Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time By Thomas Molnar Funk & Wagnalls, $4.95 Jean-Paul Sartre has built both his reputation and his fortune upon a long career of minding other people’s business. He has become, in the words of Professor Thomas Molnar, le contemporain capital, the chief witness of our age, or at least the post-1945 era—a fact which serves only to personify our — century’s essential bad taste. As a philosopher, critic, playwright, and Communist apologist he has gained a measure of notoriety and influence not common among intellectuals in our time. Only Bertrand Russell, whom he resembles in certain ways, is better known. Certainly he is more famous than his brilliant colleague on Les Tempes Modernes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who dwarfed him as a philosopher.
Like Russell, Sartre’s fame rests more on his contributions to popular literature and political controversy than on his often difficult and jargon-ridden _ philosophy. His most important work, L’Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness), like Russell’s Principia Mathematica, is largely unread, although it is often mentioned by his votaries, most _ of whom are still struggling to complete the simplistic Existentialism and Hu_ manism. However, unlike Russell, who was once a great philosopher, Sartre has – ever been a philosopher of the truly first rank. Without wishing to betray my own prejudice in favor of analytical philosophy, I think it is safe to say that at very best Sartre rates as one of Heidegger’s many disciples—an encomium only to those unfortunate intellectuals who have succeeded in wading through the lugubrious language of the old Black Forest wordmonger and gone away with a feeling of philosophical satisfaction. : – Sartre shares one final fate with Russell: both abandoned the philosophical investigations of their early years for the world of ideological speculation. But where Russell’s ideological maunderings have always been singularly naive, taking on after a time a kind of quixotic nobility, Sartre has always understood the implications of his ideologizing, ruthlessly attacking anyone au_ dacious enough to disagree with him (e.g. Albert Camus). It is this aspect of Sartre’s career that Thomas Molnar, who has had many perceptive things to say about Sartre in the past, covers in his latest book, Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time. To – say that this work has been long awaited _ would be an understatement; ever since the publication of his important work _ The Decline of the Intellectual, readers have been expecting Molnar to devote an entire book to Sartre. In The Decline of the Intellectual Molnar wrote several – illuminating pages which traced Sartre’s evolution from what Sartre himself called a philosophy of freedom (existentialism) to one of historical deter- -minism (Marxism). For Sartre, Molnar emphasized, ideology transcended _philosophy; it brought him into contact with a self-constructed mythos which he called the “working class,” and which _ he saw as the epistemological foundation of his life and work. That his fundamental atomistic individualism (to borrow a phrase from Sartre’s Marxist critics) was irreconcilable with Marxist collectivism seemed unimportant to Sartre and his followers. The caustically brilliant criticism of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, ridiculing Sartre as the last of the vulgar bourgeois individualists, has been repeated over and over again, particularly in the French Communist press; but none of this has discouraged Sartre or dissuaded him from calling himself a Marxist. Molnar raises the problem of how posterity will view Sartre: will it rank him with twentieth-century Marxist thinkers like Lukacs and the Polish writer Adam Schaff, or will it place him among the existentialists like Heidegger? I should think that since Sartre has opted for ideology, and since it is fashionable for neo-Marxists like Schaff to sprinkle their writings with existentialist jargon, history would rank him with the Marxists. That would undoubtedly annoy Lukacs, but he is much overrated these days and deserves to be annoyed. Molnar diplomatically solves the problem by using the term “utopian” to describe Sartre’s philosophy, thus classing him with the Marxists without contradicting those wishing to place him with the existentialists. The inconsistencies between Marxism and existentialism, as personified by the conflict between “atomistic individualism” and collectivism, dominate Sartre’s world-view. Molnar cites the example of Sartre’s existentialist ethical system, which says in effect that nobody can make ethical or political decisions for others, as a typical inconsistency. Marxism by its very definition would require Sartre to make decisions for others in the name of ideology. How can one be a Marxist without endeavoring to make others Marxists, Molnar asks. For Sartre, of course, a dichotomy exists, separating traditional morality (which he categorically rejects) from ideology, which is superior to morality because it postulates absolute rules of conduct. How Sartre must envy Ivan Denisovich in his slave labor camp with its absolute rules of conduct. Sartre has been equally free in distorting his philosophical mentors. Like Heidegger, his philosophical work was profoundly influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, which sought to get back to the essences of things by suspending judgments and apodictically intuiting (Husserl used the ungainly German word Wesenschau) what the particular thing was about in the first place (die Sachen selbst). Husserl saw his phenomenology as being an introduction to ontology but not an instrument of ontology, arguing that it is possible to be aware of a phenome such as ontology without actually plying ontology. To emphasize this point he wrote in his Logische Unter suchungen, once we are conscious of a phenomenon we should simply let it | “speak for its self.” Sartre, while wrap. ping himself in the cloak of phenome. — nology, endeavored to use it as a tool of ontology rather than an introduction | to ontology (he subtitled L’Etre et le Néant, Essai d’ontologie). Heidegger did much the same thing, and in his old age Husserl objected vociferously to it, One can only imagine what Marx would say about Sartrean Marxism. Professor Molnar has done much in this excellent little volume to explain just what Jean-Paul Sartre is all about. In his analysis of the particular brand of Marxist utopianism exemplified in Sartre’s writings, he has succeeded in shedding a good deal of light on the intellectual underpinnings of what these _ days is called the New Left. All those : interested in contemporary ideological developments will want to read this book.
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