c.b. daly - review of sartre's 'being & nothingness

7/23/2019 C.B. Daly - Review of Sartre's 'Being & Nothingness'

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PHILOSOPHICAL STUDmS

of

justice, its exalted rank and its limits are treated. Separate chapters

discuss commutative justice (under the heading of Recompense and

Restitution) and distributive justice (under Justice of Government).

The opportuneness and competent treatment

of

the topic

of

just govern

ment is particularly noteworthy. Generous space is allotted to it; the

points selected for illustration and application: are up-to-date and familiar

to us all. One must mention the lucid analysis of the injustice of

government based on totalitarian or on liberal principles alike, and

the reminder

of

the dangers in democratic systems

of

government where

the representative

of

the social whole is to a much greater extent [than

in a monarchy] the representative

of

particular groups

or

interests as

well.

One criticism might be made

of

the author's discussion

of

general

or

legal justice. While the treatment

of

this topic on pages 32

ff.

leaves

little to be desired, yet one gets the impression from a later section

(cf. p. 52 that legal justice is part of the cardinal

virtue-a

point which,

we are inclined to think, St. Thomas would deny.

Altogether this is a stimulating and valuable book.

St. Patrick's College Maynooth T. P. CuNNINGH M

33. Being and Nothingness. n Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.

By JEAN-PAUL

SARTRE.

Translated and with

an

Introduction by

HAZEL E. BARNES. New York: Philosophical Library,

1956.

London: Methuen. Price 50s.

In

a Preface, the translator says:

This is

a translation

of

all

of

Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Etre et Ie Neant. She earned hard and earned

well the right

to

make this satisfied statement. t was a task

of

intimi

dating dimensions. Sartre's vocabulary and style, in this, his major

philosophical opus, are grim, graceless and disheartening. Seldom has

the

French language

had

to

suffer so much in giving

birth

to

a

philosopher's ideas. American translations

of

the minor works, hitherto

available, have sometimes had the effect

of

making the obscure absurd;

their explanatory introductions have sometimes been quite silly. Of

Miss Barnes's translation, it must be said that she has succeeded admi

rably in being both accurate and readable. She has not just transposed

Sartre's words but his thought into an English which reads English

and

not

just transliterated French, and which makes Sartre not less

understandable in translation than he was in the original. Where the

translation remains barely intelligible, the fault is not hers. The Intro

duction, too, is of high quality and gives us, in forty pages,

an

intelligent

exposition and acute appraisal of Sartre's ontology which compares

favourably with anything hitherto written about Sartre in English. There

is a useful and accurate glossary of technical terms of Sartrean philosophy

and a Name Index which give the English volume important advantages

over the French.

Miss Barnes, perhaps of set purpose, confines her consideration, in

the Introduction, to L'Etre et Ie Neant and the philosophical works

which preceded and to some extent prepared for it. This limitation,

however, can be regretted for the reason that it makes Sartre's pheno

menology and ontology seem more detached and speculative enquiries

than they are. Reference to the plays, novels, essays, literary criticism


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JEAN-PAUL SARTRE:

Being and Nothingness

225

and politico-social pamphlets is necessary in order to show how com

pletely Sartre's theoretical constructions are determined by political and

social commitments

and

resentments.

In

one instance, Miss Barnes's

omission is strange; for she says:

I t

is surprising that Sartre,

on the

other hand, ignores an entire set of special experiences to which the

Idea of Nothingness

is

tremendously important; namely the whole

history

of

mysticism. This

is

an unaccountable statement; for

in

1952,

Sartre, in his Saint Genet Comedien t Martyr did, with quite unforget

table mass and density of words, relentless perseverance in paradox

and

wrong-headedness

of

argument, treat of mysticism and sanctity, per

versely trying to show that sanctity and satanism, saint and sodomite,

are kin. The

Saint Genet

with the continuing Marxist journalism are,

in fact, all that we seem likely to get by way of the work on Ethics

promised

at

the end

of


in 1943.

There is, however, more in Sartre than paradox, rhetoric and political

journalism. His philosophy expresses too many of the valid insights,

the genuine bewilderments and the

absolute

presuppositions and

partialities

of

the contemporary mind, for

t

to be ignored. British

philosophers, even when they have seriously tried to do it justice, have

usually concluded that it

rests very largely on mistakes of logic. Thus,

Bertrand Russell thinks that the philosophical basis

of

existentialism

is

the naive belief (which he himself shared in his youth) that there is some

logician's

limbo

in which there are the

things

which

logical

words l ike if , or ,

not

, mean. A. J. Ayer, writing about

Sartre as novelist-philosopher in Horizon (1945), expressed the suspi

cion that what is called existentialist philosophy has been very largely

an exercise in the art of misusing the

verb'

to

e

'. He speaks

of

Sartre's Looking-Glass Logic ; of his hopeless logical confusion ;

of

his often very subtle but desperately wrong-headed ratiocination.

