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(from Sh'ma 12/231, April 2, 1982)

The Testament of Jean-Paul Sartre

By Arnold Jacob Wolf

Jean-Paul Sartre, the most wide-ranging and brilliant mind of his age, died with a broken heart. His final despair, which he bravely resisted with the help of a study of Judaism, began long before, during the occupation of France. As we now know, from recent studies of Vichy France, it was a terrible place for humane radicals, or anyone else. Most of the French supported the anti-Semitism, the pre-revolutionary brutality of Petain and his henchmen. To be a resistance leader and one of its foremost publicists, as Sartre courageously was, meant not only to risk torture and death at the hands of the Nazis, but to be hated by one's own countrymen. Sartre was a true survivor. Like many European Jews, he fled the boot and the poison of a France debauched by occupation and collaboration alike. He could never forget the bitter lessons of the forties, an epoch when he already began to grow old.

He was also disillusioned by the "god that failed." Never a Stalinist, Sartre, nevertheless, once placed extravagant hopes in the Russian revolutionary government. He was a classical fellow-traveler, who wanted no enemies on the "left" and, at least sometimes, ignored the gulag and the knout of a police state that claimed to be the pre-eminent democracy of the working class. Marxist utopianism was doomed to disappoint an honest man, and Sartre saw through most of its pretensions early on. His existentialist "angst" may never have been as real to him as it was, for example, to Kirkegaard, but it clearly reflected an early loss of faith in the Communist revolution. An ex-Communist, Sartre never became a dogmatic anti-Communist, but he supported every attempt at revolution in the revolution. Still, the memory of lost hopes must have haunted his old age.

He was also disappointed by a literary and philosophic career that seems to most of us not less than spectacular. He knew what every writer knows: the purpose of writing is to produce masterpieces. Since he never finished many of his projects, revised all of them and doubted most, Sartre died unfulfilled. He knew that he was "not Shakespeare, not Hegel," that world literature would accord him respect, but not the final honor reserved for genius. Novelist, philosopher, biographer and autobiographer, social critic and political spokesman, he tried too much and finished too little to meet his own standards, and so he died in disappointment, inevitably.

Sartre's Fears

He was also undone by the world of the 1980's. As he reveals in the great final interview with Benny Levy (in Le Nouvel Observateur, March, 1980, translated in Telos, no. 44, Summer, 1980 and in Dissent, Fall, 1980), Sartre is terrified by the rightward swing of most Western governments, by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and by the increasing likelihood of atomic war in Europe. Whatever he expected of post-war political structures, his expectations could not have been more dour than what, in fact, occurred. Any hopes for internationalism, for a more civil conflict resolution, for steps toward world accord, have been dashed by the renewal of the cold war, under the auspices of American and British intellectuals, as well as of Russian militarists.

Sartre understood that "the life of man manifests itself as a failure." It is in the nature of mortality that it leaves all things unfinished. Even sick, even at 75, frail, blind (or half-blind), Jean-Paul Sartre clung to life, expecting five or ten years more in which to work. "The eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing," and no one's life story is ever fully told. Death comes always as an interloper; the threat of non-being is always real and decisive for all human pretensions, and closes, at last, every open door.

This, of course, is because, as Sartre came painfully to understand, we are not God. Our deepest wish is to be self-caused, self-defining, omnipotent. But we are not, really not God (maybe, Sartre sometimes thought, even God isn't), and in that limitation lie the seeds of our tragedy. From the nausea of his early work, to the resignation of his last interview, Sartre taught that "hope is necessarily disappointed." Inevitably, with mathematical certainty, the life of man is too short, too full of failure, too small--simply because he is only man after all.

Sartre dealt with his loss of historical hope by painfully acquiring another kind of hope. He replaced both existential dread and Marxist utopianism with a Jewish messianic patience. In the final interview with his friend and associate, the unlikely baal t'shuva, (returnee to Judaism), Benny Levy (formerly Pierre Victor), he reports his discovery that "the messianic idea is the base of the revolutionary idea." For many months before he died, Sartre studied Salo Baron's voluminous, magisterial work on Jewish history and, with Levy, came to a new-old view of the human prospect.

The Imposition of Hope

Sartre finally reads messianism, in Steven Schwarzschild's felicitous formulation, as permanent revolution. The human community is not a fact, as he once dreamed it might be, nor a lie, as he later feared, but a goal. It is not where we once were or now are, but it is where we someday shall be. Hope is not extrapolated from events, but always and inevitably imposed upon history. It comes despite, not because of, "reality." It is always a hope against hope. The expectation of redemption is not itself historical. Man must do his duty. Someone else will have to redeem the world. Sartre, the most persuasive non-believer of our century, nonetheless says, "I hated in humanism the certain way man has of admiring himself." Sartre found humanity less than admirable. But he believed, at the end, that we need not be admirable to survive.

Marxist revolution is not the goal; violent insurrection is not the way. For the final Sartre, world community is the goal, and patient obedience to duty is the way. In the most striking formulation in the final interview, he says: "Intention is transhistorical."

Which brings us back to man, the root of radicalism. "The primary relationship is man to man ...which we must now rediscover." As if he had invented Buber and the Bible, Sartre now proclaims, "We belong to a single family." Of course, "the unity of the human enterprise is yet to be created," still, proleptically, "what I have is yours and what you have is mine. If I need, you give to me. If you need, I give to you. That is the future of morality." What would sound simple-minded in a less complicated writer, here sounds from the depth of James' "second naivete," like a chastened and exhausted rediscovery. As Schwarzschild puts it, the apocalypse of revolutionary terrorism must give way to the ethical possibility of Jewish messianism if we are to fulfill the goal of a humane social order.

Sartre: A Kind of "Jew"

In the end, Sartre became a kind of "Jew." Already in the resistance of 1940-45, he had risked his life against Fascism. In Les Temps Modernes, at the very time of the Six Day War, he published what remains the most balanced and useful collection of essays on Arab Jewish peace and declared his solidarity with Israel. He did not accept the Nobel Prize of literature, giving reasons that are well-known. But he did accept an honorary degree from the Hebrew University in 1976, reminding the Israelis how deeply he shared their dreams, and telling them that the more he cared about them, the more he cared also about the Palestinian people.

"In order to understand the Jew from the interior, I would have to be a Jew," Sartre told Benny Levy (himself worth a story, one which might be titled, "From Mao to Masorah"), and he tried hard enough to achieve that very goal. Studying Jewish history, like many thinkers before him, he caught a vision of the messianic hope: survival, obedience and loyalty to humanity itself.

"The Jew lives. He has a destiny. The finality toward which every Jew moves is to reunite humanity....It is the end that only the Jewish people (knows)….It is the beginning of the existence of men for each other."

In the last days and in the last words of Jean-Paul Sartre, "our chief contemporary" (Mauriac), "an author who belongs to the future" (Barthes), a "fighter on all the battlefields of intelligence" (Audiberti)--in those last days and, uniquely, in the final interview, we find a brother and a teacher in Israel. More than a man, Jean-Paul Sartre achieved a stature and significance which can only be called symbolic.

"Blessed be Adonai, Master of space and time, who gives some of his wisdom to mere flesh and blood."