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of justice, its exalted rank and its limits are treated. Separate chapters
discuss commutative justice (under the heading of Recompense and
Restitution) and distributive justice (under Justice of Government).
The opportuneness and competent treatment of the topic of just government is particularly noteworthy. Generous space is allotted to it; the
points selected for illustration and application: are up-to-date and familiar
to us all. One must mention the lucid analysis of the injustice of
government based on totalitarian or on "liberal " principles alike, and
the reminder of the dangers in democratic systems of government where
" the representative of the social whole is to a much greater extent [than
in a monarchy] the representative of particular groups or interests as
well."
One criticism might be made of the author's discussion of general
or legal justice. While the treatment of this topic on pages 32 ff. leaves
little to be desired, yet one gets the impression from a later section
(cf. p. 52) that legal justice is part of the cardinal virtue-a point which,
we are inclined to think, St. Thomas would deny.
Altogether this is a stimulating and valuable book.
St. Patrick's College, Maynooth
T. P. CuNNINGHAM
33. Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.
By JEAN-PAUL SARTRE. Translated and with an Introduction by
HAZEL E. BARNES. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956.
London: Methuen. Price 50s.
In a Preface, the translator says: "This is a translation of all of
Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Etre et Ie Neant." She earned hard and earned
well the right to make this satisfied statement. It was a task of intimidating dimensions. Sartre's vocabulary and style, in this, his major
philosophical opus, are grim, graceless and disheartening. Seldom has
the French language had to suffer so much in giving birth to a
philosopher's ideas. American translations of the minor works, hitherto
available, have sometimes had the effect of making the obscure absurd;
their explanatory introductions have sometimes been quite silly. Of
Miss Barnes's translation, it must be said that she has succeeded admirably in being both accurate and readable. She has not just transposed
Sartre's words but his thought into an English which "reads English "
and not just transliterated French, and which makes Sartre not less
understandable in translation than he was in the original. Where the
translation remains barely intelligible, the fault is not hers. The Introduction, too, is of high quality and gives us, in forty pages, an intelligent
exposition and acute appraisal of Sartre's ontology which compares
favourably with anything hitherto written about Sartre in English. There
is a useful and accurate glossary of technical terms of Sartrean philosophy
and a Name Index which give the English volume important advantages
over the French.
Miss Barnes, perhaps of set purpose, confines her consideration, in
the Introduction, to L'Etre et Ie Neant and the philosophical works
which preceded and to some extent prepared for it. This limitation,
however, can be regretted for the reason that it makes Sartre's phenomenology and ontology seem more detached and speculative enquiries
than they are. Reference to the plays, novels, essays, literary criticism

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225

and politico-social pamphlets is necessary in order to show how completely Sartre's theoretical constructions are determined by political and
social commitments and resentments. In one instance, Miss Barnes's
omission is strange; for she says: "It is surprising that Sartre, on the
other hand, ignores an entire set of special experiences to which the
Idea of Nothingness is tremendously important; namely the whole
history of mysticism." This is an unaccountable statement; for in 1952,
Sartre, in his Saint Genet, Comedien et Martyr, did, with quite unforgettable mass and density of words, relentless perseverance in paradox and
wrong-headedness of argument, treat of mysticism and sanctity, perversely trying to show that sanctity and satanism, saint and sodomite,
are kin. The Saint Genet, with the continuing Marxist journalism are,
in fact, all that we seem likely to get by way of the work on Ethics
promised at the end of Being and Nothingness in 1943.
There is, however, more in Sartre than paradox, rhetoric and political
journalism. His philosophy expresses too many of the valid insights,
the genuine bewilderments and the "absolute presuppositions" and
partialities of the contemporary mind, for it to be ignored. British
philosophers, even when they have seriously tried to do it justice, have
usually concluded that it rests very largely on mistakes of logic. Thus,
Bertrand Russell thinks that the philosophical basis of existentialism is
the naive belief (which he himself shared in his youth) that there is some
"logician's limbo" in which there are the "things" which "logical
words" like" if", "or ", "not ", mean. A. J. Ayer, writing about
Sartre as novelist-philosopher in Horizon (1945), expressed the" suspicion that what is called existentialist philosophy has been very largely
an exercise in the art of misusing the verb' to be '." He speaks of
Sartre's " Looking-Glass Logic"; of his " hopeless logical confusion";
of his" often very subtle but desperately wrong-headed ratiocination."
It is nevertheless revealing to note how often Sartre emerges from
the maze of logical confusion by the same door as that frequented by
the logical positivists and their successors, the linguistic analysts. We
read, in Being and Nothingness, "Necessity concerns the connection
between ideal propositions but not that of existents. An existing
phenomenon can never be derived from another existent qua existent."
We will find the same proposition, in almost the same words, in Russell
or in Ayer, not to speak of Hume, their common ancestor. For Sartre,
as for the early Ayer, propositions about God, the soul, immortality,
absolute values, are logically self-contradictory and nonsensical. For
Sartre as for most contemporary logical analysts, the questions of traditional metaphysics are" devoid of meaning" or incapable of answer.
When Sartre says: "(Ontology) is concerned solely with what is, and
we cannot possibly derive imperatives from ontology's indicatives ",we might be listening to any modem Oxford or Cambridge moralist.
Sartre is a spokesman of the modern atheistic intellectual; and the
characteristics are, on the whole, fairly uniform throughout the species,
irrespective of national and cultural frontiers.
Sartre, like his fellow-unbelievers, claims to be a humanist and
maintains that 'humanism' is by definition incompatible with theism.
His humanism is, he tells us, simply "the effort to draw out all the

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consequences of a consistently atheistic position." His atheism must,

of course, be examined philosophically, and no other type of analysis
of Sartre, whether psycho-analytical or biographical, is relevant to the
philosophical issue or can dispense from the philosophical analysis.
This can obviously not be attempted within the limits of a review. But
it is profitable to reflect here on the extent to which contemporary
atheism is motivated by antipathy towards people, ideologies, and social
systems, allegedly identified with Christianity, rather than by reasoned
enquiry into the truth of theism or of Christian faith and morals in
themselves. This is glaringly obvious in the case of Sartre. The hinge
on which his whole system of thought turns is the doctrine that belief
in absolute values is "bad faith" and an abandonment of the human
condition and therefore a betrayal of humanity's hopes for social justice.
This is built by Sartre into the centre of his ontology and his ethics.
Belief in God, belief in metaphysical 'essences', belief in immortality,
aspiration after sanctity, all are lumped together, with belief in moral
absolutes, as "bad faith" and "inauthenticity", and condemned as
at once logically self-contradictory and morally odious. But the reason
underlying all Sartre's reasons for this is that he has, quite rightly,
decided that many people who think themselves highly moral and
virtuous, are in fact pharisees and hypocrites, Grundy'S and Tartuffe's,
often perhaps employers of sweated labour and exploiters of the poor.
From the true premise, "Some supposedly virtuous people are impostors ", Sartre draws the fantastically illogical conclusion, " All Virtue
(and therefore all Metaphysics and Theology and Religion) is imposture."
This is, at its simplest, the logic of Sartrism. This is what lies at the
base of the enormously complicated and sophisticated philosophising.
In latter years, the vesture of philosophy tends more and more to be
discarded and the underlying propaganda and partisanship to be
increasingly revealed.
There is, of course, a tradition in France for this kind of entanglement of ideas with political passions. Among Catholics, Peguy, Bloy,
Bernanos, had this among their sins and left it as a regrettable liability,
partly offsetting the rich intellectual and spiritual assets they bequeathed
to contemporary French catholicism. Peguy could write: '" I, who
am not Virtuous', says God" . . . "(The virtuous) do not offer that
open door to grace which is essentially sin" . . . "What is called
morality is a thick skin which makes us impenetrable to grace. . . .
Morality makes us capitalists of our virtues." The results of this shallow
sophistry can be seen in the personal tragedy of a defrocked priest, the
unfortunate Abbe Massin, whose apologia, Le Festin chez Levi (1952)
was full of Peguy-isms of this sort. "Virtue is the special sin of the
rich, for the rich man is essentially he who erects his own Public
Monument. . . . All that is gained for the spiritual life is lost for
virtue. . . . All that is gained by sanctity is lost by virtue. . . ."
It is remarkable how sure the new Publicans are that they are not as
the rest of men, Pharisees, extortioners, unjust, as are these bourgeois ...
Such is some of the cant of the new anti-religious Fanaticism of our
time. Such are the worst effects of the anti-absolutist philosophy of
absolute commitment. Father de Lubac has written: "Pamphleteering,

