Recall that Sartre challenged us with the thought that we might succeed
in reconciling this dichotomy “be it only once andin the realm of the
imaginary” if only we had the courage “to go to the limits of ourselves in
both directions at once” (SG 644 , emphasis added). Here as elsewhere,
Sartre is urging us to increase the tension rather than reduce it or,
perhaps better, to resolve it in the “as if ” of a Kantian ideal. However,
if one opts to “go to the limits of ourselves in both directions at once”
(to emphasize the individualandthe social), one may see this suggestion
as Sartre’s last salute toward what we might call a “Kierkegaardian
dialectic,” namely, one that forces an existential choice rather than
resolving into a synthesizing “mediation.” This would underline Ray-
mond Aron’s critique of Sartre’s project of Marxist existentialism voiced
in 1946 : “A follower of Kierkegaard cannot at the same time be a follower
of Marx.”^21
The misplaced imaginary: Sartre’s fellow-traveling
with the PCF ( 1952 – 1956 )
Sartre was already having problems resolving the tension between end
and means, politics and ethics. In 1948 he had abandoned writing his
“Ethics” promised at the end ofBNafter producing several hundred
pages of notes, published posthumously asNotebooks for an Ethics.
He later explained that the text was too idealist in nature and no longer
expressed his current thoughts (seeCe ́r 234 ). If one looks for a more
“realist” and even more “materialist” version of his ethical insights, one
could do no better than to read his “profoundly autobiographical” play,
The Devil and the Good Lord, premiered June 7 , 1951. It is commonly
accepted as mirroring Sartre’s entire ideological evolution (Contat and
Rybalkai: 249 ). For someone who balanced imagination and conceptual-
ization, the literary and the philosophical most of his life, it is not
surprising to note how creative literary works either anticipated or
retrospectively exemplified the ideas articulated in his philosophical
work. His play,No Exit, for example, communicates imaginatively much
of the phenomenological ontology of being-for-others ofBN. A major
(^21) Raymond Aron,Marxism and the Existentialists, trans. Helen Weaver, Robert Addis and John
Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969 ), 30. The citation comes from an essay written
in 1946.
Sartre’s fellow-traveling with the PCF (1952–1956) 299