The problem is his individualist looking/looked-at theory of interper-
sonal relations. He has not overcome the limits of analytic reason, even as
he is insisting that human reality is a totality, not a collection – the first
principle of existential psychoanalysis (BN 568 ).
Political existentialism ( 1947 – 1952 )
Aside from the stark contrast between the pre- and the post-war Sartre,
the other stages of his life bleed into one another. So the present period
begins with the elaboration of the concept of “committed literature”
developed in What is Literature? ( 1947 ) but previewed in Sartre’s
UNESCO address a few months earlier. This set of essays underscores
the concept of writing as “action” with its attendant political and
moral implications. But it does so while trying to navigate between
the aesthetic extremes of bourgeois “art for art’s sake” and Marxist
“socialist realism.” The situated writer who does not speak up for the
economically exploited and the socially oppressed of “our time,” Sartre
warns, is a collaborator in such oppression and exploitation. We observed
this overlap of the moral and the political in the previous chapter.
Extended to all registers of society and various forms of social injustice,
this becomes the common theme of Sartre’s writings for the next two
decades.
Various existential concepts are at work in this view of committed
literature. Chief among them is the concept of “situation” that invites
elaboration in terms of the concepts of objective possibility, praxis
and the historical just enunciated. Of the many questions which the
committed writer must address to his contemporaries, none is more
pressing than that of therelationbetween morality and politics (see
WL 154 ). This, in turn, raises the dilemma of the Communist Party
that, as we have just noted, adopts a rhetoric of moral responsibility by
its frequent appeal to social (in)justice, while sustaining a materialist
dialectic which seems to render such ascriptions unwarranted. In other
words, freedom and economic determinism are mutually incompatible.
Such is Sartre’s view of the matter.
Whatever one may think of psychological “compatibilism,” Sartre
consistently opposed it, even to the point of confessing to having
adopted a kind of “amoral realism” during his years of fellow-traveling
with the PCF (seeORR 79 ). Toward the end ofWhat is Literature?
296 Means and ends: political existentialism