June 24, 2005
NOTHING AND NOTHINGNESS
The power of negative thinking (Roger Scruton, The Spectator, June 25th, 2005)
It is fair to say that Sartre’s anti-bourgeois rhetoric changed the language and the agenda of post-war French philosophy, and was the original inspiration for Barthes, Foucault and the phoney psychotherapies of Lacan and R.D. Laing. It was translated into street theatre in May 1968, and fired the revolutionary ambitions of students who had come to Paris from the former colonies. One of those students was later to return to his native Cambodia and put into practice the ‘totalising’ doctrine (expressed in Critique de la raison dialectique, 1960, and in Situations VIII and Situations IX, 1972) that has as its targets the ‘seriality’ and ‘otherness’ of the bourgeois class. And in the purifying rage of Pol Pot it is not unreasonable to see the contempt for the ordinary and the actual that is expressed in almost every line of Sartre’s demonic prose. ‘Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint,’ says Mephistopheles — I am the spirit who always denies. The same can be said of Sartre, for whom l’enfer, c’est les autres — hell is other people (Huis clos, 1947). Like Milton’s Satan, Sartre saw the world transfigured by his own pride — a pride that caused him to refuse all tributes, from the Légion d’Honneur to the Nobel Prize, since they originated in the Other and not in the Self.Having got that off my chest and given you a start on the bibliography, I can freely admit that Sartre was a genius who saw to the heart of the modern condition and who brought French romantic literature to a kind of self-conscious and also self-refuting climax. His masterpiece, L’Être et le néant, published in 1943 at the height of the second world war, is one of the great works of contemporary philosophy. Although he begins from the obscure and ultimately untenable ‘phenomenology’ of Edmund Husserl, Sartre unfolds an unforgettable portrait of the predicament in which we are placed by self-consciousness in the world of objects (the predicament of the pour-soi [for-itself] in relation to the en-soi [in-itself]). For the religious world-view, self-consciousness is a source of joy, proof of our apartness from nature, of our special relation to God and of our ultimate redemption, as we leap from the world into the arms of our creator. For Sartre, self-consciousness is a kind of all-dominating nothingness, a source of anxiety: proof of our apartness, certainly, but also of our loneliness, which is a loneliness without redemption, since all the doors on our inner walls have been painted there by ourselves and none of them will open.
Sartre was remarkably ugly, with a flaccid body and the face of a toad; yet he was highly successful with women, one of whom, Simone de Beauvoir, remained his lifelong mentor and companion. Their free arrangement enabled her to watch his many seductions and to enjoy her own, often lesbian, affairs, thereby experiencing, both as participant and observer, the ongoing proof that pour-soi can never unite with pour-soi, whatever the en-soi is up to or up. For Sartre all loves, and ultimately all human relations, are founded on contradiction. As a self-conscious being I necessarily find myself in the position of ‘being for others’. I am a free subject in my own eyes, but a determined object in the eyes of others. When another self-conscious being looks at me, I know that he or she searches in me not for the me-as-object but for the me-as-subject. Hence the gaze of a self-conscious creature has a peculiar capacity to penetrate: it looks into me, and not just at me. It thereby creates a demand: the demand that I reveal myself, so to speak, that I make my free subjectivity present in the world of objects. Unfortunately this is impossible, and when, in sexual desire, we both strive to conjure the pour-soi out of the en-soi, the result is — well, a mess. Sartre’s bleak description of this mess, and of sado-masochism as the last futile refuge of desire and the ‘reef upon which it founders’, is without compare in philosophical literature — a description that Mephistopheles might have whispered into the ear of Faust, as he ruined the innocent Gretchen. [...]
The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France. The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank intellectual has entered the political process, and given rise to an elite for whom nothing is certain save the repudiation of the national idea. It is thanks to this elite that the mad project of European Union has become indelibly inscribed in the French political process, even though the people of France reject it. It is thanks to this elite that the mass immigration into France of unassimilable Muslim communities has been both encouraged and subsidised. It is thanks to this elite that socialism has been so firmly embedded in the French state that no one now can reform it. And it is thanks to this elite that, even today, when the ordinary French citizen has had the anti-bourgeois message up to the eyeballs — ras-le-bol — the intellectual agenda remains unchanged, with transgression as its dominating purpose.
Of course, there have been dissenters. Novelists like Louis Pauwels, philosophers like Alain Besançon and Luc Ferry, essayists like Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann, have done their best to speak up for the French inheritance against its institutionalised detractors. Interestingly, however, it is the Sartrean legacy that is exported. The message that British and American academics wish to hear from France is not that of Louis Pauwels who, in Les orphelins, tells the inner story of 1968 and its moral bankruptcy, but that of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Bourdieu — Sartreans in everything that matters, who have continued the master’s work of hunting down meanings and spearing them with their finely honed negation signs.
However, man cannot live by negation alone. Notwithstanding his heroic attempt to live in recoil from the world of others, Sartre envisaged an ideal community — a Kingdom of Ends in which he would be finally united with les ouvriers, and of which he was already in some mystical way a part. In his later writings, therefore, he comforted himself with the invocation of a new form of society whose only foundation would be authentic choice. In this groupe en fusion the intellectual and the proletarian would be united, without the mediating structures of custom, authority and law. Thus would the intellectual be redeemed, without paying the normal and intolerable price of redemption, which is obedience.
If you look at Sartre’s philosophy in that way, you will see through it to its ultimate origins in Rousseau. Moreover, Sartre’s invocation of the workers recalls Rousseau’s invocation of le peuple, to whom the intellectual is supposedly bound by a compassionate zeal. And just as Robespierre used Rousseau’s philosophy to justify the greatest attack on the people that the modern world had witnessed, so did Sartre use his philosophy to justify the totalitarian regimes that had done most to ruin the hopes of the working class. Whether Sartre was as great a writer or as ingenious a thinker as Rousseau I do not know. But he was certainly as pernicious an influence.
French intellectual history is complex and multi-faceted, but it seems clear that the betrayal of old liberal, Christian France by the establishment in the Dreyfus affair and two world wars ultimately drove the generation that now rules to worship this disgusting little man.