JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

282Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingshis own eyes—he escapes class determinations and finds himself thereby representinghuman nature “without foreign additives”; through the Romantic overview, the writersof 1830 reaffirm the superiority of the aristocratic, and the lofty gaze they level onother classes restores the hierarchical society in which by divine right they occupy thehighest rung. The former believe they are surveying society and declare their solidaritywith all men; the latter are and want to be inside it but in first place; in solidarity withtheir class and with it alone, they protest that exemplary man exists only as anaristocrat, and that the other ranks are merely rough drafts of humanity. In both cases,such a panoramic overview does not dehumanize; on the contrary, it allows theauthor—though in rather different ways—to express the human in its plenitude. Manof the eighteenth century is simply by definition what Romantic man rejects; in 1840this internalized contradiction produces uncertainty and disgust in the young menwho are ready to go on duty; consequently, the panoramic overview becomes ametaphysical rupture of the writer with his race. Denying human nature in himself, hetakes an artist’s overview of the world, that apparent totality which breaks up intomolecules, and of man, that stranger who inhabits it. What he discovers, we surmise,is universal nothingness—as the noetic counterpart of his attitude of absolute negation.The contradiction of this attitude is that he claims simultaneously to make himself anaristocrat (therefore the best of men)—a notion borrowed from the Romantics—andto sever his ties with humanity. And this contradiction is attributable not to subjectivemotives but to the coexistence in the practico-inert of two determinations of theObjective Spirit that are internalized through reading in the same mind in which theyare united, opposing each other through bonds of interiority. As if the young readerhad concluded that in order to make himself aristocratic, he had no choice but to escapefrom his own nature through absolute-art. As a consequence, absolute-art expressesthe point of view of the absolute on the world. A point of view that is resumed in theabsolute of negation.Yet the most basic requirement of the new art is impossible to satisfy. In the firstplace, the idea of absolute negation is a contradiction in adjecto. The existence of anobject or a quality in a determined sector of being, and in relation to another object oranother sector, is denied. Moreover, negation is merely the formal and judicial aspectof negativity, which is praxis, destructive work. It is logically admissible, for example,that one class can deny the privileges of another class or its rights. And this isprecisely the source of negation as an attitude: the writer-aristocrats, by their contemptand the positive aspect of their ideology, deny the humanism and humanity of thebourgeois. But transposed to the young men of 1840, pushed to the limit and decreed