Cultural Amnesia (101 page)

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Radiating contempt for its bourgeois liberal conformity, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) looms
in the corner of this book like a genius with the evil eye. For the book’s author, Sartre is a devil’s advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was
smarter. No doubt this is a disproportionate reaction. Sartre, after all, never actually killed anybody. But he excused many who did, and most of those never actually killed anybody either:
they just gave orders for their subordinates to do so. There is a moral question there, of the type with which Sartre was well equipped to deal, had he chosen to do so. He was a brilliant
man: the first thing to say about him, although unfortunately not the last. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 he called, in his capacity as a Resistance fighter, for punishment to be
vented on those among his fellow literati who had collaborated with the Nazis. The question of how much Resistance fighting he had actually done did not impede his post-war climb to
prominence. As philosopher, novelist, playwright, social commentator and political analyst, Sartre was the pre-eminent French left-wing intellectual of the Fourth Republic and beyond,
reigning supreme in the Left Bank cafés with Simone de Beauvoir the queen at his side. The pair made intellectual
distinction into a media story: the celebrity
enjoyed now by a glamour-boy philosopher such as Bernard-Henri Lévy has its precedent in that post-war connection between serious thought and media dazzle, a Parisian microclimate
which helped to give France a sense of luxury at a time when food and fuel were still in short supply. After Camus died prematurely in a car crash, Sartre’s true rival, Raymond Aron,
was a long time in attracting the allegiance of the independent left, and in the meanwhile Sartre’s
gauchiste
vision was the style setter of
French political thought, founding an orthodoxy that still saturates French intellectual life today, and, to a certain extent, continues to set a standard of
engagement
(the word, especially when detached from any real connotation, looks better in the original) for intellectual life all over the world. A key principle in
this vision is that the Communist regimes, no matter how illiberal, had serious altruistic intentions in comparison with the irredeemably self-serving capitalist West. (Academics in the
capitalist West greeted this brainwave with awed approval, failing to note that their society could hardly be self-interested if it allowed them to do so—unless, that is, freedom of
expression is a sly trick played by capitalism to convince the gullible that they are at liberty.) When Sartre broke with the Communists, he retained respect for their putatively benevolent
social intentions, and was ready to say something exculpatory even if what he was exculpating was the Gulag network, whose existence, after he finally ceased to deny it, he never condemned as
a central product of a totalitarian system, but only regretted as an incidental blemish. This manoeuvre, implying a powerful ability to deny the import of a fact even after he had
acknowledged it, was hard to distinguish from duplicity.

Sceptics might say that a knack for making duplicity look profound was inherent in Sartre’s style of argument.
Students who tackle his creative prose in the novel sequence
The Road to Freedom
or the play
Kean
(his most
convincing illustration of existentialism as a living philosophy) will find clear moments of narrative, but all clarity evaporates when it comes to the discursive prose of his avowedly
philosophical works. It should be said
in fairnesss that even the English philosopher Roger Scruton, otherwise a severe critic of Sartre, finds Sartre’s keystone
work
L’Être et le néant
(
Being and Nothingness
) a substantial work; and Jean-François
Revel, who took Sartre’s political philosophy apart brick by brick, still admired him as a philosopher who earned his own credentials, without depending on the university system for his
prestige. But those of us unfettered by being either professional philosophers or patriotic Frenchmen can surely suggest that even Sartre’s first and most famous treatise shows all the
signs not just of his later mummery, but of the mummery of other pundits who came to later fame. Foucault, Derrida and the like shouldn’t have needed scientific debunking to prove them
fraudulent: the pseudo-scientific vacuity of their argufying was sufficiently evident from the wilful obfuscation of their stylistic hoopla: and the same could have been said of their
progenitor. Where Sartre got it from is a mystery begging to be explained. It could have had something to do with his pre-war period in Berlin, and especially with the influence of his
admired Heidegger. In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

But the best explanation might have more to do with his personality. Perhaps he was over-compensating. It would be
frivolous to suggest that Sartre’s bad eye was a factor determining personality, like Goebbels’s bad foot; and anyway, Sartre’s physical ugliness in no way impeded his
startling success with women. It might be possible, however, that he was compensating for a mental condition that he knew to be crippling. He might have known that he was debarred by nature
from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered, because telling the truth was something that ordinary men did, and his urge to be extraordinary was, for him, more of a motive
force than merely to see the world as it was. This perversity—and he was perverse whether he realized it or not—made him the most conspicuous single example in the twentieth
century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization. More so than Ezra Pound, who was too crazy even
for the Fascists; more so even
than Brecht, a straight-out cynic who kept his money in Switzerland. Sartre was never corrupt in that way. Like Robespierre, he had an awful purity. Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize. He was
living proof that the devil’s advocate can be idealistic and even self-sacrificing. Minus his virtues, he would be much easier to dismiss. With them, he presents us with our most
worrying reminder that the problem of amoral intelligence is not confined to the sciences. It can happen to culture too, which suggests that on some level being a humanist means not being
like Sartre. His admirers might say that we are in no danger of that. But usually, when they admire him that much, they make his sort of noise. The tip-off is the sentence that spurns the
earth because it fears a puncture.

