| Author Quoted | Jean Paul Sartre |
| Title Quoted | Baudelaire |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1964/02/07 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1950 |
| Quotation | I emerge at the end of Sartre's involved meditation on Baudelaire [Eng. trans., 1950], like coming out of darkness underground into daylight with the last sentence: "La choix libre que l'homme fait de soi-même s'identifie absolument avec ce qu'on appelle sa destine" ["The free choice that man makes of himself is absolutely identified with what one calls his destiny"] (p. 224). This is really just what, to the superficial observer, Sartre's liberty seems not to mean. For those who think this liberty is arbitrary and subject to no restraint or limit, his portrait of Baudelaire is the most clinical and exact condemnation of a liberty misused, inauthentic, steeped in "bad faith." In fact, for Sartre, Baudelaire is guilty of the primal sin of forcing together en-soi and poursoi, willing the impossibility of their union. It is "original sin" in a very real sense for, in Sartre's philosophy, if en-soi and pour-soi could be identified their union would be God. To seek to identify them in oneself is to seek to be God-i.e., static (for Sartre) excuse, pure nature, subject as object for eternity. The sterility of Baudelaire's life ("going into the future backwards") is never for a moment justified by the beauty of his poetry. |
| Quotation Source | Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 5, 1963-1965.; Edited by Robert E. Daggy. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1997, p. 71 |
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