Sartre's second century

136 Chapter Nine
1980 interviews, 45 is not as shocking as various members of the so-called
"Sartre family" have tried to make out. He had explained to Beauvoir
herself six years earlier that, even though the idea of a sovereign creator
contradicted many of his other notions, "it is in there, as a vague
presence". 46 Hugo's portrait of himself in his poem Les Mages, hearing the
audible but faint footsteps of a being in the beyond, surely casts the
shadow of the new Romantic across Sartre's work here. But Hugo's
trajectory conversely has to acknowledge the impossibility of harmony, so
as not to confuse his individual being with that of the world entire; to do
so would lay claim to an incorporation that only God can provide once the
mortal coil is done with. The notion of a supreme form of being that is but
an echo or spectre admonishes as much as advocates the idea of an essence
to human life, since this totalisation is "the clarity we do not see": "God
the incomprehensible, the evidently invisible", who gives no guarantee of
his existence and leaves the responsibility for our choices to us. 47 This
being so, and in light of his own deep mistrust of the dogmas of
institutionalised religion, Hugo has before him a perpetual vision of a
better world that is just that: an ever-receding horizon of closure "across
the shadows of this life". 48
Consequently, Sartre encounters a "bad faith", whilst Hugo must
discount it, only for each position to pass once more through its original
point of departure. To borrow Sartre's terminology: "There must be a
duality at the heart of freedom. And this duality is precisely what we call
detotalised totality." 49 Hugo articulates this duality best in his beloved
definition of himself as the poet-philosopher, itself a potential forerunner
to Murdoch's Romantic Rationalist: "He must leave, but he must come
back. He must have wings to soar endlessly above, but he must have feet
to tread the earth, and after seeing him ascend, we must see him wander.
He must return to being a man after transcending that state." 50 On the one
hand, consciousness is intentionality: a flight toward being suffering from
See UEspoir maintenant.
46 "[...] elle est la, vague" (in Beauvoir, La Ceremonie des adieux, 616).
47 "[...] la clartd qu'on ne voit pas"; "[...] Dieu 1'incomprehensible, l'invisible
Evident" (Proses philosophiques, 527, 529).
48 "[...] a travers les tdnebres de cette vie" (Le Droit et la hi, 232).
49 "II faut une duality au coeur de la liberty. Et cette duality est precisdment ce que
nous nommons totality d&otalisee" (Cahiers pour une morale, I, 345).
50 "Qu'il parte, mais qu'il revienne. Qu'il ait des ailes pour l'infini, mais qu'il ait
des pieds pour la terre, et qu'apres Favoir vu voler, on le voie marcher. Qu'il rentre
dans rhomme apres en §tre sorti" (William Shakespeare, in (Euvres completes:
Critique, 402).