Sartre composes hisWar Diaries, he will have taken steps to free himself
of this mythical figure, though not entirely, as the case of Orestes
reveals.^54 The “authentic” individual, successor to the solitary man, will
emerge as Sartre’s ethical ideal till the end of the Second World War. By
then, Sartre’s experience of war and imprisonment has expanded his
sense of the social. We shall see the image of “integral man” augment, if
not replace, that of the “authentic” individual in the posthumously
published lecture notes for Sartre’s second, “dialectical” ethics.^55
In this fragment the description of the solitary man assumes Stoic
proportions. Recall that Bre ́hier’s lectures on Stoicism were among the
few that Sartre regularly attended at the Sorbonne. Stoicism, both pro and
con, remained a major component of Sartre’s ethical view as he tried to
contrast it with authenticity.^56 Two Nietzschean features of the solitary
man are of particular philosophical interest in this text: his nominalism
and his ethical and aesthetic creativity. I almost said “aestheticism” (in the
sense of Nietzsche’s famous “making your life a work of art”), but Sartre
would adamantly deny accusations of aestheticism in his post-war lecture
“Existentialism is a Humanism,” while nonetheless drawing a positive
comparison between the creation of a work of art and the “invention” of
an ethical decision.^57 We saw a similar warning by Apollo to Er.
Sartre’s “nominalism” is a version of the thesis that abstract and
general terms are mere “names” (in Latin,nomina) that do not refer to
existing items. Only individuals exist in reality. Abstractions like “just-
ice” or collective terms like “the Battle of Waterloo” are simply
(^54) SeeThe War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre, November 1939 –March 1940 , trans. Quintin Hoare
(New York: Pantheon, 1984 ), 76 – 84 (hereafterWD);CDG 272 , 278 , 280 – 281 , 286 ; andCe ́r
446. De Coorebyter finds traces of this figure throughout Sartre’s subsequent writings. In
fact, he hazards the hypothesis that “Sartre never really liquidated the ideal of the solitary
man” (SaP 289 ). He points out that Sartre adopted a similar posture inBNand that his
studies of Genet, Mallarme ́and Tintoretto constitute variations (on the theme) as do several
characters in Sartre’s theater such as Bariona, Orestes, Hugo, Goetz, and in his essays, like
55 Freud, Gide, Nizan and Kierkegaard (seeSaP^289 ).
See “Morale et Histoire,”LTMnos. 632 , 633 , 634 (July–Oct. 2005 ) (hereafter MH) and
56 below,Chapter^14.
57 On the relation between Stoicism and authenticity, seeWD^50 –^51 ;CDR^69 and below,Chapter^10.
Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007 ), 45 (hereafterEH) andWL 67 ;Sitii: 111. “Aestheticism” is the theory that
artistic considerations will trump moral concerns whenever they conflict with each other. It
is a corollary of the adage “Art for art’s sake,” a view that Gustave Flaubert held and that
Sartre rigorously rejected.
42 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher