WHAT WAS SARTRE?

I can't believe that Jean-Paul Sartre was a philosopher - at least not a genuine one. What makes it especially difficult, apart from the turgidity and obscurantism of much of his work, is that he also wrote plays and, to my way of thinking, plays and philosophy are completely incompatible - even absolutely antithetical on the noumenal (ethereal) planes of space and time, where we have a kind of alpha/omega distinction between objective concretion and subjective abstraction, as between completely opposite and unrelated worlds, like beauty and truth - the former superfeminine in its metachemical elemental particles and the latter supermasculine in its metaphysical elemental wavicles.

Therefore unless Sartre's drama is to be regarded as pseudo-dramatic, which, if less will and more spirit, less action and more speech, it could well qualify as being, there is no way that one could also be a serious and, to any appreciable extent, genuine philosopher; though a pseudo-philosopher, more essayistic than aphoristic in form and generally given to turgid if not prolix verbiage of the sort Sartre seems to have favoured from time to time, he assuredly could have been, albeit from a contrary gender standpoint (masculine male) than would characterize the writing, not to say writers, of genuine drama (with its superfeminine female implications in relation to free will).

If, indeed, Sartre was given to both genuine drama and pseudo-philosophy, as I suspect, he would have been state-hegemonically polar with gender cross-over from free will in the one context to free ego in the other - an uncommon but not improbable paradox for a Frenchman of Protestant ethnicity.

If, on the other hand, Sartre was more partial to pseudo-drama and genuine philosophy, which I doubt, he would have been church-hegemonically polar with gender cross-over from free spirit in the one context to free soul in the other - an equally uncommon but not improbable paradox if, unlike Sartre, you happen to be a man of Irish or even French Catholic ethnicity.

Either way, one has a kind of bi-polar literary disorder that is difficult if not impossible to justify or rationalize, especially since the alpha/omega alternatives, whether noumenal (ethereal) and absolute or phenomenal (corporeal) and relative, involving both genuine drama and genuine philosophy on the one hand, but pseudo-drama and pseudo-philosophy on the other, defy ethnic pigeon-holing and either make no gender sense whatsoever or, at least in the case of phenomenal relativity, suggest a creative, not to say axial, instability that is both ethnically and sexually paradoxical, with an antithesis between free spirit and free ego, strength and knowledge, pride and pleasure, volume and mass, objective concretion and subjective abstraction within the corporeal context of a distinction between the femininity of chemical molecular particles and the masculinity of physical molecular wavicles - an incompatible not to say implausible state-of-affairs, since free spirit can only function properly if there is no competition from the ego, as from masculine male criteria, which has to be neutralized for such spirit, avowedly feminine female in character, to have its objectivistic concrete way, and then at the expense not of philosophers, still less novelists, but of poets, the type of the pseudo-man par excellence.

What, then, was Sartre? I think I have answered that question satisfactorily. He was certainly not a genuine philosopher, or metaphysical aphorist with a leaning towards the transcendent (although there are intimations of such in his notebooks, as though in a personal aside to his principal publications). Neither, as far as I can tell, was he a genuine dramatist, more given to will than to spirit, to a Shavian dramatic pose within a context overly disposed to action as the supreme mode of drama or dramatic presentation. I think he toyed with drama largely from a polemical point of view, as in 'Nakrassov' and, to a lesser extent, 'Altona', without, however, wholeheartedly committing himself to a theatrical vocation, like, say, Wilde or Shaw or even Samuel Beckett, not to mention Ionesco. I believe he was more of a fiction writer, both short and, especially, long (novel) prose, who dabbled, whenever he could or had to, in other things, not excepting journalism and ... pseudo-philosophy, which is probably the closest one comes to knowing who or what Sartre was, that is, a pseudo-philosopher who, like so many other writers both before and since, found it necessary, whether commercially or professionally or even politically, to cross over the gender fence from a masculine literary art form to a pseudo-feminine one (at least in the case of novels, i.e. long prose such as the 'Roads to Freedom' trilogy) without in the least suspecting that, by so doing, he was compromising - not to say undermining and vitiating - his integrity as a man, and precisely in terms of being a quasi-pseudo-woman. As they say, where ignorance is bliss ...