I t

is

nevertheless revealing to note how often Sartre emerges from

the maze of logical confusion by the same door as that frequented by

the logical positivists and their successors, the linguistic analysts. We

read, in


Necessity concerns the connection

between ideal propositions but not that

of existents. An existing

phenomenon can never be derived from another existent qua existent.

We will find the same proposition, in almost the same words, in Russell

or

in Ayer,

not

to speak

of

Hume, their common ancestor. For Sartre,

as for the early Ayer, propositions about God, the soul, immortality,

absolute values, are logically self-contradictory and nonsensical. For

Sartre as for most contemporary logical analysts, the questions

of

tradi

tional metaphysics are devoid

of

meaning

or

incapable of answer.

When Sartre says: (Ontology)

is

concerned solely with what is, and

we

cannot possibly derive imperatives from ontology's indicatives

-

we

might be listening to any modem Oxford

or

Cambridge moralist.

Sartre

is

a spokesman of the modern atheistic intellectual; and the

characteristics are, on the whole, fairly uniform throughout the species,

irrespective of national and cultural frontiers.

Sartre, like his fellow-unbelievers, claims to be a humanist and

maintains

that

'humanism' is by definition incompatible with theism.

His humanism is, he tells us, simply

the

effort to draw out

all

the


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PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

consequences of a consistently atheistic position. His atheism must,

of course, be examined philosophically, and no other type of analysis

of Sartre, whether psycho-analytical or biographical, is relevant to the

philosophical issue

or

can dispense from the philosophical analysis.

This can obviously

not

be attempted within the limits of a review. But

t is profitable to reflect here on the extent to which contemporary

atheism is motivated by antipathy towards people, ideologies, and social

systems, allegedly identified with Christianity, rather than by reasoned

enquiry into the truth

of

theism or of Christian faith

and

morals in

themselves. This is glaringly obvious in the case of Sartre. The hinge

on which his whole system of thought turns is the doctrine that belief

in absolute values is

bad faith

and an abandonment of the human

condition and therefore a betrayal of humanity's hopes for social justice.

This is built by Sartre into the centre

of

his ontology

and

his ethics.

Belief in God, belief in metaphysical

'essences',

belief in immortality,

aspiration after sanctity, all are lumped together, with belief in moral

absolutes, as

bad faith

and

inauthenticity , and

condemned as

at

once logically self-contradictory and morally odious. But the reason

underlying all Sartre's reasons for this is that he has, quite rightly,

decided that many people who think themselves highly moral and

virtuous, are in fact pharisees and hypocrites, Grundy'S

and

Tartuffe's,

often perhaps employers of sweated labour and exploiters of the poor.

From

the true premise,

Some

supposedly virtuous people are im

postors , Sartre draws the fantastically illogical conclusion, All Virtue

(and therefore all Metaphysics and Theology and Religion) is imposture.

This is, at its simplest, the logic of Sartrism. This is what lies at the

base of the enormously complicated and sophisticated philosophising.

In

latter years, the vesture

of

philosophy tends more and more to be

discarded and the underlying

propaganda

and partisanship to be

increasingly revealed.

There is, of course, a tradition in France for this kind of entangle

ment of ideas with political passions. Among Catholics, Peguy, Bloy,

Bernanos,

had

this among their sins

and

left it as a regrettable liability,

partly offsetting the rich intellectual

and

spiritual assets they bequeathed

to contemporary French catholicism. Peguy could write: ' I, who

am not

Virtuous', says

God

. . .

(The

virtuous) do not offer that

open door to grace which is essentially sin . . .

What is

called

morality is a thick skin which makes us impenetrable to grace. . . .

Morality makes us capitalists

of

our virtues. The results of this shallow

sophistry can be seen in the personal tragedy of a defrocked priest, the

unfortunate Abbe Massin, whose apologia, e Festin chez Levi 1952)

was full of Peguy-isms of this sort.

Virtue is

the special sin of the

rich, for the rich man is essentially he who erects his own Public

Monument. . . . All that is gained for the spiritual life is lost for

virtue. . . . All that is gained by sanctity

is

lost by virtue. . . .

t is remarkable how sure the new Publicans are that they are

not

as

the rest of men, Pharisees, extortioners, unjust, as are these bourgeois

Such is some of the cant of the new anti-religious Fanaticism of our

time. Such are the worst effects of the anti-absolutist philosophy

of

absolute commitment. Father de Lubac has written: Pamphleteering,


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JEAN PAUL SARTRE Being and Nothingness

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caricature, vulgar popularisation, political trickery, arrogance and abuse

instead

of

proof, slanderous insinuation, cheap-sale psycho-analysis

all this is very ready to-day to take to itself the fair name of ' engaged

philosophy'.

