This is a book about a failure. True, a most spectacular and
exquisite failure, but a failure none the less. It is the failure of the philosopher
(projected in the public mind) as a political figure: apostle of the revolution,
enlightener of the unlearned, defender of the weak and poor, full-time guru, the
very embodiment of revolutionary restlessness, and, in general, upholder of all
just causes, no matter their object. The story of how politics have always
tempted, lured, charmed and obsessed philosophers is a long, long story, if a
neglected and — to a significant extent — untold one. As it appears, philosophy
is nothing if it is not about changing people’s lives. Now, within this story Jean
Paul Sartre occupies a quite distinct place, and B.-H. Lévy has the merit of portraying,
with extraordinary descriptive force, Sartre’s life as a "political life."
To be sure, Sartre was not always interested in politics; one could even say
that at some point he was overtly anti-political. However, as it happened, some
kind of "Damascus road" occurred in Sartre’s life (as I will show
below, the explanation proposed by Lévy to this "conversion" is
particularly insightful) when politics came to mean everything for Sartre, and he
came to be seen, from Havana to Moscow, and from Algeria to Vietnam, above and
foremost as a political philosopher. He

was the man who spoke words of gold.
Freedom and truth personified. He was a moral authority across the whole
planet, and people fought for his indulgences. And the fact is that, during
this period, the fifties and even the sixties, there was not a movement of national
liberation, not a revolutionary group or splinter group, not a lobby of victims
or partisans, not an association of student rebels… which didn’t try to send
him an emissary. (p. 21)

That he had once been the author of Being and Nothingness
and of Nausea was almost forgotten now: for all these people seeking
a symbolic leader for their causes, for all the "wretched of the earth,"
for all those left behind in some way or other, Sartre’s name stood now, most
of all, for dreams of political emancipation, revolutionary changes, birth of a
"new world," and various other wonders.

At the same time, as it happens
when it comes to taking sides, this only meant that Sartre had just become "the
devil in the flesh" for some other (differently politically-minded) people.
With tremendous sense of (philosophical) humor, B.-H. Lévy guides us through
the fabulous world of Sartre’s "enemies":

He was accused, in rapid succession, on
writing on all fours, of wallowing in filth, of taking delight in toilets, of
luring young women along, not to fuck them, but to get them to sniff the odor
of Camembert cheese… They tracked down the women in his life. These women were
made to tell of his paunch, his hairy white calves, his round shoulders, and
the sluggish penis of the pope of the new philosophy. They made his neighbors
bear witness, hand on heart, that they had seen him prowling, nostrils aquiver,
round the street urinals on the boulevard… He was described as a "lecherous
viper," a "hyena with a typewriter," a "jackal with a pen,"
a "slimy rat," as "the red cancer of the nation."… His apartment
was bombed twice… People paraded along the Champs Elysées to cries of "Shoot
Sartre!" (p. 35)

Needless to say, scenes like these are not to be encountered
very often in the history of philosophy. They are so amazing that I don’t
really know whether one has to envy or to regret their occurrence in a
philosopher’s life. What fame! What unheard-of degree of public attention! What
popular interest in philosophy! People becoming so interested in your
philosophy that they come to pay you visits at home, in your absence, or shout
your name in the street! Never has philosophy been so popular, indeed!

*

Some of the most beautiful pages in Lévy’s book are those dedicated
to portraying the "facetious, unserious Sartre" (p. 32), which is to
say, the pre-war Sartre, the "early Sartre," to use Lévy’s phrase. Why
on earth should philosophy be always serious, stiff-necked, grave, a
funeral-like business? Should one really be sad-looking in order to be able to "grasp"
the truth of things? Is there any special relationship between good philosophy
and bad disposition? B.-H. Lévy shows in detail how Sartre’s life was dominated
by a spirit of playfulness, joy and universal easiness. This early Sartre was
the promoter of a "philosophy of freedom," one of the most
uncompromising philosophies of freedom in the entire twentieth century. But freedom
means ultimately freedom to re-create and re-invent yourself, to endlessly mock
yourself, to never take yourself seriously: "If there is any unity in my
life, it lies in the fact that I have never wanted to live seriously." (p.
33). What he wrote he wrote with pure joy, to please himself or to make fun of
himself, without — in doing so — paying the least attention to the need for
maintaining a "formal consistency" within his oeuvre: "I
don’t feel bound by a single thing I wrote; at the same time, I won’t deny a
word of it either." (p. 223)

