Crises, Tidings & Revelations: A Sartrean Resurgence?

Like so much of his work, let me inform the reader that Sartre himself may have faded from the screen of au courant academic consciousness, but he is poised for a return if my first visit to the Sartre Society of America is a clue.

Now some may find this disquieting, but for me it is rather delightful. I, for one, would welcome a return to our old nemesis Sartre over the terminal evasiveness of such post-modern thinkers as Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard. I’ll take that old-time foundationalism of Sartrean dialectics, mired as it is in the nothingness of the “pour-soi” or situated as it came to be in praxis and dialectical reason as the ground of truth, over the “Inhuman” of Lyotardian anti-reason.

There has always been a frankness to Sartre that allowed the Christian philosopher to understand with a certain degree of precision whence the opposition of Sartre came: it came from a rebellion against God, and yet it was rooted in a constant dialogue with God, as the mythic goal of the human project, as one who outlined the horizon of possibilities which human reality was doomed to aspire to, and forever unable to obtain.

We should bear in mind that this human futility which Sartre summarized at the end of the more youthful Being and Nothingness, declaring that “man is a useless passion,” is continued on through his Marxist existential phases in the first Critique. Here he holds that “no one is free until everyone is free” — a model of utopian, anarchical bliss doomed to utter futility, a model reserved as Jacques Maritain so wonderfully noted, only for the angels. Secretary Bentsen would undoubtedly maintain to Sartre, if he were to debate the French enfant terrible, “you are no angel.” But if he is no angel, his untranscendable voluminousness and his radical utopian vision achieves such angelic proportions as practically to elevate Sartre to a status which we may be only on the threshold of comprehending.

Why is this so? First, Sartre’s vision is nothing short of the aim of the end of history and the realization of absolute freedom in an impersonal setting which of itself disallows such an end, requiring a freedom dependent upon the liquidation of material scarcity. The great thing about Sartre is that the aim of human existence which he outlines is unattainable; and in its unattainableness it holds a fascination with its possibility that defies human existence, projecting as it does a hope for perfect reciprocity and mutuality that calls for nothing short of permanent revolution against the exteriority of all human institutions. And only a God-man can incarnate such a possibility that brings us to — well, it brings us to Castro, which plunges us into one of the plenary sessions of the Sartre Society of America.

Lisandro Otero a Cuban who lives in Mexico City. As introduced to this special session the moderator recalled Otero’s claim to actual, not theoretical, revolutionary status, as one of the Cuban revolutionaries who overthrew Batista. Especially noted was Otero’s revolutionary act of kidnapping — we weren’t informed who was kidnapped or why, or what was the person’s fate, but we were left with the sense that this is indeed a bona fide revolutionary. We were in collective awe, for this was something different from academic leftism which most of those attending the Society’s meeting at DePaul University — how rich the paradox of it all — embodied.

But Otero, a much-published novelist who abandoned the ossification of Castro’s later Cuba, had been the host for Sartre’s visit to Cuba in 1960 and translated much of the conversation between Sartre and Castro. And what a rich encounter it was between the two.

The picture of Castro was of a person who “ate much and fasted much,” who slept little, and was very much the engaged leader in an existential situation sufficient to sink any French intellectual in the quicksand of guilt for the failure to incarnate revolutionary praxis.

Each morning at 4 a.m., Castro, Sartre, de Beauvoir, with entourage, toured the island of Cuba, with everyone in fatigues save Sartre, who sweated profusely in a white shirt, black tie, and jacket. Sartre the writer, upon returning from the forays among the peasants, would work feverishly into the night, spending two to three hours recording all of his insights in large ledger books. And de Beauvoir? She listened and observed, and said little. But again, it’s all there in her memoirs.

And what did Castro and Sartre talk about in these conversations? According to Otero, their conversations basically fell into five categories: 1) military tactics, with Castro explaining revolutionary strategies to Sartre; 2) Castro seeking information and Sartre’s thoughts on international figures such as Nasser; 3) Castro explaining land policy to Sartre; 4) Castro seeking Sartre’s opinion on relations between Cuba and the USA and the possibility or likelihood of an American invasion; and 5) talk about art and Sartre’s advice that art misconstrued could ruin the revolution.

And what was Sartre’s advice to Castro? First, it is immoral that one generation should be sacrificed for another for the sake of the revolution. Second, and as a corollary, that everyone has a right to be happy in their lifetime. Sartre proceeds, therefore, to ask Castro, “What if a peasant should ask for the moon?” Castro’s simplistic and pseudo-Marxist reply was that, “If he needed it then the revolution should give it to him.”

Clearly, Sartre saw in Castro the ultimate existential ruler of the revolution. He saw Castro as the embodiment of the plants, the fields, the farms — he was Cuba in its aspiration for disalienated freedom. He was the mediating third, the same as you and me, the Regulating Third, breaking the chains of alterity and the shackles of capitalistic bondage, wreaking havoc on bureaucratic enslavement, the apotheosis in himself of the group-in-fusion, requiring the enemy to be overcome, and prior to the inevitable institutionalization of the revolutionary apocalypse.

Sartre’s notion of freedom has a clarity and echoes an eternal ideal which would, per impossible, incarnate man as an angelic being, a being which would end the travail of history, and achieve a permanence and translucidity and intuitive presence which no one in temporality can embody. And yet Sartre lives on — where? In the imaginative negation of the harshness of a godless universe for those who try to live what James Collins termed a “postulatory atheism.” Once postulated and willed through an act of pride, it ushers in an unquenchable thirst for embodied, angelic freedom. And so, Sartre lives on in the desperation of the project of despairing academic revolutionaries.

From the meeting emerged a fatal paradox in Sartre. On the one hand, he makes “conflict” to be the paradigm of human relations in Being and Nothingness, and on the other he argues for positive reciprocity in his Notebooks for an Ethics. Is such reciprocity a surplus value gleaned from the corpses of dead revolutionaries? How is it to be attained while history marches forward pushed on by the inevitability of material scarcity? Is the struggle justified if the end can only exist in the imaginary? Is the imaginary necessarily negation? And is the ideal of perfect freedom the guarantor of futility? Sartre’s value may reside in his passion to follow through to the utter extremity of his own thought and its impact should be to call the reader back from the abyss which Sartre self-wills. This is negative theology unknown to the medievalists. It clarifies the urgency of the task of an authentic existentialism in our time of crisis.

Author

  • Joseph Pappin III

    Dr. Joseph Pappin III earned his B.A. in Sociology from Northeastern Oklahoma State University in 1969. In 1974 he received his M.A. in Philosophy from University of Oklahoma 1974. His Ph.D. is in Philosophy, also from the University of Oklahoma, and received in 1979. He is a Professor of Philosophy and dean at USC-Lancaster.

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