The Concept of Freedom and the Development of Sartre's Early Political Thought

Bernard Merkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367110468
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429656460
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book, first published in 1987, is a study of the development of Sartre's political thought from the late 1920s to the liberation of France in 1944, concentrating particularly upon his concept of freedom. It is argued that the evolution of Sartre's thinking can be regarded as constituting a series of problematics each of which has a corresponding notion of freedom, and these problematics are elucidated in turn.

PART ONE: ANARCHIC FREEDOM 1927–1937

1. SARTRE’S DEVELOPMENT TO 1937

Origins

Sartre was born in 1905. This thesis, however,will not seek to cover in any detail his earliest years but will deal only with the period from the late 1920’s onwards – notwithstanding my strictures on the danger of beginning a journey in the middle.

The main reason for ignoring Sartre’s childhood and adolescence is that little evidence now remains of what he did, thought and felt during those years. Sartre did write about his childhood days in Les Mots (Words)¹, but this book takes his life up only until his early adolescence. From then until his mid-twenties there are only a few fragments of writing (referred to by Contat and Rybalka) and some isolated reminiscences of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. To try to establish exactly what his ideas were during the first twenty-five years or so of his life is therefore not really practicable. Nor would it get us a long way in our enterprise of analysing his subsequent evolution, for it would be most surprising if he had by that time developed a coherent system of thought or even fully worked out any particular constituents of one.

Nevertheless, even the limited evidence we have does reveal a few pointers of some significance for his subsequent development. First there is the notion – which he was later to call a ‘neurosis’ – that the written word was of prime importance. The ‘idea that since reality had been given to me through books, I would make contact with reality, and offer a more profound truth about the world, if I wrote books myself’; and ‘I firmly believed that nothing was more beautiful than writing nothing greater, that to write was to create lasting works’ (Sartre by himself, pp.14 and 88). It is both paradoxical and indicative of the total grip that this neurosis had on Sartre that when in 1953 he felt himself cured, the way he chose to demonstrate his newfound health was precisely to write a book – Les Mots(Words) – about the disease.

A second and less well-known aspect of his earliest thought is that even as a young schoolboy he was beginning to take an interest in the problem of freedom. Many years later he wrote that he could not remember precisely when he first began to develop his ideas on freedom, but he does claim to have discussed it with his (no doubt bemused) schoolmates at La Rochelle when he was between the ages of 12 and 15. He also says that he had ‘long discussions in the schoolyard with Nizan, who was an out-and-out determinist at that time…. and I remember that I took the defence of free will’ (Sartre by himself, p20). Sartre concludes that his preoccupation with freedom was probably the result of his lonely childhood. It is not my intention or indeed within my ability to develop a psychological explanation of Sartre’s intellectual evolution. For the purposes of this thesis the important thing about Sartre’s reminiscences here is not why he was concerned as a teenager with the idea of freedom, but rather the fact of his concern which was to remain with him throughout his adult life. To the consideration of that life we must now turn.

Apolitical Anarchism

Simone de Beauvoir, in her autobiography, provides the key to Sartre’s first problematic when she states that ‘at that period he was much more of an anarchist than a revolutionary’ (Mémoires, p.34), and that ‘our love of freedom, our opposition to the established order of. things, our individualism and our respect for the working classes – all these brought us close to the anarchist position’ (Prime, p.42). But this anarchism was not really a political stance; it was not centred on the anarchists’ traditional views that governments were evil and should be overthrown, and that men, freed from the authority of the state, would spontaneously live together in complete harmony. Rather Sartre’s anarchism was a philosophical position. It was, as de Beauvoir puts it, a ‘revolt against universals’ (Prime, p.43), a rejection of ‘any maxim whatsoever that laid claim to universal authority’ (p.43). For example, Sartre, ‘flatly refused to believe in science’ (p.42), and denied ‘such vain notions’ as ‘duty and virtue’ (p.43). Moreover, this rejection of established systems of ideas was not undertaken in the name of a rival system but rather in favour of no system at all. Since Sartre ‘placed no faith in universals or generalisations, he denied himself the right even of formulating his repudiation in generalized terms’ (p.45) and instead adhered to a number of particular positions which were not necessarily compatible with each other.

