Blake's Reviews > Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist was Iris Murdoch’s first published book and the first book on Sartre’s work to appear in English. In it, Murdoch studies Sartre’s fiction, his philosophy, and his politics. And over the course of the book she offers insights and criticisms that both contextualise and historicise Sartre’s work and key concepts; and these offerings both clarify and hit their mark. Her writing is more substantial than structural and more literary than philosophical, the layout initially appears idiosyncratic and conversational; but as the details of Sartre’s work begin to appear (opening after the later produced introduction, as the monograph does truly, with an energetic discussion of La Nausée) the book finds its force of explication and exegesis.

Initially it might appear strange to assimilate Sartre to romanticism or rationalism or some combination thereof. Sartre, after all, is the go-to existentialist for many and existentialism for many more is a kind of considered and politicised subjectivism or the mature consequences of a fully realised and worked out atheism. And further, Murdoch came to have a complex relationship with existentialism, as can be seen in The Sovereignty of Good (and less so in the misguided recent attempts to assimilate Murdoch’s own work to existentialism). But Murdoch relates the point of the charge to Sartre’s uses of freedom and the will, and particularly with his use of self-aware reflectivity, isolation, and the energetic upshot of his employment of a certain existential paradox.

I’d praise this book for the author’s work on Sartre alone, but for a reader of Murdoch whose interest is primarily or latently in her philosophical and artistic writings, there are further points of interest here that only passingly have to do with Sartre himself. There are early and spectral glimpses of ideas from Murdoch about art, novels, and the poverty of the contemporary picture of the human personality, that we’d see fully embodied in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and essays like On Dryness. There are also key terms and their usages that would develop into later points of interest in Murdoch scholarship and novel criticisms of Sartre from other writers, such as her uses of ‘flux’ to describe the acute experiences of contingency in La Nausée.

So, while I’d recommend the book to anyone looking to situate Sartre, my own selfish interest here is in how it situates Murdoch. I think it succeeds at both.