Beauvoir and Sartre as Public Intellectuals in 2022

Abstract

Beauvoir and Sartre as Public Intellectuals in 2022 William L. McBride I have been fortunate enough to be able to reflect in print at least twice, in recent years, on works by Simone de Beauvoir that, written around or shortly past the middle of the last century, reference what was then the future in interesting ways—and it should be recalled that an orientation toward the future is of central importance to the ambiguous ethic that Beauvoir developed in Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, as it is in the Sartrean ontology which places so much emphasis on “the project.” A chapter of mine in an anthology dealing with philosophical aspects of Beauvoir’s novel, The Mandarins, concluded by speculating what those Mandarins would find surprising and what they would not if they were suddenly to reawaken in the early twenty-first century (McBride, “Conflict”). And in a more recent chapter of a volume co-edited by Nancy Bauer, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, in which I discuss and compare Beauvoir’s travelogues on America and China, I concluded with an implicit lament for those two worlds that she had explored so well when they were younger (McBride, “Postwar World”). Of course, the background reality to these works, as well as to many of the essays that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote during the same postwar period, was the Cold War. Especially in The Mandarins there is a strong streak of pessimism, which is to some extent in contradiction with Beauvoir’s assertion at the beginning of Pour une morale and Sartre’s in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme that, contrary to the claims of its critics on the Catholic Right, existentialism is a philosophy of hope. (It is not, I think, by chance that Beauvoir gave the name L’Espoir to the journal edited by her protagonist in The Mandarins, Henri, which [End Page 884] folded toward the end of the novel.) There was good reason to be depressed about the world scene during the late 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, with the real threat of nuclear war looming large. Indeed, who of those who lived through an episode of the mid-Cold War period, the Cuban Missile Crisis—the postmortem analysis of which by Robert McNamara and other major actors confirmed my own feeling at the time, scoffed at by some—can forget that it was a near thing? By now, the Cold War in its old form is a thing of the past. So why are so many of us still not feeling very good about the world scene? If resurrection were a real possibility, what might Beauvoir and Sartre say if they were to be brought back to the world stage? And what is it that existentialism more generally, however difficult it is to define, can contribute to illuminating our situation? These are the questions I shall attempt to answer in the next few pages. This essay is a small part of what I wrote about the imaginary resurrected Mandarins reawakened in today’s Paris. True, they would be surprised by some obvious things, notably the elimination of the Soviet Bloc. Nevertheless, I wrote, “they would feel very much at home. They would hear everyone talking about American imperialism; they would hear references to the announced prospect of an endless war; and if they were to read newspaper articles about the United States they would see that creeping fascism in the form of increased police state tactics (suppression of rights, vast augmentation of surveillance procedures, a ‘criminal justice’ system that houses one-quarter of the world’s prisoners drawn from less than 5% of its population, etc.), effective control of major media outlets by right-wing forces, strong encouragement of ‘patriotic’ nationalism, and so on, were the order of the day in that country” (McBride, “Conflict” 44). So, presumably, they would still regard existentialism and “résistentialisme,” as Beau-voir’s character Anne puts it, to be appropriate, humanistic attitudes to adopt in face of the diverse threats to humanity posed by a sizable segment of humanity itself. Before proceeding further with this nostalgic exercise of my imagination, I should say something about what the two...