Jean-Paul Sartre: the Sentimentalist.

There is a bizarre and enigmatic passage in his novel *Nausea* wherein Jean-Paul Sartre, the Marxist-existentialist, describes a man who is revealed to be a pedophile and properly harassed by a librarian. The passage is at first absurd because the narrator, who knows this man to be a pedophile, well in advance, proceeds to beat the poor librarian, as though the latter had no cause to denigrate the pedophile.

It is a very odd phenomenon, yet sadly not uncommon; even Sartre’s once friend and rival in philosophy Albert Camus wrote how he would not justify an act of murder given vague, intrinsic feelings of compassion for “the stranger” (who became the subject of a novel by this latter writer). Yet more recently I have discovered *why* it was that Sartre, at least, felt such a vague compassion for a man who, in all other segments of his narrative, he stubbornly refuses to accept as equal, brother, comrade, fellow socialist or humanist, etc.:

Sartre’s chief (and laughable) mistake is that he underestimates the Other. All his talk of Others, even his insistence that they are the very incarnation of damnation, (“Hell is Other People”, as he famously professes) represents that basic, antisocial phobia that blinded the creator of *Attack on Titan*. What for human-hearted viewers is a story of vendetta, to avenge the loss of someone that one loves, the edifying passion which insists that love lives on in spite of death unjust, to the creator is a fable about hatred being hypocritical. He represents the death of Eren’s mother not as tragedy to be avenged but rather horror to be overcome, at first by violent resistance but at last by meek acceptance. This is Sartrean in essence: that we hate because *we* do not wish the Other to suppress *my* freedom, though this hatred is a failure, to be recognized as such by any standing by, since they feel *their* own freedom threatened by the hatred of the “antihero”. 
Yet how meek and cowardly this worldview truly is!! Again, it seeks to undermine the Other by *reducing* him to that which *threatens me*, not that which injures *those I care about*. For Sartre, as is the case with any misanthrope, (including those denying their misanthropy) the Other only ever acts as threat, a threat which cannot be surmounted and must be accepted, since it’s everyone. So Sartre falls short of truly recognizing Others and dissolves them in the Self. Though he professes that a liberal philosophy of tolerance is just as arbitrary and oppressive as intolerance, the passion of resistance fades before the resignation that I can’t control the Other. Yet this resignation only proves that all he wants is to control the Other. 
Those who would resign themselves to tolerance and preach it only seek to undermine intolerance because they wish to dominate the vengeful “antihero”. These become that “evil genius”, that “voice within one’s head” that says, “You do not *really* love the Other; you just hate yourself.” This is that narcissism which is most insidious, since it would make of any act of heroism, even hatred, “nothing more than” a projection of the Self and its subconscious defects, filtered through the hubris of inflated ego. Yet in fact it’s merely cast its net of Self upon all Others to ensnare them in its misanthropic cynicism, calling that same cynicism “sympathy”, “compassion”, “mercy”, or whatever terms it can appropriate for resignation. It comes off as impotent because it fails to master and control, and so it interrupts, appearing in the form of “evil genius” and scoffing when it’s blamed for its enduring influence, for how is it responsible that it’s permitted to live on, “rent-free”, within another’s mind?

Yet scoffing at its privilege affirms its enterprise: it *wants* to live on in the minds of those it criticizes. It’s the narcissistic *ego* which feels threatened by all hatred, criticism, cruelty, and conflict. Yet the selfless Self exists, for, though it be a paradox (as is the way with all organic processes) it’s understandable: it’s born of selfless action, such as when the ego is dissolved within the drive to save that Other *which one loves* from *that which threatens them*. That principal distinction — between what I love and that which threatens — is the basis upon which a hatred comes of love. Yet love is that which is primordial, and it’s not love as Sartre describes it, based on fear and domination, but it’s love as Hamlet loved his father: selfless adoration, irreducible to cynicism. 

Yet the matter runs far deeper than this brief analysis can fathom. It may very well assist us in unraveling the mystery of why so many viewers tend to root for characters like L and Jimmy and against such men as Light and Chuck. It may expose why people riot like a mob of animals when they have witnessed footage of police brutality, yet never do they exercise this same brutality (that of the mob, far greater than the harm done by police) in witnessing a crime that’s proven to destroy more lives *per annum*. It may even be the reason why they are persuaded into sympathizing with a monster by the final episode who killed a young boy’s mother in the first. 
To Sartre’s insistence that the man who’s beaten in the streets must be himself, the answer is quite obvious: if you *were* such a man, would you deny that you deserve the beating?

**[({R.G.)}]**
  
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