Charles D. Tenney
3
AESTHETICS IN THE PHILOSOPHY
OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
AN adequate aesthetics should undergird the artist as he creates a work of art, the viewer or listener as he experiences it, and the large culture which the artist and his audience thereby support. This support cannot be
established by reducing aesthetic processes to mere factual data, to physical or psychical determinants, to raw feelings and emotions, to crude sensations, to remembered images, to conceptual schemes, to verbal constructs, to political slogans, to anthropological reports, or to psychological case histories. Methods of analysis contribute little to aesthetic apprehension, which is an apprehension of richnesses, complexities, and totalities. To break up these totalities, to simplify these complexities, to water down these abundances is to misrepresent the very thing presented. Richness itself is the distinction of aesthetics.
established by reducing aesthetic processes to mere factual data, to physical or psychical determinants, to raw feelings and emotions, to crude sensations, to remembered images, to conceptual schemes, to verbal constructs, to political slogans, to anthropological reports, or to psychological case histories. Methods of analysis contribute little to aesthetic apprehension, which is an apprehension of richnesses, complexities, and totalities. To break up these totalities, to simplify these complexities, to water down these abundances is to misrepresent the very thing presented. Richness itself is the distinction of aesthetics.
Unfortunately, richness is difficult to assess, and this is why aesthetics plays such a negligible part in many philosophies -- in fact, in all philosophies that are reductive rather than productive in character. In their efforts to devise manageable schemes of description, such philosophies tend to fix upon discrete elements and to deal only with combinations derivable from ready-made formulas. In the process, they drop the subtleties, surprises, and distinctive qualities of experience. Presumably they intend to reinstate them later, but somehow they seldom do. This kind of reductionism -- whether deliberate or inadvertent -- may have a certain healthy
utility in the physical sciences or in abstract metaphysics, but it wounds the biological and social sciences and it is usually fatal to the humane arts.
Materialisms, positivisms, and absolute idealisms are simply too coarse to screen the fine substance of aesthetics. Because of its subtlety and complexity, aesthetics cannot be based on a narrow philosophy. It is noteworthy that the problems of art have achieved their most adequate treatment in the systems of two great comprehensive thinkers, Aristotle and Kant. These men had the time and patience to pursue
the complex as well as the simple, the nuances as well as the obtrusions. Such thinkers establish firm connections between art and the rest of life. They find the aesthetic important to their systems precisely because it is a way of surpassing the regularities of science and the schemata of logic. Conversely, a philosopher's view of art provides an excellent test of the adequacy of his system, for the very reason that experience of art is perhaps the most inclusive and most complex of human experiences. Unlike reason, which is essentially abstract and reductive, art is concrete and enriching. Unlike analysis, which is by definition divisive and sequential, art is unifying and immediate. Attempts to reduce the philosophy of art to a specific type of philosophy usually fail, or at the very least produce monstrous theories that maim and hinder the practice of both the art and the philosophy. Art theory, therefore, needs a base as broad as the broadest of philosophies. The objects of art are shaped materials subject to the most subtle ontojpgical and cosmological considerations. They provide kinds of knowledge -- perceptual, illuminating, revelatory -- that stretch our epistemological theories to the breaking point. They create not only aesthetic values but also utilitarian, emotional, material, and intellectual values in complicated relationships that fully test theories of axiology. A philosopher's view of art (like his view of science) puts the historical relevance of his theories to the ultimate test. For art (as well as science) is accumulative: it changes, grows, develops, enlarges, and never ends. These constant alterations demand oil the philosopher a certain prescience; his theories must have predictive value and a dynamism of their own. Otherwise his aesthetics (and his science) are condemned to perpetual inadequacy. Some schemes of thought better support an aesthetics than others. For example, Aristotle's ontology clashes less with his aesthetics than does Plato's with his. Bergson's view of existence is more congenial to theorizing about art than, say, Ernst Mach's. Jean-Paul Sartre is unusual in that his ontology is already an aesthetics and his aesthetics is already an ontology. He emphasizes a kind of existence that seeks to create being; and in general he is more interested in the process of creation than in its end product. He sees man's imagination as forever at work on projects, each unique to him in his situation. Some of these projects result in objects of art, and some do not. At all events, the creative process is broadly the same whether it results in an imagined object (that is, a work of art), or a technological discovery (say a new instrument or machine), or a social invention (say a unique life-style), or a political device (say a novel method of balloting), or a new morality, or a new metaphysics. The creative process is inherently an aesthetic process, |
for it enriches the world with new qualities and values; at the very least it achieves a basic aesthesis that is lacking in more abstruse intellectual processes. The union in Sartre of the imaginative and the rational is of great advantage to his aesthetic thinking. It must first be noted, however, that the Sartrean aesthetic tends either to repudiate or to ignore traditional aesthetics -- the classicisms, the romanticisms, the realisms of the past. The ancient theory of art as the imitation or representation of nature has never appealed to Sartre, who seldom if ever speaks of nature in the same terms as the stolid realist, the romantic enthusiast, or the restrained classicist. For the very word "nature" he tends to substitute such terms as "world," "objectivity," "situation," "being." Being, as the extreme of nature, is distasteful to him; it is either marmoreal, stonelike, inert, and cold, or viscous, gummy, doughy, and slimy -- in a word, nauseating. Even nature as modified by scientific thinking is too abstract, too rigid, too fragmented by analysis to be aesthetically appealing. The physiologist, for example, does not show us the life in nature, but the death. In fact, physiology reveals life itself as a modality of death; it attempts to reconstitute living persons into corpses. Realistic art, based as it is on the scientific attitude, attempts to reconstitute nature by representing it in faithful artifacts or simulacra. But it succeeds only in yielding anatomies, skeletons, which lack the wholeness of particular lives. Classical or neo-classical art, seeking as it does a conceptualization or idealization of nature, runs into a similar difficulty. By attempting to discover essences, it reduces art to fixity, to its pastness or history, thereby removing it from the sphere of living existence. Forms become formulas, meanings are regulated under hierarchal classifications, objects become frozen into signs, and lives sink beneath their appurtenances. In general, classical art is subsumed into ideas or at the very least into allegories. Romantic art is closer to the aesthetic in its attempts at emotional syncretization and concrete mythologies; but in its idealizing tendency it often runs awash in undifferentiated feelings and blurred sensations. It is in a sense a return to primal viscosity; and it constantly verges on the bad faith of the sentimentalist. By attempting to adhere to the outlines and details of being, all kinds of representative art limit and deaden the artist's program of expression. To imitate is simply to yield up one's freedom of expression. It is for these reasons, among others, that Sartre is inclined to repudiate traditional and official art, however prestigious. Among the works he spurns are the vast majority of "masterpieces," which err chiefly by exalting political and economic power. For example, Sartre protests against |
the Venetian establishment of the sixteenth century, which approved slick paintings that supported the religious, mythological, and monarchical hierarchies of the day. He thinks Titian too smooth and too bland, a painter who allowed a suave technique to gloss over the pain of cruelty and struggle. He is suspicious of the alliance between painting and money that has produced not only ornate mythological pieces celebrating heroines and heroes, goddesses and gods, but also numerous portraits of kings, queens, popes, presidents, and merchant princes. Such works, commissioned by the rich and powerful, are full of the trappings of position and wealth -- velvets and brocades, gold chains and jewels, splendid furniture and ornate accessories, the luxury of Arcadian countrysides. They attempt to immortalize the sitters, immobolize the living flesh, deny the human, and in general emphasize being rather than becoming.