His philosophizing meant not only
writing, but also living: Lévy has also admirable pages about Sartre’s poverty,
his life-long commitment not to have "objects," "possessions,"
"money," in order not to be "possessed" by them. Every
single gesture in Sartre’s life could be seen as being, in some way or other, connected
to his philosophizing. For example, living in hotels, living a hotel life was
for Sartre a method of keeping yourself somehow "detached" from the enslaving
possession of things: "Sartre liked hotels and hotel life. He liked the
anonymity of hotel rooms. He liked the sense of freedom that anonymity brought
with it. He liked the way identity, unlike in a house, finds no anchor or
fixity there." (p. 230) Sartre’s writing meant writing not only
philosophy, but also literature: novels, plays, screenplays, political manifestoes,
newspaper articles, songs, prefaces. And he mastered all these genres with the
same degree of artistry. Lévy praises Sartre for having been, from this point
of view, unique among his contemporaries: "Sartre was the only one in his
generation to invest his energies in all genres. He was the only one to occupy
the territory, all the territory, available. He was the first … ‘to write in so
many languages that things pass from one language to another’." (p. 46)

Before moving on, let me just point
to one of the most curious things about this book. Seriously contaminated with
Sartre’s fundamental unseriousness, B.-H. Lévy seems to deal with Sartre in a
most Sartrean manner. His style is colloquial and funny, which makes his book
not only readable to the highest degree, but also makes it resemble some "fable":
in it Sartre’s philosophy is being "narrated," it unfolds itself just
like a story. There are sections in this book titled "A short note on
Sartre’s ugliness," "Bleed the bosses like pigs," "They do
shoot philosophers, don’t they?" Most importantly, one cannot really
distinguish between what is philosophy and what is literature in this book
about Sartre — a Sartre who made precisely of this mix one of the key feature
of his writing. With artful negligence, Lévy’s book offers a sophisticated mixture
of styles, genres, temporal planes, epochs and worldviews. In short, one can
hardly imagine a more appropriate eulogy to Sartre than such a book. Finally,
at some point, Lévy comes even to confess his Sartrean credo: "I like the
idea that philosophy is not opposed to a joy that is sometimes serene,
sometimes fierce. I like the image of the great philosopher, laughing,
frivolous, always able to indulge in a bit of fun, a fracas, a vaudeville act,
a grotesque or truculent anecdote, a bit of fooling around, a parody, a
speculative practical joke." (p. 31) It wouldn’t be a total exaggeration
to say that, for both Sartre and B.-H. Lévy, to philosophize is to be in the
entertainment business.

*

"People always act as if there were only one Sartre,
don’t they? They act as if Sartre’s philosophy were a ‘block’ that we were free
to take or leave, without a nuance, without discussion… The truth is that there
are two of them, really two, quite clearly separated, obeying distinct
principles." (p. 294) One of the major merits of B.-H. Lévy’s work lies
precisely in having shown what exactly means that there are two Sartres, and —
more than that — how the thing happened. In admirable pages, he talks of the
Sartre who wrote Being and Nothingness and Nausea, of Sartre the
apostle of rootlessness and ultimate, if tragic, freedom ("this
pessimistic and light-hearted Sartre, despairing but never afflicted, this
Sartre who saw no remedy for the diaspora of souls…" [p. 296]). A Sartre
who was "a champion of every category of metaphysical anti-totalitarianism"
(p. 264), a total anarchist, a metaphysical rebel who refused to settle down,
to have possession, to become a "respectable citizen."

