socialists and the Communists who, after the Great War, framed a
different situation from which and for which to write. The Heideggerian
term “historicity”(Geschichtlichkeit) and sometimes “historialization”
already employed inBNand employed several times in theNotebooks
for an Ethicsnow enters the scene. If History (with a HegelianH) is the
study of the dead past under the retrospective illusion of causal necessity,
then we can say that “historialization” is the revival of these past
moments as “lived absolutes,” with their contingency, possibility, and
risk.^43 It is to this sense that Sartre appeals in his response to the
question “For whom does one write?” The answer depends on the
situation and must be changed accordingly. One does not propose
abstract freedom to oppressed and exploited people. But it is Sartre’s
hope that the rise of class consciousness among the proletariat in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries will invite the writer to realize that
union of content and form that had necessarily eluded his bourgeois
predecessors.
While acknowledging the limitations of his brief history, Sartre
tellingly appeals to its conclusion “be it only an ideal” as the discovery
of “the pure essence of the literary work and, conjointly, [of] that type
of public – that is, of society – which it requires” (WL 134 ). “In short,
actual(en acte) literature can only realize its full essence in a classless
society. Only in such a society could the writer be aware that there is no
difference of any kind between hissubjectand hispublic”(WL 137 ). For
the subject of literature has always been man in the world. As that world
changed and concrete freedom became objectively possible (a Weberian
term Sartre is courting but doesn’t use), the writer can address “the sum
total of men living in a given society...in social time” (WL 136 ). For
“if the public were identified with the concrete universal, the writer
would really have to write about the human totality; not about the
abstract man of all the ages and for a timeless reader, but about the
(^43) SeeNE 467 andTruth and Existence 79 – 80 (SFHRi: 83 ): “we must make ourselves historical
by living our era (historical situation) to the fullest.” LikewiseWL: “It is not a matter of
choosing one’s age but of choosing oneself within it” ( 195 ). InENhe will remind us that
“the historian himself ishistorical(historique) that is to say, that he ‘historicizes’ himself
(s’historialise) by clarifying ‘history’ in light of his projects and those of his society” (BN 501 ;
EN 582 ). In theCarnets, it was the kaiser’s unwillingness to “historialize” his historical
situation, namely the gradual loss of his empire, that constituted his inauthenticity in
Sartre’s view (seeWD 19 – 20 andSFHR 1 : 82 – 83 ).
258 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation