'A penetrating introduction to the romantic rationalist, novelist and penseur' The Times Iris Murdoch SARTRE Romantic Rationalist l' VINTAGE Published by Vintage 1999 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright © by Iris Murdoch 1953 Introduction copyright © by Iris Murdoch 1987 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published in Great Britain by Bowes & Bowes Publishers Ltd, in the series Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought, 1953 Published with a new introduction by Chano & Windus Ltd 1987 Vintage Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5A Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 www.randomhouse.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0 09 927372 1 Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Limited, Reading, Berkshire ~ IRENE AND HUGHES MURDOCH CONTENTS Introduction page 9 I. The Discovery of Things 39 II. The Labyrinth of Freedom 5':! III. The Sickness of the Language 64 IV. Introspection and Imperfect Sympathy 81 V. Value and the Desire to be God 90 VI. Metaphysical Theory and Political Practice 96 VII. The Romance of Rationalism 105 VIII. Picturing Consciousness 114 IX. The Impossibility of Incarnation 126 x. Linguistic Acts and Linguistic Objects 138 Bibliography 151 Translations into English 155 INTRODUCTION Philosophers are not often popular idols, and works of philosophy rarely become guide-books to living, during the philosopher's lifetime. In the twenty years after the war Sartre was probably the best-known metaphysician in Europe, best-known that is not just among professional thinkers (many of whom ignored him) but among young and youngish people who, for once, found in philosophy, in his philosophy, the clear and inspiring explanation of the world which philos ophers are generally supposed to provide. The funda mental and attractive idea was freedom. It had long been known that God was dead and that man was self created. Sartre produced a fresh and apt picture of this self-chosen being. The metaphysical imagery of L'ttre et le Niant, Being and Nothingness, was, for popular pur poses, easily grasped. The pour-soi, for-itself, a spon taneous free consciousness, was contrasted with the en soi, in itself, inert, fixed, unfree. The en-soi was the world experienced as alien, senselessly contingent or un reflectively deformed. The heroic consciousness, the individual self, inalienably and ineluctably free, chal lengingly confronted the 'given', in the form of existing society, history, tradition, other people. The war was over, Europe was in ruins, we had emerged from a long captivity, all was to be remade. Sartre's philosophy was an inspiration to many who felt that they must, and could, make out of all that misery and chaos a better world, for it had now been revealed that any- 9 10 Introduction thing was possible. Existentialism was the new re ligion, the new salvation. This was the atmosphere in Brussels in 1945 where I first read L'£tre et le Niant and where I briefly (and on this occasion only) met Sartre. His presence in the city was like that of a pop star. Chico Marx, who was there at about the same time, was less rapturously received. The only other occasion when I saw a philosopher being hailed as a prophet was in California in 1984 when I attended a lecture by Jacques Derrida (Un autre temps, toujours la mime France). One of the charms of the Sartrian philosophy at that moment was that it readily carried a political message. The enemy was the past, the old bourgeois world with its clumsy mechanism and its illusions and its fatal mistakes. It was and must be the end of an era. Fascism had been destroyed, left-wing governments would come to power everywhere, and in England one promptly did. It is interesting, and indeed touching, that so much optimism arose out of the vaguest under standing of Sartre's doctrine, which also carried the melancholy message that since the pour-soi can never be united with the en-soi, man isune passion inutile, a useless, futile, passion. The darker message of the doc trine was unnoticed, or became itself a source of energy, perhaps because, as in the case of other so called pessimists such as Hume or Schopenhauer, the cordial and self-satisfied discourse of the thinker conveys a cheering v~tality quite at odds with his theory. The en-soi, an alien object of fascination, of fear, even of hate, in Sartre's obsessive and hypnotic world picture, appears in his philosophical novel La Nausee as contingent matter, our surroundings, things, experienced as senseless and awful. In L'£tre et le Neant and also· in the novel sequence Les Chemins de la Liberti, Introduction II the en-soi appears, in contrast to free reflection, as inert conventional opinions, dead traditions, illusions. In the drama Huis Clos, which was received with enthusi asm and is still played, the alien being is another person, whose freedom contradicts one's own, and whose unassimilable Medusa gaze turns one's pour-soi into an en-soi. This imagery returns us to the realis ation that the 'hero' ofSartre's early philosophy is, like the Cartesian subject, alone. In his elegant account of his childhood, us Mots, Sartre, brought up, he tells us, by two women and an old man, was early aware of himself as an actor, uncertainly enacting his role as a child prodigy, unable to find and coincide with his real self. This, already, was expressive of the inutile metaphysical passion which fills and inspires his work, longing to devour the world and make it his own, together with a tormenting and invigorating consciousness of the impossibility of success. The model which seems to prove that such a total philosophical synthesis can be, very nearly, achieved is Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, and it has been the dream of more than one metaphysically minded thinker, after and including Marx, to rewrite this book and get it right., Sartre attempted it twice. L'ttre et Ie Niant was a huge non-historical revision of the subject-object dialectic, in which the prime value, and motive force, replacing Hegel's Geist, was freedom (individual project), and wherein the insights of Hei degger (whose mythology Sartre secularised), Husserl, Freud and Marx were all to be accommodated. Sartre here portrayed the dialectic psychologically as the human soul; later he portrayed it socio-politically as human history. His later work remains, for all its obvious- divergence and new tone, significantly close, 12 Introduction his critics would say too close, to the first fine careless rapture of the early synthesis. Sartre is, in himself, as philosopher, novelist, play wright, literary critic, biographer, essayist, journalist, a remarkable instance of the universal omnivorous writer. La Nausee, Sartre's celebration of the horror of the contingent, is one of the very few unadulterated and successful members of the genre 'philosophical novel'. It is unique in Sartre's work, and I think in literature generally, a young man's tour de force. The unfinished sequence Les Chemins de La Liberti are by con trast traditional novels, crammed with characters, events, story, various people, various moral judge ments. Sartre evidently had, at this stage, no difficulty in telling a story, a feat which later on writers (and perhaps he) felt to be more difficult and problematic. Th«;se novels have a huge subject; passionately grasped and felt, the outbreak of war and the occu pation of France, and they retain their power as works of literature. There are fairly inconspicuous moments of philosophical reflection, but these are not in any for midable or purposive sense 'existentialist novels', and their hero, Mathieu, is not a didactically existentialist hero. Indeed he appears, in comparison with more extreme and bizarre pictures of the human person con jured up elsewhere in Sartre's philosophical and liter ary writings, and in spite _ of being periodically exhausted by the futile vagueness of his thoughts, a pillar of sobriety and decency, possessing quite ordi nary qualities including a traditional moral sense. Short stories, in the collection Le Mur, explore a Sar trian existentialist idea, evident in Sartre's followers and indeed in late romantic literature generally, that authentic being is attained in extreme situations, and Introduction 13 in revolt against society. Here the figures who fascin ate Sartre are often violent, even criminal. Hatred of existing (Western) society, often identified as 'bour geois society' and contrasted with some imagined alternative, has of course been a long-standing (and often fruitful) source of literary inspiration. Sartre later indulged and explained his admiration for stylish and talented criminals in his long book about Jean Genet. He continued his literary career not as a story teller but as a, successful, writer of plays. The plays were propaganda as well as art, and could be seen as supplementary to the battling articles in Temps Modernes. But perhaps in the long run the play satisfied the literary Sartre because of its compulsory formal brevity. The metaphysician who could not say any thing unless he said everything was compelled in the theatre to give his message briefly; and as Sartre unfor tunately could not do' everything, as opposed to thinking everything, he found the theatre, where he had un doubted talent, a sympathetic place to drop into. It often remains a mystery, in spite of hard work done on the subject by spectators including Sartre himself, why artists suddenly stop doing something they are good at and do nothing, or something else, which of course they may be good at too. Sartre might have gone on to write a huge novel full of thoughts and people. He did not, instead he wrote a book about Bau delaire, a long book about Jean Genet, and an ex tremely long book about Flaubert. These works come, strictly speaking, under the head of existential psycho analysis, a procedure outlined in L'ttre et Ie Niant, not under that of literary criticism. Les Mots, presumably an instance of existential self-analysis, is calm, even cold in tone. The other books, more passionate, in