JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Sartre was unquestionably the greatest of modern French writers and the one whose philosophy had the most influence on his contemporaries. He was in many respects the antithesis of Camus - a sophisticated northern Frenchman who was more at home in libraries and lecture halls than in the natural world of Mediterranean neo-paganism. But he wasn't a transcendentalist, and if one thing more than any other characterizes and limits Sartre, it is his general indifference to and even ignorance of religious values - in short, his materialist bias, which owed not a little, I suspect, to his Protestant upbringing. The existence of men in a meaningless universe was a taken-for-granted axiom of his Existentialist philosophy, its inference that man is only free when he acts ... the cornerstone of his mature thought. He came at the tail-end, so to speak, of humanistic civilization in a bourgeois country and, not altogether surprisingly, he didn't point the way forward to post-humanistic civilization. He remained a victim of his nihilism, convinced of the absurdity of human life but persisting in his perseverance with it, if only because suicide would have required more courage or resolve than he possessed.

It is hard to believe that anyone with such a bleak philosophy as Sartre could be a great philosopher, and one may doubt whether, in the strictly academic sense of the word, he was really a philosopher at all. Rather, one could argue that he was a twentieth-century philosophe, or combination of artist and thinker, an 'author' and 'writer', in Roland Barthe's paradoxical distinction. A philosopher should really be a man who writes philosophy and nothing else, and to be such a man one must either have the means to support oneself, like Schopenhauer, or acquire those means through some profession congenial to or associated with philosophy, like as a professor at some university. Alternatively, there is the possibility of one's being supported by a pension or dole, like Nietzsche, who nevertheless had been a professor, as, of course, had Schopenhauer. But none of these categories would apply to Sartre, who, following the termination of his short-lived pedagogic career, was obliged to earn a living from editorial as well as literary work. Sartre was more than a philosopher and on that account also considerably less than one!

Nevertheless in Sartre's case we are dealing with a man who was a jack of all (literary) trades but, paradoxically, a master of many. To compare any one side of Sartre's creativity with the corresponding side of Camus' ... is to see how comparatively inferior the latter was. As a novelist, Sartre's Nausea and his Roads to Freedom trilogy dwarf the three very short novels and one medium-length novel by Camus, both in technique and content - the former being less conservative and more expansive than Camus', the latter ... both more intellectually and thematically interesting. As a short-story writer, Sartre's Intimacy displays greater imagination and intellectual depth than Camus' Exile and the Kingdom. As for the theatre, the disparity between the two men is even more conspicuously in Sartre's favour, for his plays - the best of which, like Nakrassov and Altona, are contemporary classics - both outnumber and outclass the two or three original works by Camus. As for philosophy, there is no comparison between Sartre's Being and Nothingness or, for that matter, the even more complex Critique of Dialectical Reason and Camus' two comparatively lightweight philosophical works, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, which one could argue are both reactionary and misguided. Admittedly, the Lyrical Essays reveals an aspect of Camus' creative scope which Sartre doesn't appear to have. But then there is no place in Camus - and probably never would have been - for full-scale biographical works or psychoanalytical studies like the ones by Sartre on Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Genet, not to mention his essays on artists, such as the brilliant ones on Tintoretto and Giacometti. Clearly, Sartre's range of creativity both exceeds and surpasses, genre for genre, that of his close contemporary.

That Sartre's work or, at any rate, the best of it will continue to be read during the decades and centuries to come ... I have little doubt, and I would wager that Nausea will constitute his principal claim to literary immortality, with the probability of a philosophical work like Being and Nothingness in accompaniment. Not that Sartre's philosophy is particularly enlightened, or particularly readable. But it subsumes and refines upon a sufficient number of earlier twentieth-century philosophers to have at the very least a certain historical significance. Even if it's only regarded as a record of bourgeois decadence or of a civilization in decline, it will retain some posthumous value.

Sartre's reputation for political affiliation with the Extreme Left is too well-documented to warrant my dwelling on it in this essayistic sketch. But although he gave a lot of thought and time to politics, he never went out of his way to join a party, including the French Communist Party, which he courted for a time. One might describe him as a social anarchist, given his active sympathy for La Cause du Peuple and kindred radical-syndicalist causes; though if he was originally a Marxist who then became an Existentialist, his subsequent attempt to fuse the two disciplines wasn't altogether convincing, and one must pin part of the blame for this on his lack of a transcendental perspective, the possession of which just might have precluded the anarchic modification of Marxism from taking place. But fundamentally Sartre was too much of a bourgeois to ever be anything more than an enfant terrible to the bourgeoisie and a sympathetic onlooker or fellow-traveller to the communists. Anarchy, in one guise or another, has long been attractive to bourgeois radicals, and Sartre's existentialist variation on a Marxist theme shows him to be no exception. The Soviet Union, with its state control of the workers, both politically and economically, proved disappointing to Sartre, though he never sought to emulate Gide in attacking it. Instead he concentrated his political hopes on a revolution in France which would free the proletariat from bourgeois oppression and (presumably) leave them to do their own collective thing within a broadly Social Democratic context.

Although one or two of Sartre's works give the impression that he was a loner, he fared well from both friends and mistresses throughout the greater part of his life, supplementing his long-standing platonic attachment to Simone de Beauvoir with a number of short-lived, though for the most part satisfying, love-affairs with younger women. He was too well-born, too wealthy, and too famous to be a perverted solitary, like Genet, and although his only autobiographical work, Words, gives one the impression that life was a regrettable burden on him, nevertheless he did relatively well out of it in terms of writing, travelling, loving, listening to music, eating, drinking, smoking, and so on. Even in old age, when reduced to blindness and unable to write, he had to admit that his life had been well spent and quite successful on the whole. There were still some things that could be done, but France's most famous and celebrated intellectual hadn't done too badly, even so!