JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

14 WritingLiterature is the art form in which Sartre expresses his own philosophy. Thenovels and plays are strewn with characters in bad faith: Garcin in No Exit,Goetz in The Devil and the Good Lord, the senator in The RespectableProstitute, Hugo in Dirty Hands, Franz in Altona, Lucien in the short story‘Childhood of a Leader’ in The Wall, Daniel in The Roads to Freedom, Keanin the play of that name, and of course, the café waiter who features not onlyin The Age of Reason, the first volume of The Roads to Freedom, but inBeing and Nothingness.Opposed to them, but fewer in number, are the characters who in differingdegrees recognise their own freedom: Mathieu in Iron in the Soul (but not inThe Age of Reason and The Reprieve), Oreste in The Flies, the torturedresistance fighters in Men Without Shadows, Lizzie in The RespectableProstitute, Roquentin in Nausea. Works of fiction provide a criterion for thetruth of a ‘humanistic’ philosophy such as Sartre’s existentialism.Sartre draws a sharp distinction between literature and science: Literatureis ambiguous but each sentence of science or philosophy has, or shouldhave, one and only one meaning. Sentences of literature may have multiplemeanings, or may express different propositions. This presents Sartre witha dilemma. To the extent to which the sentences making up his novels,stories and plays are ambiguous they do not serve as a vehicle for hisphilosophy. To the extent to which they are unambiguous, they are notliterature, at least by his own criterion. This dilemma is never fully resolvedin his work.Sartre’s literature, especially Nausea, contains putative solutions tophilosophical problems. For example, in Nausea, some versions of theproblem of induction are depicted as genuine and as at once psychologically