JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

14Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsIn chapters on freedom, bad faith, temporality, transcendence, and socialrelations Sartre describes the existential structures of human reality. Thecomplexity of insight, the richness of description, exceed Heidegger’s Beingand Time and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. What isperhaps most striking about the book is that where a scientific treatisewould seek mechanisms ‘behind the scenes’, or a law-like physical realitybeyond appearance, Sartre treats everything as ‘surface’. Appearance isreality. It is science that fabricates a world of abstractions and our daily worldof choice and consciousness is concrete reality.Sartre left Being and Nothingness unfinished. A large impression of themoral philosophy promised in its closing pages appeared posthumouslyas Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for an Ethics) (1983). There ishowever something in principle incompletable about Sartrean existentialphenomenology. If the distinction between being-for-itself and being-in-itselfis Hegelian in origin, it resists any Hegelian overcoming or synthesis inabsolute knowing. Although human reality is the desire to be God, thisdesire is forever frustrated. In this incompleteness, this perpetual deferral,lies our capacity for self-definition, our freedom. We make ourselves whatwe are by our choices and this process of self-definition is only complete atthe moment of death.What is Literature? (1948) is an attempt to answer the questions: What iswriting?, Why write? and For whom does one write?, and ends with ameditation on the situation of the writer in the post-liberation France of 1947.Sartre insists that one should write for one’s own age, not for posterity, not torestore the past, not to gain status or money. Literature must be committedliterature or engaged literature (la littérature engagée). The literature of agiven age is alienated and inauthentic when it does not recognise withinitself its own freedom but subjects itself to a prevailing ideology or rulinginterest. The writer should write to express their own freedom and liberatethe reader. Committed literature is committed to freedom.A paradigm case of Sartrean committed literature is the Roads to Freedom(Les Chemins de la liberté) trilogy: The Age of Reason (L’Age de Raison,1945), The Reprieve (Le Sursis, 1945), and Iron in the Soul (La Mort dansl’Âme , 1949). Parts of a fourth volume The Last Chance (La Dernière Chance)were serialised in the November and December 1949 issues of Les TempsModernes. In a famous passage, which concludes the first part of the lastcomplete volume of the trilogy, Iron in the Soul, Mathieu Delarue, the previouslyineffectual schoolteacher, acts meaningfully and decisively for the first timein his life. Deserted by their bourgeois officers during the May–June 1940Nazi invasion of France he and his comrades choose to resist to the deaththe oncoming Wehrmacht from the cover of a village clock tower: