Sartre's second century

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 129
driving towards purpose. "The general impression of Sartre's work is
certainly that of a powerful but abstract model of a hopeless dilemma,
coloured by a surreptitious romanticism which embraces the hopelessness."
21
The Surreptitious Romantic
Murdoch's reference is an intriguing one. It allows us to look at Sartre
from an angle that highlights rather than obscures idealist humanism,
without overlooking existential indeterminism. She gestures to a
worldview that is structurally similar to Existentialism. Romanticism's
different emphasis can help us examine Sartre's idealist leanings more
closely so as to confirm such aspirations to be themselves anguished, not
forthright. Romanticism identifies the same discrepancy between the
transcendent and the material that is found in Existentialist thought. The
Romantic temperament was not only stirred by the harshness of everyday
life but also enticed by the escapes offered through the imagination. The
vital difference between the two mindsets is one of perspective, not effect.
Whereas Existentialism reaches for a totality of being, Romanticism sees
existence as part of an infinity of being, often a divine entity, whose
endless creativity is at the heart of nature. Touching on nuances already
broached by Emmanuel Ldvinas, totality implies a recuperation of
fragmented parts into one fixed whole, whereas infinity multiplies that
fragmentation into an incomprehensible and interminable whole. Rather
than start with man's alienation and his yearning to integrate with his
world, the Romantic senses an intangible harmony, whose eternal essence
is intuited in a temporal world of matter and substance. The result is
similarly tense. Much like the blank page allowed the writer to give free
rein to his imaginative powers, so could the physical world become a work
of art to be crafted by man and claimed as his own. But that claim is never
sovereign, for nature's unending creation shapes an ever-changing
existence of which man is but one element.
This incompletion is no coincidence. Since both modes of thinking
thrive on human freedom and self-determination, they must each prise
open the kind of dialectic that Murdoch marks. In order to safeguard
existence as a dynamic rather than static condition, Sartrean alienation
cannot entirely do away with the notion of a fully unified mode of being
for us to pursue. Conversely, the Romantic vision of a supreme or
supernatural order is complicated by malaise and uncertainty in the here-
Murdoch, Romantic Rationalist, 111.