is the most Nietzschean of Sartre’s currently accessible texts, not only in
its obvious concern with style but also in its content and form. Its style is
relentless in its aggressiveness, biting irony, and cumulative negativity.
It is a spirited attack on scientific rationality, on its cousin, abstract
philosophy, and on the egalitarian ideals of the common man (for which
read “herd”). There were hints of this in the previous story. But what
marks the Nietzschean character of the present work most clearly is the
genealogical form of its argument.^47 As Nietzsche did in his “On Truth
and Lie” fable, Sartre undermines an established philosophical view – in
this case the claim that “Truth” is impersonal, timeless and universal –
with a fictional, though vaguely possible, account of its historical origin.
This does not so much disprove the earlier view as cast suspicion on its
plausibility by facing it with another, purportedly historical alternative.
Even truth is a confection, we are informed, that bears the marks of its
own fabrication.
Clearly, such an account exhibits all the hallmarks of what logicians
call the “genetic fallacy,” namely, the thesis that one can answer a
question by pointing to its origin: for example, when a student fresh
from a class in psychology answers your query with “I know why you
said that!” They may indeed know why, but that was not the question.
Fallacy or not, it is often an effective rhetorical move. As Foucault,
who was famous for his “genealogies” and who citedThe Legend of
Truthas evidence of Nietzsche’s influence on Sartre,^48 once admitted:
Lie” is a fragment published posthumously. See Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans.,The
Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954 ), 42 – 47. Christine Daigle, “Sartre and
Nietzsche,”Sartre Studies International 10 ,no. 2 ( 2004 ): 195 – 210. See also Jean-Franc ̧ois
Louette,Sartre contra Nietzsche: Les Mouches, Huis Clos, Les Mots(Presses Universitaires de
Grenoble, 1996 ). Both Sartre and Nietzsche have in mind the challenge of the eighth
hypothesis of Plato’sParmenides, as Pierre Verstraeten points out in his essay “Le Huitie`me
hypothe`se duParme ́nides, Gene`se du concept de se ́rialite ́,” inEPS,ii: 59 ff. In Sartre’s case,
this will raise the issue of the “singular universal” that, as we have noted, he will attempt to47 resolve dialectically in hisCritique of Dialectical Reasonnearly three decades later.
The general model for such argumentation, of course, is Nietzsche’s formidableThe
Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage,
481968 ). SeeSaP^206.
“Did you know that Sartre’s first text – written when he was a young student – was
Nietzschean? ‘The History of Truth,’ a little paper first published in a lyce ́e review around
1925. He began with the same problem [as I]. And it is very odd that his approach should
have shifted from the history of truth to phenomenology, while for the next generation –
ours – the reverse was true.” Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,”
Philosophical reflections in a literary mode 37