“Experience has taught me that the history of various forms of
rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and
dogmatism than is abstract criticism.”^49 So Sartre has fashioned a quasi-
Nietzschean account of the origin of truth and linked its construction to
the economic and scientific interests of thedemos(a democratic spirit).
Of course, given Sartre’s subsequent egalitarian spirit, one can question
whether his first year of military service had erased all traces of the
elitism imbibed during his years at the ENS, despite his friend Nizan’s
laconic dismissal of the school as “allegedly Normal and supposedly
Superior.”^50 In fact, it is probably his close association with Nizan,
his fellow “superman” during their student days, that encouraged this
Nietzschean spirit as much as his reading of the Andler biography
mentioned earlier.
Nietzsche’s strategy (repeated by Foucault) was to lay bare the lowly
origins of our high-minded ideals (pudenda origo). Sartre does the same:
Truth originates with commerce; its function is to serve as a measure for
regulating barter. Gradually, this measure is internalized and man forgets
that it was his own creation. But Truth, in this account, assumes three
other functions besides that of Measure; namely, Form, Matter, and
Relation. Not only does it function as a criterion, it gradually assumes
the honorific of essence and substance – which are synonymous with
“Being” in classical Greek thought. And when defined as “correspond-
ence” between mind and thing, Truth colonizes common sense and
continues to govern it to this day.
Sounding like Nietzsche in his critique of Socratic reason, Sartre
marks the next stage in the downward spiral of truth through the
introduction of the metaphysical principle of identity: “A thing cannot
be itself and something other than itself at the same time and in the same
respect” (Legend of the Truth 42 ), from which follow the logical principles
of noncontradiction and excluded middle, though they are not
interview with Ge ́rard Raulet, inEssential Works of Foucault, 1954 – 1984 , ed. Paul Rabinow,
vol.ii,Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology(London and Harmondsworth: Allen Lane and49 Penguin,^1998 ); hereafterEWwith volume, essay title and page.
Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason,” in
Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977 – 1984 /Michel Foucault, ed.
50 Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge,^1988 ),^83.
John Gerassi,Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of his Century(University of Chicago
Press, 1989 ), 70.
38 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher