## 1. Metaphysical foundations of existentialist aesthetics




The term "aesthetics" as it first emerged in modern
philosophy (in A. G. Baumgarten's 1750 *Aesthetica*)
encompassed the theory of perception, the theory of beauty and the
theory of art. This remained true of all classical philosophical
aesthetics in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
In this brand of aesthetics, the aesthetic moment is but one aspect of
the general theory of how humans perceive, know, and act in the world;
the theories of beauty and of artistic practice depend on the theories
of perception, knowledge and judgement, and those in turn are premised
upon more fundamental considerations regarding the nature of reality
and our relationship to it. By contrast with the specialised aesthetic
theories developed in the last few decades, existentialist aesthetics
is a continuation of this grand tradition. Existentialist aesthetics is
intimately connected to certain metaphysical views, and it owes its
richness and consistency to the fact that it is part of a complex and
coherent philosophical system. Therefore we should begin by delineating
the most salient features of this metaphysical outlook.




The key insight that defines and unites existentialism as a
philosophical position, despite all the divergences between the authors
included under that denomination, is the emphasis on the radical nature
of human freedom, and the metaphysical and ontological imports of that
freedom. The metaphysical and ontological significance of freedom
precedes its moral, ethical, and political aspects, since the ways in
which human beings "hook up" to the world should be
considered before issues of duty or justice. For existentialism, human
freedom grounds the very possibility of knowledge in its deepest form,
i.e., the capacity of human beings to reveal something about reality. A
Christian existentialist like Gabriel Marcel interprets the
metaphysical reach of human freedom in terms of the capacity and
responsibility of individuals to make themselves
"available" to the mystery of their participation in
creation, in particular by responding to the appeal of the great
"Thou" (see in particular Marcel 1960b). Atheistic
existentialists (Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty), on the
contrary, do not ground freedom in faith and the hope of accessing the
transcendent; instead they emphasise the difficulty of assuming that
freedom, since nothing can ensure that our attempts at finding meaning
in the world will actually yield something objectively present in it.
But in all cases freedom is the ultimate ground of human beings'
capacity to relate to the world.


## 2. The phenomenological core of existentialist aesthetics




For the 20th century existentialists, a decisive
philosophical inspiration was phenomenology, the philosophical method
devised by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, during the late
19th and early 20th centuries, and which his
famous student, Martin Heidegger, developed into a combination of
existential analysis and deep ontology. Even Camus, who does not define
himself as a phenomenologist, and indeed sometimes rejects the tag of
"existentialist" (1945), appropriates the notion of
intentionality, central to Husserl's phenomenology, in his most
famous work, *The Myth of Sisyphus* (Camus 1942b,
44-50). It follows that existentialist aesthetics and the
phenomenological approach to aesthetic perception and judgement
(Ingarden 1962, 1965) are two closely related areas. Mikel Dufrenne
situates his work precisely at this intersection (see especially
Dufrenne 1973). However, the existentialists' approach to
phenomenology is highly original, and has significant and distinctive
implications for aesthetics.




What does intentionality mean, and why is it such a central notion
in existentialist thinking about art? Husserl shows that when any type
of meaning is articulated (in cognitive, moral, affective, aesthetic
attitudes, etc.), a specific act of consciousness occurs. The
specificity of the meaning in question depends on the particular way in
which consciousness "intends" its content in each case,
i.e., the specific way in which it relates to a given (e.g., an object
to know, judge, perceive, enjoy, and so on). In other words, different
types of meaning depend on the specific structure of the acts of
consciousness that carry them; in particular, they depend on the
specific temporality of these mental acts. To give an example that made
its way into some of the most famous existentialist literary works
(e.g., in the famous descriptions in *Nausea*, Sartre's
first novel): there is a specific temporality involved in perceiving an
object in space. The object is not given in an instant, and every
perception points to a potential new perception which will confirm or
revise the previous ones. This temporality of perception implies
recourse to memory and a unification of past moments of perception.
This emphasis on the way human consciousness "intends" the
world in different ways accounts not just for the content of human
knowledge, but also, more radically, for the relationship of the human
being to reality. It is not just an epistemological but a metaphysical
position.




This approach to the basic problem of metaphysics is highly
significant because it circumvents the dualisms of classical
philosophy: subject vs. object, impression vs. *a priori*
principles as the basis of knowledge, freedom vs. determinism, and so
on. The emphasis on intentionality avoids these dualisms because it
entails, on the one hand, that all meanings are constituted through
acts of human consciousness, thus insisting on the active role of the
subject in the formulation of any meaningful aspect of the world. On
the other hand, however, the theory of intentionality also implies that
the world already contains the meanings that consciousness reveals,
either because these meanings are potentialities from the point of view
of human action (this is Sartre's view), or simply because these
meanings are already in the world (Merleau-Ponty's view, but also
that of Marcel, for whom true knowledge arises from the openness to the
fullness of Being).




The existentialists explicitly embraced the philosophical solution
that phenomenology provided. For example, Sartre's *What is
Literature?,* the key text of existentialist aesthetics, starts off
by reformulating the fundamental lesson of Husserlian
phenomenology:



> 
> 
> Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the consciousness that
> human reality is a "revealer", that is, it is through human
> reality that "there is" being, or, to put it differently,
> that man is the means by which things are manifested. It is our
> presence in the world which multiplies relations. It is we who set up
> this relationship between this tree and a bit of sky. Thanks to us,
> that star which has been dead for millennia, that quarter moon, and
> that dark river are associated in the unity of a landscape. It is the
> speed of our car and our aeroplane which organises the great mass of
> the earth. With each of our acts, the world reveals to us a new face.
> But, if we know that we are directors of being, we also know that we
> are not its producers. If we turn away from this landscape, it will
> sink back into its dark permanence. At least, it will sink back; there
> is no one mad enough to think that it is going to be annihilated
> (Sartre 1948a, 26).


## 3. Art as revelation of the world




Sartre draws a basic aesthetic implication from the thesis that
meaning in the world depends on acts of consciousness: the fundamental
aim of the work of art is to deliberately and consistently exert this
uniquely human quality to introduce meaningful order and regularities
into the world. Whereas in the "natural attitude" this
happens without the agent's awareness (in the form of natural
perception, folk and scientific knowledge), in artistic practice
the order, regularities, perspectives, and meaningful relationships are
formalised, emphasised, systematised, and wilfully arranged. The
simultaneous effect is to "reveal" significant features of
the world and to gain a reflexive sense of being
revealers of the world and 'manifesting' it. Thus, our
sense of freedom is tremendously increased:



> 
> 
> One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need
> of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world. If I fix
> on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a
> look on someone's face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of
> having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order
> where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of
> things (Sartre 1948a, 27).




Thus the first aspect of aesthetic pleasure is this double
"joy" (Sartre 1948a, 41) of "disclosing" the
world and fully appropriating the unique power to do so, becoming aware
and exercising our radical freedom. This first aspect of aesthetic
pleasure can be called "metaphysical", since it arises from
the fundamental relation between humans and the world (Howells 1988).




Indeed, such is the metaphysical reach of human freedom that every
attempt to disclose a portion of the world tends to aim for the
disclosure of the "totality" of beings. This is because (as
Husserl already insisted) the most partial or minute act of
perception entails a reference to a broader horizon of future potential
perceptions. Many existentialist writers have stressed this primordial,
metaphysical function of the work of art as a partial revealing that
aims to uncover the totality of Being. This idea is found, most
notably, in Simone de Beauvoir's defence of the metaphysical
novel (de Beauvoir 1946, 1965, 73; see also, Merleau-Ponty's
reflections in his review of de Beauvoir's first novel,
1945c).




Such an intimate link between metaphysics and art explains why
existentialists often place certain artists on a level equal or
superior to the philosophers: Camus with Dostoievski, Marcel with Bach,
Merleau-Ponty with Cezanne, Sartre and de Beauvoir with Faulkner
and Kafka. It also partly explains why most existentialist philosophers
were equally, or in fact more, active as creative writers. According to
them, metaphysical inquiry and
artistic practice share a fundamental aim: both are ways of revealing to human beings their own
freedom and responsibility.


## 4. Art as expression of human freedom




The metaphysical and ethical dimensions of human freedom are
intimately related. This is the most significant difference between the
existentialists and Husserlian phenomenology: the existentialists link
the power to disclose the world to the necessity of human beings to
decide who they should be, in terms of the fundamental values directing
a person's life. The concept of "existence"
designates precisely this ethical dimension of human life. The
existentialists argue that, of all the beings existing in the world,
the human being is the only one that can decide what it should be;
indeed, it is forced to do so since it has no fixed nature. As the
existentialist motto goes, "man is condemned to be free."
Here, freedom is not just independence in the sense of independence
*from*, but in the sense of being able to decide who and what
one should be. This ethical dimension of freedom as the power of
self-determination (which also entails the duty to use it) explains the
central place of the notion of " *engagement* (commitment)." Before it
designates any necessity to choose in particular situations,
"engagement" refers to the fundamental position of the
human individual, whose very being consists in having to make use of
its freedom. On the existentialists' outlook, the only positive
feature of "human reality," strictly speaking, is
responsibility towards others and towards oneself (and, for the
Christian existentialists, towards God). Many human beings refuse
this burden and flee from their ontological responsibility by accepting
pre-given roles. This is what Sartre's "bad faith"
and Marcel's "functional man" designate.




What is the link between the metaphysical and the ethical dimensions
of human freedom, and how does this latter concern aesthetics?




Let us begin with the first part of the question. We will first
approach it by using a mode of argument typical of phenomenology. Many
existentialists insist that the ways in which a human consciousness
"intends" the world (that is, imposes a certain order and
regularity in external phenomena) is intrinsically dependent on the
values the person has set for herself. A mountain climber views a
mountain in a way radically different from an intellectual who has
devoted his or her life to books. The difference in their perspectives
relates to the deep projects of selves that distinguish these two
persons. In other words, behind every perception there is a value
influencing the perception in advance and thus ultimately determining
its precise content. On a deeper, ontological level, the experience
that there is something at all, the experience of being, cannot be
conceived if there is not a desire for it (an "ontological
exigency" says Marcel). The very capacity of human beings to
conceive something in the world at all is premised on their capacity to
posit values (Sartre 1943a; Marcel 1960a, for the religious
perspective).




If that is true, however, then every "revelation" of the
world in the first, metaphysical sense also entails a revelation of the
fundamental ethical (or, as the existentialists preferred, existential)
project underpinning this perception. This answers, then, the second
part of the question regarding the relation between the work of art and
the ethical aspect of freedom. For the existentialists, as we saw, the
work of art brings to a higher level of reflexivity and consistency the
innate capacity of human beings to disclose the world. However, since
this capacity is itself rooted in the ethical or religious nature of
human beings, the work of art plays a central role in conveying a more
acute sense of ethical responsibility. It follows that there is an
intimate link between art and engagement: every aesthetic ordering of
the world brings with it a conception of human freedom and suggests
ways to use it.




Hence, Sartre's definition of the literary work, which applies
broadly to all works of art: "... an imaginary presentation
of the world inasmuch as it requires human freedom" (1948a, 45).
In other words, the artwork serves the purpose of "making us feel
essential in relation to the world." The work of art presents the
world not just in the sense that it reveals aspects of it, but also in
the sense that it calls for human involvement, notably in collective
action (or, for Marcel, 'communion') (Goldthorpe 1992).




This definition of the artwork remains ambiguous inasmuch as it does
not specify whose freedom is required. A number of features can be
delineated as a result, depending on whose freedom is emphasised in
each case.




The freedom required by the world is first of all that of the
artist. Every artwork reveals a fundamental, existential attitude
towards the world, and is the expression of an existential choice. We
will return to the fundamental notion of expression below, but we can
already note that putting existential weight on every act of disclosure
leads directly to the conclusion that artistic practice is intimately
linked to ethical and political choices.




However, the 'expressive' aspect of the artwork, the
fact that it is the manifestation of a unique subjectivity, is not the
most interesting one for the existentialists; from this perspective,
existentialist aesthetics is quite distant from romanticism. This is
because existence, freedom and self-determination are, for the
existentialists, essentially active and practical notions. The
existential choice is not simply a choice of *who* one should
be, in the sense of a choice of personality or character; the theory of
existence does not translate into a theory of genius. Rather, the
emphasis is on the active relationship within the world, and especially
*with* others. Accordingly, one defines who one is by what one
*does* with one's freedom in the world, through the ways
in which one proposes to change the world, notably in relation to other
human agents. When the artist presents the world, whether he or she
likes it or not this presentation also proposes to others ways to
live in the world and possibly (at least for the most politically
minded authors, such as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty) ways to
change it. In Sartre's words, every "imaginary presentation
of the world" is an act of "a" freedom speaking to
"other" freedoms about possible ways of engaging freedom in
the world. Extending Sartre's definition of the novel, then, we
could say that every artwork is an "appeal" (Sartre 1948a,
32).




Therefore the artwork involves a freedom that is not just that of
the artist, but also that of the audience. In existentialist language,
it is freedom considered as 'engaged,' that is, irreducibly
caught up in engagement and forced to do something about it. Hence,
Sartre offers another definition of the artwork that identifies the
different poles of the metaphysical power of art: "... the
writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to
other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the
object which has thus been laid bare" (Sartre 1948a, 14).




In their own artistic practice and their work as critics, the
existentialists tended to interpret this conception of art's
mission (as revelation and appeal) as an argument in favour of
representational approaches, and against formalistic and puristic
approaches. They were generally sceptical of 'autotelic'
conceptions of the artwork that view it as a self-contained object
answerable only to its own formal rules. In this respect, again, they
differ from some modernist views. Indeed, this insistence on the
representative dimension of art might appear old-fashioned, inasmuch as
the more modern insistence on the autonomy of the artwork has marked
most late 19th century aesthetic projects and their
20th century descendants. The existentialists'
insistence on the intrinsic ethical and political significance of the
artwork further distances them from these other aesthetic
approaches.


## 5. Art and the absurd




So far we have only considered the subjective side of the link
between human revelation of the world and the world itself.
Existentialism, however, also emphasizes the objective side of the
link; that is, the world itself as object of perception and knowledge,
and as the context in which human action takes place. Here, there are
some notable differences between 'optimistic' and
'tragic' conceptions of the world in terms of our human
endeavours.




The 'optimistic' ontologies, like those of Marcel or
Merleau-Ponty, see the world as being on the whole a welcoming place
for human knowledge and action. Marcel, despite his critical analyses
of what he sees as the ills of modern society, is the most optimistic
of all, mainly due to the theological grounding of his ontology.
Ultimately there is no gap for him between the yearning for full
participation in the world (including in God) and the world itself,
since we owe our very existence and capacity for participation to the
ultimate origin of this world. As he writes in his diary:
"Knowledge is within being, enfolded by it" (1935, 115).
Although Merleau-Ponty does not share this theological conviction, he
agrees with Marcel on a crucial point: our incarnation in the world
through our bodies is the fundamental beginning of our learning to
inhabit the world meaningfully. As a result of our being both in and of
the world through our bodies, Merleau-Ponty believes that on the whole
our presentations of the world reveal objective features of it.




The 'tragic' ontologies of Sartre, de Beauvoir and
Camus, on the other hand, insist on the inhospitality of the world
towards human endeavours insofar as the world is mostly reticent to our
attempts at introducing meaning and unity into it. For Camus, the
'absurd' mainly designates this resistance of the world to our
endeavours. Whilst we crave for sense and harmony, the world has
nothing to offer but chaos and a random play of blind forces. All our
efforts to impose order and sense upon a world that can ultimately
accommodate neither are therefore doomed to fail. The absurd, then,
denominates both the most fundamental state of the world and the
absurdity of human attempts at overcoming this basic fact.




However, whilst Camus' 'absurd' names the
essentially tragic state of humanity, it is counterbalanced by his awe
towards the indifferent majesty of Nature. For Camus, one of the ways
of liberating oneself from the illusion of meaning and unity is to open
up to the beauty of Nature and partake in it, abandoning oneself in
privileged moments of hedonistic communion with wild environments, such
as the rugged Algerian landscape or the Mediterranean, or in eroticism
(1938a; see the moments of happiness in *The Outsider*, for
example, 1942a, 23-24, 116-117).




Sartre, on the other hand, insists on the "disgusting",
"nauseating" aspect of a world reticent to meaning, order
and beauty. His first novel, *Nausea*, painstakingly chronicles
this ontological disgust towards the strangeness of the world. A
proffered hand becomes "a big white worm," a glass of beer
a hostile partner whose "gaze" the hero attempts to avoid
for half an hour; a pebble on the beach reveals the
"nausea" that is communicated from the world "through
the hands." Even here, however, aesthetic experiences trigger
some exceptional moments in which the hero manages to escape
ontological 'nausea'. This occurs, for example, when the
novel's main character suddenly hears a jazz song in a
cafe, which, like a "band of steel," points to a
different time beyond the drudgery of the everyday (Sartre 1938,
21-23).




Many of the existentialists' literary creations attempt to
describe the entanglements of human freedom in these fundamental
ontological features of the world. Admittedly, this applies to some
existentialist authors more than others. For instance, Marcel's
plays explore the difficulties that modern individuals encounter in
responding to the appeal of transcendence, and in giving in to faith
and hope. But these obstacles arise mainly from social institutions
(notably around marriage) and historical events (the tragic
circumstances of the 20th century and what Marcel sees as
the dangerous objectivism of modern society). Similarly, de
Beauvoir's novels tend to portray individuals seeking their true
selves beyond the strictures of social morality. In contrast, a great
part of Camus' and Sartre's literary work is dedicated to
describing the difficulties that people face when trying to find their
place, not just in their social, but also in their natural and material
environments. As we have noted, some of the best-known passages in
their literary writings also describe moments in which the
obtrusiveness of the world is overcome, yielding fleeting yet sublime
experiences of sensuous communion with nature and others.


## 6. Ontology of the artwork




Sartre drew some particularly interesting conclusions from the
definition of the functions of art on the basis of an existentialist
metaphysics. These conclusions relate to what, in contemporary
discussions, is called the 'ontology' of the artwork: the
type of reality of the artwork's different elements and their
internal relations. Mikel Dufrenne has most thoroughly pursued this
ontological approach.




Sartre's early texts on the imagination already provided
significant insights in that regard (in particular, see
Dufrenne's lengthy discussions of them in his *The
Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience,* 1973). The freedom that
characterises human subjectivity is manifested most vividly in a
specific type of intentionality: the imagining of an object.
Imagination exemplifies the power of human consciousness because it is
a type of intentionality that posits in the same act both the existence
of the object and its inexistence, since it "intends" it
precisely as a virtual object. In imagination, the object is indeed
intended by consciousness, but "as absent", as
"containing a certain part of nothingness" inasmuch as it
is posited as not existing here and now (Sartre 1940). This
distinguishes it from the type of intentionality involved in
perception, one of the key aspects of which is precisely the positing
of its object as existent.




This emphasis on the 'derealising' aspect of the
consciousness of an image has important implications for the
ontological status of the artwork. The real, material elements of the
artwork are, properly speaking, not the actual elements on which the
aesthetic judgement is fixed. These are fixed instead on a virtual
object, i.e., the work's ideal qualities, wherein the work's
meaning, power and beauty are manifested (Sartre 1940, 213; see also
Dufrenne 1973, 3). On this account, the material aspects of the artwork
are "occasions" for the manifestation of the ideal aspects.
Sartre insists that one should reject any suspicion of dualism here:
"There is no realisation of the imaginary, nor can we speak of
its objectification," (ibid.) as though a prior mental
representation had been "objectified" and realised in the
actual artwork. Rather, the "real" artwork has two sides: a
real and an "unreal" (*irreel*, virtual, or
ideal) side. These two are, however, indistinguishable. "The
painting should then be conceived as a material thing visited from time
to time by an unreal which is precisely the painted object"
(ibid; see Dufrenne 1973, 3-18). The real, says Sartre, is the
*analogue* of the ideal. Merleau-Ponty puts it in similar terms,
at first in terms of sense and non-sense, and later on in terms of the
visible and the invisible: the ideal content of the artwork is
"in transparency behind the sensible or in the heart of the
sensible." It "doubles up the lights and sounds from
beneath, is their other side or their depth" (Merleau-Ponty
1964a, 150-151, but already in 1945a, 182-183).




This general "negative" dimension of the artwork (the
fact that as an ideal object it is not reducible to the materiality
that carries it) applies also to each of the artwork's elements
and their relations (the colours and shapes in a painting, the words
and sentences in a novel, and so on). Existentialist
aesthetics generally insists on the unity that artistic expression
brings to the world. As a consequence of this emphasis on organic
unity, it seems to propound a rather conventional image of the
aesthetic qualities of the artwork (see, for example, from a
theologically informed perspective, Marcel's discussion of the
symphony and the fugue as examples of self-enclosed
"perfection" [1960b, 53-54]).




However, Sartre's analyses of the relationship between the
artwork's elements shows that the insistence on unity as a
criterion of artistic beauty is perhaps not as banal as it might sound.
Sartre's pre-war texts on the imagination are especially
informative on this topic. In them, Sartre shows the substantial
relationship between the power of human consciousness to
"nihilate" the world (to overlook some of its aspects and
emphasise others on the basis of an existential set of values) and the
internal coherence of the artwork:



> 
> 
> ... each stroke of the brush (is) not for itself, (...) it
> (is) given together with an unreal (*irreel*) synthetic
> whole and the aim of the artist is to construct a whole of real colours
> which enable this unreal to manifest itself. (...) It is the
> configuration of these unreal objects that I designate as beautiful
> (Sartre 1940, 216).




This implies that the consistency of the existential project, from
which the world is revealed in a special way, also commands the
consistency of the artwork. But the quote above also indicates the
relation between the different elements that make up the overall
composition: in the end, every particular material element that
contributes to the general composition is related to the others through
a relation of negativity.




The theory of meaning that underpins this view of the
artwork's structure thus seems to anticipate a Saussurean
definition of language. Famously, Saussure analysed the functioning of
language as a 'diacritical' system in which each sign owes
its signification not to a substantial, one-to-one relation between
word and referent, but rather to its place within the overall
linguistic system. Basically, a sign means what it means on the basis
of 'not being' any of the other signs. 'Dog'
means what it does because the signifier (the material sound) and the
signified (the intended meaning) differs from all others, and
especially the proximate ones: 'log', 'fog',
'god', and so on; 'wolf', 'cat',
and so on.




