614
PARTISAN REVIEW
you speak? ... The truth is that your contributor would like us to revolt
against everything but the Communist Party and the Communist State.
He is, in fact, in favor of revolt, which is as it should be, in the condition
(of absolute freedom) described by his philosophy. However, he is
tempted by the kind of revolt which takes the most despotic historical
form, and how could it be otherwise, since for the time being his philo–
sophy does not give either form or name to this wild independence?
If
he wants to revolt, he must do it in the name of the same nature
which existentialism denies. Hence, he must do it theoretically in the
name of history. But since one cannot revolt in the name of an
abstraction, his history must be endowed with a global meaning.
As
soon as this is accepted, history becomes a sort of God, and, while
he revolts, man must abdicate before those who pretend to be the
priests and the Church of such a God. Existential freedom and ad–
venture is by the same token denied. As long as you have not clarified or
eliminated this contradiction, defined your notion of history, assimilated
Marxism, or rejected it, how can we be deprived of the right to con–
tend that, no matter what you do, you remain within the boundaries of
nihilism?"
This is a stringent argument. Sartre did not answer it, except by
insisting that "our freedom today is nothing but the free choice to
struggle in order to become free . . . ," and that if Camus really
wanted "to prevent a popular movement from degenerating into tyran–
ny," he should not "start by condemning it without appeal." "In order
to deserve the right to influence men who struggle," Sartre admonished,
"one must start by participating in their battle. One must start by ac–
cepting a lot of things,
if
one wants to attempt to change a few." Which
is, among other things, a theory of conformism, or at least of reformism,
not of revolution and drastic change. Because if one "must start by
accepting a lot of things" in order to change "a few," then why not
begin by giving up wholesale notions such as "capitalism," "commu–
nism," the "masses," etcetera?
If
he had cared to answer further, Camus
could easily have retorted that it was precisely the awareness that "one
must start by accepting a lot of things"
if
one wants to obtain real
changes that had persuaded him to give up ideological radicalism.
While Sartre, for the sake of changing "a few things," is ready to
swallow a totalitarian ideology plus a totalitarian organization.
One thing is certain: Sartte is more intelligent than that, and
knows much better. How can he then, in polemic with a man like Camus,
imagine that he can get away with taking over the most ordinary kind
of journalistic arguments?
