FRANÇOIS SAUZEY

Born in this century of "specialized knowledge," when the human sciences have divided themselves into ever smaller sub-disciplines, Sartre's thought was complete: In the end, its subject was always the totality of human experience. Though perhaps primarily a moralist, Sartre also provided an epistemology and a psychology, a theory of emotions and a theory of history, even a full esthetics. And, like all "philosophies" in the classical sense, his was unified by an ontological vision…. Juding from Nausea, and from the pace of Being and Nothingness, the discovery of what was to form the bedrock underlying the multiple levels of Sartre's later work had the quality of an intuition, the force of an illumination. In trying to explain the prime energy and simplicity of his vision, one risks being branded a popularizer.

Allowed only one word to characterize it, I would choose "anti-idealism"—meaning not an absence of "ideals," of course, but a refutation of the belief held by centuries of "idealistic" philosophers that values pre-exist and descend upon man according to some abstract and eternal gravity. Allowed a little more than one word, I would choose that tenet of Husserl and the German school of phenomenology, "All consciousness is consciousness of something." (p. 19)

[Sartre wrenched this tenet] from its original purpose to serve his great revolution: Consciousness does not pre-exist; it is only insofar as it relates to something outside. If consciousness does not exist in itself, per se, there is no such thing as an "essence" that in any way precedes "existence," and no such thing as a "nature" of man upon which we can base some overhanging ethics or principles for action. Many can only be defined by his positive interaction with the world (what Sartre called our "project"); nothing binds him a priori, except the outside world and what he chooses to do, or not to do, with it in every given "situation."

Traditional ontologies and their religious or moral extensions had pre-empted man's faculties. Now, as a famous existentialist slogan had it, "man is condemned to be free." True, he is "abandoned" under "an empty sky," as we had been told in school. But this was merely another way of saying that man is restored to the fullness of his powers, that the whole range of his abilities can be fully mobilized; never before have his possibilities been so passionately challenged. (pp. 19-20)

The irreducible individual who redefines himself from one situation to another is at the center of all Sartre's works—from the plays to the novels, from the philosophical treatises to the mammoth biographies and the biting day-to-day exercises of the polemicist. Sartre's dedication to individual man can also be seen in his literary criticism—those beautiful texts, perhaps less known in the U.S. than in Europe, that have molded so much of our literary sensibility since 1938….

It was his belief in man's inalienable individuality and freedom that made Sartre's long relationship with Marxism so difficult—and so seminal…. Sartre's fierce individual … could never submit to being explained or pluralized in the "monstrously mechanical" fallacies of dialectical materialism—or in the abstract concepts and absolute universals superimposed by Marx's followers and interpreters, starting with Engels.

"Valéry is a petit-bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about that. But every petit-bourgeois intellectual is not Valéry. These two sentences sum up the fundamental heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism," Sartre wrote in Questions de Méthode. The method had to be revised, and existentialism was going to do just that; it would give Marxism the foundations it cried for. In order to generalize, to move away from the individual's alienation to the idea of a "group," capable in turn of giving an "end" to history, the analysis had to start from the bottom with the experience of the individual. Hence the enormous and unfinished attempt of the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, that frenzied, perilous exercise in permanent dialectic….

[Because of his death this] Cyclopean, versatile oeuvre was left unfinished. We shall miss the great Ethics he had promised us. But Sartre's ethics are already there, they are the thread-mark and texture of those books where he is most himself: Saint Genet Comedian and Martyr, Words, the Critique, and above all perhaps the first nine volumes of his collected essays, Situations. Sartre's original vision, never entirely sacrificed to circumstances or theories, remains intact. (p. 20)