In the same manner, the existentialist philosophers who dedicated
the most attention to the articulation of meaning (Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty) insist on the essentially diacritical essence of the
aesthetic element in a given composition: an element has aesthetic
significance on the basis of its relation to the other elements, rather
than owing to any substantial meaning of its own. It follows that, for
example, in a painting the pleasure derived from a particular colour in
isolation from the rest of the work is not 'aesthetic' in
the strong sense but only in a lower sense: as a pleasure for the
senses only. This also implies that often the meaning and aesthetic
power of a composition (a text, a painting and so on) rests just as
much on what is not said or not shown; what lies in-between the
elements of the composition, rather than on the elements explicitly
shown. The existentialists all insist that meaning is largely to be
found in a certain form of *silence*. In the case of a
novel:



> 
> 
> ... the literary object, though realised *through*
> language, is never realised *in* language. On the contrary, it
> is by nature a silence and a contestation of speech. The hundred
> thousand words aligned in a book can be read one by one without the
> meaning of the work emerging; meaning is not the sum of the words, but
> its organic totality (Sartre 1948a, 30).




This means that the different elements of the artwork should not be
approached separately or in their immediate reality, but in terms of
how they function organically, systematically and negatively. The
colours in a painting, and the choice of words and the rhythm of
sentences in a novel are all but traces, ellipses, elisions, and
caesuras that suggest in the negative, just as much as the elements
positively indicate the contours of a certain perspective onto the
world.


## 7. Theory of expression




The emphasis on the capacity of human consciousness to
'derealise' the world amounts to a defence of the creative
freedom of the artist. The artwork is the most striking example of the
power of human consciousness to turn towards the world in such a way
that it takes in from it certain elements and blanks out others, in
accordance to a fundamental existential project. Artistic practice is
one of the most eminent demonstrations of human freedom because it
shows how human practice can recreate (Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir,
Merleau-Ponty) or recover (Marcel) a new, more ordered world out of the
given world. Camus offers a concise formulation for a central principle
of existentialist aesthetics: "To write is already to
choose" (Camus 1951, 271).




The existentialist philosophers did not refrain from formulating
internal (aesthetic) and external (ethical and political) constraints
to artistic practice, but their aesthetics fundamentally proclaims the
radical freedom of the artist, also seeing in it the privileged
exemplar of human freedom in general. Camus, for example, makes
artistic activity, the choice of becoming an artist, one of the
privileged modes for humans to deal with the absurd (Camus 1942b,
86-88). Many existentialist texts dedicated to aesthetic matters
emphasise the 'mystery' of creativity, the amazing
'solution' that an artwork represents, the 'miracle
of expression' that elicits admiration from the audience and the
philosopher.




But radical freedom is ambiguous, as it must work with a
*facticity* (a term the existentialists adopted from Heidegger),
viz., a set of given factors (physical, social and so on) that it has
not created. In the case of the artist, the ambiguity resides already
in the decision and the passion to become an artist. Although a set of
genetic and social preconditions influences that decision, it is
equally the product of an individual decision in that specific
situation.




The work of art is caught up in the same ambiguity. On the one hand,
it is the free creation of an unconstrained person, a purely
idiosyncratic expression of an individuality. On the other, it is
constrained by various factors that exert influence on its very
structure: the audience, the historical period that will receive the
work, the material elements that make up the artwork, and in
particular, the already signifying elements that the artist reuses and
recomposes to create a new work.




Merleau-Ponty's writings of the 1950s advance an original
existentialist theory of expression that addresses this latter
dimension in particular. It can be argued that this theory of
expression captures and makes explicit thoughts that a number of other
existentialist writers shared on these questions.




In *The Prose of the World* (1964), Merleau-Ponty explored the emergence and logic of meaning and meaning-giving activity, of
signification and expression, using the example of literary works
(particularly the novel). Stendhal provided him with a paradigmatic
case study. Such an attempt to draw deep philosophical conclusions from
artworks is typical of existentialist practice.




Firstly, the literary work can help us understand the phenomenon of
meaning and meaning-giving by seeing the writer as creating new
meanings, indeed a new language (a Joycean version of English, a
Flaubertian French, and so on) by recomposing a language he or she
shares with an entire historical community. This is a truly ambiguous
aspect that can be taken (on one hand) as the proof of the mystery of
expression, evidence of a creative power required to make possible the
emergence of the new out of the old, while (on the other hand) this new
is possible only on the basis of the already-instituted. But this
initial remark points to a much deeper level; here, it is painting that
offers the most precious indications. In discussing Andre
Malraux's seminal essays on the history of painting (Malraux
1953), Merleau-Ponty articulated a detailed existentialist theory of
meaning where the artwork plays the central role. The Husserlian
metaphor of 'perspective' is appropriated and transformed
into a general formula for both the power of perception and the
metaphysical condition of the human being.




Intentionality can be said to coincide with the establishment of a
perspective in a world where there is, prior to human presence, none.
For reality to appear in all its different qualities and structures,
human consciousness is required. What distinguishes the artist from
other language-users is the consistency and coherence of a specific
outlook onto the world. Such coherent perspective introduces an element
of regularity and structure in the chaos of the world. It introduces
directions: a high and a low, a right and a left. That is, it
introduces sense.




This link between artistic expression and meaning leads to a major
re-evaluation of the notion of style. Rather than a superficial way of
formulating meanings that remain unchanged by their expression, style
in this context now indicates a fundamental perspective from which the
world can be approached; it indicates a perspective that would not have
existed prior to the expressive act. It designates an
"irreplaceable deviation" that is possible only from a
specific way of being-in-the-world, and which is subsequently
recaptured in symbolic language, whether the linguistic form of
literature, or the "indirect language" of painting. Style
is a coherent perspective, a "coherent deformation," a way
of being-in-the-world and of approaching the world from a certain
angle. On this model, style does not express pre-existing meaning, but
creates it. Camus, in the pages of *The Rebel* devoted to the
aesthetic dimensions of rebellion, developed a concomitant conception
of artistic expression:



> 
> 
> ... unity in art appears at the limit of the transformation
> which the artist imposes on reality. This correction, which the artist
> imposes by his language and by a redistribution of the elements
> extracted from reality, is called style and gives the recreated
> universe its unity and its boundaries (Camus 1951, 270).




This in turn gives a more specific meaning to the relation of the
new and the old in expression. True expression (whether the first
genuine self-expression of the learning speaker, a new scientific
meaning, or true artistic achievement) is both totally idiosyncratic,
and a re-composition of shared elements; it transforms the old. For
true expression to occur, two forms of speech are thus required:
"speaking speech" and "spoken speech"
(Merleau-Ponty, 1945a, 197). This explains the puzzling fact that a
true expression must be at once a true creation, something unheard of,
and yet can be understood only if the language it uses (natural,
scientific or artistic) is known. In other words, expression is always
also a form of communication between one "speaker" and the
community of speakers. Assuming that Merleau-Ponty's analyses are
representative of views that were shared by the other existentialist
writers (see Sartre, 1948a, 56, in which the germane concept of
"mediation" is used; "communication" is the
central notion in Marcel's philosophy of theatre), we can note
that once again existentialist aesthetics seems at odds with many
modern artistic currents, which have insisted on drawing a radical
distinction between the functions and uses of artistic and everyday
languages. For example, a major poet and theorist of literature like
Paul Valery was inspired by Mallarme's famous
characterisation of poetry as "giving a purer sense to the words
of the tribe." We can also mention surrealist and expressionist
painters and film directors who sought to break through everyday
imagery in order to transfigure reality.




