of them. He has digested anti-intellectualism, Manicheism, mysticism, pessimism,
anarchy and egotism: they are nothing more than stages, unfinished thoughts which
find their justification only in him.
(Nausea 118 )
Refusing to play the labeling game, Roquentain protests to himself:
“I don’t want to be integrated, I don’t want my good red blood to go
and fatten this lymphatic beast: I will not be fool enough to call myself
‘anti-humanist.’ I am not a humanist, that’s all there is to it” (Nausea 118 ).
Though the “evidence” is taken from a piece of imaginative literature,
it conveys Sartre’s own thought on the matter of humanism as exhibited
by his other writings at that time, including his masterworkBeing and
Nothingness. There we shall find him denying that we have a human
nature but insisting that we share a human “condition” comprised of
indelible features of human life such as birth and death, language and
community, existence in place and time, and the rest. His opposition to
the traditional concept of human nature is based on his postulatory
atheism (there is no God to view “humanity” as a whole) and on his
correlative view that nature offers us no moral norms; in other words,
that one should not look to human nature to construct a “natural” law.
It is texts such as these but especially the remarks inNauseathat lead
Bernard-Henri Le ́vy in a highly publicized book, to claim that there are
“two” Sartres, a good one who is an individualist and anti-humanist and
a “bad” one who discovers and embraces a kind of socialist or even
Maoist humanism at mid-point in his career.^38 But we should recall that
Roquentin/Sartre “will not be fool enough to call [him]self ‘anti-
humanist.’ He is not a humanist, that’s all there is to it.” In other words,
the case rests unresolved. Taking this remarkable passage fromNausea
just cited as the “negative” of Sartre’s composite image of the humanist,
we shall observe its “positive” emerge in subsequent writings, starting
with theWar Diariesand his own “belief in man,” ironically a kind of
“socialist humanism” (minus the Party, of course) reminiscent of the
autodidact’s conversion in the detention camp.^39
(^38) See Bernard-Henri Le ́vy,Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, trans. Andrew
39 Brown (Cambridge: Polity,^2003 ),^170 –^180.
See my “The Humanisms of Sartre,” inRevolutionary Hope. Essays in Honor of William
L. McBride, ed. Nathan Jun and Shane Wahl (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013 ), 53 – 69.
Omnivorous humanism(s) 151