The Age of Defeat Read online

  And yet, like Sartre, Camus has certain clearly defined limitations. It is extremely difficult to see how he can maneuver his existentialism out of the impasse it seems to have reached. (A recent book on him speculated whether his next move might not be to join the Catholic church, but this is hardly likely.)

  His limitations have very little in common with Sartre’s. While Sartre has devoted most of his energy during the past ten years to politics, Camus has continued to explore the basic problems of existentialism. (On one occasion, he spoke of his main preoccupation—somewhat rhetorically—as his “quarrel with God.”) Sartre has preferred to concentrate on the position of the worker in modern Europe; Camus is more interested in the position of man in the universe. In this, he has remained closer to the spirit of existentialism than Sartre. His readers have come to accept that his “solution,” when and if it comes, will be some individual vision, some reconciling insight into the condition of man. Yet although Camus has been deeply influenced by Dostoevsky, he seems to lack the temperament that can reach towards mystical insights, the vision that compensates an Alyosha Karamazov for the nihilism of Ivan. Camus’s position is not unlike Ivan’s. He is keenly aware of human suffering, of the world’s hostile absurdity; like Ivan, he is an atheist; like Ivan, he loves life in spite of the absurdity. Even though Camus has reconciled himself to his own vision of absurdity, although his final position is one of affirmation, he makes on the reader the impression of being a negative writer, negative in spite of his intention. Compared with most American (and English) writers, he has achieved complete inner-direction; his writing has a subjective integrity with which very few of his contemporaries can compare. But there is still a strong element of the cult of the ordinary chap in him. He himself would undoubtedly acknowledge this, and insist that it is necessarily so. But the fact that it is a self-imposed limitation does not make it any the less a limitation.

  In spite of the criticisms that may be leveled-against them, both Sartre and Camus have achieved remarkable results, and their complete seriousness has never been in question. Their conclusions may be regarded as doubtful, but the psychological method of analysis, perfected by them both, will remain an invaluable instrument for existential thinkers in the future.

  Conclusion

  The problem that Riesman and Whyte explore at such length is fundamentally the same problem that Sartre and Camus have attacked. For instance, Riesman, writing of the other-directed businessman, says: “Obliged to conciliate or manipulate a variety of people, the other-directed person handles all men as customers who are always right; but he must do this with the uneasy realization that… some are more right than others… [Thus] the other-directed person tends to become merely his succession of roles and encounters and hence to doubt who he is or where he is going” (my italics). This could hardly be plainer. Hell is other people. Riesman is describing inauthentic existence. All Sartre’s analyses of inauthentic existence are really analyses of other-direction. When Electra in Les Mouches allows Zeus to persuade her to repent, she is being other-directed. And Sartre’s insistence upon the act of choice is echoed by Whyte when he advises the organization man to think for himself and defy the boss.

  It could be said, then, that Sartre and Camus have spent the past twenty years trying to propound answers to the same problems that Riesman and Whyte have more recently analyzed. Moreover, the American sociologists and the French thinkers have arrived at these statements by completely different routes. Riesman makes it clear that he considers the spread of other-direction to be due to the switch of emphasis in American economic life from production to consumption. Sartre and Camus know that the roots of existentialism can be traced back for at least a century and a half. And yet all four are ultimately concerned with the loss of autonomy in modern man. Riesman, like Camus, has no practical solutions to offer. Whyte, like Sartre, propounds a limited solution: he urges the organization man to make an act of choice, to refuse to be treated like a package of consumer goods.

  The existential method has proved itself a more subtle instrument of analysis of other-direction than the sociological method (although it is not, for this reason, wholly superior). To what extent, then, can existentialism offer a solution to the problems of “the lonely crowd”?

  The question bristles with difficulties. And the first of these is the lack of positive content in French existentialism. Existentialism began as a revolt (against Hegel), and a revolt is essentially negative. It has continued as an analysis of human psychology and the human situation. But the analysis halts before it reaches the point of synthesis. Is it possible for existentialism to become something more positive?

  1 There is hardly any need here to point out the similarity of Sartre’s doctrine to the quietism of Molinos (which the church condemned as a heresy): the belief that repentance is a waste of time, that a man had better decide to do better next time and forget about his “sins.” Sri Ramakrishna preached the same: “It is the mind that makes one bound or emancipated.” Shaw’s dictum that a man should have the courage of his vices is still another approach to the same belief. It is pointless to accuse Sartre of unoriginality. In philosophy, all thought is common property; what matters is the light that each individual is able to shed on it.

  2 It is interesting to note that D. H. Lawrence was temperamentally closer to Huxley and Sartre than to Hemingway or Camus. Although he lays such emphasis on physical affirmation, the effect of much of his later work—particularly Lady Chatterley’s Lover—is of cantankerous disgust; only his very early work seems to be free from this attitude.

  Part 5. The Stature of Man

  From the considerations of the last part, one point emerges with undeniable clarity; the responsibility of the writer in our time. His responsibility is heavier than that of the politicians or the church, for what is in question is a revolution in thought, not a five-year plan or a recipe for “getting right with God.” Man in the twentieth century suffers from an insignificance neurosis, which can only be attacked from inside. Riesman puts his finger on it when he says, “It is not only that [the other-directed man] withdraws emotional allegiance from a political scene that strikes him as too complex and too unmanageable—it strikes him so in part precisely because he has withdrawn” (my italics). If it is a mental attitude that has created the problem, then it will be a change of attitude that will be the first step in solving it.

  “Insignificance” is a literary trend that can be combated. Arthur Miller indicated that he considered a “heroic” revolt might produce a new romanticism, a defeat for realism. This only demonstrates that for Miller the word “heroic” means what it meant for Cervantes: ranting and posturing. This is a negative view. The insignificance fallacy will not be destroyed by a mere desire to create characters who are not creatures of their environment. Only a positive conviction can hope to do it. This requires a careful definition of the concept of the heroic. And this, in turn, requires an advance beyond the existentialism of Sartre and Camus.

  Three Types of Commitment

  Before considering the more complex issues, the recurring question of commitment deserves to be examined.

  There are three obvious ways in which a writer can be committed to take social action, and three possible motives:

  1. Self-interest. The writer is committed to civilization, and therefore to world peace, because he writes for a civilization, and his aim is to add something to civilized values.

  2. Dislike of cruelty. This is an instinctive response in anyone who is aware of himself as a member of society, and is an outcome of the ability to identify with other people. The degree to which a man may feel committed to oppose cruelty depends upon two factors: his imagination, and the energy he has to spare from his own internal struggles.

  3. Desire for fuller self-expression. For men of a certain temperament—Shaw and Sartre are examples—writing is not finally a completely satisfying means of self-expression. Sartre is obsessed by the idea that philosophy should lead to acti
on.

  The first of these seems to me to be the most important.

  To be a thinking, responsive human being means to realize that even a Trappist monk owes his ability to save himself to the fact that he has been born into a human society and taught modes of self-expression. In the mid-twentieth century, all values are threatened by the possibility of the destruction of civilization. Every issue that constitutes a threat to peace—whether immediate or indirect—demands an attitude of commitment. For this reason, issues like the Suez crisis, the occupation of Cyprus, the South Africa treason trials, the hydrogen bomb tests demand a definite attitude. (The writer should not underestimate his possible influence in these matters. Alexander Werth states that the attitude of Les Temps Modernes helped to discourage the Americans from launching a preventive anti-Soviet crusade at the time of the witch hunts.) And if the writer is committed to preserving peace, he is also committed to conserving the values of peace in times of crisis, to not allowing himself to be swayed by popular emotions, to resisting the forces that blur our language. (Again, Les Temps Modernes has been disinterested in attacking Russia and the West; Sartre has frequently declared that he will not allow particular instances—the concentration camps, the Hungarian rising—to make him anti-Russian, although he has given full prominence to Russian, as well as American, abuses in his magazine.)

  The second type of commitment—dislike of cruelty—is certainly of immense importance, but it is so deeply ingrained in most civilized men (or we are to hope it is) as to need no underlining. Here again, the writer’s role can be of great importance. The recent campaign against capital punishment is an example. (Camus has written a long article opposing capital punishment, which has had considerable impact in France.) 1

  The third type of commitment requires no elaboration. But it throws into relief another important aspect of this question. Committed writers often speak as if it were a form of cowardice to be uncommitted. They are ignoring the most important fact about any kind of creation: that it originates on a level below the “social personality.” The ideally mature creator may be able to act and create out of the same impulse, without doing violence to either. But for less mature artists—and this covers ninety-nine per cent of the species—there is a problem of self-division: action is essentially the opposite of creation, and the social personality must be balanced in such a way as to give the maximum freedom to the creative drives. It is no use telling a subjective young poet that he ought to be taking part in marches to oppose the H-bomb tests. The probable result will be to make him say, “To hell with the tests; I’m a poet, not a politician.” He says this not because he ultimately means it but because it is a response to the bludgeon tactics of people who lack the subtlety to realize that all men are necessarily self-divided. (This, of course, forms a powerful argument against the state control of artists practiced in the Soviet Union.)

  But the final point about commitment leads directly to the central problem of existentialism. For Sartre, commitment means action. But great art is action. This is to say that the Soviet critics who attacked Joyce’s Ulysses for having no message for the worker were ignoring the fact that an artist’s intensity cannot be turned on and off like a tap. Great action, like great art, rises from a subpersonal level. But ordinary action, the uninspired variety, is “of the personality.” The artist who becomes too obsessed with the idea of translating art into action will become a mediocre artist. This, perhaps, explains why Sartre’s Les Chemins de la Liberté is an artistic failure in comparison with Ulysses or Crime and Punishment. (Sartre dislikes Flaubert because of the contempt the latter felt for the working classes; he also seems to feel that Baudelaire ought to have allied himself with the working-class movement instead of writing Les Fleurs du Mal.)

  Towards a New Existentialism

  This points to one of the main causes of the failure of French existentialism. It has failed to place sufficient emphasis on the creative drives. It deifies the ordinary at the expense of the extraordinary. One might adapt Shaw’s comment on Shakespeare, and say that it understands human weakness without understanding human strength.

