More Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford: OUP (1953), p. 335:

Coleridge very carefully kept science, poetry, and religion distinct by attributing each, primarily, to its appropriate faculty of understanding, imagination, and reason. It was only in the early Victorian period, when all discourse was explicitly or tacitly thrown into the two exhaustive modes of imaginative and rational, expressive and assertive, that religion fell together with poetry in opposition to science, and that religion, as a consequence, was converted into poetry, and poetry into a kind of religion.

Sartre and Stevens were both heirs to this early Victorian shift. Sartre converted its epistemological dualism into the phenomenological ontology of being and nothingness; Stevens into the metaphysical dualism of reality and the imagination.

Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

From the entry "Poetry" in the Continuum Encyclopedia of American Poetry, p. 900.

Wallace Stevens was another modernist poet whose influence would be deferred for many years; he was a symbolist like Eliot rather than an imagist like Pound and Williams. Stevens was an existentialist as well. Most of his poems were expositions of the proposition that mankind ought by now to have grown out of romantic notions that there is a god who created the universe and looks after everything in it. To believe in such a creator is to blind oneself to the fact that people need to perceive life with "a mind of winter"--as Stevens wrote in his poem "The Snowman" from his first book Harmonium (1923)--and become responsible for their own actions, make their own order out of the chaos of existence.

Kant's Universalism/Heidegger's Obscurantism/Sartre's Cosmopolitanism

In the fourth thesis of his Idea for a Universal History, Immanuel Kant proposes a sociology of conflict anchored in an anthropology of "unsocial sociability." According to Kant, human beings enter into social bonds which they subsequently strain to the breaking point with their desire to assert their individual proclivities.

Kant argues that, far from being a "design flaw," this built-in tendency to conflict is Nature's way of forcing human beings to realize their innate powers.

Hegel will, of course, develop a similar schema into his famous dialectic. Marx will absorb Hegel and, in the process, invent the conflict model of modern social science.

Sartre is heir to this entire Enlightenment project. At the same time, he reaches back to Parmenidean ontology: there is being and there is nothingness. Unlike Parmenides, however, Sartre will not privilege being over nothingness. For Sartre, as for Kant, it is what we lack that drives us to invent ourselves vis a vis the herd.

In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre doubled back to re-examine the herd and find its potential (previously unremarked by him) as the mass. Following Marx, Sartre became convinced of the revolutionary potential of the mass as individuals struggle with themselves and with each other to realize that which they are not and have not.

This is why I contend that all of Western philosophy is mere prelude to Sartre. Heidegger arrogated to himself the role of Western philosophy's midwife to a new way of thinking, but Heidegger's new way of thinking proved to be little more than the old way of thinking clothed in a German peasant's smock. He abandoned the challenge posed by Kant's universalism after he soured on National Socialism. He pretended to mysticism, but delivered only mystification and "post-modern" obscurantism.

Sartre absorbed Heidegger or, rather, those parts of Heidegger he found useful, and discarded the rest (a truly judicious use of the Heideggerian corpus). Attuned always to what is lacking, Sartre saw clearly that a new way of thinking was not necessary, but new ways to act. Heidegger had begun with that premise (existence precedes essence) but became confounded somehow: he became lost in the labyrinthine lucubrations that characterized his years of post-war exile and silence.

Not so Sartre. Perhaps because he abandoned academic philosophy, perhaps because he remained active in politics, in Paris cafe society, in the world of art and literature, Sartre remained faithful to his Copernican insight that "freedom from" and "freedom for" constitute philosophy's true subject and humankind's true interest. And rather than set himself up as some sort of gnostic eminence (a la Heidegger), knowing "the way" to thinking, knowing "the way" to language, Sartre knew only the way to nothingness. He knew this because he knew that nothingness is what eludes us and that what eludes us is forever with us. The way to nothingness is, therefore, always open.

As Parmenides put it: "What is there for thinking and for being is the same." That sameness bored Sartre. Besides, thinking is a way open only to the few. Action is open to everyone: therefore, nothingness (not being) is where the action is. What we lack is what we strive for; ultimately, it is also what we achieve.

Only the joke's on us. For every achievement is something, not nothing; and every achievement is something we will want freedom from. In this manner, Kant's Nature, Hegel's Spirit, Marx's matter carry on their eternal struggle through Sartre's Cosmopolitan ontology.

Philosophy begins with Parmenides and finds its true "end" (as Heidegger punned) in Sartre--who turned Parmenides on his head. What is not there for thinking and for being is not the same: it is difference. Heidegger wished to bury philosophy but only managed to give it a new lease on life. Sartre did not wish to bury philosophy but finally managed to bring it to rest--so that our true labor could begin. Again.

A Brief Kantian Interlude

Kant's theses on universal history with cosmopolitan intent.

Notes On Sartre and Benjamin

Sartre's late work on existential psycho-biography and a close reading of Walter Benjamin's Theses On the Philosophy of History discloses important parallels.

When writing a particular life (Genet's, Flaubert's, even his own), Sartre sifted his data for what he called, borrowing a term from Merleau-Ponty, the "differential": that which placed his subject out of step with the prevailing spirit or presumptions of his time and, as a consequence, permitted him to undertake a life-project that reflected the peculiar stamp of his individual consciousness. For Sartre, every life is filled with opportunities to step away from the drowse of "bad faith" that encumbers every life and embark upon a career of existential authenticity.

Benjamin, theorizing a Marxist historiography, focused not on specific individuals but rather on the sweep of history itself. And yet he, too, was in search of the "differential" that impregnated historical moments with "chips of Messianic time" (Addendum A): those historical junctures which presented historical actors with opportunities for revolutionary action. In Thesis XV, Benjamin wrote:

"The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action."

Likewise, the recognition of such moments in the course of sifting one's historical data presents the critical historian with the opportunity to salvage them from the ash-heap of the victor's narration of the past and, thereby, transform her scholarship into a mode of revolutionary praxis.

I am, at present, uncertain whether or not Sartre was familiar with Benjamin's Theses. I would be surprised if he were not; but this is a matter for further research.

Notes On Sartre and Marx

Douglas Collins's Sartre As Biographer (HUP, 1980), though a monograph on JPS's relationship to the genre of biography is, at the same time, a lens through which Sartre's entire intellectual project may be comprehended. Indeed, I will be so bold as to say that JPS's relationship to this particular genre is the key to understanding his decisive contribution to modern thought.

Collins observes that "Sartre has an important place in the history of ideas, not because he developed a distinctive definition but rather because he broadened and applied the earlier ideas in new and unexpected ways. Only by reading Sartre in the context of his predecessors can one discover where the originality lies" (p. 32).

This sort of achievement is not unique to Sartre. Originality never involves creation ex nihilo--except in certain systems of theology (and theology is largely composed of what Wittgenstein termed "language on holiday").

Sartre, intent upon putting language to work, was no theologian. And the longer he labored with language, the more his attention shifted towards labor itself. His turn to Marx is therefore a source of embarrassment only to those who fail to appreciate the drift of his thinking over the course of his long and productive intellectual career.

Those who fail to appreciate the drift of Sartre's thinking are, by and large, intellectuals of the Liberal class: individuals who confuse freedom with license and, consequently, experience intense episodes of dyspepsia when confronted by Sartre's demands for moral responsibility and political commitment.

Liberals fawned over Sartre when they mistook him for the Philosopher of License. The love affair ended when Sartre began to point out that "men are free as well as determined, that they make their own history, though within an environment which conditions them. The seeds of such a method have always been contained within Marxism, and it is the historical task of existentialism, with its emphasis on the concrete man as the center of knowledge, to recall Marxism to its original interest in the specific human existence" (Collins, SAB, p. 27).

In other words, Existentialism was not conceived by JPS as a "stand alone" philosophical school but an adjuvent and corrective to what was, and remains, the most penetrating school of sociological analysis produced in the modern period: the school of Karl Marx.

Sartre and the Liberal Class

Writing after the "death of god," Sartre attempted to anchor personal responsibility in ontology (since theology was not an option for him as it had been for Dostoevsky).

His subsequent eclipse among Liberal Class intellectuals is due to their discovery that this ontological anchoring of responsibility placed strenuous moral and political claims upon them--not what they had initially expected from the man who had promoted a philosophy of freedom (a concept that they had interpreted to mean "license").

As Dostoevsky explained in an edition of A Writer's Diary:

In the present shape of the world people think of freedom as license, whereas genuine freedom consists only in overcoming the self and one's will so as in the end to achieve a moral state such that always, at every moment, one is the real master of oneself...

Real mastery of the self consists, for both Sartre and Dostoevsky, in negation (Sartre would say, "in nothingness"); in both cases, in the ability to say "No."

"Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre" is a form of askesis. A hard sell in the era of Neo-Liberal consumerism and capitalistic commodification.