The positive image was already starting to appear even before the
advent of the “phoney war.” In his essay on Faulkner’sSartorispub-
lished in theNouvelle Revue Franc ̧aisein February of 1938 , Sartre had
appraised the author’s humanism as “doubtless the only acceptable
[form]. It hates our well adjusted consciousnesses, our engineers’ con-
sciousnesses [reminiscent of Sartre’s stepfather]” (Siti: 13 ). If it is the
solidarity that Roquentin resists in the name of the solitary individual,
it is what Sartre will later denote inBeing and Nothingnessas “the spirit
of seriousness” that repels him with its smug self-satisfaction. Speaking
for herself but doubtless reflecting a similar change in Sartre, Beauvoir
remarks: “It is impossible to assign any particular day, week, or even
month to the conversion that took place in me about this time. But
there is no doubt that the spring of 1939 marked a watershed in my
life. I renounced my individualistic, antihumanist way of life. I learned
the value of solidarity” (Prime 433 ). It is the “value of solidarity” that
Sartre will learn through the threats of Nazi invasion, the rough-and-
tumble life of a soldier and prisoner, and the occupation and resistance
as he undertakes the first stage of his conversion to “socialism and
freedom” – the name he will give to the Resistance group of intellec-
tuals that he and others will form on his return from the stalag.
Though he continued for the rest of his life to despise the “bourgeois
humanism” of his family and of such old friends as Pierre Guille, his
military experience shows signs of a weakening resolve. Reporting a
conversation among his fellow conscripts about the moral obligation
to share the fate of the most wretched in society, he allows: “The
principle of this new Idea – whose presence I obscurely sense – is
Guille’s humanism, which is entirely defensible but which I do not
share” (seeWD 9 ).
One senses that if one could distinguish between “solidarity” as a
psychological phenomenon and an ontological state, on the one hand,
and “human nature” as an abstract essence or “species,” one could break
this barrier between Sartre’s “socialist” sympathies and his “humanist”
antipathies. Consider the following reflection, again from the Wa r
Diaries:
This is precisely the basis of humanism: man viewing himself as species. It is this
abasement of human nature that I condemn. Species whose destiny is to conquer and
order the world...The religion of man conceived as a natural species: the error of
1848 , the worst error, the humanitarian error. Against this, [he proposes] to establish
152 The necessity of contingency:Nausea