Only the future will tell whether Sartre is going

to

merit

being treated as a serious contemporary philosopher

or

is going to

degenerate into a pamphleteer and vulgar populariser.

Of the propensity towards vulgarity, there can be

no

doubt. Gabriel

Marcel has said

of

Sartre: I t is by no means

an

accident that his

work presents us with one

of

the most frightful exhibitions

of

obscenities

that is to be found in contemporary literature. There is an affectation

among literary critics to-day that dirt is not dirt, but Art, when used

in a cause or by a person of whom the critic approves. Sartre certainly

uses dirt usque ad nauseam against people of whom some critics dis

approve; hence they indignantly protest that he is not pornographic.

Sartre was undoubtedly sincere when he declared, in Saint Genet: Je

n'aime pas autant la merde qu'on e dit. But he has certainly loved

throwing it on bourgeois salauds, right-wing philosophers, capitalists,

employers, Americans, imperialists, Christians

and God-for

all these

for him are oddly one. There is indeed a wild abandon about Sartre's

vulgarity which resembles the teddy-boy urge to shock and smash

and make a noise. There is an imp of plate-smashing anarchism in

Sartre; shown in the gusto with which he describes in La mort dans

i ame,

Mathieu's final wild shooting showdown with Virtue, Respecta

bility, the Bourgeois World- Liberty is Terror

-;

shown too, even

more teddy-boyishly , in his approval of the respectable Frenchman

in America who deliberately acts immorally in order to get his own

back on American Virtuousness. Saint Genet is full of adolescent

foolishness like this: there are few more ridiculous statements in the

history of philosophical advertising that Francis Jeanson's claim that it

is

the

outstanding work

of

contemporary philosophy.

Exaggerated claims by his friends, biassed dismissals by his critics,

irresponsibility by himself, all have made it difficult to assess objectively

the originality

and

greatness

of

Sartre as a philosopher and as a novelist

and

dramatist of ideas. There is one aspect

of

his writing about which

his defenders are extremely sensitive, that is his propensity to plagiarism.

Anyone who suggests that Sartre has 'cribbed' ideas and expressions

widely, persistently, and very successfully, must be prepared to be

accused

of

pedantry, irrelevance, prejudice, reaction. But the facts are

there. How many

of

Sartre's most striking thoughts, most disturbing

and brilliant images, were already in Malraux. La souffrance de la

pensee ; Ie reve d'etre Dieu ; l'angoisse qui est e fond de I'homme,

la conscience de sa propre fatalite d'ou naissent toutes les peurs ; the

impossible desire, by an absolute crime,

to

possess oneself, to coincide

with oneself, completely; the insurmountable solitude, the mutual

treacheries of

love-all

this was ready for Sartre in a Condition Humaine.

There is,

of

course, a free market in ideas;

but

images are more copy

right, and

it

is unusual to find such close correspondence in imagery

as there is between Malraux's episode

of

Clappique and the mirror and

that

of Roquentin

and

the mirror in Sartre's a Nausee. Words too

are rather personal;

and

Sartre's famous s e n t e n e ~ '\ l'homme n'est rien


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228 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

d'autre que l'ensemble de ses actes is straight from Malraux:

U n

homme est la somme de ses actes, de ce qu'il a fait, de

ce

qu'il a pu Caire

Rien autre.

Similarly, one can find many of Sartre's favourite phrases and ideas

and literary devices anticipated by D. H. Lawrence or liberally sprinkled

through the novels and essays of Aldous Huxley. D. H. Lawrence

pre-empted Sartre's attack on ideals and fixed codes of morality in the

name of sincerity and authenticity; as well as his critique of the Idea

of

God

as man's

insatiable

desire to be

everything ,

his radical

passion . . . to include

everything

in himself (e.g., in his Essays

on Democracy , 1936, and

on

Whitman , 1923). The essential

argument of both of Sartre's much-lauded essays in literary-moral

criticism,

Baudelaire

and

Saint Genet,

was already stated, much less

tediously

and

pretentiously, in Aldous Huxley's artfully wicked little

essays

on

Spinoza's Worm , Francis and

Grigory ,

Baudelaire

and Pascal , in Do What You Will (1930). One could compile

an

amusing anthology of Sartreanisms from Malraux, Lawrence, Huxley.

This,

of

course, makes Sartre's friends very indignant. t is one of the

matters about which the devotees

of

Sartre's

chapel

have very strongly

l'esprit du serieux . Such literary borrowings, however, though they

seem incompatible with greatness, are not incompatible with talent.

Sartre's talent as a novelist

and

a dramatist are beyond question.