Sartre also despises the museums that enshrine official art. In his first novel, La Nausée, he includes a number of famous set pieces that presumably reflect stages of his own intellectual development. Among these is a fictional museum in the fictional town of Bouville, as viewed by the novel's protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who is presumed to be a thin disguise of Sartre himself. In the portrait gallery of the museum are ensconced the worthies of Bouville, or rather depictions of these worthies by the fictional painters Bordurin and Renaudas.
The complexions in the portraits tend to dark brown; lively colors would seem indecent. The backgrounds of the portraits tend to deep black, but against them white hair and white whiskers show up well and collars shine "like white marble," The accessories and appointments in the portraits are consistent with the positions of leadership held by the sitters: top hat and gloves, pearl-gray trousers, books with handsome bindings, a great leather armchair, a table loaded with papers. Roquentin starts out by noting these perquisites in a mildly satirical fashion, but the set piece ends with his explosion of rage and contempt ("Salauds!") in what can only be a glamor of loathing, an inspried nausea.
In La Mort dans l'âme (volume 3 of Les Chemins de la liberté), Sartre gives a fictional rendering of the Museum of Modern Art in New York -highly organized, systematized, approved, enclosed, sanitary, and sterile. Although this museum contains much of the kind of art Sartre finds congenial, he treats it too in a somewhat satirical fashion, as a place more dead than alive. In fact, he tends to wax sardonic about recognized art of any sort, but the height of his animus is directed against official portraits that glorify the power structure of a community.
This leaves for Sartre's approval a comparatively small number of works that, in his judgment, express the complexity, the mobility, the vitality, and the anguish of human existence by showing it in passage or process.
These works are open, not closed; dynamic, not static; suggestive and expressive, not fixed and definitive.
For example, Sartre has admired the AvignonPieth and the Grünewald Crucifixion because they disclose, not only in their subject matter but also in their technical means, what it is to exist in anguished humanity. He has admired Tintoretto for the violence and expressiveness he was able to achieve in his paintings in spite of all the blandishments of the Venetian art establishment. In modern art, as against the fixity of Mondrian, he approves the disintegrative power of Picasso. He dislikes most sculptures because they are frozen, inert, but he enjoys Giacometti's emaciated and isolated forms because they are placed in an open field: they exist in never completely defined relationships with each other and with the ambient spaces, thereby discovering the solitude that enwraps individuals. He enjoys African poetry because of its emphasis on dynamics, which seems to relate it to dancing, and its expression of negritude, in which an image of blackness becomes an image of openness, of freedom. Obviously Sartre's resentment of closure has had a marked effect on his aesthetic preferences.
Among poets he finds little to admire in Mallarmé, whose work is hermetically sealed, but a great deal to admire in Francis Ponge, whose work flickers between interiority and exteriority. Sartre sees in the poems of Ponge, which constitute miniature existential psychoanalyses of specific physical objects, a refusal to comply with human society. He argues that the poet, in his attempt to penetrate physical objects and to allow them to speak in their own styles and voices, has gone a long way toward achieving an intuitive grasp of nature, an understanding of things not as human representations but as reposing in their own uniqueness. Ponge's poems appear to Sartre like the solids seen in the paintings of Braque and Juan Gris: discontinuities that force the eye to create continuities. Ponge's lines constantly flicker between objective and subjective elements, an effect emphasized by the poet's elimination of verbal connectives and his technique of gradual agglutination into an expressive synthesis. Owing to this achievement, in Sartre's view, Ponge's poems are truly creations rather than imitations of nature. Perhaps because Ponge deals with solid objects, however, Sartre feels a certain petrifaction, not so much in the poems as in the poet, whose project transforms him into statue and stone, into being rather than becoming. Sartre argues that Ponge is unable actually to assimilate consciousness into external objects; hence, his work tends to be retractile instead of expansive, as perfect poetry should be. It lacks the dynamism Sartre finds in African poetry.
As I have said, Sartre is disinclined to admire sculpture because of its customary massiveness and stolidity, which remind him of the immobility
of a plenum. He makes art exception, however, in the case of the mobiles of Alexander Calder, which he claims cannot really be compared to the sculptor's art. For a mobile is an object defined by its movement; the imagination revels in its continually changing forms. It moves, it hesitates, it gropes, it decides upon new courses as if correcting former errors of choice. Its motions can be violent or indolent, tremorous or sweeping, abrupt or gradual. When it is responding to movements of the air, it enjoys the holiday spirit of a festival; it is animated, alive. Aside from these movements, it is dead: in effect, non-existent. Sartre enjoys Calder's creations because they are lively; because their motion is pure motion, signifying nothing save their own animation; and because, like living creatures, they are full of unpredictable variations, even though they work within general patterns. Since Sartre himself is a fine literary artist, a word should be said about his own work in fiction and drama, which provides an interesting perspective on his aesthetics. All aesthetic objects contain impurities -- materials not perfectly assimilated while the artist is carrying out his aesthetic project. It is possible for a novel or a play, as a work of art, to contain a great deal of factual, moral, and philosophic matter, but it may then run the risk of being taken for an exposition or a tract. It is possible for a poem to incorporate a metaphysics without ceasing to be a poem, but only if its readers are able to subordinate the metaphysics to its total poetic intention. It is possible for a painting to represent historic events, costumes, faces, landscapes, and architecture, but it can surpass photography only by subduing the descriptive details to the painterly elements. It is possible for a musical composition to embody a program, but only at some risk to its character as music. On the other hand, without some kind of solid content, the object of art may seem frivolous or inane. The problem in hand is for the artist to interpenetrate his aesthetic structure with non-aesthetic data, which by virtue of this interpenetration become thoroughly assimilated into the structure. There should be sufficient data to pack the structure densely, but not so much as to overstrain and destroy it. Furthermore, there should be no overage of unassimilated data. As an artist, Sartre is fully aware of this principle, and in his best novels and plays (for example, in La Nausée, Huis clos, Les Mains sales) he adheres to it quite closely. These works are packed with images and ideas that nevertheless are successfully integrated into the projects that carry them forward: balance and tension are admirably sustained. But Sartre, like most writers, is an uneven artist and he often violates the principle. At heart, perhaps, he is a moralist who has used fiction and drama to convey his ethical and political concepts. |
Hence it is that when he comes close to assimilating his concepts into the basic imagery and structure, his fictional and dramatic works are superbly effective, but when he fails to do so his audience may end with the feeling that it is hearing lectures or exhortations. No work of art can successfully carry an intractable burden of factual data and intellectual material.
In sum, Sartre is responsive to two schemes of art, one of which he regards with satirical contempt and the other of which he applauds generously. Traditional and official art belongs to the past; it is over and done with, finished. Open art carries us into the future and can continue indefinitely. Traditional art is oppressive: it weighs us down with its unnecessary detail and its emphasis on a larger than life scale, on heroics and flourishes. Open art frees us: it is conceived on the human scale, it is close to our emotions, we live in it as an ongoing process. Traditional art limits itself to the death of essences; open art reveals the liveliness of existence. The two schemes are dialectical opposites that in a sense define each other.
Although Sartre well knows where his sympathies lie, he must recognize the strength and the persistence of tradition. This he must regard as part of what he has called the "practico-inert," the active resistance of the material environment and of all other finalities that limit the ends toward which we aspire. Official art cannot be ignored: it has the massiveness and the plenitude of endlessly accumulated data. But it is dead or ever dying and must be opposed by living art. Although traditional and official art cannot be ignored, it must somehow be surpassed. To surpass it should be the aim of all artists to come.
Sartre's declared preferences in art reveal his aesthetic predispositions, but they by no means add up to a systematic aesthetics. As far as I know, he has never brought all his artistic interests together into a statement that reveals an organizing philosophy of the fine arts. If anything resembling a complete aesthetics is to be found in his work, it must be inferred from the components of his total philosophy, and certain of these components must be inferred from other components.
Moreover, although Sartre's view of art is wide-ranging and ingenious, it is not held together by dominating principles. Instead it seems to emerge out of his disquisitions in the form of aperçus. It tends to anticipate or to follow from the several stages of his developing thoughts on other topics, phenomenological, ontological, political, sociological, anthropological, psychological, biographical. In other words, Sartre's aesthetics is a reflux from his other interests; it appears to be not central to his thinking and perhaps is not even a major interest. This in no way diminishes its value, but it does reduce the possibility of making accurate judgments and statements about it.
Nevertheless, we must now assume that from his basic views we can adumbrate an aesthetic that is both sound and attractive. I shall attempt to disclose the components of his thinking upon which his aesthetic responses and his art criticisms appear to be based. My purpose in doing this is not only to understand Sartre but also to understand new possibilities in aesthetics. The first component of a Sartrean aesthetics is undoubtedly his philosophy of the situation. Sartre assumes that all human activity takes place in-and has developed from -- specific circumstances and contingencies. My situation includes my place (the space in which I and all my projects are located), my past (which provides me with both a backdrop and a point of view), my environment (the instrumentalities that surround me, each with its coefficients of adversity and utility), my fellows (who constitute the Other and provide the words and techniques whereby I can both appropriate the world and belong to such of its collectivities as the human race, one of its nationalities, certain professional and family groups), and my approaching death (which I must choose as the certain limitation of all my choices, as one term of a series in effect present in all my other terms, as the phenomenon that makes my life unique because I can never recover from it). In situation, I am an existent among other existents; but I can know only my own situation, not others. I cannot exist without my situation, for it is that part of externality upon which I must draw in my quest to surpass it. My growth takes place in a specific but changing context. All other externality is to me irrelevant. My situation is my place, an environment presented to my consciousness. But I must not rely only upon my situation: I must also surpass it. In order to justify my existence, to objectify myself, I must imagine myself as ahead of my immediate circumstances. I must take hold of My freedom to foresee, to imply, to transcend. As a material being who is able to go beyond the condition in which he has been placed, I must work, act, and dramatize my situation. The situation is that which I must surpass to create my existence. From the standpoint of Sartre's philosophy, it would appear that both artists and their art spring from situations. There is something vacuous about the work of artists who dwell in the ivory tower (although that, too, is a situation). Only in the, hurly-burly of time and circumstance can they develop their art effectively and in strength. The artist, like everyone else, is to some extent the slave of his situation. He must work against certain resistances and overcome certain obstacles. An important element in his situation is the medium in which he works. A sculptor confronts the intolerance of stone or metal. A painter finds limits to the possible uses of canvas and pigments. A poet is rebuffed by the intractability of words, particularly when he tries to match them against the pattern of a sonnet or a five-act play. A musician may be baffled by the contingencies of instrumentation. Any artist may find himself crushed by the establishment, by the burden of history and tradition it forces him to bear. Any artist may find his opportunities for creation reduced by illness or privation. The artist's situation usually includes the audience that is lying in wait for his work-- an audience that may accept it, reject it, or ignore it. The terrible presence of the Other may ruin him or sustain him. The artist's situation provides him with materials, subjects, themes, and models which must, however, be adapted to the need of his artistic projects and may exhibit considerable resistance to the adaptation. It also provides him with the setting or scenes of his story, poem, play, picture, or composition, but not with its intentions and freedom of action. In aesthetic terms, therefore, the situation is everything that directly infringes upon the artist's freedom but that may also, in certain circumstances, assist him in carrying out his projects. From the situation and the need for transcending it, we must turn to the second component of a possible Sartrean aesthetics: namely, his philosophy of the project. My character as a human being is that I can go beyond a situation and make of myself more than what I have already made. My behavior must grow out of both present and future factors: first, those that condition it and, secondly, those related to an object still to emerge that I am trying to bring into being. Those factors already given constitute the situation; those still to come (in the form of a surpassing of the given) constitute the project. In a sense, however, situation and project are inextricably intertwined. For my situation consists of those coefficients of adversity and utility which will oppose or support my project; and my project retains much of the situation it surpasses. I must think of this surpassing as a leap ahead, as a relation of the existent to its possibles. By projecting the situation toward a field of possibles and by realizing one specific possible, I objectify both the possible and myself. The possible intervenes between two poles of objectivity: the given object and the surpassing object. In effect, the possible thereby accounts for my creative powers. A chief distinction with respect to projects is that some are selfrenewing and some are not. A completed project is a mere thing: the process of totalization is over, the imagination is stilled. We then have a museum object, a machine operating routinely, a stratified social system, a repressive tradition or institution, or what William James called a "block universe."
Sartre's philosophy of bracketing, based (with alterations) upon Husserl's idea of abstention (the phenomenological epochē). In order to free myself from the coils of brute reality (that is, in order to enter the realm of art), I must eliminate the natural view of things as an active force in consciousness. This I can do, said Husserl, by placing in "brackets" whatever the spatio-temporal world includes as objects, environmental laws, and natural facts generally. I simply abstain from any recognition of the world as an active force by disconnecting it (in my ego) from phenomena of which I may be otherwise conscious. The world may still remain in my consciousness, and its being cannot be denied; but by putting it in brackets, setting it off to one side, and abstaining from any consideration of it except as it appears in disconnection (that is, in judgments modified by bracketing), I rid myself of its rules and its objects. On the positive side, consciousness must be consciousness of something, and hence it is always intentional. From Sartre's standpoint, the intention that underlies all my reflections is a project. At best it is an intention of beauty, the value that can emerge only with great difficulty from a blending of being and consciousness. In my project is embedded both my knowledge of phenomena and a volitional thrust or upsurge. My intention is to seize upon the phenomena and assimilate them into the project, to select and emphasize, through voluntary reflection, the values I reflect on. My project isolates the phenomena from the stream of irrelevant causes that would otherwise clog my consciousness. It insures that the important in my reflection survives. My project, therefore, proceeds by a kind of bracketing that places the objects of my reflective consciousness in suspension, as in a cell cut off from the remainder of being. It insulates those objects with a layer of nothingness (nothingness in this sense is unacceptability to consciousness), and it makes them believable or valuable in their own terms, not in those of other volitions. In terms of Sartre's views on bracketing, a work of art must be regarded not so much as nature extending itself, but as a free, separate, and autonomous project. Consisting as it does of imagined realities, it is separate from the ponderousness of the large world of common sense and science and refuses to obey its laws. It disconnects itself from the rest of nature by a kind of nihilation. Although it does not exist for its own sake it does not exist for nature's sake either, but for the responsive human consciousness. An aesthetic artifact is bracketed off from the rest of being by its man-made form, which delimits it in space-time, cuts it off from an overweening plenum, surrounds it with a nothingness in which it can live and move, and frees it from most of the contingencies that condition natural objects. Artists often emphasize this separateness by devising frames that bracket off their work from the externalities of brute being. The painter puts a frame around his painting; the dramatist separates his action from its audience by a proscenium arch and a curtain on an elevated stage, the writer and the musician invent distancing devices to place their works in their own times and spaces. The use of bracketing is of major consequence in the arts, because objects of art usually stand not on the world, but on pedestals. Their space-frames and time-frames separate them from the remainder of reality: when the viewer or listener is attending to them, he is not attending to anything else. They exist in a shell of nothingness, the effect of which is not to evaporate or eviscerate them, but to disclose the perfection of their being free from the distractions of the imperfect. All this applies only when the viewer or the listener can concentrate upon an object of art without let or hindrance. If he allows his attention to wander or permits it to encompass objects irrelevant to the aesthetic object proper, the autonomy of the work is violated, and the resulting experience is scarcely art at all. It is a mush, a viscosity, a misplaced intention, an example of bad faith. The autonomy of art is its chief preservative. This does not mean that art must be closed or hermetic. In its shell of nothingness it has freedom to extend itself, to reach out, to reveal its value. But this it does in its own terms, not by external references or confusing juxtapositions. Unfortunately, the autonomy of a work of art is sometimes undercut by the artist himself. In so far as he feels bound to follow nature by imitating given objects, he constricts his own freedom to choose, to arrange, to express; he denies free consciousness and becomes enslaved by the thing itself. In so far as he follows, other artists and draws upon existing conventions, he likewise surrenders his freedom cheaply in the name of moribund classicisms or romanticisms. This is an error that Sartre would avoid at all posts. As we have seen, he is impatient with the slavishness of naturalistic art and the timid conformity of neo-classic art. Detailed likenesses, whether on glossy canvas or in polished marble, offend his sensibilities. He prefers the expressiveness of a free consciousness. I doubt that we should infer from this preference that he entirely rejects the art of the past or even the art of the schools and academies. Surely he would grant to each artist a period of apprenticeship in which to study and learn from both nature and his fellow artists: an artist is first of all a craftsman, a workman. Surely he would concede that even the most selfexpressive artist must accept something of what has been learned about the limitations of his medium and his forms. But the important thing is that the artist must be free to move out on his own and to renounce the fruits of his apprenticeship, which after all only affords a basis for his creative extrapolations and distortions and by no means defines his true work as an artist. He must honor the brackets that maintain his work as integral. A fourth basis for a Sartrean aesthetics is Sartre's philosophy of the imagined object. In order to imagine, I must be able to hypothecate an unreality. As a consciousness, I must somehow elude the massive body of the world and seek to withdraw from the impermeability of being. The world taken as a whole is a plenum; the world for the imagination is. . . nothing. For my imagination dwells in its own realm, which is a negation of the plenum. It directs my attention away from the practico-inert and toward the responsive and free. To be sure, each of my images is limned across the wholeness of reality, but it achieves its status as image only by negating that wholeness, that reality. What is real and what is imaginary are two distinct things. They can come close to each other only in analogies or symbols, which are sources of correspondence between being and nothingness. Art creates images and therefore must in part deal with the unreal. The work of art exists as partly real and partly imagined -- partly as an object immersed in the plenum of being and partly as a dislocation of that object from the plenum by a negating consciousness. Although the object as object is subsumed in an undifferentiated plenitude, the object as a work of art is isolated (and hence defined) within that plenitude by an intentional consciousness that locates and identifies and brackets it off. The aesthetic consciousness makes a hole, a gap, a breach in being. It is like a cookiecutter that surrounds a portion of dough within a boundary of nothingness, thereby shaping it into something distinct and perhaps tasteful. For itself, the work of art is an imagined object; it exists not in actual time or space but in its own imagined atmosphere. To be sure, a painting as a physical object may occupy geographical space and endure in historical time -- but only as a physical object. A painting as an imagined object, however, is not concerned with the motives and agencies of the geographical and historical world. What goes before it, or comes after it, or is external to it, is also irrelevant to it; and in a sense it is irrelevant to them. It is a negation of the world, and therefore free of the world. The negation as a sanctuary of freedom is in itself more real than the world; for art relies upon the nothingness that is rather than the nothingness that is not. By its disconnection with the world, the imagined object gains its autonomy, its freedom. The physical object of art can, however, provide analogues to that pleasant state of consciousness which entertains imagery. The real is never beautiful; only states of mind supervening upon the real across nothingness are beautiful. The beauty of an imagined object may in a sense be due to physical presences, but only in the form of analogous states in consciousness. Each of the artist's image takes on the coloration of his fundamental project. He therefore reveals himself totally in an imagined object, because it is symbolic of his project and hence of him. Truly to interpret his art is to locate in his symbols the totalizing effort, the human thrust, which distinguishes him as an individual. The intention of art is expressed in terms of the numberless concrete desires that weave themselves into the artist's life. In a totalizing movement of enrichment, each desire comes to stand for the artist himself; it enters into his project, his total vision. By virtue of his artist's skill in symbol-making, that vision may become generalized in an imagined object that embodies a desire for total being. What is significant for the individual thereby becomes significant for mankind (or at least for those men who understand and accept symbols). The creation of imagined objects or symbols is not, of course, confined to the professional artist, who has no monopoly on artistry. Everyone senses some of the analogies between images and the feelings they seem to enshrine; almost everyone is an artist at moments. Sartre delimits art by making a distinction between imagined objects and useful signs. A painting or a sculpture is an imagined object; a fire alarm or a red light is a useful sign. Painting and music consist of imagined objects, the materials and forms of which embody qualities that are directly felt. Poetry likewise consists of imagined objects -- collections of words recognized not so much as signs but as objects with their own qualities of tonality and structure. Prose, however, is not so much an art as a craft: it uses words as signs or cues to action. To the extent that we concentrate on the direct meanings of the words and neglect their tonal values or structures, we are dealing with them as practical objects and not as aesthetic objects. In literature, only poetry is art, and poetry is only art. Prose is utilitarian -- in other words, non-art. Drawing this distinction enables Sartre to cope with the problem of pure literature (art for art's sake) versus engaged or committed literature (explanation and persuasion). The poet deals with the qualities of life; the prose writer with the exigencies and urgencies. The poet regards writing as an end in itself; the prose writer, as a means to social activism. In Sartre's terms, social action should not be an aesthetic issue at all; it is simply the prose of experience. Unfortunately, however, poetry at times encloses prose, and prose at times encloses poetry; the two are not strictly separable. The distinction beween artistic and utilitarian writing is always being muddled. Therefore Sartre sometimes has appeared to waver between a literature of exis and a literature of praxis. He started out by separating prose from the arts of poetry, painting, and sculpture: that is, prose is not an art but a praxis. He then began to urge a literature of commitment to the social causes in which he believed, but argued that it should fall short of outright propaganda. This literature of commitment must have at its command all the devices of art, but it must not use them for art's sake only -- it must use them to encourage and abet the survival of man. In other words, prose literature must bring artistic means to bear on moral and political situations, but it must avoid the extreme of becoming an art, because that would argue its disengagement. Ideally, of course, there could be a pure poetry without utility or moral reference, and a pure prose without aesthetic value. In practice, however, there is usually an admixture of the two, for life is seldom simple. And so art and utility are not single self-sustaining threads, but strands woven together in different combinations. We must constantly cope with totalities that yoke together both aesthetic (or disjunct) and non-aesthetic (or engaged) elements, but the distinction sometimes disappears in the work of art itself. The plain fact of the matter is that there is no hard and fast boundary between poetry and prose. They are simply two poles, between which extends an indivisible continuum. The effect of all this is to blur the line between being and nothingness. In the most perfect art, the line may be clear; but many imagined objects are far from perfect. A fifth Sartrean principle of aesthetics has been his philosophy of freedom. Creation and innovation are confined to artists and inventors, the freest of men. Starting from a still undefined situation, the free man comes to exist as a project -- precognition of his own -- future. He carries out this project through actions that are basically free, that is, bracketed off from brute being; and as a result he is perhaps able to create imagined objects of surpassing worth. In carrying out his work, he both uses up and expresses his freedom by objectifying it. The processes by which imagined objects come into being do not differ essentially from the processes that produce other kinds of creations. Provided that they result from the activities of free men, they achieve the uniqueness of freely created art. Sartre's early and insistent regard for freedom is no doubt allied to his distaste for representative art, which inhibits the artist's freedom. To imitate is to conform to the outline and details of what is imitated. Only minor adjustments and deletions are allowable; basically, the object imitated controls the work.
God-seeker who is willing to accept God as a work of art, an imaginary object, a creation of man, could in fact capture him. But this is usually not enough for the God-seeker, who in spite of the imperfections and incompatibilities within being itself, desires God as a manifestation of total Being. One cannot arrive at being God -- or at the being of God -- all at once. Instead, he must work at realizing particular desires in particular concrete situations; and he must accept what he imagines as well as what he senses. As Bernard Shaw put it: "Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love." The project of being God always fails, whereas the project of being an artist may have its small successes. A Sartrean aesthetics must find a place for the ugly as well as the beautiful. Ugliness is the reversal of beauty, a special kind of value. Whereas beauty is the impossible ideal of the in-itself-for-itself, ugliness is the. only too active possibility that the in-itself will compromise or destroy the foritself. Most of Sartre's own fiction embodies the harsh, the hateful, the graceless; but such works as La Nausée and Huit clos cannot be called unaesthetic. Instead, they involve the imagination of the ugly, and thereby may become objects of art. There are some embodiments of ugliness, however, which in Sartre's scheme must be viewed as anti-aesthetic. Two chief perils lie in wait for the in-itself-for-itself as that stage of being that encompasses art. The first peril is that it may succumb to the state of viscosity. The second is that it may end in a state of petrifaction. Viscosity compromises freedom; in it, the in-itself entangles the foritself. Viscosity is the quality of all sticky, gummy, gluey, adhesive, absorptive, clinging, miry, sucking, sugary, molasses-like, honey-like, pitch-like, leech-like things -- things that are fluid, soft, yielding, docile, compressible, collapsing, deflating, foundationless, baseless, creeping, squashy, and slimy. In spite of its liquidity, the viscous may also be solidifying, crystallizing, resistant, thick, and slow. Morally, the viscous is ambiguous, vague, compromising, destructive, ensnaring, entrapping, appropriative, parasitical, possessive, fascinating, resistant, and stubborn. In viscosity, the child and the artist come to recognize existence as an anti-value -- the attempt of plenitude to overwhelm nothingness, of being in-itself to take over existence for-itself, of substance to invade and ultimately to obliterate consciousness. The child is both curious about the viscous and fearful of its entrapments. He seeks to re-establish plenitude by eliminating all the holes in it -- he sticks his fingers and arms into every opening; he tries to fill up his mouth with all of the world he can take in. The artist seeks to re-establish the plenitude by filling vacancies with forms, by creating beautiful or even ugly objects; by crowding the void with images and symbols; by eliminating from his art whatever is sentimental, mawkish, murky, syrupy, foggy, or nasty; by purifying his intentions; and by refusing to lapse into a bad conscience. Petrifaction goes beyond viscosity by altogether eliminating freedom: in it, the in-itself destroys the for-itself and becomes marmoreal. Like the being of Parmenides, the plenum is solid and stolid, excluding the possibility of movement, life, and creativity. Because it fills to repletion, it excludes the nothingness that makes change possible. Fullness of being destroys all aspirations, even all anxieties. In the end, it destroys art -- or at least it results in an unimaginative art, marmoreal and cold. I have already indicated that Sartre scorns the formal portraits and statuesque postures of official art. Art that aims at "being," at Platonic ideas or essences, is petrified even apart from its stony materials. The art of museums and galleries, which is out of the living world, likewise is the victim of petrifaction. Art that attempts to present divinities in a hierarchy murders itself by sheer immutability. In order to avoid the perils of petrifaction, the artist not only must repudiate the classical tradition, reject Parmenides' plenum and Plato's essences, destroy the hierarchy of officialdom, and burn down the museums and galleries, but also must devise new forms (like Giacometti's solitary figures and Calder's mobiles) that are bracketed by nothingness and have room to move in. He must emphasize the unique and ephemeral rather than the kind of finality that derives from depictions of a retractile immobility. Although, as Sartre has said, a chief aspect of the beautiful is the appropriateness of act to essence, act must leave its traces in the object of art if petrifaction is not to ensue. In sum, an aesthetics that is firmly based in the actuality of situations, that sees the artist projecting himself beyond situations into a creative surpassing, that assures the autonomy of imagined objects by suspending them between phenomenological brackets and properly defining their imaginative contents, that stresses the freedom the artist requires in order to remain creative, and that defines the beautiful (and the ugly) in terms appropriate to the arts -- this would appear to be a sound and attractive aesthetics. All these concepts are firmly in place in Sartre's ontology; and even though he has not attempted to bind them together into a coherent system, or even to apply them consistently throughout his own art criticism, they are no doubt responsible for his most dazzling insights into the arts. Sartre's aesthetics, as far as he has completed it, stands up well against the general requirements for a philosophy of art. It is by no means reductive or limiting. It testifies to the adequacy of his total philosophy, at least in those parts of it that abut on the rationale of the arts. It has the further value that it fully supports the artist and his audience in their respective roles, thereby enriching the culture to which they contribute. It accepts current practices in the fine arts and has by no means been outmoded by present-day developments. Works that Sartre selected for admiration many years ago have also stood up very well; in fact, the reputations of the artists he early acclaimed -- men like Hemingway, Faulkner, Calder, and Giacometti -- have been steadily growing. Conversely, the trends he has opposed look worse now than when he first criticized them. His sardonic comments on traditional aesthetics and on the museum mentality that enshrines the tradition have lost none of their bite, simply because they have lost none of their truth. For all these reasons, it is a bit sad that Sartre appears to have lost a great deal of his interest in aesthetics (although not necessarily his interest in the fine arts). For a while his concern for aesthetics grew in concord with his ontological interests and gave promise of his developing a powerful and effective instrument for the elucidation of the fine arts. In particular, his theory of situations and projects initially held great promise for aesthetics by providing a structure in which the artist can germinate, develop, organize, and totalize an aesthetic creation. At some point along the way, however, Sartre's ontology changed into a scheme that no longer supported his aesthetic interests. This is not to say that Sartre was no longer capable of making aesthetic judgments, but rather that he increasingly came to see the situation and the project as psychological and political constructs. They became subdued to the needs of praxis; they were entangled by ideas of engagement, involvement, and commitment; instead of developing fully and freely they vanished in dialectical sleight of hand. The aesthetic components of his judgments were overshadowed by sociological and biographical components, which tended to dwarf his earlier concern for the fine arts as such. Although he never lost his interest in artists, particularly in literary artists like Genet and Flaubert, he came to regard them not so much as artists but as phenomena constituting case materials for existential psychoanalysis or anthropological investigations. Perhaps it was their stature as literary artists that initially drew him to them; but as he later viewed them he seemed much more concerned with their prose as psychologically or politically significant than as artistically rewarding. What is responsible for Sartre's change in emphasis and for his increasing use of art and artists for other than aesthetic purposes? First, it is evident that from the very start Sartre's own artistic production carried a heavy burden of non-aesthetic materials: philosophical concepts, autobiographical and biographical data, implied and overt moralizing. At his best, his command of form, imagery, and feeling was powerful
springs perhaps disqualify it from including an impartial survey of general aesthetic qualities. And perhaps, too, Sartre's use of overstatement is a deliberate strategy. What renders his philosophy exceptional is the vigorous, concrete terms in which he expresses it. He never fears to use analogies, metaphors, and expressive language generally. The result is a powerful individual style that exposes a powerful individual outlook. Finally, we must raise the question, What happened to Sartre as a critic of the arts? Sartre's early criticism was illuminated by flashes of insight; it was sometimes playful and often witty; it ran off in unexpected but promising directions. In his criticisms of Ponge, Calder, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and the like, he developed a genuine feeling for aesthetic effects and values. The aesthetic motive as such, however, seldom if ever appears in Sartre's more ponderous later works. Existential psychoanalysis, social commitment, political engagement, and Marxist exegesis are his chief concerns and felt obligations over the later decades. A philosophy of all or nothing, of extreme situations, of revolutionary intent propels him in new directions. Although he retains the skills he developed as an art critic, he increasingly devotes them to tenets or doctrines, to analyses and explications, to campaigns and vendettas. It is as if Sartre had come to regard the arts as too playful, too decorative, too disinterested, too distracting (in a word, too autonomous) to displace the serious mechanisms of his life. His intellectual intensity and his fiercely controversial attitudes simply could not accept the sensuality of an aesthesis, but had to burn through to the intellectual and moral core of things. In the process, what is aesthetic is either consumed or radically transformed. As a result, Sartre is not a critic of art and literature in any strict sense of the phrase. That he has been a powerful and effective critical force in the arts cannot be denied; but that he might still be considered an art critic as such is open to question. Other commitments took him off on other critical tangents. It is the business of an art critic or a literary critic to disengage from the artistic performance those qualities, actions, passions, and images which reinforce its aesthetic effect. This is the analytical part of his work. Having done this, he must turn his attention to the aesthetic effect itself -- to the totality that should emerge from the particulars and, in the end, should define the aesthetic value of the performance. This is the synthetic, integrative, and totalizing part of his work. It is not his business as art critic to produce a history, a biography, a memoir, a psychological case study, a political tract, or an anthropological treatise. True, each of these may contain elements that support an aesthetic
Sartre was always able to draw out his works to enormous lengths; in fact, he found it difficult if not impossible not to carry them to extremes. At his intense and brilliant best, his use of details for purposes of diagnosis was highly effective. But sometimes, particularly in his long later works, the result was a kind of imbrication -- analysis upon analysis upon analysis -that had little to do with aesthetic totalization. In Sartre's treatments of Genet and Flaubert there is a kind of obscene giantism. He appears to know everything about them: and the smallest clues take on enormous meanings: a single phrase, precept, or symbol may be blown up, deflated, and blown up again. In these works Sartre is no longer viewing the artist as an artist but as a kind of elaborate case history, twisting and tearing away at his perceptions in the interest of a pre-emptive understanding. The machinery of analysis disrupts any feeling for the quality of his fictions. To be sure, Sartre exhibits the details for purposes of diagnosis, as symptomatic of larger issues. But I cannot help thinking his concentration on clinical symptoms that particularly interest him gives false impressions of works of art, by putting these works under rigid constraints. Sartre virtually ignores Baudelaire's genius as a poet while dwelling at length on his childish adoration of his mother. He shows greater appreciation for Genet's response to being called a thief and his ability to violate the canons of bourgeois respectability than for any aesthetic quality he displays. He defines Flaubert also mainly in terms of his relationships to the complexities of bourgeois society (although he occasionally analyzes some of his artistic maxims as well). Now all this is in no way discreditable to Sartre. His intensity, his scruples, his intellectual bent, his moral concern, and his profound sympathies and anxieties are all to be respected, if not admired; and his phenomenological analyses and Marxist excursions are of course perfectly justifiable. What is wrong is to call such occultations literary criticisms. Instead, they are fascinatingly detailed treatments of Sartre's preoccupation with bourgeois antics, revolutionary violence, psychological obsessions, moral doctrines, and partisan nuances. They do at times throw a somewhat lurid light on the literary works of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Genet, but more as biographical artifacts than as works of art. From the standpoint of art criticism, however, Sartre's emphasis on these matters is something of a tragedy, because Sartre had it in him to become a top-level art critic. Some of the essays collected in the several volumes of Situations demonstrate this only too well. In these essays, Sartre does not ride a thesis or pursue a project to its ultimate demise. In them he shows the finest critical abilities and sensitivities, together with a determination to respond to a body of work not in doctrinaire fashion but in terms of sympathy with its unique qualities. I think that a great critic of art and
Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Publication Information: Book Title: The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Contributors: Paul Arthur Schilpp - editor. Publisher: Open Court. Place of Publication: La Salle, IL. Publication Year: 1981. Page Number: 138. PREFATORY NOTE THE interview with Jean-Paul Sartre that follows represents a major departure from the format which has heretofore characterized works in the Library of Living Philosophers. The departure was occasioned by an unfortunate circumstance. Shortly after Sartre agreed to participate in this Library project, his eyesight began to fail. The condition progressed so rapidly that it soon became clear that he would be unable either to read the papers contributed by others or to compose the responses and the autobiographical statement usually submitted by philosophers featured in this series. ( Sartre was long accustomed to editing as he wrote, and therefore eschewed the use of a dictating machine.) With the resourceful advice of Professor Michel Rybalka, we endeavored to complete the project despite these apparently insurmountable difficulties. We concluded that it would be possible only if one or more bilingual scholars would be willing first to read the contributed articles with some care and then to sit down with Sartre and summarize the authors' statements, pose the questions they raised, and invite his responses. By this interview procedure we hoped to obtain from Sartre not only some observations of an autobiographical nature, but also at least some answers to the more persistent questions raised by the contributed articles. To avoid abandoning the project altogether, Sartre agreed to participate in the interview designed to elicit some of this desired information. However, it will become immediately obvious that, under these circumstances and with these handicaps, it was impossible to get either specific or detailed answers to each of the contributions. In brief, we had to do the best that could be done, which as it turned out, resulted in material which went beyond our fondest expectations. Any Sartre scholar who reads this interview will agree that it would have been most unfortunate if these frank and unhindered Sartrean remarks had been lost to posterity. The interview should be read as a document rather than a series of replies. The interviewers were: Dr. Michel Rybalka (hereafter designated as R.), Professor of French at Washington University Dr. Oreste F. Pucciani (hereafter P.), Professor of French at the University of California at Los Angeles
THE INTERVIEW I [At Sartre's request, the first interview session began with an overview of the, subjects covered by the contributed essays. The transcript commences following that overview.] R. Now that we have introduced the essays, if you are willing, we will first attempt, by way of more general questions, to get something like all intellectual autobiography from you. After that we will go on to some of the specific questions raised in the essays. R. D. Cumming makes the following observation: You, M. Sartre, have left a kind of literary testament in the form of your Les Mots; you have hinted at what might be your political testament with On a raison de se revolter, but until now you have not yet taken such a retrospective look at your own philosophy. Sartre This is precisely what I have undertaken with Simone de Beauvoir: a book that would be a sequel to Les Mots in which I take the position of someone drawing up a philosophical testament. This book will follow a topical procedure, not the chronological order of Les Mots. R. There is a period in your life concerning which we know relatively little, the one dating roughly from 1917 to 1930, in other words, from the end of what you have written'about in Les Mots to the beginning of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs. My first question may seem rather trite: Your initial intention was to write, that is, to do literary work; how did you come to do philosophy? Sartre I was not at all interested in philosophy in my last years at the lycée. I had a teacher named Chabrier, whom we nicknamed "CucuPhilo." He did not arouse in me the slightest desire to do philosophy. Nor did I acquire that desire in hypokhâgne; * my teacher, by the name of Bernes, was inordinately difficult and I did not understand what he was talking about. ____________________
It was in khâgne that I made up my mind, under a new teacher, Colonna d'Istria. He was a cripple, a very small and wounded man. The story went around in class that he had been in a taxi accident and that the crowd had moved in around him saying, "How horrible!" Actually, he had always been like that. The first essay topic that he assigned, advising us to read Bergson, was: "What Does Duration Mean?" [Qu'est-ce que durer?]. I therefore read Bergson's Essay sur les données immédiates de la conscience, and it was certainly that which abruptly made me want to do philosophy. In that book I found the description of what I believed to be my psychological life. I was struck by it, and it became a subject for me on which I reflected at great length. I decided that I would study philosophy, considering it at that point to be simply a methodical description of man's inner states, of his psychological life, all of which would serve as a method and instrument for my literary works. I still wanted to continue writing novels and, occasionally, essays; but I thought that taking the agrégation exam in philosophy and becoming a professor of philosophy would help me in treating my literary subjects. R. At that time you already saw philosophy as a foundation for your literary work. But didn't you also feel a need to invent a philosophy to account for your own experience? Sartre Both were involved. I wanted to interpret my experience, my "inner life" as I called it then, and that was to serve as a basis for other works that would have dealt with I don't quite know what, but assuredly purely literary things. R. Thus in 1924, when you entered the Ecole Normale, you had made your choice. Sartre I had made my choice: I was going to study philosophy as my teaching discipline. I conceived of philosophy as a means, and I did not see it as a field in which I might do work of my own. Undoubtedly, so I thought at the time, I would discover new truths in it, but I would not use it to communicate with others. R. Could your decision be described as a conversion? Sartre No, but it was something new which made me take philosophy as an object for serious study. As the basis and foundation for what I was going to write, philosophy did not appear to me as something to be written by itself, for its own sake; rather, I would keep my notes, et cetera. Even before reading Bergson, I was interested in what I was reading and I wrote "thoughts" which seemed to me philosophical. I even had a physician's notebook, arranged in alphabetical order, that I had found in the subway, in which I wrote down those thoughts. R. Let's go back. Was there a philosophical tradition in Your family?
|
