“abstract” freedom, which it likewise fosters in order to succeed.
This is why Sartre can assert that no decent literature was produced
under the Fascists or the Nazis.
We now encounter a form of argument that has been favored by
classical German idealists like Fichte, Hegel and especially Schiller.
The argument, as Sartre elaborates it, is to connect in some demonstra-
tive or at least plausible manner, the freedom that is the definition of the
individual with the socioeconomic freedom (promised by socialism) via
what he calls theaesthetic pact. But to reach Sartre’s socialist goal the
argument must extend to concrete freedom for everyone and not just
for a chosen few.
He has been facing that challenge sinceEH. Can the aesthetic free-
dom and the joy that accompanies its successful exercise invite or even
demand political freedom or at least, undermine its blockage? Clearly
totalitarian governments since Plato have seemed to think so and have
censored what the Nazis labeled “degenerate” art accordingly. In his play
Rock and Roll, prominent British playwright Tom Stoppard dramatizes,
among other things, the mutual incompatibility of this popular art
form and the discipline of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
Sartre has long valued the “democratization” of art. Recall his lecture to
the students and their parents on the “seventh art” at their honors
ceremony during his first semester of teaching. But it is inWLthat he
draws on the resources of his phenomenological studies to forge an
argument between the creation/reception of art and political commit-
ment by means of the experience of freedom.
His argument turns on the phenomenological thesis that “the aes-
thetic object is properly the world in so far as it is aimed at through the
imaginary” (WL 64 ). And the aesthetic pact entered into between artist
and audience, he claims, modifies the intersubjective situation of each
one’s respective project. The factual world as imaged emerges as a value
because of its saturation with mutual freedom. That “world” becomes
ours in the aesthetic joy conveyed (or at least made available) to each and
everyone. The work of art is both an exigence and a gift: a gift as “an
act of confidence in the freedom of men” (WL 67 ) and “a task proposed
to human freedom” (WL 65 ) to maximize the concrete freedom (the
choices) for all. “Although literature is one thing and morality a quite
different one,” Sartre allows, “at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we
discern a moral imperative” (WL 67 ).
256 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation