Sartre's second century

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 135
"this necessary and indisputable meeting of ideas with matter",
elsewhere termed la vision of human imagination and la vue afforded by
reality. All nature is an exchange between these twin faculties of insight
and sight, perception and picture, which will forever be "necessarily
unequal". 41 Thus, no ambition realises itself fully in this world: "This
flame which is in me, which warms me and which enlightens me and
which sets me alight, and which thinks and hopes and loves" can ignite
"my material self of flesh and emptiness", but not consume it. 42
Nonetheless, "what is missing from us attracts us", hence: "We are at once
points of arrival and points of departure. Every being is a centre of the
world." 43 The sovereignty of the individual that is so crucial to Sartrean
freedom is likewise affirmed by Hugo as man's endlessly imaginative
productivity, for which he alone is responsible: "Freedom implies
responsibility. [...] Responsibility starts with choice. To choose is to act:
to choose is to react." 44 Similarly, Hugo pre-echoes Sartre's accent on
"doing" over "being". But whereas Sartre argues that there is no essential
human reality accessible to us in our contingent world, Hugo sees that
ideal of being as remaining hidden within that same supposed contingency.
Such wholeness is the trace of the divine for Hugo, an anchor of
being from which we have been cut loose. As a result, Sartre's initial
portrait of man is untouched by bad faith in any essential meaning to our
lives, whilst Hugo's is on the contrary laden with it.
However, in order for man to enter into the to-and-fro of subjectivity
and objectivity that they mark as the free human condition, both Sartre and
Hugo will have to slide over to and through the other's position. The
Sartrean course will have to smuggle a clandestine amount of bad faith
along for the ride, since for the for-itself to come into existence, it is
condemned to seek an impossible fulfilment of being. In this respect,
Sartre's ethical investment in a Judaic spirituality that based its fraternity
on religious as much as social values, as expressed in his controversial
"Cette rencontre n£cessaire et incontestable de l'idee et de la matiere" (Proses
philosophiques, 493).
41 "Ndcessairement inegal" (ibid., 680).
42 "Cette flamme qui est en moi, qui me chauffe et qui m'eclaire et qui me brGle, et
qui pense et qui espere et qui aime [...] mon moi matenel de la viande et du n6ant"
(ibid., 527).
43 "Nous sommes en meme temps points d'arrivee et points de depart. Tout &re est
un centre du monde" (ibid., 685).
44 "Libertd implique responsabilitd. [...] La responsabilite' commence au choix.
Choisir, c'est agir; choisir, c'est r£pondre" (ibid., 512).