The Cogito never delivers anything except what we ask it to
deliver. Descartes never interrogated it concerning its functional aspect: “I doubt, I think,” and by having wanted to proceed without a guiding thread from this functional aspect
to its existential dialectic, he fell into the substantialist error. Husserl, instructed by this error, remained fearfully on the plain of functional description. By that fact, he never
superseded the pure description of appearance as such; he remained fixed on the Cogito; he merits being called, despite his denials, a phenomenist rather than a phenomenologue; and his
phenomenism borders at all times on Kantian idealism. Heidegger, wanting to avoid the phenomenism of description that leads to the megatic and antidialectic isolation of essence, directly
tackles the existential analytic without passing through the Cogito. . . .

—JEAN-PAUL
SARTRE
,
L’Être et le néant
, QUOTED BY
JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL IN
Pourquoi des philosophes
, PP. 69–70

B
UT ENOUGH, AND
more
than enough. Language which makes such a show of saying everything at once is usually concealing
something important, and in Sartre’s case, Revel knew exactly what it
was. Revel could have hung Sartre out to dry, had he wished. Revel had the credentials and the information with which to expose Sartre’s imposture as a Resistance hero. Sartre’s
nauseating theatricality in that regard (he didn’t mind implicating de Beauvoir in the charade either: for once they were a couple) was finally laid bare in 1991 by Gilbert Joseph in his
blood-curdling book
Une si douce occupation
. But it could have been done years before, by people who were on the scene and knew the truth: people like
Revel.

Revel contented himself with pointing out what ought to have been self-evident: that anyone who could
perpetrate a passage of balderdash like this had done a pretty thorough job of detaching philosophy from wisdom—and wisdom, according to Revel, was the only thing that philosophy could now
concern itself with, and had been since the rise of the sciences cancelled the last possibility of philosophy being a science to itself. In France, where the language offers no automatic defence
mechanism against the flummery of scientism, this argument needed plenty of putting until quite recent times. Finally it took a pair of scientists, writing in French but with a thorough
background in American scepticism, to produce the book that blew the whistle on Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and the other artistes in the flouncing kick-line of the
post-modern intellectual cabaret. But the two sceptical critics, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, did not extend their catcalling to management level. Their justly praised but not really very
revolutionary book
Impostures intellectuelles
(1997) should not have come as such a bombshell. It did so because critics well qualified to assess the health
of French intellectual life had been pussyfooting for decades, uncomfortably aware that the infection of pseudo-scientific casuistry was not peripheral to the main fields of humanist speculation,
but central: exalted balderdash was their common property. Revel knew all too well that Sartre was peddling a system for betting on the horses. But the interesting question was how a serious
customer like Sartre got himself into such a comical fix, and that was the question that Revel couldn’t bring himself to tackle.

Surely part of the answer is that Sartre couldn’t do for himself as an analytical thinker what he was bound to do
for himself as a creative artist—live out his bad faith. Sartre is high on the list of the writer-philosophers
who were more writer than philosopher. Montaigne, Pascal,
Lessing, Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—it is exalted company, but Sartre earns his place as a stylist who could make the language speak. The actor lucky enough to take the title role
in Sartre’s play
Kean
(in the original production it was the mighty Pierre Brasseur, he who was Frédéric Lemaitre in the
Occupation’s escapist masterwork, the film
Les Enfants du Paradis
) gets better things to say about existentialism than are ever said in Sartre’s
formal writings on the subject. In its later life, Sartre’s play
Huis clos
is too much praised for having been an act of political daring when it was
written. Its original production was officially allowed by the German Occupation authorities, some of whom came to see it. They allowed it because they knew its appeal to liberty was camped in
the air, and they came to see it because they knew they were in safe company. The moral problems with which the play’s supposedly trapped personages elegantly wrestle are woefully abstract
compared with those which were currently drenching even the proclaimed fascist sympathizers among French intellectuals in cold sweat every night. (Sartre might really have had something if he had
set his play in the
wagon-lit
that took the minor writers Jacques Chardonne and Marcel Jouhandeau on their 1941 trip to Germany, or if he had set it in the
swastika-decorated salon of the Vienna hotel where they were joined not only by the French collaborators Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach but by the Nazi hier-arch Baldur von Schirach in
full dress uniform.) As for the moral problems waiting to be faced by French intellectuals who fancied that they were resisting tyranny by assenting to its demands with sufficient reluctance,
those had not yet arisen in perceptible form, and in the conspicuous cases of Sartre and Beauvoir they were never to do so.
Huis clos
is a play absolutely
not about its time—a time when the case for humanity was being heard not behind closed doors but with the doors wide open, so that everyone could see, but only at the price of weeping tears
bitter with the salt of shame. It is, however, a play
of
its time, and perhaps most flagrantly so because of what it ignores. In other words, the inner
turmoil gets into the action somehow. Why else would these etiolated personalities be pretending ordinary life is hell, unless somewhere, in the real life outside, real personalities were
encountering a hell without pretence? What could not be said in the
street was there in the theatre in the resounding form of what could not be said on stage. As a writer, in
short, Sartre was unable to escape history, because his use of language could not keep it out.