  Why are Sartre and Camus so preoccupied with the “ordinary man”? It could be due to the fact that both came to maturity as writers during the rise of Nazism, that both worked in the resistance in occupied France, that Sartre was interned in Germany at one stage. For five years “freedom” meant freedom from the Nazis; such an experience can be expected to leave a permanent bias. This is both a weakness and a strength; a weakness for the reasons I have discussed, a strength because it endowed them with a formidable single-mindedness.2

  It can be said of existentialism that it has rescued religious concepts from the limbo of superstitions. Sartre’s mauvaise foi, Heidegger’s “inauthentic existence” are in practice identical with pride and sin. The final recrudescence of religion in the nineteenth century had been also its complete betrayal by language: the popular church movements, the Theosophical Society, the Christian Scientists, all helped to blur and discredit religious concepts. To the existentialists belongs the credit of restoring to these concepts the precision they possess in the work of Pascal or Saint Augustine.

  But pride, sin, and delusion are the negative part of religion. The positive part has not experienced the same rehabilitation. It is true that Sartre speaks of “salvation,” but his use of the word commands no conviction.

  The problem, then, will be to create a new positive existentialism. It would not be accurate to say that this would have to begin where Sartre and Camus left off, for both have been committed for some time to the direction that appears to have led to an impasse; a new existentialism would have to begin further back, utilizing only their psychological method.

  An example might clarify this point. The question at issue is of the positive and negative aspects of existentialism: these are exemplified in D. H. Lawrence’s story, “The Man Who Died.” The story falls into two parts. In the first, Jesus rises from the tomb, exhausted and shattered by his experience, robbed of the moral energy that led him to preach. In this state, his activities in the past seem futile, inspired by delusion and egoism. This is the typical existential attack on idealism; Lawrence is accusing Jesus of robbing life of its real values by imposing a set of ideal values on it. In this respect, the first part of the story corresponds quite precisely with Camus’s La Chute, or Sartre’s La Nausée. It shows the breakdown of a man’s belief in his values.

  But Lawrence goes further. Having demolished these ideal values (to his own satisfaction), he goes on to make the attempt to replace them with real values. It goes without saying that these involve sex. In the first part of the story, Jesus has seen a cock strutting among its hens and is struck by the fact that this is the law of life: will to power and propagation. In the second part, he experiences this himself when he comes to an Egyptian temple in the wilderness and has sex with a priestess of Isis. (This is the part of the story that was denounced as blasphemous on its publication.) This restores his contact with life and turns him into a mystical worshiper of the life-force.

  Most readers will suspect that Lawrence achieved this demonstration at the expense of a certain distortion of the values concerned. But this, although it may invalidate the argument in the last analysis, leaves its logical beauty unaffected. In its way, the story has the perfection of a geometrical theorem; it moves inevitably from a critical existentialism to a visionary and positive existentialism. No work of Sartre or Camus makes any attempt to reach this second stage. Sartre’s “L’Enfance d’un Chef” shows Lucien Fleurier losing all integrity in self-deception; only by implication is it positive. Camus’s La Peste ends with a stoical gesture of endurance: “The problems may be insoluble, but human beings have one another.” No matter how suspect Lawrence’s solution may be, no matter how much he may have distorted the views he wishes to attack, he has at least laid down a solution with no attempt at evasion.

  It is worth noting that Lawrence’s method is the purest ki
nd of existentialism. It is the most basic human response to life that he keeps referring to; nothing more grandiose is acceptable. He is an intuitive Blakeian; his aim is to “renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof” (of idealism and intellectualism). But this Blakeian approach led him into a rejection of all commitment; he insisted on the importance of conflict, the clash of wills. In politics, his ideas were based firmly on the dictator principle (although this was mainly because he envisaged himself as the dictator). This needs emphasizing because Lawrence was a better existentialist than Sartre or Camus; he stuck closer to first principles, and relied completely on intuition. There is no point in disguising the fact that positive existentialism can steer very close to fascism. This will require further analysis.

  Existentialism and the Hero

  How far can critical analysis hope to create a new existentialism? Its value is obviously limited to clearing the ground. The actual edifice must be the work of poets and novelists.

  This is the first major point of disagreement with Sartre.

  With some justification, he feels that philosophizing and criticizing are “just talk”; as an existentialist, he has no intention of being satisfied with talk. But his next step is more dubious; he believes that therefore a philosophy will prove its sincerity by striving continually to ally itself with action. In this, his attitude comes close to that of another existential thinker, Wittgenstein, who believed that language can only express things that are not worth expressing and that a point comes when the philosopher has to “be silent.” This is to ignore the fact that great literature is always expressing the inexpressible, since it has the same power as great music and painting to appeal directly to the vital intuitions. The results of Sartre’s belief can be seen in his writing. La Nausée was written before he developed his views on commitment, and it has passages of extraordinary power and beauty; the later novels are competent, but pedestrian. It is a fallacy to believe that action can get closer to life than writing. The aim of philosophy is depth and vital intensity. Political action could give philosophy this added dimension; it could also produce total confusion.