Bridging the Gulf Between Autonomy and Utility: On Sartre's View of Literary-Artistic Fiction

Sartre holds that literary art is an imaginative fictional world, and holds that the root of fictionality is the human's nihilation of being. But once literary art becomes an unreal fiction, it is irrevocably estranged from the real world; it hangs high above reality, severs its direct connection with real society, and becomes an independent, autonomous world, no longer able to be taken as an effective means for realizing real aims. Then, as a writer who values reality, how, after all, does Sartre expound the fictionality of literary art, and use literary art—this fictional thing—to practice real aims and exert its social function?

I

In The Psychology of Imagination, Sartre clearly points out: “The art-work is a kind of unreality.” (1) Sartre takes painting as an example: in a painting, the real things are the effects of the brushstrokes, the pigment and its grains on the canvas, the varnish spread on the pigment; but none of these constitutes the object of aesthetic grasping. The “beautiful” thing is only something that cannot be experienced through perception and that, in its very nature, is also outside the world. Only when consciousness undergoes a fundamental change and becomes imaginative does the painting appear as an unreal aesthetic object. So it is said that “the aesthetic object is constituted and grasped by an imaginative consciousness that posits it as unreal.” (2) The creation of the novelist, the poet, and the dramatist is likewise so. They precisely, by the help of the “verbal analogue,” constitute an unreal object. For example, on the dramatic stage, the actor who plays Hamlet is no longer himself in real life, nor is he Hamlet; he, with all his feeling and ability and his whole body and posture of action, lives entirely in an unreal way as the analogue of the image of Hamlet. Therefore, “the actor is completely absorbed and summoned by that unreal thing. It is not that the character has become real in the actor, but that the actor has become unreal in the character.” (3) What drama displays is precisely the unreal fictional world.

Sartre's recognition of the unreality of literary art is built upon the uniqueness of the human. Sartre holds that the world, as being-in-itself, is a pure, unconditioned, full existence. Differing from this, the human is the conscious being-for-itself. Because consciousness can only be consciousness of something, its characteristic lies precisely in always leaving itself and pointing toward external things, toward the world; this dooms the human to be unable to be identical with himself—he both is what he is not and is not what he is. He always continually negates his own existence, transcends the already-formed existence and becomes non-being, becomes nothingness. The for-itself is the pure nihilation of the in-itself; its existence can never be given, and nihilation always distinguishes it from itself, so that it is forever in a suspended, undecided state, in a perpetual deferral. “The for-itself, apart from being the nihilation of being, has no other reality. Its sole determinateness comes from its being the nihilation of a particular, specific in-itself, and not from the nihilation of being in general.” (4) Through negating the in-itself, it makes itself manifest what it is not, and thereby manifest what it ought to be. Nothingness constitutes the ontological determination of the human's existence.

“Every for-itself is a free choice; any one of these activities, the most insignificant and the most noteworthy alike, expresses this choice and originates from it; this is what we call our freedom.” (5) Nothingness endows the human's existence with freedom, lets him have infinite possibility, never to be framed by the already-formed existence, and so he must make his own choice and decision in the face of all kinds of situations. From this angle, imagination precisely most fully embodies the nothingness and freedom of the human's existence. The nihilating nature of the human's existence dooms the human to be free, and also dooms the human's freedom to need the help of a free consciousness to be realized. So Sartre says: “The reason the human can engage in imagination is precisely that he is transcendentally free.” (6)

Husserl says: “The word imagination, or at least the word fiction close to it, usually expresses ‘unreality,’ expresses fabrication; the imagined thing is only an illusory image, only a false appearance.” (7) Sartre points out that imaginative consciousness differs from general consciousness: its image-object is not the existing but the posited, a non-existent object, that is, a fictional object. If consciousness usually proceeds from the given situation and makes a choice aimed at the given situation, unable to escape the constraint of the given situation, then imagination, because of its unreality and because its object is fictional and self-sufficient, breaks free of the constraint of the specific situation and gains thorough liberation. Imagination is the most creative fictional activity, and also the most free activity. “The activity of imagination is an unpredictable activity. It is a sorcery doomed to create the object of human thought, doomed to create the thing the human longs for; it is precisely in this way that the human can possibly obtain this thing.” (8) So, on one hand, Sartre “insists that the human often cannot but live and act for the goal of transcending their present situation”; on the other hand, “he maintains that this ultimate goal is only a self-contradictory fantasy.” (9) Thus, a space is left for imagination: “We can only be conscious of beauty through imagination; imagination grasps this fantasy, while at the same time recognizing the unreality of this imagination.” (10) It is precisely this unreality of imagination that makes freedom possible and makes beauty possible; it, with its unpredictable “sorcery,” creates “the thing the human longs for,” to relieve the human's ontological anxiety. It is precisely from this problem that Sartre sees the root of value, of beauty, and of literary art.

“According to Sartre, the human has a fundamental lack.” (11) Because the for-itself and the in-itself are both inseparable and have an unbridgeable difference. The for-itself always wants to negate and surpass the in-itself, to become another in-itself, but can never become any one in-itself; it can never coincide with the “ought-to-be” existence, and the difference between them is precisely the lack. Therefore, the lack dooms the human, whose existence is the for-itself, to be unable to break free of desire, dooms this desire to be transcendence itself, to be a flight of the self toward the desired object, toward the “ought-to-be” existence; and when this object is not a really-existent object but the concretization of the human's free ideal, it manifests as beauty, manifests as literature and art. The free relation between the human and the ideal state of the world is embodied as the aesthetic relation. Imagination is precisely the bridge that strives to make up the lack, to connect the human with the thing the human longs for, the human with the ideal state of the world: “Therefore, beauty expresses an ideal state of the world, related to the ideal realization of the for-itself… insofar as we take ourselves as a lack, we hold that the universe is lacking in beauty… insofar as the human realizes beauty in the world, he realizes it in the manner of imagination.” (12)

II

Once literary art takes its foothold on the human's imaginative activity, and the literary work becomes an imaginative fictional world, it is also separated from the real world and becomes a self-sufficient, autonomous independent kingdom. Sartre takes the portrait of Charles VIII as an example. He says that this portrait, as a real thing, is related to the surrounding environment and influenced by the environment—for example, the change of light and darkness in the environment, and the color too may be somewhat faded; its objectivity depends on being taken as a real thing of a spatio-temporal whole. But if what we grasp on this portrait is Charles VIII as an image, the situation is completely different. The bright-and-dark light-and-shadow on the cheeks of Charles VIII in the portrait was determined in unreality by the painter at the start; what decides the degree of light and dark on the cheeks is that unreal sun, or the unreal candle the painter specially placed. What the real lighting apparatus can do is only to illuminate the real picture-frame as a thing, and it cannot change the light and dark on the cheeks of Charles VIII as an image. Therefore, at the same time as the unreal image appears, it also surpasses the reachable range of reality. In order to create Charles VIII as the object of an image, consciousness must have the ability to negate the reality of this picture. “To posit an object is also to constitute an object at the edge of the totality of reality. Therefore, this also means keeping a distance from the real thing, releasing oneself from the real thing—in short, negating the real thing.” (13) This is to say, when the portrait is not a thing in the real world, but an art-work that is the object of appreciation, it has already surpassed the real world and entered the imaginative fictional world.

However, when the work becomes a self-sufficient, autonomous fictional world, separated from the real world, it can also no longer engage with social reality and exert an action. No matter what meaning the work expresses, it speaks only to itself in the fictional kingdom; it transcends concrete social history and loses the ability to dialogue directly with reality. Correspondingly, the author and the appreciator too must enter the fictional world before they can communicate with the work, because “the imagined world is completely isolated, and I can only contact it by nihilating myself in this world.” (14) The author or appreciator, because of entering this imagined fictional world, cannot but let himself break free of the real world and abandon the various real relations. But the key to the problem lies not in the human's separation from the real world, but in the fact that, once the human has entered the fictional literary-artistic world, he must abandon the real utilitarian aim, because fiction releases literary art itself, together with the human, from the various connections of the real world, and the utilitarian aim is thereby suspended. This abandonment finally lets the human return to himself, become his own aim, and gain true freedom. Evidently, Sartre's view of literary-artistic fiction inherits Kant's doctrine of aesthetic autonomy.

When the human withdraws from the real social-historical connection and returns to himself, this so-called “human” can only be the abstract universal human, and the so-called “freedom” can only be abstract eternal freedom. “A basic characteristic of the concept of the universal human is that he does not engage with any specific age”; “the universal human does not go to think of anything beyond universal value; he is the pure and abstract affirmation of the human's rights unrestricted by time.” (15) And “freedom itself, if one examines its eternal form, is also like a withered branch.” (16) The universal human and eternal freedom are bound, because of losing historical concreteness, to lose the real social foundation, becoming empty, abstract notions. The human cannot but “have a concrete form of existence”; (17) no one would be interested in the abstract human and freedom. And so, literary art, even if it wants to accomplish something, can only be doing-without-doing, use-without-use. The abstract, universal, eternal thing is utterly incompatible with the historical, social, concrete reality; between the two there exists an unbridgeable gulf.

As a writer keen to engage with real society, Sartre evidently realizes the conflict between literary art's pursuit of the metaphysical fictional nature and historical consciousness. Fiction empties out the historical concreteness of literary art and lets one be intoxicated in the metaphysical, eternal human nature; this is in fact a flight from reality. Either hold fast to literary art's fictional nature and abandon the writer's and artist's social responsibility, or distort literary art's nature for the sake of intervening in social reality—this seems to be a dilemma in which one cannot have both. Sartre was not bound by Kant and phenomenology; he both faced this contradiction squarely and strove to seek a path that communicates and reconciles the two. He attempts to give a remedial plan from two aspects: first, to place literary art—whose nature is fiction—within a concrete historical context, and especially to relate it to the receiving collective; second, to make a new explanation of the different situations and actions of literary-artistic form and content (subject-matter) in the receiving process.

Sartre holds that literature is always produced in a specific social-historical environment, and the author and reader are also located in a concrete situation. “Writing and reading are two aspects of one and the same historical fact, and the freedom that the author entices us to strive for is by no means a consciousness of one's own freedom in a purely abstract way… each book, proceeding from a specific alienation, suggests a concrete path of liberation.” (18) In Sartre's view, the author must write facing the reader. On one hand, writing is the author's summoning of the reader; on the other hand, the public is summoning the author, raising a question about the author's freedom. At the same time as the author determines his own reading-collective, he also determines himself.

Sartre analyzes several key periods in the process of the evolution of literature. He holds that in Europe around the twelfth century, clergy wrote specially for clergy, and reading and writing were skills mastered by professionals. In seventeenth-century France, writers were still immersed in the ideology of the privileged class, so that they could have no other thought. In these two periods, apart from the “true readers” of the privileged class or group to which the author belonged—who shared a common cultural cultivation, taste of appreciation, and ideology—there did not exist a “potential reader” beyond this class or group. Writing and reading became a ceremony of mutual recognition by which the elites paid respect to one another, that is, affirming, in a ritual way, that they mutually belonged to the same world and held the same view on all problems. Every spiritual product was at the same time an act of courtesy, and style was the highest respect the author expressed to the reader.

The eighteenth century provided French writers with a rare opportunity: the bourgeoisie was gaining economic advantage and already possessed money, culture, and leisure, becoming the true reading-collective. The writer was sandwiched between the two hostile reading-camps of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, importuned from both sides. In this contradiction, the writer held that he was in collusion with no one, and could autonomously choose his own enemies and friends. At the moment he took up the pen, he could break free of the constraint of environment, nation, and class; he soared above the dusty world; he himself was pure thought and gaze. He wrote in order to demand a separation from the class to which he belonged, and turned writing into a solitary situation. It was precisely in this period that literature, through the writer, began to be conscious of its own independence. The writer, because he faced different readers, had to become the universal human, to create literature of pure form, to resist concrete oppression with abstract freedom, and to resist history with reason, in order to cope with the universal reader: “Because the writer turns himself into the universal human, he can only have universal readers, and the demand he raises upon the freedom of his contemporaries is to sever their historical connection so that they may ascend with him to the realm of universality.” (19) Such a “realm of universality” can only be an abstracted fictional world independent of concrete social history, in which the writer as universal human and the universal readers gather, sharing universal human nature and eternal freedom.

This change of literature happened to coincide with historical development. At that time, the bourgeoisie, in order to seize political power from the aristocracy and consolidate its own power, had to unite with those oppressed classes that could not yet raise a demand for political power. Facing the many social groups, it wanted to unite them, rather than let them produce a clear consciousness of themselves; this could only stress the general, abstract connection among the different groups. And so, the universal human nature and the freedom of public opinion that the writer advocated happened to coincide with the bourgeoisie's need to seek political power.

But by the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie had already gained political power. At this time, the writer again needed to satisfy the demand of a unified reading-collective. This bourgeois reading-collective no longer demanded the writer's critical character; it had turned toward construction, and demanded that the writer help it carry out construction. And the writer, released from religious ideology, likewise refused to serve bourgeois ideology. In this period, the potential reading-collective constituted by the oppressed classes had already begun to show signs, but the writer did not understand it, and even more feared lowering his own class status to stoop to it. The oppressed class could only be the subject-matter of certain works, and not the reader the writer chose. And so, the excellent writer, because he refused to cooperate with the integrated bourgeois reading-collective, was thereby prompted, in principle, to write against all readers.

Sartre, by analyzing the situation of the writer's freedom in different ages, and the demands the reader raised upon the writer and literature, expounds the dialectic of the evolution of literary conceptions, and from this discovers the “pure essence” of the literary work and the social type of the literary work. Literature was at the start concrete and alienated. The writer wrote for clergy from the standpoint of clergy, or wrote from the position of the privileged class; literature naturally was not independent and free. The literature of the eighteenth century became abstract negativity. At this time, the writer no longer faced a single reading-collective; the contradictory opposition of the reading-collectives forced the writer to adopt a transcendent attitude, to pursue abstract human nature in the identity of the universal human, and to negate reality. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the conflict between writer and reader reached an unprecedentedly sharp state, and the writer therefore refused all readers. Literature too moved toward absolute negation, severing all connection with society, wholly concentrating on discovering literature's own autonomy. And so, literature took itself as object, intoxicated in experimenting with its method, attempting to determine literature's inner law through experiment and to forge new skills. “Going to the end in this direction, there could possibly arise an absolute creation that gathers the essence of luxury and waste in one body, useless in this world, because it does not belong to this world, and because it does not yet indicate anything in this world: imagination is conceived as a power to negate reality unconstrained by anything, and the art-work is built upon the collapse of the world.” (20)

Regardless of whether Sartre's description of the development and change of literature completely accords with reality, the method of placing the autonomous, self-regulating, free, and fictional nature of literature within the social-historical process to analyze provides an extremely important enlightenment for later generations. Sartre himself attempts, through historical analysis, to provide a reference for a difficult task: “to create a literature that can make the metaphysical absolute and the relativity of historical fact converge and reconcile.” (21) But up to this point, the key problem still remains unsolved: since the nature of literature is autonomous, self-regulating, free, and fictional, how can it engage with concrete social history and let the writer become an engaged writer?

Marcuse holds that literary art creates a fictional “world of otherness,” thereby enabling the human to break free of real repression and cultivate a “new sensibility.” It is precisely this “new sensibility” that prefigures the human's future and possesses true revolutionary character. Evidently, the connection between literary art and revolution that Marcuse speaks of is utopian; he places hope in the distant future, in a dream hard to realize.

Sartre is not so. He says: “The literature of a specific age, when it cannot clearly be conscious of its own autonomy, when it submits to secular power or some ideology—in short, when it takes itself as a means rather than an unconstrained end—the literature of this age is alienated. In this situation, the work, in terms of its particularity, undoubtedly transcends this enslavement; every work undoubtedly contains an unconstrained demand, but all this is only latent. I hold that a literature, when it has not yet fully recognized its own essence, when it merely proposes its principle of formal autonomy and regards the subject-matter of the work as irrelevant, this literature is abstract.” (22) In Sartre's view, the recognition that has always reduced the nature of literature merely to the principle of formal autonomy is incomplete. Literature should be a “concrete universality,” should be the “convergence and reconciliation of the metaphysical absolute and the relativity of historical fact.” It must be noted that Sartre's meaning here is by no means the “unity of essence and appearance.” What Sartre thinks about is: literature, in its essence, has transcendence; through negating reality and breaking free of the various real constraints, it wins its own autonomy and freedom, and also wins universality. But this characteristic also often makes literature be abstracted into pure form, abandoning historical concreteness. He holds that literature has transcendence, and that the writer should not be divorced from real society. While acknowledging that purely formally resorting to abstract free will would leave each individual in the original isolated situation, one cannot simply abandon it, but must take it as the starting point; otherwise, once one loses this thread, people would lose their way in the “jungle of propaganda.” The feasible method is, through the content (subject-matter) of the literary work, to change the independent, autonomous “city-state of ends” into a concrete, open society—that is to say, one should endow the subject-matter of the literary work with a full social-historicity.

Sartre greatly values the value of the concrete individual in history; for example, in discussing Flaubert, Sartre once said: “If Flaubert is a member of the provincial bourgeoisie, then it is not that every provincial bourgeois is Flaubert.” (23) This mode of thinking is likewise embodied in Sartre's recognition of literary art. He holds that aesthetic appreciation of a literary work can arouse in the human a pure formal volition that takes the human as an end, to some extent dissolving his experiential personality, escaping his resentment, fear, and covetousness, and letting him soar to the summit of freedom. At the same time, through the work's real subject-matter, it leads the appreciator's volition toward the world he lives in, toward his neighbors, that is, the oppressed of this world, thereby “making these non-temporal good wills… historicize themselves while maintaining their purity,” “changing their formal demand into a material demand with a definite date.” (24) In this way, between form and subject-matter, between the human nature ideal, free will, and the human's real existential state, a special tension is created, which goes on to lead people to recognize society and transform society. Such a writer is the engaged writer: he does not take literature as a means of propaganda or of realizing some practical aim, yet literature most effectively exerts its social-political function.

III

Sartre ingeniously found a path that communicates literary art's autonomy and utilitarian purposiveness, the metaphysical and the historical, while at the same time leaving later generations a theoretical space for further deep exploration.

First, Sartre regards fiction and autonomy as the nature of literary art, and holds that those literary arts that submit to power or ideology are its alienation; this in essence already a priori presupposes an essence for literary art, and does not carry his historicizing intention through to the end—it even contradicts his philosophical view that “existence precedes essence.” But Sartre's historical analysis of literature is still very useful, and indeed crucial, for solving the above paradox; only that he was too deeply influenced by Kant and did not completely transcend it, so that the answer his historical analysis could originally have obtained was finally missed. It is precisely from Sartre's concrete analysis that one can see that the fictionality and autonomy of literary art are the products of historical construction.

Second, Sartre's analysis of the relation between literary form and content (subject-matter) also has a suspicion of dualism, and the complex relation between literary autonomy and utilitarian purposiveness still fails to be deeply and clearly expounded.

For literary art, there exists no form separated from content, nor content independent of form; any content is always formalized content. The peculiarity of the aesthetic process of literary art is precisely to lead the appreciator into aesthetic appreciation and to participate in aesthetic construction. Form, as an external sign and structuring force of literary art, distinguishes literary art from the daily object-world, and leads the human, with an unreal attitude, to establish an aesthetic relation with the work, that is, a fictive intentional relation, and to go on, together with the work, to construct the fictional aesthetic world. Marcuse made a good exposition of this action of form: “It is precisely by the help of form that art transcends the existing reality, and becomes, within the existing reality, a work that opposes the existing reality. This transcending component is inherent in art; it lies on the dimension of art itself. Art changes experience through reconstructing the object, that is, through reconstructing words, sounds, and images.” (25) And it is precisely in this sense that Wolfgang Welsch says: “It is precisely in the opposition to the real world that the aesthetic world affirms the quality of the fictive world, affirms the dissolution of reality, affirms the depicting of, and attention to, the unreal. Contrary to reality, the aesthetic world is more superior, lighter, brighter, relatively unreal, and sometimes shrouded in cloud and mist… around ‘the fictive,’ this central attribute, once ‘the aesthetic’ means a mode of existence, it refers precisely to this category of meaning.” (26)

Literary art, by the help of aesthetic form and unrealization, creates a fictional aesthetic world, an independent, autonomous world of otherness with respect to reality. In this world, the real utilitarian aim cannot but be suspended; and so, literary art itself becomes the end, the human himself becomes the end, and the human freely unfolds his own sensuous life, fully experiencing the richness of the existence of life.

But in fact, the appreciation of literary art is by no means a single, pure aesthetic activity; the relation between appreciator and work is also by no means a single aesthetic relation; aesthetic activity itself is also complex and changeable. Nietzsche's analysis of tragedy precisely reveals the complexity of literary art and its appreciation. He holds that true art, especially tragedy, should be the mutual penetration and fusion of the Dionysian factor and the Apollonian factor, like the fraternal alliance of two divinities: the Dionysian speaks the language of the Apollonian, and the Apollonian finally also speaks the language of the Dionysian. These two factors play a mutually-opposing-yet-complementary action in the process of art appreciation. The Dionysian destroys the daily limits and rules of life, drowns the individual and all he has experienced in the trance of intoxication; with a thread of forgetfulness it separates daily reality from the reality of the Dionysian; it intends to destroy the individual, with a mysterious sense of unity releases the individual, and opens the road back to the mother of existence and to the original living being, letting the human, in pain, feel original joy. The Apollonian, in turn, is the guardian deity of the principle of individuation; it strips away the universality of the Dionysian, lets the human again be intoxicated with the individual, displays the human image to the human one by one, inspires the human to apprehend the mystery of life contained therein, and, with such great energy as the arousal of image, concept, ethical teaching, and sympathy, pulls the human out of the self-destruction of indulgence, and, with the illusory image, entices him to evade the universality of the Dionysian process.

These two forces make the appreciator experience “the situation of both wanting to view and wanting to transcend above the viewing,” and these two processes “clearly coexist at the same time and are felt at the same time.” (27) The Dionysian, with frenzy, lets the human break free of reality, break free of the individual and tend toward universality and free will; the Apollonian, in turn, with serene contemplation, faces directly the myriad phenomena of the world and the hundred states of life, and arouses sympathy—and this provides the opportunity for the author and appreciator to engage with social reality. And when the illusory image of the work displays the mystery of life, it is closely related to the appreciator's life-experience; as the reality of the work's subject-matter strengthens, the experiential distance between work and appreciator also tends to shrink, and this goes on to lead the aesthetic attitude to dissolve and turn toward the attitude of reality, (28) leading the appreciation of literary art to transition from the aesthetic to the cognitive-critical. This is also the process in which “entering-within” and “standing-outside” interweave.

In discussing the cultivating and purifying action of the aesthetic on the human, George Santayana says: “The more we can break free of the dusty worldly garment we have accidentally put on, the more the spirit that endures through calamity is laid bare and pure; its superiority and unity reach all the more toward perfection, and so its joy is all the more limitless. At that time, few worldly thoughts remain in our hearts—only the essence of pure reason, which several great philosophers once called the eternal essence identical with the divine.” (29) When the appreciator “enters within,” immersing and intoxicating himself in the fictional world of literary art, he forgets his own real existence, breaks free of real constraint and gains full freedom, and in a certain sense transforms into a free ideal existence, transforms into Sartre's “universal human.” And only in this state can literary art be said to be independent, autonomous, and disinterested. But when the appreciator “stands outside,” transcends the work, and goes on to view the work with a cognitive attitude, he again returns to reality. However, the appreciator has already changed; he is no longer the “I” in the original daily reality, but an appreciator who has experienced true freedom and glimpsed ideal human nature. In a certain sense, he has “broken free of the dusty worldly garment accidentally put on,” and, standing on the standpoint of ideal human nature, views, in the identity of a free subject, the situation the work provides, and makes a critical recognition of it. The literary work too is no longer independent of the real world; it again becomes an “event” in the real social-historical situation and is closely related to the whole of social reality. At this time, the real subject-matter that Sartre advocates precisely becomes the bridge that communicates the work and real society; it leads the appreciator to attend to reality, to critique reality, and leads his sympathy toward his neighbors and those people oppressed and alienated by reality.