But the character

of

his latest work inevitably raises doubts

about

the value of his claim to be rated as a serious philosopher. As Marcel

predicted in 1947, he has moved ever closer to Marxism, despite the

vicissitudes of

his relations with the Communist Party, and Marxist

preconceptions have more and more biased his thinking. His latest

theatre has been either straight entertainment

(Kean)

or slapstick anti

Right-Wing farce (Nekrassov). His current writing is mainly concerned

with somewhat tedious argument

and analysis about his relations with

Marxism

and

with the Communist Party. A long study of Existential

ism and

Marxism

running serially at present in

Temps Modernes,

pretty completely abandons philosophical discussion for Marxist labelling

and libelling. Like his faithful echo, Simone de Beauvoir, he seems

more concerned nowadays with thinkers' social class

and

incomes and

politics than with their ideas or arguments. The text of

an

interview

he gave on the B.B.e. last May, makes sad reading.

He

said: .. (A

philosophy) is an all-inclusi\fe whole reflecting the way in which the

rising class looks

at

the world . . . a method to solve the real problems

of life and a weapon against other opposing classes. One cannot go

beyond such a philosophy as long as the circumstances which have

produced

it

have

not

changed.

In

that sense, Cartesianism was a

philosophy. . . . One was able to go beyond it only when science

assumed a different form and when the bourgeoisie of mercantile capi

talists upholding that philosophy reached the industrial stage. I take

t that one cannot go beyond Marxism to-day because the really important

questions of contemporary philosophy are still within a Marxist frame-

work. As long as scarcity remains a problem for the people's demo

cracies and for us, the exploitation of man by man remains a living

problem,

and

one cannot go beyond the great Marxist problems and


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JEAN PAUL SARTRE Being and Nothingness 9

therefore, their solutions. . . . Marxism

is

an all-inclusive whole

reflecting our age. No one can go beyond it I

am

a Marxist.

That, to be absolutely precise, means

that

I cannot attempt not

to

be

one without falling back

on

old notions such as abstract freedom

or

equality

of

rights.

Yet, despite this deplorable nonsense, one feels that Sartre may only

be letting his head be temporarily turned by his heart.

I t

is not reason

which speaks in him for the present but sentiment towards the dis

possessed and resentment towards their oppressors. The feeling is

eminently praiseworthy even if the thinking is disastrously muddled.

Sartre may yet both feel

and

think his way to a genuine humanism.

I t should not be forgotten

of

him that he wrote, in

Temps Modernes

for January, 1957:

The

Soviet tanks at Budapest fired, in the name

of

socialism,

on

all the proletariats of the

world ;

and to those who

would have counselled silence, because this was not the moment

to

embarrass the Party,

h

bravely replied: I f this

is

not the moment,

then the moment will never come. And yet his tragedy remained: if

the

God of

Marxism failed, then the hope of men, the only hope of

men had died. I t is with a pathetically blind faith and a pseudo

religious hope that he wrote in the same article:

I f

the U.S.S.R. is

worth only the same as capitalist England, then indeed, there is nothing

left for us

but

to cultivate

our

garden. To preserve hope,

w

must do

precisely the opposite;

w

must recognise, beyond its errors, its horrors

and its crimes, the evident superiorities

of

the socialist camp, and condemn

with all the greater vigour the policy which puts these superiorities in

danger.

Sartre may yet become ' demystified '

of

Marxism as he has already

been 'destalinised '. The elements of a true humanism are already in

his system.

He

has said:

For

man, hunger is always much more

than hunger. His theory

of

hierarchies

of

significance rightly

emphasises that each detail of conduct expresses in its fashion man's

total project and fundamental choice of himself. This thought would

find its completion in an integral and theocentric humanism such as

Maritain's. For Maritain has said: I t is in vain that one affirms

the dignity and vocation

of

the human person, if one does not work to

transform the conditions which oppress him and to bring about the

conditions in which he can worthily eat his bread (Humanisme Integral).

That is

the problem

of

to-day: not just. food and fair shares, but also

conditions worthy of man's total project. Sartre should remember from

his own

Being and Nothingness,

that man

is

not just a passion for plenty

but also a passion for God.

Camus wrote, in reply to Mauriac, in Combat (January, 1945): I

believe I entertain a just notion

of

the greatness

of

Christianity.

But

there are some

of

us in this persecuted world who feel that if Christ

died for certain men, he did not die for us. . .

.

(Cited by Peyre,

The Contemporary French Novel). May it not be, in part at least, the

fault of ourselves as Christians, if men like Sartre and Camus feel that

the passion

of

man for God is useless and the Passion

of

Christ for

man alien?

The Queen s University, Belfast.

C.

B

DALY

c.b. daly - review of sartre's 'being & nothingness

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