Artistic communication also has a certain capacity to transcend the
ages and cut across languages. Beyond the historical situatedness of
artistic communication (the fact that an artistic language re-uses the
language of its contemporaries), the task of giving sense on the basis
of being-in-the-world is part of the metaphysical condition of being
human, and so applicable to all humans throughout history. As a result,
considering that art is a 'higher degree' of communication,
the work of art is not just a striking example of genuine expression,
but also exemplifies the fact that every act of meaning is open to the
past and the future of other human acts of expression.




At this point, we can note a tension within the aesthetics of many
existentialist writers (a tension that is quite acute in Sartre's
work) between the relative trans-historical meaningfulness of artworks
and their utter *situatedness*: artworks offer an image of
engaged freedom in particular situations that are truly accessible only
to its contemporaries (Sartre 1948a, 50-52). Merleau-Ponty, for his
part, insists on the underlying unity of the history of painting, which
allows us to find traces and echoes of past painters in modern ones.
The history of painting is a microcosmic image of history, and a
testament to the capacity of present generations to understand the
actions and passions of the past (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 72).
Merleau-Ponty's vision of the possibility of empathy across the
ages does not deny the historical relativity of sense formations. It
shows how, despite the spatiotemporal distance that separates
historical contexts, humans can still understand each other, historians
can understand previous times, anthropologists other peoples, and we
can somehow access some of the meanings of past artistic practices. The
expressive achievements of other peoples are both radically alien, and
yet the result of expressive gestures that are commensurable to ours,
inasmuch as they are the product of a common human capacity, viz., the
capacity to transcend the natural world and recreate it as a meaningful
and ordered universe.


## 8. The artist




A central, shared assumption of existentialist aesthetics, beyond
the stark religious and political differences of the existentialists,
is the essential ambiguity of the human condition: I am radically free
as consciousness, yet radically determined by my facticity, the
physical, social and other circumstances in which my consciousness
comes to the world. On this particular point Heidegger's
existential analytic is a shared reference that brings
together otherwise diverse (or, indeed, antagonistic) thinkers. An
important implication of the emphasis on human facticity is that it
forges a vital link between philosophy and the arts, which from this
perspective similarly aim to explore the metaphysical ambiguity of the
human
condition.




This grants the artist a special status from at least two
standpoints:




1) Artistic activity as an existential choice is a privileged mode
of assuming and realising the paradoxical nature of being human. In
Camus' words, artistic activity is one of the key attitudes to
face the absurd. Camus' celebration of art in *The Myth of
Sysiphus* (1942b, 127), which crowns artistic expression as the
ultimate form of "joy," would ring true for the other
existentialists despite their noted differences on the question of the
absurd. Indeed, many other existentialist writers made similar
statements reflecting their own life choices, in particular their
decision to pursue a philosophical and literary career. The personal
dimension that can be found in many existentialist writings grants
these texts a special status in the history of philosophy, since it
blurs a boundary that has been essential to the definition of the genre
of philosophical writing, viz., the boundary between the theoretical
and the biographical, the personal and the general. Marcel's
"metaphysical diary" is a good case in point. More than
just an original form of philosophical analysis, the diary illustrates
Marcel's own conception of the true self as a gradual awakening
to the "appeal" of being through the combined practices of
ontological inquiry, artistic creation and personal engagement. Sartre
also wrote an autobiographical account of his discovery of the world of
words, *Les Mots*, without doubt one of his masterpieces. The
same can be said of Camus' last narrative text, *La
Chute*, which mixes autobiography with an ironical account of his
philosophy.




Beyond their own personal practice, the existentialists also find
philosophical significance in the lives of great artists, and are
interested in the moment they chose to become artists and how this
primordial choice unfolded over the course of their lives. Artists
provide paradigmatic case studies for the paradoxes of
"existence" and "expression" (Sartre 1947b,
1971). Indeed, this is true not just of writers and painters but also
of actors. For Camus, in fact, actors are those "who draw the
best conclusion" from the metaphysical truth of human existence
(1942b, 107).




2) The artist's activity is also deeply significant in terms
of its power of articulating a coherent world. Every person has to make
existential choices and has a need for expression, but artists present
particularly pure and powerful exemplars of these facets of human
existence. Their achievements are worthy of admiration because they
involve the creation of virtual worlds. Every consciousness, every
being-in-the-world is expressive, but only rarely is this expression
truly *new*. Most of the time, human expression is only the
repetition of instituted meanings, as in the quasi-automatic use of
spoken language. Only the great artists show the power of expression in
its purity, its newness and coherence. To recreate a virtual world that
can do justice to the complexity of the real world is an almost
"miraculous" fact, as Merleau-Ponty says of Cezanne.
As we can see, the existentialists are no longer that far from the
romantics in what respects their emphasis on genius.




Since the expressive world of a genuine artist is a new perspective
onto the world that is identical with the artist's whole
idiosyncratic mode of being-in-the-world, there will be a deep,
underlying continuity in his or her work. The communication that the
work of art establishes across time and space operates, first and
foremost, within the *oeuvre* itself, with themes and stylistic
traits echoing each other throughout it (Camus 1942b, 102-103;
Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 67). But there is an inherent fatalism in artistic
activity. Expressive activity can only ever be an *attempt* at
expression, and it is structurally doomed to fail because there is too
much to reveal in the world. The means of expression are finite, and
they operate in a twisted manner, just as much through direct
designation as through ellipse and allusion. This leads Camus to
conclude that creative activity, like all free activities, is in the
end only another absurd attempt at dealing with the absurdity of human
life (1942b, 130).


## 9. The audience




An essential ambiguity characterises
also the experience of the audience. On the one hand, the genuine
artist creates a new virtual world that expresses a coherent,
idiosyncratic perspective on the world shared by all. When the audience
meets the artwork successfully, the spectators suddenly change their
own mode of perception and have to adopt a new perspective. To use a
linguistic metaphor, the tired, instituted language of everyday
communication ('spoken' or sedimented language) is
rejuvenated by a 'speaking' language, a true expression
that imposes itself on the audience (be it the reader or the
spectator). Therefore, the artwork, in a sense, creates its own
audience (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 86, and also 12-13; see also Dufrenne,
1973, 63-71).




Nevertheless there is also an active side to artistic enjoyment, as
in reading, for example. Without the spectator's contemplation,
or the reader's reading, the artwork's expression remains
purely subjective. It becomes objective, manifesting its sense in
actuality, only through the symbolic consumption of the audience. This
act, however, is not passive: it mobilises the audience's own
power of expression and imagination. Reading, watching, or listening
are, as Sartre puts it, "directed creations": "To
write is to make an appeal to the readers that they lead into objective
existence the revelation which I (the artist) have undertaken by means
of language" (Sartre 1948a, 32; Dufrenne 1973, 47-60).
Marcel's conception of the theatre as an experience of
'communion' also implies this active participation of the
audience.




The ambiguity of aesthetic experience is linked directly to the
above mentioned theory of the negativity of the expressive means. The
work of art functions when it is able to define a coherent perspective
onto the world, yet this perspective is mainly defined in the negative,
as the trace of iterable and consistent attitudes in the world.
Therefore, the spectator is required to translate the traces, caesuras
and elisions that negatively defined the new world of expression into
*positive* traits: "... the imagination of the
spectator has not only a regulative function but a constitutive one. It
does not play: it is called upon to recompose the beautiful object
beyond the traces left by the artist" (Sartre 1948a, 33).




