“intentionality” that will release him from the inside–outside dichotomy;
much less has he discerned the dialectic that will render intelligible
this apparently contradictory relation between the singular and the
universal. The problem is being framed imagistically, but the conceptual
resolutions have not yet emerged.
It is important to note in this rich though scarcely diaphanous text,
that Sartre distinguishes the solitary man from the isolated one. Unlike
the latter, who does not live in the society of his peers, the solitary
man must form a positive idea of his solitude. He defines himself
in opposition to the plurality and to the ideas of the many. “So there is
a technique of solitude.” It is in terms of and in opposition to the
“universals” of the scientists and the “natures” of the philosopher that
he defines himself. Again, the solitary man is Nietzschean in his inverted
Platonism: his downward tumble from the heights; his recognition that
impersonal reason is nothing but the viewpoint of others who would have
us think democratically as other to each other (what Sartre will call
“seriality” in theCritique). The physical truths which science would
impose are not the fruit of universality but merely “the systematic
impoverishment of spontaneous thoughts” (EPS 55 ). Though it is likely
that many of the qualities of the solitary man are projections of Sartre’s
own attitudes and personal phantasies, and commentators are inclined to
see him as an approximation of Sartre at that time in his life, we should
be cautious about taking this admitted “fable” as simple self-projection.
Some of these claims are obviously ironic and others hyperbolic. Again,
the hazard of indirect communication.
But what, then, are we to make of Sartre’s acknowledgment of this
identification in an interview given to Michel Contat and published in
1976?
Before the war I considered myself simply as an individual. I was not aware of any
ties between my individual existence and the society I was living in. At the time
I graduated from the E ́cole Normale, I had based an entire theory on that feeling.
I was the “solitary man” (l’homme seul), an individual who opposes society through
the independence of his thinking but who owes nothing to society and whom society
cannot affect, because he is free.That was the evidence on which I based all that
I thought, all that I wrote and all that I lived before 1939.^60
(^60) Jean-Paul Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,”L/S 45 ; see alsoSitx: 176.
Philosophical reflections in a literary mode 45