Sartre, The Condemned of Altona and the Critique of Dialectical Reason-to-come: Insanity or Bad Faith Running Away with Itself?

ABSTRACT

What for Sartre happens when bad faith goes so deep that one is no longer master of it? In The Condemned of Altona, Franz Gerlach, after an initial show of resistance, joins the Nazi cause and tortures prisoners of war in his charge. Fleeing home from Russia at the war’s end, he sequesters himself in the attic of the family mansion and attempts to absorb the guilt of the twentieth century by frantically arguing his case before a tribunal of scuttling crabs.

What does Sartre’s portrayal of hallucination tell us about the human condition and is it the result of insanity? As a harbinger for the Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR), Sartre’s ontology has shifted away from an emphasis on human isolation and absolute freedom to a concern with how behaviour, even of an irrational kind, is a profound reflection of one’s place in a social hierarchy. Also a reflection of a CDR-type approach, Sartre’s views change regarding the status of truth and interpersonal relations. For while someone like Nausea’s Roquentin exhibits a redemptive value through introspection, fantasy and private experience, Franz’s behaviour points to a repeated failure to deal with social reality and the associated attempt to redeem his own existence by acting authentically towards others.

Notes

1 For an earlier version of this view, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part Four, Chapter One. Henceforth BN.

2 This text was only published posthumously in 1983.

3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1. Henceforth CDR.

4 I have dealt with the idea of bad faith and worlds of belief in “Bad Faith, Good Faith and the Faith of Faith” and in “Gestalt Mechanisms and Believing Beliefs: Sartre’s Analysis of the Phenomenon of Bad Faith”. For Sartre’s idea of situation, see F. Noudelmann and G. Philippe, dirs. Dictionnaire Sartre, 345–46.

5 The interplay between bad faith and historico-material forces finds its fullest expression in The Family Idiot, Sartre’s memorable study of Flaubert (1971–72).

6 Sartre writes about Baudelaire that

… his bad faith went so deep that he was no longer master of it. He had such a violent horror of himself that we can regard his life as a long series of self-inflicted punishments [through which] he redeemed himself … [b]ut at the same time … set himself up as a guilty man.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, 83.

7 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Condemned of Altona.

8 In Nausea, Roquentin despises the shallow, bourgeois way of life of the good citizens of Bouville:

it seems as though I belong to another species. They come out their offices after a day of work, they look at the houses … with satisfaction … they have proof, a hundred times a day that … the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws … Idiots … They make the laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. (158)

By contrast, his own isolation and intensely strong private experiences eventually lead him to discern a reality that underlies the superficiality or banality of quotidian, middle-class existence:

“the roots of the Chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root anymore. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface … This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder … [an] obscene nakedness” (127).

That is, Roquentin’s introspective experiences point to an objective truth that lies beyond mundane, everyday existence. Page references are to Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea.

9 CDR, 67, 318ff.

10 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2, 37, 40.

11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet:Actor and Martyr, 31.

12 For an earlier version of this theme, see note 6.

13 The original text reads “La guerre étais mon destin et je l’ai voulu de tout mon âme. J’agissais, enfin! … j’étais d’accord avec moi.” Les séquestrés d’Altona, 304. Taken in conjunction with the idea of destiny (Schicksal), the phenomenon of being wholeheartedly at home with or owning oneself – i.e. being Eigentlich – precisely mirrors what Heidegger, in Being and Time, specifies is necessary for Dasein to act authentically. Is Sartre therefore deliberately referring to Heidegger regarding Franz as a Nazi?

14 Robert Tembeck, “Dialectic and Time in The Condemned of Altona,” 12.

15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 55–56.

16 The flashback scene of a German woman confronting Franz in his flight back home (137ff) is extremely effective in conveying this point.

17 See A. Mirvish, “Freud Contra Sartre: Repression or Self-Deception?”

18 See the first two articles in note 4, plus A. Mirvish, “Death, Contingency and the Genesis of Subjectivity.”

19 See Peter Royale, “Crabs,” https://philosophynow.org/issues/67/Crabs.

20 BN, 604ff.

21 Individuals of inferior quality who would dilute the purity of the Aryan race. Thanks to holocaust scholar Michael Thaler for pointing out this term to me.

22 Racially inferior types such as Jews.

23 Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 286.

24 I have discussed this optimism in “Sartre on Friendship: Promoting Difference & Preserving Commitment.”

25 See James Brydon, “World War Two Reconsidered: from Men without Shadows to The Condemned of Altona.”

26 For the early Sartre’s view of madness see, for example, David Mackey, “Sartre and the Problem of Madness”. For Sartre’s later view of madness from the mid 1950s involving family dynamics, see for instance Colin Davis, “Historical Reason and Autobiographical Folly in Sartre and Althusser.”

27 Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and The Jewish Question, 179.

28 See A. Mirvish, “Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis and the Nature of Neurosis.”

29 Moreover, once the pledge is undermined and drama has literally played itself out, Johanna and Werner are clearly meant to retreat back into an empty and loveless marriage while Leni is left, now even more cynical and manipulative than ever, to maintain the family’s status; but this is to say, again exactly predicting the CDR, that the pledged group degenerates into seriality.

30 See the first article in note 4.

31 In fact, Sartre has Johanna say to the father that Franz “ … was a little Puritan … who wanted to pay with his blood for the land you sold … You wiped everything out. What remained was only a game for a rich playboy” (40).

32 See BN, p. 554f.

33 John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre, 90–91.

34 See note 28.

35 See the first two articles in note 4.

36 That is, anxiety is a catalyst that promotes hallucination. See the articles mentioned in notes 4 and 28. The fact that he is able inchoately to be aware of the psychic constraints or boundary conditions of his situation again shows that Franz is far from being insane.

37 See the first two articles mentioned in note 4.

38 Hazel Barnes, Humanistic Existentialism, 398.

39 See endnote 6.

40 With the exceptions of his behaviour towards the rabbi and that towards Johanna.