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227

caricature, vulgar popularisation, political trickery, arrogance and abuse

instead of proof, slanderous insinuation, cheap-sale psycho-analysisall this is very ready to-day to take to itself the fair name of ' engaged
philosophy'." Only the future will tell whether Sartre is going to merit
being treated as a serious contemporary philosopher or is going to
degenerate into a pamphleteer and vulgar populariser.
Of the propensity towards vulgarity, there can be no doubt. Gabriel
Marcel has said of Sartre: "It is by no means an accident that his
work presents us with one of the most frightful exhibitions of obscenities
that is to be found in contemporary literature." There is an affectation
among literary critics to-day that dirt is not dirt, but Art, when used
in a cause or by a person of whom the critic approves. Sartre certainly
uses dirt usque ad nauseam against people of whom some critics disapprove; hence they indignantly protest that he is not pornographic.
Sartre was undoubtedly sincere when he declared, in Saint Genet: "Je
n'aime pas autant la merde qu'on Ie dit." But he has certainly loved
throwing it on bourgeois salauds, " right-wing" philosophers, capitalists,
employers, Americans, imperialists, Christians and God-for all these
for him are oddly one. There is indeed a wild abandon about Sartre's
vulgarity which resembles the "teddy-boy" urge to shock and smash
and make a noise. There is an imp of plate-smashing anarchism in
Sartre; shown in the gusto with which he describes in La mort dans
i'ame, Mathieu's final wild shooting showdown with Virtue, Respectability, the Bourgeois World-" Liberty is Terror "-; shown too, even
more" teddy-boyishly", in his approval of the respectable Frenchman
in America who deliberately acts immorally in order to get his own
back on American Virtuousness. Saint Genet is full of adolescent
foolishness like this: there are few more ridiculous statements in the
history of philosophical advertising that Francis Jeanson's claim that it
is "the outstanding work of contemporary philosophy."
Exaggerated claims by his friends, biassed dismissals by his critics,
irresponsibility by himself, all have made it difficult to assess objectively
the originality and greatness of Sartre as a philosopher and as a novelist
and dramatist of ideas. There is one aspect of his writing about which
his defenders are extremely sensitive, that is his propensity to plagiarism.
Anyone who suggests that Sartre has 'cribbed' ideas and expressions
widely, persistently, and very successfully, must be prepared to be
accused of pedantry, irrelevance, prejudice, reaction. But the facts are
there. How many of Sartre's most striking thoughts, most disturbing
and brilliant images, were already in Malraux. "La souffrance de la
pensee "; "Ie reve d'etre Dieu "; "l'angoisse qui est Ie fond de I'homme,
la conscience de sa propre fatalite d'ou naissent toutes les peurs "; the
impossible desire, by an absolute crime, to possess oneself, to coincide
with oneself, completely; the insurmountable solitude, the mutual
treacheries of love-all this was ready for Sartre in La Condition Humaine.
There is, of course, a free market in ideas; but images are more copyright, and it is unusual to find such close correspondence in imagery
as there is between Malraux's episode of Clappique and the mirror and
that of Roquentin and the mirror in Sartre's La Nausee. Words too
are rather personal; and Sartre's famous sentence~ '\ l'homme n'est rien

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PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

