Sartre's second century

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 127
herself has emphasised that Sartre's sometimes uneven thinking cannot
and should not be assimilated into a kind of Hegelian synthesis. Instead,
his emphasis is on "maintaining in tension the dual poles of a dialectic of
paradox". This tenacity "necessarily led him to reject the one-sided nature
of the so-called 'death of the Subject', even though he welcomed the antiindividualism
of the Structuralist endeavour in so far as it was conceived
as an antidote to bourgeois humanism." 15
This ongoing effort to expose and explore the plurality inherent in
Sartre's thinking is seemingly anticipated by Iris Murdoch in 1953.
Writing just before the onslaught of postmodernism, the English moral
philosopher uses different poles in which to figure Sartre's duality.
Sartre's emphasis on analytical understanding is countered in her eyes by
his exuberant imagination, bringing tangible fact and emotive feeling into
a turbulent interaction: the "Romantic Rationalist". She makes her point
by citing a familiar dilemma of Sartrean philosophy: if man is a nonessential
and therefore free being, what fundamental purpose could he ever
have? Sartre may have ardently attended both to the notion of individual
liberty and to its everyday practice, but he could not square one with the
other into an integrated ethical framework of social conduct. For Murdoch,
the devil is in the detail. Existence may precede essence for Sartre, but this
binary sequence crucially depends on both. Doing and becoming are the
key focus as the actions which bring us into existence, but they carry with
them an element of being that cannot be fully erased. Sartre throws the
individual into a to-and-fro, or va-et-vient as he puts it, always yearning
for an absolute state of being and yet encountering an indeterminism
which thwarts that desire.
Sartre's metaphysical distinction between being and nothingness had in
fact foregrounded a paradoxical duality in his philosophy. To summarise:
"Consciousness is rupture, it is able to spring out of unreflective thing-like
conditions—but it is also projet, it aspires towards a wholeness which
forever haunts its partial state." 16 Human consciousness is insubstantial:
self-reflexive being-for-itself, rather than self-present and in-itself. It
ruptures us out of the material "thing-ness" of the world, but we are thus
left trying to shape in the emptiness of that consciousness a world we can
call our own. Sartre in turn finds himself exercising a balancing act
between the conscious mind and the physical world, whereby each weighs
upon the other back and forth in a fraught equilibrium. Under Sartre's
supervision of this existential "see-saw", conscious being and objective
15 Howells, Sartre, the Necessity of Freedom, 115.
16 Murdoch, Romantic Rationalist, 92.