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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Man, Sartre once wrote, is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’ If he is to bejudged, therefore, it will have to be on the basis of his actions. As long as he is alive, however, his actions remain incomplete; he may continue in the same general direction, doing more or less the same kind of things he has always done, or he may change his course, thereby giving his life a totally different meaning. It was just such a change that Kierkegaard was hoping to find in Bishop Mynster. Mynster, he believed, was betraying Christianity by the kind of preaching he did and the kind of life heled; but he could redeem himself by declaring that it was not really the faith he was proclaiming, but rather some watered-down version of it. Kierkegaard therefore waited till the Bishop died and only then, after all his acts were complete, did he begin his famous ‘attack on Christendom’. Up till April the fifteenth 1980, the day Sartre died, it was likewise possible that a dramatic change would take place — perhaps a confession, like Aquinas’, that all he had written had merely been ‘straw’. But that was not to be; apparently Sartre died, not regretting anything he had said or done. This does not mean necessarily that the way is now open for an ‘attack on existentialism’; but it does mean that Sartre has become himself totally, as he would have put it, and we are in a position to apply to him those words that Inez, a character in Huis Clos, applied to Garcin: ‘One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life and nothing else.’
1 Quoted in Philip Thody, Sartre (London: Studio Vista Ltd., 1971), p. 139.Google Scholar
2 Macquarrie, John, Existentialism (Penguin Books Ltd., 1973), pp. 27Off.Google Scholar
3 Existentialist Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), p. 52Google Scholar; cf. p. 1.
4 Sartre, J.-P., Questions de Méhode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 250.Google Scholar
5 See Existentialism versus Marxism, ed. Novack, George (New York: Dell Publ. Co., 1966)Google Scholar; especially the ‘Introduction’ by Novack and the essays of Lukacs (‘Existentialism or Marxism?’) and Garaudy (‘False Prophet: Jean-Paul Sartre’).
6 Aron, Raymond, Marxismes Imaginaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 48, 55.Google Scholar
7 Questions de Méthode, p. 42.
8 Collingwood, R. G., Essay on Metaphysics (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1972), p. 31.Google Scholar
9 Sartre, J.-P., L'Etre et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 519.Google Scholar
10 ibid, p. 521. ‘En fait, il ne suffit pas de vouloir: ilfaut vouloirvouloir.’
11 Baillie, D. M., ‘Philosophers and Theologians on the Freedom of the Will’, The Theology of the Sacraments, and other Papers (New York: Scribner, 1957), pp. 129, 132.Google Scholar
12 L'Etreet le Néant, p. 517.
13 See Löwith, Karl, ‘Nietzsche's Revival of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence’, App. II, Meaning in History (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1949)Google Scholar. Lowith discusses Nietzsche's attempt, from his earliest years, to conceive a synthesis of the free will, which creates history, with fate. Nietzsche believed he achieved this in his doctrine of Eternal Return. Lowith, however, considers this doctrine self-contradictory because of Nietzsche's emphasis on will and creativity. Cosmic necessity, the eternal cycle of the world, simply does not leave room for any will to create the future. Lowith may be right, but the point here is not the validity of Nietzsche's doctrine, but the fact that Nietzsche intended to find a place for human freedom within the framework of an Eternal Return.
14 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, vol. III, 3, tr. Bromiley, G. W. and Ehrlich, R. J. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), p. 342.Google Scholar
15 Quoted in Baillie, John, The Interpretation of Religion (New York: Scribner, 1928), p. 344.Google Scholar
16 L'Étreet le Nént, pp. 308f.
17 John Macquarrie, op.ci7., p. 127.
18 L'Éire et le Néant, p. 502.
19 Novack, op. cit., p. 151.
20 L'Étre et le Néant, p.614.
21 ‘Nausea,’ essentially, is the feeling of anxiety that accompanies the sense of contingency or meaninglessness. More succinctly, it is the ‘anxiety of meaninglessness’.
22 Sartre, J.-P., La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938)Google Scholar. cf. Camus, L'Étranger where Meursault's reaction to everything — his mother's death, a new job, marriage, killing an Arab — is ça m ést égal, it's all the same to me.
23 If one were to choose one word to describe the essence of bad faith, that word would be ‘irresponsibility’. To exist in bad faith, according to Sartre, is to try, through selfdeception, to escape what one is. See L'Etre et le Néant, pp. 85ff; also pp. 94ff, where he describes the bad faith of a coquette. There are some interesting examples as well in his fiction: Daniel, for example, in LeSursis, and Garcin in Huis Clos.
24 Our reaction to the death of God, says Nietzsche, is ‘like a new and indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, encouragement, and dawning day … In fact, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the ‘old God’ is dead; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation.’
25 Sartre, J.-P., ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. & tr. Kaufmann, W. (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1956), p. 307.Google Scholar
26 This is implied in Mill's statement that education and opinion should use their power ‘to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole.’ Utilitarianism, ch. 2.
27 Novack, op. cit., p. 150.
28 Warnock, op. cit., p. 47.
29 Cranston, Maurice, The Quintessence of Sartrism (Montreal: Harvest House Ltd., 1969), p. 43.Google Scholar
30 Before 1968 (the year of the student rebellions) Sartre's engagement was evident in his literary activities during the Resistance, his support of the Algerian independence movement, his condemnation of both French and American aggression in Vietnam, etc. After 68, however, he really became involved! As he himself put it: from 1968 onwards ‘I changed from a left-wing intellectual (un intellectuel de gauche) into a leftist intellectual (un intellectuel gauchiste).’ ‘The difference,’ he explained, ‘is one of action.’
31 Tillich, Paul, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 46.Google Scholar
32 cf. the penitents of Argos in Les Mouches who will not admit to themselves their freedom; also the preacher in La Mori dans L'Ame who tells the captured French soldiers to confess themselves evil and submit to divine chastisement.
33 Kierkegaard, S., Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. Swenson, D. and Lowrie, W. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941), p. 211.Google Scholar
34 Tillich, Paul, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), p. 172.Google Scholar
35 Kierkegaard, S., Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, tr. Lowrie, W. (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1954), p. 203.Google Scholar
36 op.cit., p. 206.