings to certain values even at the expense of seeming to make them empty. The Marxists revile Sartre because he describes man as a fundamentally non-social, non-historical individual. But what Sartre wishes to assert is precisely that the individual has an absolute importance and is not to be swallowed up in a historical calculation. Sartre’s man is depicted in the moment-to-moment flux of his thoughts and moods, where no consistent pattern either of purposeful activity or of social condition can easily be discerned; at this level freedom seems indeed like randomness, the freedom of indifference.

  Sartre wishes at all costs to withdraw his man to a point at which he is independent of what seems to him the inhuman determinism of the modern world, the realm of the economist and the sociologist—even if it means depicting him as an empty shell. ‘We stand for an ethics and art of the finite’, Sartre wrote in What is Literature? Yet because Sartre cannot rid himself of the absolute aspiration, the desire for certainty and completion which he presents as an eternal characteristic of man, he wishes nevertheless to create a total picture of the broken totality, to describe man’s limit from a point beyond that limit. And because he finds nothing that he values in either of the alternative civilisations which confront him he makes his picture as empty and abstract as possible. He asserts simply the absolute nature of the individual even if he is without hope and the sacredness of reason even if it is fruitless.

  Sartre’s play on the word ‘freedom’ may be a flagrant case of ‘persuasive definition’; but it is also a symptom of a dilemma in which we are all involved. For many reasons, the chief of which is that science has altered our societies and our key concepts with a dreadful speed, it seems now impossible for us either to live unreflectively or to express a view of what we are in any systematic terms which will satisfy the mind. We can no longer formulate a general truth about ourselves which shall encompass us like a house. The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists. But what we hold in common, whatever our solution, is a sense of a broken totality, a divided being. What we accuse each other of is ‘metaphysical dualism’. All modern philosophies are philosophies of the third way.

  * * *

  1 Partly perhaps because she belongs to a race whose liberation can still be conceived as a proper task of Reason and one which is within its power. See her book Le Deuxième Sexe.

  2 Simone de Beauvoir, Les Temps Modernes, XVII, p. 857.

  3 George Lukacs, Existentialisme ou Marxisme?, p. 196.

  VIII

  PICTURING CONSCIOUSNESS

  I have considered Sartre’s theories in the light of his practical interests. Now I shall look at them simply as ‘philosophy’ in the traditional sense. To consider them only in the latter way would be misleading; Sartre’s political passions mark all his work and are responsible for inconsistencies which would be incomprehensible to someone viewing him as an academic philosopher. But to consider his work too exclusively in a political light is to risk underestimating his qualities as a thinker. He is at his most original (philosophically) when he is at his least persuasive.

  If we think naïvely about sense perception we can imagine it as the taking of a series of snapshots. Such a thought lies behind the ‘magic lantern’ view of consciousness held by Locke,1 Berkeley and Hume. Percepts are one kind of snap, and emotions, or thoughts of absent things, are other kinds. Kant and Hegel upset this notion by introducing problems about the meaning of the ideas, and about how the observer might be shaping or altering them. Subject and object sprang together. Later idealists such as Husserl still tried to speak of objects of consciousness as if they were identifiable pictures passing before the mind; and Freud occasionally uses this sort of language too. The metaphysical problems suggested by such a view have been under consideration for a long time; more recently an empirical objection was framed. We do not in fact experience any such thing. Sartre, with his Cartesian starting point, brooding over the moment-to-moment deliverances of consciousness, is impressed by this. La Nausée is at pains to portray the indeterminate and nebulous character of many of our ‘states of consciousness’. For this, the magic lantern is not a good image. Sartre is not an adherent, either, of the cognate view of consciousness as what Professor Ryle has called ‘the ghost in the machine’. As he does not think of awareness as a clear rational stream of ideas, he does not think of it as a stream in parallel to our actions.

  What are the memorable examples used in L’Etre et le Néant? The gambler whose resolutions melt near the gaming table, the woman who prol
ongs her indecision by leaving her hand inertly in the grasp of her admirer, the watcher at the keyhole who suddenly realises that he himself is watched, the stroller in the park whose solitary scene is transformed by the arrival of another observer. Sartre remains interested in the deliverances of consciousness because of the role which our attempted conceptualisings of ourselves play in relation to our conduct; and the feature of our awareness which for Ryle marks the inner world as beyond salvage is for Sartre its most important feature. Consciousness is ‘troubled’; we are not able to contemplate our states of consciousness, they are not thing-like. Conscious belief turns into unbelief,2 our ‘characteristics’ exist for other people, but seem to vanish before our own gaze. Sartre is interested in man not so much as a ‘rational’ being but as a ‘reflective’ being: self-picturing, self-deceiving, and acutely aware of the regard of others.

  How does Sartre set about describing our consciousness, or our ‘being’? We have already encountered the recurrent image, incarnated particularly in Roquentin and Daniel, of the consciousness (pour-soi) as a sort of uneasy void (néant) lying between a state of unreflective solidification (en-soi) and an ideal but impossible condition of fully reflective self-contemplative stability (en-soi-pour-soi). I shall now try to give a clearer philosophical sense to this image. We may if we please picture the world ‘realistically’ as an assembly of things with stable and determinate characteristics; and even the nebulous things therein offer themselves as capable of being named and defined. This is not a complete picture, however, since we have still omitted the observer. As soon as we attend to him, we realise not only that his awareness of the things which he takes to be stable and determinate is not itself stable and determinate, and that he is also aware of ‘things’, such as his own emotions, which do not at all lend themselves to being observed and specified; we also realise that, after all, the solid things of the world do not have their qualities unambiguously written upon them. It is the observer who draws lines and affixes labels. An acute realisation of this is one way of beginning philosophy. It also puts one in immediate danger of going too far in the other direction. (The move from realism to idealism can be instantaneous: consider Berkeley.)