“image” and the “imaginary” in our present chapter have suggested this
and the rest of our study will confirm Sartre’s quasi confessional claim.
An effect of the peculiarly French experience of the war and occupa-
tion, Sartre seems to believe, is that it gives the lie to moral relativism.
Not in favor of absolute good, perhaps, unless one assigns that honorific
to “freedom,” but clearly to absoluteevil. He cites torture as the
paradigm. Hinted at in his early works but now brought to center stage
is Sartre’s “theodicy.” This is a branch of metaphysics formulated by
Leibniz to “justify the ways of God to men,” that is, to reconcile the
various evils in creation – physical, metaphysical and moral – with the
existence of a good and omnipotent God. Sartre’s is a failed theodicy,
I would argue, but a theodicy nonetheless in that it addresses the
justification of evil in the world. Its message is that evil is real and that
it “cannot be redeemed” (WL 180 ; seeSitvii: 332 – 342 ). The former he
argues against his idealist professors like Le ́on Brunschvicg, who insist
that evil does not exist except as a function of ignorance; the latter is
sustained against his Christian compatriots who seek to overcome evil
with absolute good. Sartre gives this problem full artistic expression in
his playThe Devil and the Good Lord(Lucifer and the Lord)( 1951 ) and in
his extraordinary existential biography,Saint Genet. Actor and Martyr
( 1952 ). The effect of dialectical materialism, as he claims to have shown
presumably in “Materialism and Revolution” is “to make Good and
Evil vanish conjointly. On that view, there remains only the historical
process” (WL 178 ).
Sartre exhorts the writer to create “a literature of production” (of
praxis) to counter the bourgeois “literature of consumption,” whose
model is Gide (seeWL 119 ). To counteract his critics, he argues that
“if negativity is one aspect of freedom,constructiveness is the other”
(WL 191 , emphasis added). For “production” readpraxis, understood
as “action in history and on history; that is a synthesis of historical
relativity and moral and metaphysical absolute, with this hostile and
friendly, terrible and derisive worlds which it reveals to us” (WL 194 ).
We will make frequent reference to “praxis” and its dialectical “rational-
ity” when it supplants “consciousness” inSearch for a Methodand
theCritique.
Finally, Sartre reaffirms the moral exigence lodged in the aesthetic
experience and he translates it into the demand to convert the city of
ends (his version of Kant’s moral kingdom) into “a concrete and open
260 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation