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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
Being and Nothingness
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
Being and Nothingness
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