Lest we take this tendency toward the imaginary as evidence that
Sartre was an innocuous “dreamer” who had never fully freed himself
from the childhood heroes in his grandfather’s library, we must keep in
mind that he was a moralist – the social conscience of his age – and that
his keen sense of injustice suffered by the oppressed formed the deep
source from which his “dreams” were fed. Yes, there was street theater
aplenty – the events of May 1968 fit that category well, as do photos of
Sartre in the middle of the street selling copies of a banned Maoist
journal. That was simply a courageous act of “consciousness-raising.”
Sartre was not a finger-wagging moralist, but someone who valued social
justice and strenuously opposed injustice wherever it surfaced. This was
the kind of “dreaming” that brought him to the site of striking mine
workers and that led him to denounce exploitation of the vulnerable
wherever he encountered it. His political ideals displayed an ethical
dimension that often clashed in the aesthetic – plays, novels, short stories
where the inevitable contest between means and end was played out, if
not fully resolved. But if their “resolution” was “in the imaginary,” this
was not the fantasy of “art for art’s sake” but the “down and dirty”
dealings of individuals trying to achieve something like an authentic life
in an inauthentic society.
And yet we find Sartre and his Flaubert admitting that, in the final
analysis, the imaginary had succumbed to the real – the pen to the sword,
Napole ́on to the Prussians. His friend and collaborator onLTM, Andre ́
Gorz (Ge ́rard Horst) diagnosed their situation well: “The most radical
and strenuous work of liberation may be able to be carried out only in
the imagination, because it cannot suppress the original constitution of
total alienation.”^5
Is it in despair, then, that Sartre undertook his anomalous third ethics
in full knowledge of his approaching death, of the eclipse of his creative
powers, and of the seductive vision of his youth (a return to the works of
the 1930 s, toNausea)? His response, I believe, occurs in an admission
made to Le ́vy and to himself toward the end: “Such is the calm despair
of an old man who will die in that despair. But the point is, I’m resisting,
and I know I shall die in hope. But this hope must be grounded”
(Hope 110 ).
(^5) Andre ́Gorz,Le Socialisme difficile(Paris: Le Seuil, 1967 ), quoting Sartre to himself.
Conclusion 411