According to de Beauvoir, Sartre and she were ‘anti-capitalist, yet not Marxists; we glorified the powers of pure mind and perfect freedom, yet we rejected the spiritual approach; though our interpretation of man and the universe was strictly materialistic, we despised science and technology’ (p.42). It is arguable whether a coherent framework of thought could have been constructed from this collection of disparate notions. But whether Sartre could have developed one or not, the crucial point is that he saw no reason to do so, nor any need to consider whether, let alone to ensure that, the particular views he adopted were consistent with each other. Indeed the very ideas of consistency and coherence were ruled out by virtue of the fact that they implied the existence of universal rules of thought and knowledge which a priori he would not and could not accept. For him the individual thinker was bound by no laws other than those he applied to himself. So Sartre, as de Beauvoir puts it, carelessly ‘skipped from one conviction to the next, without rhyme or reason’ (p.42), without paying any attention to the totality of his thought or to how, if at all, particular ideas meshed together. Such matters, were merely difficulties or ‘problems’ and as he told de Beauvoir ‘when you think in terms of problems …… you aren’t thinking at all’ (p.42).

Thus in this early phase of Sartre’s intellectual development, the period which Peter Caws styled Sartre’s ‘philosophical prehistory’², he made a deliberate effort to cultivate an unsystematic, even incoherent way, of thinking. Pressed to its absurd conclusion, this would preclude any rational thought at all, but taken only as far as Sartre did – to the refusal to acknowledge any general principles, or to concern himself with ‘problems’ it resulted in his grounding all his ideas on his own individual experience and his own feeling of personal freedom. Since he had rejected all general concepts and theories, he really had little alternative to so doing. And this was to make him most receptive to the ideas of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Husserl which he came across in the 1930’s and which seemed to offer a validation of his approach.

From the Althusserian perspective we have outlined above, we might say that Sartre was attempting to avoid giving his thought a precise framework or problematic but that this very attempt in effect created such a problematic. This was essentially that of the apolitical anarchism we have described, and because of his self-imposed incoherence it left Sartre to some extent a captive of the dominant bourgeois frame of reference which he had set out to dethrone.

Sartre’s Attitude Towards Politics

In the late twenties Sartre was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, cut off, as Thody³ well points out, in a life of irresponsible, middle-class luxury from other less well- cossetted students and even more so from the rest of society. As he admitted in an interview some thirty years later, at that time ‘I was young, of good family and had the impression that the world could be mine without having to undergo the compulsion of want and work’⁴.

While a student at the Ecole he evidently spent a great deal of his time engaged in political and philosophical debate with his fellow students, and particularly Paul Nizan, with whom he had been at school. Nizan, in fact, seems to have acted as a sort of intellectual counter-weight to Sartre in that Sartre formulated his own views and attitudes in response to Nizan’s more concrete certainties, which had led him to join the Communist Party. Sartre appears to have felt the need to adopt a position on every issue in relation to such definite opinions, even though he had some doubts about Nizan’s reasons for holding them.⁵

But whereas for Nizan political theory and political participation went hand in hand, Sartre’s interest in political issues was really an interest in arguing about political issues. He took up positions on various matters but he did so not as a preliminary to personal involvement but instead of it. As he later put it, ‘my anger was only a bar of soap, his was real’⁶. Moreover ‘I hated the fact that he entered politics, because I didn’t feel the need to’⁷.

In short, as de Beauvoir tells us, Sartre at that time ‘was interested in social and political questions; he sympathised with Nizan’s position; but as far as he was concerned the main thing was to write and the rest would come later’ (Mémoires, p.342) .

The trouble is that the rest did not come later; the end of his student days saw no noticeable alteration in his views on political participation or even the formation of a cogent political viewpoint. His position was that of a spectator. Not, however, an involved spectator taking a real interest in the affairs of his fellow-men, but rather a superior figure peering down from the heights at the follies of the world. Indeed Sartre cast himself in the Kierkegaardian part of ‘l’homme seul’ (solitary man). As de Beauvoir writes, ‘this ‘solitary man’ believed that important truths – perhaps the Truth itself – had been revealed to him and that he had a mission to teach those truths to society’. (Mémoires, p.342).

Little wonder, then, that Sartre was unwilling to join in any organised political grouping in which his own ideas, still only half formed, might have had to be foregone in favour of received certainties and superior knowledge and in which other people might challenge his notions with ‘general laws and concepts and all such abstractions (which) were nothing but hot air’ (Prime, p.31).

Thus although Sartre felt an emotional opposition to society as it was then constituted, because it hindered the creation of the anarchistic individuals and type of life that he favoured, and therefore more than once ‘was vaguely tempted to join the Communist Party’ (p.134) or ‘those who were working for this revolution’ (p.134) he did not do so, since ‘His ideas, aims and temperament all militated against such a step’ (p.134).

