Sartre's second century

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 139
whose gestures are more involving than simplistic political activism.
Sartre's and Hugo's philosophies figure and refigure visionary imagination
and rational thought onto one another in a dialectic that must remain
engaged with itself if freedom is to survive. They tackle the crisis of how
to live in a modern age in which man is, as Marx famously argued, both
producer and product of his world. They stress engagement (commitment)
as the pursuit of a meaningful and unconditional way of life, but never its
firm attainment—a mode of being that is always constructed, never done
with. Their massive ceuvres of novels, plays, essays, and political
commentaries were not merely self-indulgent exercises of their creative
imaginations, nor militant crusades of social action, but a richly tense
interaction of the two. To be engaged is to accept a necessary contradiction,
and to be caught between independence from ideological agendas
and involvement in those same domains. Steve Fuller reminds us:
The intellectual, like the superhero, lives in a dualistic universe. [...] For
intellectuals and superheroes, social structures are disposable sites for the
ongoing struggle between Good and Evil: what embodies Good one week
may embody Evil the next. The heroic intellectual never gives up on the
chase. 60
A paternal or vertical system of thinking that demands a hierarchy of
meaning is turned on its side by the fraternal impulse for both Sartre and
Hugo. Here again we have the analogy of the see-saw, whereby any rigidly
categorical thinking has to be pushed aside in favour of a more circular
mindset that respects the slippage between subject and object. To cite
Sartre: "The truth always remains to be discovered, because it is
immeasurable; which is not to say that you don't obtain truths in the plural
sense." 61 Hence Hugo's succinct aim: "Authority transfigured into
freedom." 62 As a result, the Sartre-Hugo dialogue begins to reaffirm the
modern French cultural tradition—and, importantly, Sartrean ethics—as a
site not of resolution or resignation, but of revolution, in the strictest
sense: of a continued engagement with a contingent world.
60 The Intellectual 36-37.
61 "La ventd reste toujours a trouver, parce qu'elle est infinie. Ce qui ne veut pas
dire qu'on n'obtienne pas des venteV ("Autoportrait", 148).
62 "L'autorite' transfigure en liberte"' (Le Droit et la hi, 399).