had years before come to believe was “class conflict.” Indicative of his
own ambivalence in this regard, he refused to join the Party himself,
though we said he supported four years of fellow-traveling with the PCF
from 1952 to the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956.
In his last interview with Beauvoir ( 1974 ), Sartre admitted: “I was
never in favor of a socialist society before 1939 .” He described his
position up to that point as “an individualism of the Left” (Ce ́r
479 – 480 ). If his experience in the army and in the POW camp taught
him the importance of social relations, he was still in thrall to the
individualist ontology he was formulating inBeing and Nothingness.
It based interpersonal relations on the objectifying gaze of competing
individuals, resulting ontologically in a kind of stare-down and politically
in a Hobbesian war of all against all. Recall a famous phrase from that
book that “the essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not
the [Heideggerian]Mitsein(being-with); it is conflict.”^15 Twenty-six
years afterBN, Sartre described this stage of his thought as “a rationalist
philosophy of consciousness.”^16
Commentators have read the ontology ofBN, namely, its basic categories
of being-in-itself and being-for-itself as a Cartesian dualism of material
thing and immaterial consciousness. But we have seen that this is mistaken,
if taken to mean that Sartre subscribed to a two-substance ontology of
matter and mind. Only being-in-itself is substantial or thing-like; being-
for-itself or consciousness is a “nonsubstantial absolute” (a no-thing related
to the in-itself by an internal negation). There is no need to unpack these
ontological claims except to reaffirm that the basic dualism which grounds
Sartre’s ontology and so his political and his ethical theories is a dualism of
spontaneity and inertia. A functional equivalent of the for-itself and the in-
itself respectively, they will replace these terms fromBNin hisCritique,
though, significantly, they return in the Flaubert biography.
Ethics and politics (means and ends)
The end–means issue is a recurrent theme in Sartre’s thought. It
distinguishes him from the means–ends continuum of Deweyan prag-
matism and the consequentialism of the utilitarians, for whom he had
(^15) BN 429.
(^16) BEM 41.
Ethics and politics (means and ends) 289