d'autre que l'ensemble de ses actes" is straight from Malraux: "Un

homme est la somme de ses actes, de ce qu'il a fait, de ce qu'il a pu Caire.
Rien autre."
Similarly, one can find many of Sartre's favourite phrases and ideas
and literary devices anticipated by D. H. Lawrence or liberally sprinkled
through the novels and essays of Aldous Huxley. D. H. Lawrence
pre-empted Sartre's attack on ideals and fixed codes of morality in the
name of sincerity and authenticity; as well as his critique of the Idea
of God as man's "insatiable desire to be everything", his "radical
passion . . . to include everything in himself" (e.g., in his Essays
on "Democracy", 1936, and on "Whitman ", 1923). The essential
argument of both of Sartre's much-lauded essays in literary-moral
criticism, Baudelaire and Saint Genet, was already stated, much less
tediously and pretentiously, in Aldous Huxley's artfully wicked little
essays on "Spinoza's Worm ", " Francis and Grigory", " Baudelaire"
and" Pascal ", in Do What You Will (1930). One could compile an
amusing anthology of" Sartreanisms " from Malraux, Lawrence, Huxley.
This, of course, makes Sartre's friends very indignant. It is one of the
matters about which the devotees of Sartre's " chapel" have very strongly
"l'esprit du serieux". Such literary borrowings, however, though they
seem incompatible with greatness, are not incompatible with talent.
Sartre's talent as a novelist and a dramatist are beyond question.
But the character of his latest work inevitably raises doubts about
the value of his claim to be rated as a serious philosopher. As Marcel
predicted in 1947, he has moved ever closer to Marxism, despite the
vicissitudes of his relations with the Communist Party, and Marxist
preconceptions have more and more biased his thinking. His latest
theatre has been either straight entertainment (Kean) or slapstick antiRight-Wing farce (Nekrassov). His current writing is mainly concerned
with somewhat tedious argument and analysis about his relations with
Marxism and with the Communist Party. A long study of" Existentialism and Marxism" running serially at present in Temps Modernes,
pretty completely abandons philosophical discussion for Marxist labelling
and libelling. Like his faithful echo, Simone de Beauvoir, he seems
more concerned nowadays with thinkers' social class and incomes and
politics than with their ideas or arguments. The text of an interview
he gave on the B.B.e. last May, makes sad reading. He said: .. (A
philosophy) is an all-inclusi\fe whole reflecting the way in which the
rising class looks at the world . . . a method to solve the real problems
of life and a weapon against other opposing classes. One cannot go
beyond such a philosophy as long as the circumstances which have
produced it have not changed. In that sense, Cartesianism was a
philosophy. . . . One was able to go beyond it only when science
assumed a different form and when the bourgeoisie of mercantile capitalists upholding that philosophy reached the industrial stage. I take
it that one cannot go beyond Marxism to-day because the really important
questions of contemporary philosophy are still within a Marxist framework. As long as scarcity remains a problem for the people's democracies and for us, the exploitation of man by man remains a living
problem, and one cannot go beyond the great Marxist problems and

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Being and Nothingness

therefore, their solutions. . . . Marxism is an all-inclusive whole

reflecting our age. No one can go beyond it. . . . I am a Marxist.
That, to be absolutely precise, means that I cannot attempt not to be
one without falling back on old notions such as abstract freedom or
equality of rights."
Yet, despite this deplorable nonsense, one feels that Sartre may only
be letting his head be temporarily turned by his heart. It is not reason
which speaks in him for the present but sentiment towards the dispossessed and resentment towards their oppressors. The feeling is
eminently praiseworthy even if the thinking is disastrously muddled.
Sartre may yet both feel and think his way to a genuine humanism.
It should not be forgotten of him that he wrote, in Temps Modernes
for January, 1957: "The Soviet tanks at Budapest fired, in the name
of socialism, on all the proletariats of the world"; and to those who
would have counselled silence, because "this was not the moment"
to embarrass the Party, he bravely replied: "If this is not the moment,
then the moment will never come." And yet his tragedy remained: if
the God of Marxism failed, then "the hope of men, the only hope of
men" had died. It is with a pathetically blind faith and a pseudoreligious hope that he wrote in the same article: "If the U.S.S.R. is
worth only the same as capitalist England, then indeed, there is nothing
left for us but to cultivate our garden. To preserve hope, we must do
precisely the opposite; we must recognise, beyond its errors, its horrors
and its crimes, the evident superiorities of the socialist camp, and condemn
with all the greater vigour the policy which puts these superiorities in
danger."
Sartre may yet become ' demystified ' of Marxism as he has already
been 'destalinised '. The elements of a true humanism are already in
his system. He has said: "For man, hunger is always much more
than hunger." His theory of "hierarchies of significance" rightly
emphasises that each detail of conduct expresses in its fashion man's
total project and fundamental choice of himself. This thought would
find its completion in an integral and theocentric humanism such as
Maritain's. For Maritain has said: "It is in vain that one affirms
the dignity and vocation of the human person, if one does not work to
transform the conditions which oppress him and to bring about the
conditions in which he can worthily eat his bread" (Humanisme Integral).
That is the problem of to-day: not just.food and fair shares, but also
conditions worthy of man's total project. Sartre should remember from
his own Being and Nothingness, that man is not just a passion for plenty
but also a passion for God.
Camus wrote, in reply to Mauriac, in Combat (January, 1945): "I
believe I entertain a just notion of the greatness of Christianity. But
there are some of us in this persecuted world who feel that if Christ
died for certain men, he did not die for us. . . ." (Cited by Peyre,
The Contemporary French Novel). May it not be, in part at least, the
fault of ourselves as Christians, if men like Sartre and Camus feel that
the passion of man for God is useless and the Passion of Christ for
man alien?
The Queen's University, Belfast.

C. B.

DALY