increasingly toward the politics of the Left and its alternative to the
bourgeois “humanism” that he had rejected so categorically inNausea.
If his years in the ENS were among the happiest of his life, he can write
retrospectively that he was happy in the camp as well. Unlike the elitism
of the former, the latter opened him to a quasi-romantic regard for the
“average man.” Here he could be “a whole man, composed of all men
and as good as all of them and no better than any” (concluding line of
his autobiographyWords).
Sartre learned “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit) from Heidegger but,
as usual, read it in his own way.^20 In this case, “historicity” denotes
temporality as the unique and incomparable mode of being of human
selfness (seeBN 158 ) that makes narrative history possible. Historicity is
not a feature of nature, or of the environment. Likewise, “historiality”
and “to historialize oneself,” in Sartre’s usage, is a component of
authenticity in the sense that one assumes responsibility for one’s
current “history.” Thus the inauthentic individual – inThe Roads of
FreedomMathieu, initially, for example, or Sartre himself inWar Diaries
( 138 ), given their respective situations – is someone who retains a
spectator’s attitude with regard to his “being-at-war” (SeeCDG 59 ,
126 ).^21 It is this appreciation of “creating oneself in History” rather than
simply undergoing it, that moves Sartre beyond a timeless “wisdom” to a
practical authenticity. This implies facing up to his concrete immersion
in the war and in his social class, whether in explicit denial, hatred
or acceptance, and the like. “Those are things that had escaped me but
which the war at least will have managed to teach me” (CDG 138 ).
But he pursues the issue in a way that betrays his possibly futile attempt
to relate Heidegger and Husserl when he asks: “Why do we always hesitate
between wisdom and the authentic, between the timeless and History?
(^20) Sartre admits that his reading of Heidegger, firstWhat is Metaphysics?and thenSein und
Zeit, “supervened to teach me authenticity and historicity just at the very moment when war
21 was about to make these notions indispensable to me” (WD^182 ).
This becomes a basic issue inBeing and Nothingness. Discussing how each person finds
himself in the presence of meanings which do not come into the world through him, Sartre
remarks: “We are not dealing with a limit of freedom; rather it isin this worldthat the for-
itself must be free; that is, it must choose itself by taking into account these circumstances
and notad libitum.” Whence he concludes that it is by choosing itself and by historializing
itself (s’historialisant) in the world that the for-itself historializes (s’historialise) the world
itself and causes it to bedatedby its techniques (BN 521 ;F 604 ). For his most complete
discussion of “historialization” and its cognates, seeTE ̧especially the appendix.
170 The war years, 1939–1944