A metaphor Sartre and Merleau-Ponty employ frequently is that of the
two sides of the artwork, comparable to the two sides of a mirror. The
artist only sees his or her own work from the inside; he or she
*lives* the artwork in a sense, since the expressive power is
rooted in an idiosyncratic form of being-in-the-world. For the work to
become an objective entity with a manifest meaning, the understanding
and imagination of the audience needs to reconstruct the meaningful
silence in between the traces. And this understanding cannot be
passive, since the truly expressive meaning involves a new form of
being-in-the-world. The spectator or reader is called upon to
effectuate the same original mode of being-in-the-world: "If he
is a writer, that is, if he knows how to find the ellipses, elisions
and caesuras of conduct, the reader will respond to his appeal and meet
him at the centre of the imaginary world he animates and rules"
(Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 89). Once again, a key feature of aesthetic
experience is communication, the 'echo' that a subjective
attitude to the world finds in others.


## 10. The existentialist "system of the arts"




This vision of the artwork as a privileged medium of expression and
communication (in the substantive, metaphysical senses given to these
words in existentialist philosophy) leads to a relatively coherent
approach to the different art forms, something like a loose
existentialist 'system of the arts.' A system of the arts
explains not just what art is in essence, seeking a definition of art
and determining its social, political or philosophical functions. It
also ranks the arts in a hierarchy, giving an account of how each form
uses specific material and expressive means to fulfil those functions.
In the end, one art-form in particular is usually regarded as
privileged, exemplary of the mode of fulfilling the mission of art. All
classical philosophical aesthetics, from Kant and his immediate
followers to Alain, have presented their own, more or less developed
"*systeme des beaux-arts*" (Alain 1920,
Natanson 1968).


### 10.1 Theatre




For most of the existentialists, theatre is the prime art form,
i.e., the one that best allows the artist to use his or her freedom to
create a virtual world that simultaneously appeals to the
audience's own freedom (regardless of how we define that freedom,
theologically or politically). For Camus, de Beauvoir, Marcel and
Sartre, philosophical activity and recognition as playwrights were
intimately linked (Goldthorpe 1986). Marcel defined himself as
"*philosophe-dramaturge*" (philosopher-dramatist,
see Lazaron 1978), to insist on what was, for him, an indissoluble
unity between philosophical meditation and playwriting. Indeed, it is
well worth noting that, apart from de Beauvoir (whose single attempt at
writing for the theatre was not very successful [see de Beauvoir 1945b
and 1962, 672-673]), they were all equally famous as playwrights and as
philosophers in their time.




Arguably, Sartre's theoretical reflections on the theatre of
his time have remained the most widely read today. In describing
what were for him the defining features of existentialist theatre,
Sartre also aimed to identify some of the main aspects of theatre
itself. As these features are grounded in his theory of freedom,
theatre is, for Sartre, the art *par excellence*.




The identification of art in general with the theatre is already
evident in the fact that the same word - 'situation'
- simultaneously encapsulates the metaphysical position of the human
being-in-the-world, and summarises theatre's core aesthetic
element (Sartre 1976, 35). The two 'enemies' in French
existentialism, Sartre and Marcel, agree on the centrality of the
concept of 'situation.' *What is literature?* had
defined the mission of literature as the attempt "to reveal the
world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter
may assume full responsibility before the object which has been thus
laid bare" (Sartre 1948a, 14). Centred as it is on the praxis of
real human beings confronted with the contradictions of concrete
situations, theatre is the best medium to present in purified form the
tragic responsibility of human freedom, the fact that "we are
condemned to be free" in a world inhospitable to our
projects.




This emphasis on action and situation leads to a series of highly
prescriptive rules, as we see in the criteria that Sartre used in
his critical reviews of contemporary theatre writing and production. To rise
to the task of achieving a "theatre of situations," writing
and production must resist the temptation of focusing on the
characters; they need to present archetypical *situations* in
which human freedom is most radically at stake, notably through
different types of universal 'conflicts of rights.' Theatre
needs to avoid psychology and concentrate on action (in clear contrast
to Marcel's theatre, which is mainly concerned with staging
conflicts of inner conscience); it must be wary of a realistic approach
that might take the focus away from the violence of the conflicts. For
the same reason, the duration of the play and the number of the
characters must be reduced. The stage must be empty and the language
must be direct but non-realistic, compressing the acuteness of the
situation as powerfully as possible. In short, existentialist theatre
explicitly intends to return to a Greek conception, attempting to
present contemporary "myths" in a world without gods
(Sartre 1976).




But the situations, precisely, are situated: they always take place
in specific social and political contexts. The myths that the theatre
presents, therefore, have two temporal dimensions: 1) Because they are
about distinguishing features of human 'being,' they have,
like Greek and Corneillian tragedy, a transhistorical appeal; they are
plays about human freedom in general. This explains the classical bent
of many existentialist plays. Thus, it makes perfect sense to stage the
conundrums of modern, absurd freedom through the figure of Caligula, as
Camus does in one of his most famous plays. 2) The situation is always
a specific one, particularly a specific social and political
circumstance, with its specific conflict of rights. In the years
following the Second World War, the conflict of rights is widely
understood as the conflict between liberal rights and the socialist
ideal. All the existentialists agreed on this, with the notable
exception of Marcel. The 'communist question' (of whether
to embrace the proposed communist solution to the problems facing the
world in 1948--the date of publication of *What is
Literature?*) was one of the most urgent political questions for
them. More generally, we can mention the question of the value of
individual engagement as opposed to engagement in a collective movement
(a question at the centre of Malraux's novels, notably his
*Human Condition*, which approaches the existentialist
aesthetic), and the place of individual freedom in an age of conflict
between global forces. These questions were at the forefront of
existentialist concerns when they devised their aesthetics, and wrote
their plays and novels.




We have noted the similarity between Sartre and Marcel regarding
their emphasis on the notion of situation. Although Sartre noted other
features of existentialist theatre that formally apply to
Marcel's plays, there are stark differences in their approach to
playwriting. Whereas for Sartre the ultimate justification of theatre
is political, for Marcel it is metaphysical: it is a question of
finding salvation and hope, and safeguarding the possibility of faith.
Yet, like Sartre's, Marcel's plays staged the specific
problems of the age as he saw them, e.g., how the rise of technology
brings about a reductive attitude to the world and especially to other
human beings, the atrocities of the century, and the moral
disorientation of modern individuals. Despite his metaphysical
optimism, Marcel's theatre shares with other existentialist plays
a patently sombre mood. He wants to depict "the drama of the soul
in exile, of the soul that suffers from its lack of communion with
itself and with others" (Preface to Troisfontaines 1953,
35). Marcel's plays consistently portray a creeping feeling of
absurdity that befalls the main characters. It is a forgotten fact that
Marcel wrote more plays than any of the other existentialists.


