JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Writing279them; when they yearn to make use of them, they run up against objective resistancesarising from the fact that these are the tools proper to their class, and they will notappropriate them without being appropriated in turn. As a result, the human subjectof their books—if there is one—will no longer be the man depicted by Voltaire,Diderot, or Rousseau himself; he will no longer contain that “human nature” definedby analysis thanks to social and psychological atomism. But the young writer offersno substitute; in any case, nothing new occurs to these young minds spoiled byanalysis. Romantic man, in effect, could not seduce them for long. In 1840, Romanticismis dead, as witness the failure of Les Burgraves; for Romantic man represents asynthetic totality, and as good bourgeois they could not refrain from dismantling himdespite themselves. Yet by vanishing, the hero made them ashamed of themselves, oftheir class of origin. The aristocratic authors’ contempt remains in them as the greatmute negation hidden behind Romantic frenzy. They have contempt for themselveswithout knowing why. And this contempt becomes their sole greatness since it raisesthem above themselves. This contorted attitude, the internalization of absolute negation,must be held without respite. But which do they scorn in Others and themselves, thebourgeois or the man? First, surely, the bourgeois. These unhappy young men haveinternalized the contested but ubiquitous and scornful gaze of another, nearly moribundclass; they are cut off from themselves by this gaze of failure and death that revealsonly bourgeois utilitarianism and the spirit of analysis—ethical and epistemologicalnorms already familiar to them. But the bourgeoisie rejects the “people,” that vastnational unity invented by the monarchy in the interest of propaganda. It knows theworking classes, which it exploits, fears, and dislikes, and which its resident thinkersattempt to reduce to the swarmings of individuals; it takes itself for the universal classand now proclaims that classes are abolished. Consequently, its younger sons seebourgeois man everywhere; for it means to impose bourgeois nature, on the ethicaland psychological level, on the individuals who each day, constrained by the wretchedpoverty spawned by industrialization, make “free” individual contracts with it. Thebourgeoisie teaches them, it teaches its own children that this “nature” is truly theessence of the species, that like good bourgeois, the workers, too, seek their interest,competing with each other for employment just like businessmen or entrepreneurs,and that—like bourgeois, maybe more so—they are individually envious of theprosperity of others. The fact is that human nature is bad; it must be restrained byrigorous institutions and its weaknesses supported by real property. Raised in theseprinciples—without much questioning them—the young bourgeois have no difficultyextending their contempt to the universe. This is made even easier by the fact that the