There exists a misconception in the customary view, which holds that once a real subject-matter is used in a literary work, it is already incorporated into the fictional aesthetic world, and its ability to refer to reality is completely lost. In fact, this isolated state occurs only in the pure aesthetic relation, in aesthetic intoxication. When the appreciator transcends the world of the work and turns to view the work with a cognitive attitude, the subject-matter's ability to refer to reality is again restored, and its ability to refer to reality is precisely closely related to the reality of the subject-matter itself, only that this reference is not determinate reference, but general reference. (30) The whole context of fiction cancels the possibility of determinate reference, and it can only, through association, through the isomorphic relation of work and reality, realize a general reference to reality. However, it is precisely because the referentiality of the subject-matter is not determinate reference but general reference that literary art is endowed with an enormous critical force: it is no longer confined to a certain limited, determinate social phenomenon, but extends its feelers to every corner of social history, points toward all kinds of similar and related phenomena, and greatly expands its own critical horizon. Only when the reality of the work's subject-matter is emptied out, loses its connection with reality, so that it cannot build a bridge to reality through association, is its ability to refer to reality exhausted. Although Sartre did not make a concrete exposition of the transforming relation in the process of literary-artistic appreciation, he had already, with the intuition of genius, grasped the key to the problem.

The critical force of literary art lies not only in pointing out the obscure and unclear social phenomenon, but also in the fact that the appreciator has experienced aesthetic cultivation and purification, broken free of his own limitation, and begins to carry out this critique from a more universal value-standpoint and with a more profound concern—just as Vernant says, “entering into another way of seeing.” (31) In the process of literary-artistic appreciation, on one hand, the appreciator, “by aiming at all people, is as if the eternal freedom were dimly visible on the horizon of the concrete historical liberation he pursues, as if the universality of humankind were manifested in the concrete historical collective constituted by his reading-collective.” (32) On the other hand, he again, from the angle of free will and ideal human nature, enters the historical activity displayed by the work's subject-matter, faces social history with a new passion, and dissects it with a new gaze and measure, thereby reaching a new critical depth. Therefore, the relation between the form and content (subject-matter) of literary art is by no means the mutual opposition that Sartre held; rather, from this is constituted a special tension between the human nature ideal, free will, and the human's real existential state. In fact, form and content are one whole; only that, in the process of appreciation, the appreciator experiences different states, the intentional relation between appreciator and work proceeds interwoven from the aesthetic to the cognitive, and the human precisely can integrate the different fruits of different stages and different states, thereby realizing the utilitarian purposiveness of literary art.

The reason literary art differs from any other thing in the real world lies precisely in its belonging to the fictional world; the reason the utilitarian purposiveness of literary art differs from other utilitarian purposiveness lies precisely in its being built on the basis of aesthetic experience. Literary art, in a unique way, provides the human with a fictional—that is, indeterminate, unfinished—existential state. It is precisely this characteristic that makes it possible for the appreciator to transcend the limitation of the given social-historical conditions, to proceed from a more far-reaching and more human-nature-fitting aim, rather than from the private interest of a single moment, to practice the utilitarian aim of humankind itself. One may say that Sartre ingeniously pointed out a line of thought for cracking the difficult problem of the relation between autonomy and utility, the metaphysical and the historical, and for exploring the mystery of literary art, leaving later generations an extremely valuable theoretical resource.