JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

284Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsthem from regarding philosophy as a rigorous discipline; rather, they have seen it as anauxiliary of art. The free play of ideas gave a broader foundation and some guidingschemes to the free play of imagination. And as for mysticism apart from the fact that1they lacked faith—the result above all of the progressive laicization of all sectors ofhuman activity—they could not espouse the elevation of the mystic in any case.Indeed, if the mystic in his dark night has the feeling of progressively shedding themundane determinations of his finitude, passions, language, and even imagination, it isbecause his enterprise has only one purpose: to offer himself to God so that He mightpenetrate him and suffuse him with ecstasy. He isn’t the least concerned with leaningover and looking down to contemplate terrestrial nothingness from above. The negativeis merely a means of ascesis; the end is pure positivity. And if, on the contrary, hereturns to our world, he does so in order to regard it with the utmost seriousness andto help his brothers, as did John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila. Instead, our youngmen, caught between negativity and nothingness, frustrated by faith, convinced of thetruth of scientism but hardly attracted by its austere theories, elevate themselves onlyto take their distance from the world and to embrace it in a single negative view. Havingtaken up literature in order to escape their fathers, naively persuaded that it could treatonly lofty sentiments, they have seen those sentiments disappear and have understoodin their disappointment that literary art was the terrain dreamed of for the totalizationof their rancor and the assuaging of that hatred of man provoked by the ObjectiveSpirit. But since they must elevate themselves without any source of support orlifeline, and without any real destination, they cannot help knowing that their ascensionis fictive, or, rather, that they are embarking upon it without considering its strictimpossibility, and even against it. And this is precisely why they define the imaginaryas a permanent recourse against the impossible.For these young men, literature opens an emergency exit; the imaginary beingbeyond the impossible but without its own consistency, its objectivization in thework will give it the consistency it lacks. In view of the work, and by virtue of it, theyinsist on their unconditional condemnation of the real by absolute negation as anunreal negation whose virulence comes, in fact, from their choice of unreality. In otherwords, literature imposes itself on them through the Objective Spirit as having nodomain but the antireal, or pure unreality, pitting itself against the palpable world.Only in this way can they give a certain efficacy to the various ruptures imposed onthem by their situation and the determinations of the Objective Spirit. In the name ofautonomy they had to break with the public just when contrary imperatives werecompelling them to break with man, then with the world. In short, with the totality of