Scruton on Sartre

I’m not registering with anything for a dose of old Scroot-Scroot, of course, but if someone could tell me how I can remember which of the New Statesman and the Spectator is which without actually having to ever read either, I’d be wildly grateful.

(Looking at the covers doesn’t work for me; my eyes slide off them without managing to read anything, which is presumably a psychological self-defence mechanism honed on the paleologically ancient Veldt.)

Perfick! Thanks very!

He says (or at least it sounds like) that French Communist party collaborated with the Nazis – is that a fact? I guess he’s talking about the period between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Barbarossa; still, was it really ‘collaboration’?

Abb1: There was a spectacular piece a while back on ’68 and Foucault which could be adequately compressed to “It’s people like him what cause unrest!”.

He’s a complete twit, but he lives the joke. (Man.)

What’s insightful, Chris? Scruton is as ignorant of Sartre’s philosophy as he is of his life. The description of le visqueux in B&N has nothing to do with God; Sartre did not hate his paternal grandather; there was no religious tension in his home’ Sartre’s German was weak, not fluent; Sartre forged a medical release from the prisonner of war camp; he had a small role in the resistance (printing anti-German leaflets); he did not repudiate the legacy of the enlightenment as Scruton implies (after all, Sartre’s hero is Descartes, the enemy of the post-structuralists); The Critique represents a rejection of the doctrine of the for-itself as source of all meaning and values and therefore a decisive break with existentialism, not its continuation….

It’s just a waste of time reading Scruton when he’s in polemic mode (almost all the time). It’s a journey into his fevered imagination, which is not a place I would choose to go.

Thank you, Neil.

I had nowhere near the patience…

Backword D,

Sartre was a sloppy scholar (I say this as something of a fan). He read the Germans largely in translation, and certainly creatively misunderstood them. There were good translations of most of the people you mention, but there is a rumor that he only read selections from Hegel, never the entirety of any of his works (but then, Kant read Hume only in translation, and also only selections).

It isn’t really fair to accuse him of hypocrisy. He tried to engage in direct action, but his resistance contacts – wisely – refused his services. He did take risks: he had a printing press, which was nearly discovered. And it took a great deal of obtuseness on the part of the German censors not to see Les Mouches as the anti-fascist play it was.

As for totalitarianism in the Critique: well, he certainly celebrates action by the masses. Under certain circumstances, he argues, atomised individuals can become a ‘fused group’, almost a single organism, and take action in defence of itself, and this, he implies, is a kind of ecstatic moment. His example (the Critique is a long meditation on the French revolution, in many ways) is the storming of the Bastille. He thinks it takes action by others, who threaten the lives of people, to produce a fused group. It is a response to this threat. But once the threat is dealt with, the return to what he calls seriality, the separate lives of distrustful individuals, is inevitable. You get totalitarianism as a result of the attempt to maintain the fused group, in the absence of an immediate threat from outside. By internalising the threat, people attempt to eternalise the fused group. But they only ossify it. Sartre’s exmaple is the terror, though in the second vol. there is a long meditation on the cult of Stalin as an attempt to preserve the group.

So: totalitarianism, in Sartre’s view, is a failed attempt to preserve something worthwhile. There is no hint of an endorsement of totalitarianism, unless you think tout comprendre, tout pardonner.