UNSIGNED PROFILE
(First published on 30 June 1956, a profile of the philosopher and the communist dilemma.)
In our age, there is one besetting moral problem: what attitude to adopt towards Communism. There is, therefore, a unique and universal significance in the ratiocinations of a man whose formidable intellectual energy has been devoted exclusively to its solution. Jean-Paul Sartre is a playwright of genius, an incisive pamphleteer and controversialist, a writer of ideological novels, a schematic philosopher, an anti-Freudian psychologist, a brilliant teacher and editor, and a professional Left Bank mandarin. But through each and all of these activities runs a unifying thread: the search for an intellectual reconciliation with the dominant material and political force of our times. Nobody else has made the attempt in such a systematic and determined manner, has been so ruthless in eliminating extraneous considerations. The Koestlers and Silones have surrendered to rigid moral imperatives, the Kanapas and Aragons have embraced dogmatism. But Sartre, with his fanatical—almost irrational—belief in reason, has marched doggedly on into the dark tunnel.
Somewhere within the mind of this dwarf-like sage, behind the thick spectacles, the angry eyes, the fleshy facial mask with its wide and sensual mouth, the decisive intellectual battle of our century is being fought in microcosm.
Yet, despite the single-mindedness of Sartre’s aim and the logical symmetry of his intellectual development, no great thinker has been more misunderstood and provoked such violent and conflicting reactions. Sartre has been denounced as “unfathomably obscure” (Raymond Aron) and as “a deliberate vulgariser” (Merleau-Ponty). L’Être et le Néant was once called “the most difficult philosophical work ever written”; yet L’Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme has sold more copies (150,000) than any other volume of modern philosophy. The Vatican has placed his works on the Index; yet Gabriel Marcel, himself a militant Catholic, regarded him as the greatest of French thinkers. The State Department found his novels subversive; but Les Mains Sales was the most effective counter-revolutionary play of the entire cold war. Sartre has been vilified by the Communists in Paris and fêted by them in Vienna. No great philosopher ever had fewer disciples; but no other could claim the intellectual conquest of an entire generation.
Amid the bitter hatreds and controversies of which Sartre has been the centre, his principal objective—and the logical concentration with which he has pursued it—has tended to become obscured. Around the man has grown a myth; and around the myth, foggy, concentric rings of intellectual prejudice. When we strip the layers, however, we find that increasingly rare—indeed, today, unique—phenomenon: a complete philosophical system, an interlocking chain of speculation which unites truth, literature and politics in one gigantic equation.
In the late Thirties, Sartre was a young, under-paid, over-educated philosophy teacher in a smart Paris school, a member—and a typical one—of the most discontented, numerically inflated and socially dangerous group in the world: the French bourgeois intellectuals. He had studied Heidegger and Kierkegaard in Germany; he taught Descartes in France. Like all intellectuals, he asked himself the question: had his knowledge any relevance to the problems of his day? The Fascists were at the gates of Madrid; what was he supposed to do about it? Why had Blum failed? Did it matter that Stalin had seen fit to murder the Old Guard of the Bolsheviks? Why was capitalism in ruins, Hitler triumphant, the democracies afraid?
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