Not only did Sartre not become actively involved in politics, he did not even bother to vote in elections. In a discussion of 1972 he stated that in 1936, ‘I was entirely favourable to the Popular Front but did not see the need to vote to give the sense of a decision to my opinion. I felt myself attracted by the crowds which made the Popular Front, but I did not really understand making myself part of them and that my place was in the middle of them. I saw myself as solitary. The positive element in that was an obscure repugnance towards universal suffrage, and the vague idea that a vote could never represent the concrete thought of a man’.⁸

Another vivid example of Sartre’s apolitical orientation in the early thirties was given by Merleau-Ponty when he recalled a conversation he had had with Sartre during this period. Sartre had said that’ At bottom there is not very much difference between a catastrophe in which ten or fifteen die, and one in which three hundred thousand people die. There is, of course, the difference of numbers, but each individual dying is in a sense the world dying, whether there are three thousand of three hundred, the scandal is no bigger’. Clearly taken aback by Sartre’s rather abstract, metaphysical approach to the world’s problems, Merleau-Ponty comments that ‘a thought like that shows that at that point in the years before the war Sartre was very far from what I would call a political, historical point of view’.⁹

Perhaps even more revealing than either Sartre’s ‘obscure repugnance’ towards elections or his conversation with Merleau-Ponty is the fact that he spent 1934 in Berlin totally immersed in his philosophical reading and writing and apparently oblivious to the critical political events that were happening around him, such as the proclamation of Hitler as Fuhrer on 2nd August. When asked in 1972 about this apparent myopia, Sartre could reply only that ‘it didn’t occur to me to turn what I was witnessing into a theory’ and that ‘in those days I still felt that all that was an area about which one didn’t write’.¹⁰

‘Nothing’, writes de Beauvoir, ‘could shake us out of our apolitical attitude’ (Prime, p.111), and looking at what we know of Sartre’s political development during the period of his anarchic problematic, the most striking thing is that Sartre did not undergo any political development at all. It is obviously inadequate to explain this entirely by reference to his bourgeois background or his isolated position as a cossetted middle-class student and intellectual. His friend Nizan was after all in the same situation and yet chose to follow a path that was diametrically opposed to Sartre’s. Sartre, however, reinforced whatever influence his bourgeois upbringing and milieu had upon him by the very problematic he had developed in order to free himself from it. This problematic not only prevented him from formulating a coherent framework for his ideas, but it even prevented him from seeing the need to do so. In turn this led him to take up an ultra-individualistic, anarchist position in which he felt himself free from general social constraints. De Beauvoir later came to proffer a psychological explanation for this. She writes that ‘it was our conditioning as young petit bourgeois intellectuals that led us to believe ourselves free of all conditioning whatsoever’ (Prime, p.21). But whether or not we accept the notion that this sort of conditioning underlay Sartre’s theoretical development, that development itself combined with his background and his circumstances that permitted ‘a certain measure of detachment, free time, and general insouciance’ (p.20), produced in Sartre the notion that he was absolutely free.

What his friend, Nizan, thought of Sartre’s viewpoint was somewhat ruefully recounted by Sartre in 1960: ‘I repeated to him that we were free. He didn’t answer but the slight smile at the corner of his mouth said a great deal about this idea’ (Aden-Arabie, p.93). Nizan notwithstanding, Sartre refused to back down from this notion. He would not admit to himself that such personal freedom as he had might result from his particular way of life, his belonging to a small privileged elite; nor did the ideas he had developed give him any reason to do so. Instead he came to regard freedom as the universal condition of mankind. His concept of it is detailed in his writings of the period which we must now consider.

2. SARTRE’S EARLY WORKS

The Theory Of The State

The first work of Sartre’s that contains any political ideas is his essay on ‘The Theory of the State in French Thought Today’.¹ This was published in January, 1927, and is notable more for what it does not contain that for what it does. Though it sets out to tackle some oE the key concepts of political philosophy, such as the state, sovereignty and rights, it never goes further than to describe several currently fashionable theories and to point out some of their philosophical inadequacies. Apart from a clear aversion to anything that appears to subsume the individual in a collectivity, the state or society for instance², Sartre reveals nothing about his own political views. And the way in which he concludes the essay provides an indication of his lack of political ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Anarchic Freedom 1927 – 1937
• Part Two: Magical Freedom 1934 – 1942
• Part Three: Committed Freedom 1938 – 1945
• Notes
• Bibliography