### 10.2 The novel




The novel comes very close to theatre as the art-form of choice for
the existentialists. For most existentialists, the ultimate models were
not philosophers, but contemporary novelists; two of whom were
especially paradigmatic, viz., Dostoievsky and Kafka. Sartre, de
Beauvoir and Camus saw themselves in equal measure as writers of
fiction and as philosophers. They engaged with each other's
fictional work at least as much, if not more, than with their
theoretical one (Camus 1938b, 1939, Sartre 1943b). Indeed, as already
noted, fiction and autobiographical writings were direct applications
of their philosophical visions. "To think is to create a
world," writes Camus, showing the deep identity between
philosophical and fictional creation (Camus 1942b, 87-91). The reason
is the same as with theatre: narrative fiction, focused on a series of
'situations' in which the fundamental existential choices
facing human beings can be carefully staged, is a powerful mode of
engaging the free imagination of the reader, and thus of calling him or
her to action: "What in fact is a novel but a universe in which
action is endowed with form?" (Camus 1951, 263). The novel is a
revelation of the world, notably in its social and political urgency,
by a freedom for other freedoms. As Merleau-Ponty writes in
"Metaphysics and the Novel": "Intellectual works had
always been concerned with establishing a certain attitude toward the
world, of which literature and philosophy, like politics, are just
different expressions; but only now [thanks to existentialist
philosophy] has this concern become explicit" (Merleau-Ponty
1945c, 27; see also Camus 1942b, 92 and 1951, 258-267).




In existentialist aesthetics, artistic activity and its products
have external aims: to reveal the world to others, both in a
metaphysical and political sense. As noted, this aesthetic theory
therefore conflicts with the notion that the artwork is an end in
itself, or that style and form are self-justified. Thus, the
existentialists were deeply suspicious of some of the main artistic
movements of the time, particularly Surrealism, even if some of them
admired its rebellious spirit (Camus 1951, 88-100); or, later on, the
*Nouveau Roman* (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and
Claude Simon) and the literature that was developed around the
post-structuralist journal *Tel Quel* (de Beauvoir, in Francis
and Gontier, 226, 233-234). Compared with Dadaism, Surrealism, and the
literary avant-gardes that immediately followed the existentialist era,
existentialist aesthetics has an outdated, almost conservative air to
it. It unabashedly calls for a new classicism somewhere between
formalism and realism (either in its naturalist or socialist versions),
and beyond romanticism (Camus 1944 and 1951, 268-271), on the grounds
that the moral and political dimensions of literature consist not just
in a rebellion against everyday language and the social-political order
of the day, but also in the more demanding (yet modest) task of
properly naming the world in order to unveil the immense injustice
reigning in it, while also retrieving its fleeting and inhuman beauty
(Camus 1951, 272-279). In his prolific work as literary critic, Sartre
consistently rejected formalism and "art for art's
sake," even in the case of illustrious French writers such as
Mallarme or Flaubert. However, it can also be argued that, from
the perspective of the relation between politics and arts in the
20th century, the existentialist demand that art retain a
strong connection to everyday reality (so as to fulfil its moral and
political roles) is also completely of its time.




The condemnation of "art for art's sake" applies
to all the arts and has important repercussions for aesthetic critique
and the conception of style. The existentialists take great pains to
note that their rejection of formalism, purism and autotelism in the
arts does not amount to advocating a crude version of realism (Camus
1951, 268-270; Sartre 1948a, 44). As we have noted already in the case
of theatre, the classical aspect of existentialist aesthetics impacts
on the choice of stylistic means: "One is not a writer for having
chosen to say certain things, but for having chosen to say them in a
certain way. And to be sure, the style makes the value of the prose.
But it should pass unnoticed" (Sartre 1948a, 15).




Furthermore, the existentialist definitions of meaning as
negativity, and of expression as 'coherent distortion',
mean that stylistic achievement (the ability to let new sense be
revealed) relies as much on the choice of words and syntax as on the
'silences' and omissions that define an expressive
gesture.


### 10.3 Poetry




With their emphasis on action in situations, the existentialists
have an uneasy relationship to poetry. Only Camus, following the
example of Nietzsche, wrote a number of poems (in his youth writings
and his notebooks, Camus 1933, 1935-1941). In many passages in Camus,
poetry has a positive connotation. This connotation, however, refers to
a specific quality of language, viz., the use of vivid images that
manage to convey some truth about the human condition, rather than to
the merits of poetry as a specific literary form.




For Sartre, the stance of 19th century novelists who
engaged in 'art for art's sake' is not too dissimilar
to the problematic way modern poets approach language. In fact,
Sartre's studies on two of the major French poets of the
19th century, Baudelaire and Mallarme, are tinged
with the same disapprobation as his immense study of Flaubert (Sartre
1947b, 1952b, 1971-72). Modern poetry for Sartre is, in the final
analysis, a misguided use of language. It uses language as an end in
itself, a thing, the same way that a painter uses colour. This ignores
the fact that in language the relationship between materiality and
signification is the inverse to what is the case in other artistic
media. Language is, for the existentialists, the favoured artistic
medium because, as the mode of expression that is most directly a
medium of signification, it is the one that best reveals a situation as
*situation* in the strong sense, viz., as a part of the world
where human freedom is directly engaged metaphysically, ethically and
politically. Poets, on the other hand, "are men who refuse to
utilise language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by
language conceived as a kind of instrument, it is unnecessary to
imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true. Nor do they dream
of naming the world" (Sartre 1948a, 5). In their use of language,
modern poets seem to overlook and act against the main qualities that
the existentialists grant it, namely, its representative and
communicative powers. This explains why poetry remains at the margins
of the existentialist system of the arts, as a literary genre that is
not as eminently philosophical and political as the theatre and the
novel. The existentialists are, once again, squarely at odds with the
surrealists, who condemned the novel and saw in poetry the real
artistic medium.




The existentialists made, however, some notable exceptions. Camus,
for example, wrote a vibrant review of the work of Rene Char
(Camus 1935-1936), and saw in the work of Francis Ponge an eminent
illustration of the task of literature in the absurd situation of
post-war France (Camus 1943). Sartre also dedicated a long and largely
positive review to the work of Francis Ponge, seeing in it a kind of
profane phenomenology (Sartre 1944 in 1947a). This positive assessment
might well have rested on a misunderstanding, since Ponge seemed to
have had the exact opposite view of language as Sartre, and regarded
poetry precisely as the form that would best be able to "name the
world" and make human freedom face its responsibility.


### 10.4 Non-linguistic arts: painting and music




The existentialists' lack of interest in poetry (which, in the
case of Sartre especially, turns into outright dismissal) is based on
their view that poets make a misguided use of language. For the same
reason, the other non-discursive arts attract almost as little interest
as poetry (however, see Camus 1951, 257). Yet, when they are discussed,
they are treated more favourably than poetry, since they do not have
language as their medium, and this means that the accusation against
poetry becomes irrelevant. The emphasis on language as the eminent
medium for the representation of human freedom reproduces a classical
argument that is already at the heart of Hegel's aesthetics (a
fact that the existentialists are fully aware of [Sartre 1948a, 5]).
The implication for the other arts is that they are able to produce and
convey ideal contents, meaning and beauty, but that these are never as
transparently accessed as in linguistic expression. Rather, the ideal
content in non-linguistic art-forms remains trapped, glued, as it were,
in the materiality of the artwork: "... it is one thing to
work with colour and sound, and another to express oneself by means of
words. Notes, colours, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothing
exterior to themselves. (...) As Merleau-Ponty has pointed out in
*The Phenomenology of Perception*, there is no quality of
sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with significance. But the
dim little meaning which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid
sadness, remains immanent or trembles about like a heat mist; it
*is* colour or sound" (Sartre 1948a, 1).




