shorthand for individual qualities, agents, actions or events. Nietzsche
offered a powerful metaphor to describe the emergence of “general”
terms and abstractions (read “essences”). Such words, he claimed, were
like coins that had lost their images by being passed from hand to hand
until only the abstraction “coin” remained.^58 Sartre proposes a similar
account in the present case. But he shifts between a notion of necessity in
nature, which science discovers, artificiality in our linguistic domain, and
what in aesthetics is called a “type-token” relation between a model and
its instantiations; between feeling such pain, for example, and its various
dramatizations on stage. Consider the following:
I comparel’homme seulto an actor. The great actors differ from the mediocre ones in
that they do not seek clarity in their acting. Rather, they assume a natural ambiguity
and raise it to the typical. For example, by the “type” of pain, I do not mean an
expression so transparent that it could serve as the canon for posterity but an
individual nature, existing by itself and such that it seems to contain in great
indistinctness all possible pains and many other feelings...So it is with thoughts
about solitary man (l’homme seul). Thanks to the necessary link that binds their
elements, they resemble the limits toward which all the natural thoughts of the same
order strive like the innumerable curves of the sand and the waves that strive toward
the circle. Again, one must not take literally what I’ve been saying because, unlike the
waves and the circle, the thoughts I’ve been referring to are inexhaustible.
(EPS 50 – 51 )
Sartre finally appeals to art, specifically to those painted figures that
“seem to be the completion of so many unfinished faces” – like Filippo
Lippi’s portrait of a woman whose particular inclination of the head
serves as the model for numerous portraits that seek to capture this
grace, each in its own way (EPS 51 ). Such are the thoughts of the solitary
man: They exist like portraits, like statues, like dances and not like
dancers, or animals, or employees of the Republic.^59 The solitary man
“scorns the future, security, and consistency; he knows well that
thoughts are real risks” (EPS 50 ).
Consistently or not – and Husserlian “essences” oreidēwill challenge
this view – Sartre maintained his nominalism but with one crucial
(^58) See Kaufmann,Portable Nietzsche, 47. “On Truth and Lie.”
(^59) Again, Sartre is perhaps unconsciously anticipating a common “solution” to the traditional
problem of universals in Anglo-American philosophy when he appeals to the type-token
relationship just mentioned. (See Richard Wollheim,Art and its Objects, 2 nd edn. [Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992 ].)
Philosophical reflections in a literary mode 43