Sartre's second century

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 163
through literature. This set should not be taken as exhaustive, for it is
possible, and indeed likely, that there are many other nuances worth
discussing. However, these are three that, in my view, are especially useful
for analysing Hope Now. Let us therefore turn to the text itself.
Hope Now: Destabilising the Distinction
If we accept the basic guidelines I have proposed, then the first way to
decide whether Hope Now is a literary or a philosophical work, by Sartre's
own standards, is this: to determine whether it is a philosophical argument
that uses literary techniques for the sake of clarification or, conversely, it
is a presentation of a world that we are meant to experience and from
which we can then extract philosophical ideas. The first thing we can say
on this matter is that Sartre and L£vy are clearly attempting to build an
argument. Sartre tells L£vy: "I would like our discussion here both to
sketch out an ethics and to find a true guiding principle for the left." 14 We
see Sartre relying on his philosophical vocabulary, using such phrases as:
"try to clarify", "we have to define", and "develop your idea further".
Furthermore, the method he employs to identify the "true guiding
principle" is reminiscent of the eidetic analysis he had used for much of
his previous philosophical work. He focuses on various instances of
human solidarity in order to extract the essence of the experience of
solidarity itself, so that he can then construct ethical formulations.
Together with L£vy, Sartre compares and contrasts his ideas with those of
Kant, Marx, Plato, and, of course, famously with Judaism.
But it is impossible to ignore that Sartre offers Hope Now to the reader
as a demonstration. 15 Sartre brings up the nature of his project with Ldvy
directly after he puts forth his new opinion that consciousness is at every
moment conditioned by the other. He describes his collaboration with
Levy as "a thought created by two people" filled with "plural thoughts we
have formed together, which constantly yield me something new." 16
Moreover, he shows an explicit desire to have the reader understand the
true nature of their collaboration:
[A]s always when you are not alone with me, you stay a little in the
background, so that, in spite of everything, what one sees in this exchange
is an old man who has taken a very intelligent guy to work with him but
who nevertheless remains the essential figure. But that isn't what happens
14 Hope Now, 61.
15 See Aronson, "Sartre's Last Words", 12-13.
16 Hope Now, 73-74.