This seems to introduce some important differences amongst the
existentialists, since Merleau-Ponty, for instance, claimed that all
art forms function like language. But Merleau-Ponty agrees with Sartre
on the important differences between art forms. The *Prose of the
World* established that there was a single source behind all acts
of expression, which made them commensurable to language, only to
acknowledge the specificity of language in a manner similar to
Sartre's. For example, the "voices" in painting -- a
metaphor for the ideal content of painting -- are 'voices of
silence' that speak only an 'indirect language' (the
titles of Malraux's famous studies on the history of painting).
That is to say, they remain attached to their specific materiality,
making the work a self-enclosed world. In Merleau-Ponty's
repeated metaphor, every painter starts the history of painting afresh
(1960, 309-311) because the same visible world calls for an infinite
number of expressive variations, each singular in its determinate
coherence. The history of painting, therefore, is indeed made up of
constant echoes and criss-crosses, with each generation revisiting the
visual themes and techniques of the past generations, but the
communication amongst the works are haphazard, indirect, and cannot be
accumulated. There is no progress in the history of painting. In
language, on the other hand, meanings acquired from the past are
sedimented in current meanings and allow for the dialectic of spoken
and speaking speech discussed earlier (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 97-113).
This means that the material of literature carries with it the
sedimented historical experiences of the lifeworlds it speaks about.
There is no progress in literature either, not in a sense comparable to
scientific progress, but the novel, simply by using the language of the
lifeworld it arises from, is a direct witness of the broader historical
narrative in which it is embedded. As a result, it can portray ethical
and political situations very powerfully.




Precisely, the poet's sin is to treat language as though it
were a sound or a note; it is to treat language as a thing and to
revere its materiality. This ignores the nature of linguistic
expression, in which the signs must be traversed towards their
signification. The reverse error is that of Paul Klee, who, according
to Sartre, uses colour both as sign and as object (1948a, 23). The
existentialist system of the arts is ordered according to the Hegelian
principle where arts that involve language rule over the others,
because they best express human freedom.




In Sartre's *What is Literature?* this apparent disdain
for the materiality of painting seems at odds with another aesthetic
principle of the existentialists, namely, the capacity of art to
witness the obtrusiveness of the world, and, in exceptional moments of
aesthetic communion, its inhuman beauty. Indeed, in a few, smaller
texts of Sartre's (for example, those he wrote for exhibition
openings) he seems to return to this aspect of the artwork, which he
himself had so powerfully demonstrated in his first novel. However, it
is true that the existentialists are more interested in the ways in
which human beings sort out the entanglements of their freedom in the
absurd world, than in the depiction of the materiality of that world.
Merleau-Ponty's texts on the ontological grandeur of
Cezanne's painting are not representative of existential
aesthetics generally, but reflect only that author's unique
perspective on art and ontology.




Music, which in some classical systems of the arts (in Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche, for example) is the highest and most metaphysical, also
receives an ambiguous treatment in existentialist aesthetics. In
*The Myth of Sisyphus,* for example, Camus seems to be saying
that it is the absurd art *par excellence* because it realises
in the purest form what all art conscious of the absurd should be
about, namely, the "triumph of the flesh" in the absence of
any ultimate meaning:



> 
> 
> ... that game the mind plays with itself according to set and
> measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass that belongs to us
> and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in an inhuman
> universe. There is no purer sensation. (...) The absurd man
> recognises as his own these harmonies and these forms (Camus 1942b,
> 91).




Marcel often emphasised the extent to which music had played a
significant role in his philosophical inspiration. He was famous for
his improvisations on classical 19th century poems, which
his wife noted after the Second World War. We saw earlier that Sartre
in a famous passage of *Nausea* had described an encounter with
jazz music in a cafe as a sublime experience in which the
beautiful inner coherence of the musical flow transcended for a moment
the nauseating meaninglessness of the material world. And note also de
Beauvoir's late enthusiasm for music (in Francis and Gontier
1979, 67).




Despite these descriptions of music as a privileged meaningful
experience in an absurd world, none of the existentialists has
undertaken any sustained analysis on the relationship between music,
philosophy and the existential condition. Camus interprets positively
the formality of music, its lack of discursivity and the abstraction of
its relation to the world of flesh (see also his early essay in Camus
1935-1936), features that the latter Merleau-Ponty interprets
negatively; but, in the end, the existentialist writers do not give
music any detailed consideration.


### 10.5 Cinema




The most puzzling aspect about the existentialists' systems of
the arts is their relative lack of interest, in their most famous
writings at least, in cinema, the privileged art form of the
20th century. Of all the arts, this would have been the one
that would appear to have truly been able to present
'situations.'




In the case of Sartre, this is all the more surprising given the
intimate association of Sartre with cinema at many points in his life.
Several passages in de Beauvoir's and Sartre's
autobiographical writings attest to their shared enthusiasm for the new
art (Sartre 1964). The profound influence of film on the young Sartre
is well documented in his early writings, where he demonstrates great
sensitivity towards the formal and political potentialities of the new
medium, in contrast to most of the French intelligentsia of the time
(Sartre 1924, 1931). Indeed, these early texts credit cinema with
precisely the same capacities of expression that are later granted to
theatre, such as the capacity to present action, the necessary yet
ambiguous necessity of engagement and the capacity of artistic
expression to represent the masses to the masses. Literary criticism
has established to what extent Sartre attempted to reproduce in
literary form the techniques employed by cinema in the representation
of time, space and internal states of consciousness, and specifically
how such an influence was crucial in his first major work,
*Nausea* (Johnson 1984).




During the war, Sartre was employed as a script writer by a
production company for whom he wrote eight scripts. Two of these were
published after the war (Sartre 1947c, 1948b), and two of them were
filmed. Most of these scripts provided the material for Sartre's
plays and novels when their realisation failed. In 1958, he also wrote
two scripts for films on Freud and Joseph Le Bon. Sartre also wrote
twelve articles on film in total, notably a critique of *Citizen
Kane* in 1945, which inspired a response by Andre Bazin that
was to become one of his most famous essays (Bazin 1947). De Beauvoir
also recounts the deep impact that the cinematic experience had on
Sartre's ontological views. According to her, the cinematic
representation of human actions hostage to the world's power of
resistance was a crucial source of inspiration for his mature ontology,
notably for his vision of the absurdity inherent in the world's
contingency (de Beauvoir 1960).




Despite this intimate connection with cinema, the enthusiasm that is
apparent in the early texts receded in the background after his
discovery of phenomenology in 1933, following his study year in Germany
(de Beauvoir 1962, 231). After that date, cinema no longer features as
an important art form in his aesthetic writings. Indeed, in a 1958
conference, Sartre explicitly ranks theatre above cinema because it
"has more freedom," as "a film depicts men who are in
the world and are conditioned by it," whereas "theatre
presents action by a man on the stage to men in the audience, and,
through this action, both the world he lives in and the performer of
the action" (Sartre 1976, 60-61). In other words, theatre is the
true art of freedom in situations. Similarly, in later years, de
Beauvoir explicitly ranked the novel over cinema for its capacity to
"materialise the presence of human beings to human beings"
(de Beauvoir quoted in Francis and Gontier 1979, 200). As with the
*Nouveau Roman*, Sartre and de Beauvoir were quite reserved
towards the *Nouvelle Vague*, the new French cinema of the 1960s
(*ibid*.).




Rather than Sartre, it is Merleau-Ponty who gave the most lucid
exposition of the evident link between cinema and existentialist
philosophy in a conference at the *National School of Cinema* in
Paris (1947b). Despite this insightful text, however, compared with the
eminent philosophical status that is bestowed upon theatre, the novel, and painting for the late Merleau-Ponty, as the truly
"metaphysical" art forms, cinema is remarkably absent from
the most important existentialist writings in aesthetics.