Gide

Gide is invoked as both a witness to the entanglement of motives and causes and a literary reference point for the possibility of radical self-transformation. Sartre draws on Gide’s reflections about feeling and on Philoctetes’s renunciation of hatred to show how a person’s project can shape experience—and, in an extraordinary conversion, give way to another.

Identity and Role

Gide appears not as the subject of a continuous biography but as a writer whose formulations help Sartre examine freedom, feeling, and action. His examples serve two related purposes: a remark about being on the “good side of the barricade” illustrates one possible motive for political commitment, while his question about the purity of feelings leads Sartre to challenge the distinction between willing an emotion and experiencing it.

The two references give Gide a double role in the argument. He helps name the subjective passions that may accompany a decision, but his literary work also supplies an instance in which a person’s defining orientation changes. Sartre treats neither role as a complete psychological explanation; both are points of entry into the question of how a person’s choices make a life intelligible.

Motives and Political Commitment

In Sartre’s example, someone may join the Socialist party because they judge it to serve justice and humanity, or because they believe it will become a major historical force. These are presented as causes: assessments of the situation and its possible development. Alongside them may be motives, including pity for oppressed classes, an inferiority complex, a wish to shock one’s relatives, or the shame of finding oneself on the privileged side of a barricade—a formulation Sartre attributes to Gide.

The example does not settle which element produces the decision. Sartre argues that the traditional distinction between objective causes and subjective motives cannot explain how the two contribute to one act, much less how they might conflict. Gide’s phrase therefore belongs to a broader problem: an emotion may describe the agent’s experience, but it cannot simply be measured against an objective cause as though each were an independent force with an assignable share in the choice.

Feeling as Choice

Sartre returns to Gide’s question about the difference between a willed feeling and an experienced one. His answer is that there is no difference in the sense the question assumes: to will to love and to love coincide insofar as loving involves choosing oneself as loving and assuming consciousness of that love. Feeling is not merely a passive state that a separate will later adopts or rejects; it is bound up with the way a person chooses and lives a self.

This account connects Gide’s question to Sartre’s claim that consciousness and choice are inseparable. The choice at issue is not necessarily a deliberate decision made after weighing motives as objects. It is the more fundamental orientation that already shapes how a person understands a situation, takes up its possibilities, and acts. Gide’s problem of emotional purity thus becomes a problem about freedom: a feeling cannot be treated as wholly separate from the person who lives it.

Philoctetes and Conversion

Sartre names Gide’s Philoctetes as an image of conversion: at a decisive instant, Philoctetes casts off his hatred, described as his fundamental project, his reason for being, and his being. The change is not represented as a small adjustment produced by the old project’s motives. The prior project collapses into the past as a new one begins to emerge, still only in outline.

Sartre describes such conversions as moments in which humiliation, anguish, joy, and hope are delicately blended. Their movement is reciprocal: letting go makes grasping possible, while grasping entails letting go. The example makes freedom visible as a radical metamorphosis of a person’s fundamental orientation, rather than as a simple victory of deliberate will over passion. Yet Sartre cautions that these dramatic instants are only one manifestation of freedom, not its sole form.