Obviously, the question on
everybody’s lips is:

What occurred…in his work, in his life…
for that free man, that rebel, that flamboyant character, that dandy, that
resolute and definitive anti-totalitarian… to turn his back to what had been
his saving grace and become that great lost soul, an accomplice of the worst
Stalinists, accumulating, from Vienna to Moscow, and from Havana to Peking,
positions and texts which neither the fog of the time nor the theorems of truth
and error are sufficient to account for? (p. 381)

To answer this question, B.-H. Lévy explores what happened
to Sartre during his six month stay in the POW camp at Trier, in 1940, under
the German occupation. And here he finds the answer. In the camp Sartre simply came
across the thick reality of the collective life ("I found in the Stalag
a form of collective existence I hadn’t had since l’Ecole Normale"); it
was the intense experience of this "feeling of being part of a mass"
(p. 382) that eventually triggered his "conversion." As he would
later recall, it was there that "I abandoned my pre-war individualism and
the idea of the pure individual and adopted the social individual and socialism."
(p. 383) A Sartre entered the POW camp, and quite another left it, six month
later. I cannot but agree with B.-H. Lévy’s well documented, fascinating demonstration.
He explains how "from that demeaned, degraded life that was life in the
POW camp, from that immersion in a collective which seemed as much like a herd
as like a society, from those days of debasement and ill-treatment, he [Sartre]
emerged as a new supporter of …the values of community." (p. 385) Thus a
new Sartre was born.

Once this inner transformation has occurred,
it was only a matter of time before Sartre embarked on a long journey of — by
all standards considered reasonable today — self-embarrassment and
self-deceit, culminating with the unbelievable spectacle of a philosopher turned
into the laughingstock of the large public ("there is nothing more
pathetic than this aging Sartre, a recluse in his own desert, who kept being
dragged in front of the cameras, at demonstrations…" [p. 444]). When he
returned from his first trip to the USSR, in 1954, he uttered: "The
freedom to criticize is total in the USSR" (p. 328) and later: "An
anti-Communist is a dog. I can’t put it any differently and I will never be
able to put it any differently." (p. 341). When he went to Cuba, he told
the Party officials there: "In you I salute humanism." (p. 340) He
advocated terrorism and political violence, he didn’t see anything wrong in the
existence of the labor camps in the USSR under Stalin. Finally, he said about
Solzhenitsyn: "He experienced the camps and so he was completely immersed
in Soviet ideology." (p. 335). Of course, the story is too long to be told
here in its entirety; his Stalinist allegiances were later replaced by others, and
then by others, according to the Zeitgeist. Lévy concludes: "a
sorry figure… this Sartre who turned into a sort of Pavlov’s dog of political
activism, running from one megaphone to the next, from one podium to another,
to bring the good news of his new faith: Soviet, Cuban, Chinese, Maoist, it
changed…" (p. 442)

*

The moral of this story points, I think, to the existence of
a certain flaw that lies at the very heart of the European philosophy: namely, the
nature of its relationship to the sphere of politics. I can hardly find a
better, a more appropriate and expressive, illustration of this flawed
relationship of philosophy to politics than that suggested by Lévy in his book:
"I can see him [Sartre] in Havana, in February 1960, opposite Castro —
his meticulous, slightly inane smile, his face straining towards his idol,
oozing respect; and the other, bursting with wealth, visibly contemptuous of
the little man and everything he stands for." (p. 443)

 

© 2004 Costica Bradatan

 

 

Costica Bradatan (PhD,
University of Durham [UK], 2003) is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Cornell
University’s Knight Institute, where he teaches philosophy and literature, and
does research on a project dedicated to "the anatomy of novelty" in
the history of Western philosophy. Bradatan has a book manuscript under review
(The Other Bishop Berkeley. An Experiment in Philosophical Historiography),
and is the author of two recent books (both in Romanian): An Introduction to
the History of Romanian Philosophy in the XX-th Century (Bucharest, 2000)
and Isaac Bernstein’s Diary (Bucharest, 2001).

Categories: Philosophical