Book Review: Sartre: A Philosophical Biography
/Sartre: A Philosophical Biography
Sartre describes his early years at greatest length in four published locations: the War Diaries (Carnets) that he kept during mobilization in the "phoney war" or 1930-40; his autobiography, Words, published in 1964; the filmed conversation with Simone de Beauvoir and others (February-March 1972); and his interviews with Beauvoir (August-September 1974). [...] If we take each of his accounts as a kind of transparency sheet to be superimposed, as for an overhead projector, what configuration of his early years emerges from this set?
The ordinary biographer would not only have kept most of this paragraph in a footnote, but the final sentence would not appear in the book at all. Isn't the superimposition of sources to create a coherent narrative the point of a biography? Meanwhile, one can find footnotes like this:
On Sartre's telling, though he sang in the choir for a time as a schoolboy, what kept the women [in his family] going to church was chiefly the organ music. He rather casually abandoned his faith at the age of 12 while waiting for some companions in La Rochelle: he had "a tiny intuition that God did not exist."
The reader interested in anecdotes and personal context will need to rely -- strangely enough -- almost entirely upon the footnotes.But austere focus isn't necessarily a bad thing when the biographer's subject has attracted more than his fair share of overblown legends. The cafe life and amorous adventures of Sartre, his wartime exploits, the grand gesture of repudiation when he refused the proffered Nobel Prize for Literature -- these things are the hooks from which his celebrity hangs. But the amours, closely examined, were somewhat sordid; Sartre's role in the French resistance was negligible in comparison to that of intellectuals like Marc Bloch who actually risked (and paid with) their lives; and the tagline of his celebrity -- that he was the "conscience of France" -- is surely contradicted by his support for totalitarian communism. If Sartre deserves to be remembered, it must be not as a hero of conscience or of love but as a hero of the mind.In Sartre's mind, according to Flynn, the unifying idea was always imagination. Not only did Sartre write L'Imaginaire, "the most sustained and detailed account of the nature of imagination in Western philosophical literature," but Flynn tries to show that his entire intellectual career was governed by this idea, from its literary origins to its political end.Sartre discovered the joys and rigors of philosophy after he was already committed to a literary life. (He wrote in his autobiography that as a child he "palmed off on the writer the sacred power of the hero.") So he gravitated naturally to that most literary of philosophers, Nietzsche. Sartre and his best friend Nizan "occasionally referred to themselves as 'supermen' [after Nietzsche's 'ubermensch'], and considered [another student] to be above the herd though not quite on their level."Sartre eventually embraced a less cripplingly pretentious attitude to philosophy. It helped that he failed the nationally ranked teaching exam. Rumor had it "that Sartre had used the three essays of the written examination to exposit his own interpretation of the assigned texts, to the dismay of the examiners, who expected something more traditional." He was mortified. But he took himself in hand and passed the exams the next year, ranking first in the country. As a young teacher in the provinces, he began to develop positive ideas of his own in notebooks and diaries. Flynn shrewdly notes that these ideas revolved around the assigned topics of the teaching exam he had passed.But the real advance in his thinking came from a research leave in Germany, where he encountered the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, known as "phenomenology." Here was a positive philosophical project he could embrace.The really exciting possibility in phenomenology, it seemed to Sartre, was that it promised a way out of the old debate between realism and idealism. For millennia philosophers had fallen into roughly two camps regarding the important question of whether our experience of the world was the experience of something objectively out there -- a position called realism -- or the experience of something projected subjectively from within our own minds -- a position called idealism. Phenomenology promised to end this gridlock. It would freely admit that experience depended upon out-there objects while also insisting that experience itself (and "objects", as experienced things) were "constituted" by the ego.Sartre jumped aboard this train with his whole heart.At this point in the biography, Flynn's special talent is brought to bear on the story: he is a masterful summarizer of philosophical arguments.Sartre almost immediately began dissenting from the particulars of the new philosophy. Flynn narrates the incremental steps by which Sartre's small objections to phenomenology lead him to original ideas.For example, Sartre objected to an idea of Husserl's called "the transcendental ego." The transcendental ego, thought Husserl, was the "I" that experiences things. It was necessary to hypothesize a transcendental ego because, without one, all the different sensations of a consciousness would fall apart. But Sartre objected. He liked phenomenology as an alternative to idealism. But to be non-idealist, he thought, one had to rid one's philosophy from all this talk of something beyond and before experience.
"Can one 'purify' consciousness from its 'inner life,' [...] without appealing to a transcendental ego to hold the experience together? Sartre's response [...] is an unqualified yes."
This is the origin of one of Sartre's most famous ideas: that consciousness is just an empty container directed toward its objects.Flynn is very good at ferreting out the subtle development of such ideas, but sometimes he gets in his own way. The attempt to unify a very diverse body of work does not always benefit from his insistence that it all boils down to "imagination." For example, relating imagination to the obsession with Marxism that filled Sartre's latter days leads Flynn into an equivocation. The young Sartre's straightforward interest in the faculty of the imagination is somehow transubstantiated, according to Flynn, into the "idealism" of his commitment to Marxism:
Even when [Sartre] finally abandons imaginative literature in favor of political commitment, I shall argue, it is in the service of an egalitarian ideal -- what he calls "socialism and freedom" or the "city of ends."
While admittedly the promise of communism proved "imaginary," I hardly think Sartre chased it for that reason.Even at his best, Flynn never quite escapes that curse of the academic pen, didactic pomposity. The phrase "as we shall see" -- no doubt a verbal tic in his lectures at Emory College -- grates very soon after its fifth appearance in the first chapter and on every one of its several million further appearances.Flynn's biography, though welcome in its emphasis upon the thinking of Sartre, is for neither the faint of heart nor the uninitiated. It will baffle non-philosophers and occasionally annoy those with the background to follow it. But for the truly interested, it's probably the best biographical study of the set of ideas we call Sartre.
