"Nothing but face" - "To hell with philosophy"?: Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the scandal of human countenance

Sartre reluctantly admits that after immuring himself in his selfhood, he grew less happy with the idea of isolation as being sustained, existentially, in isolation. He notices, "in his peripheral vision, that it would find a glad repose in the thousands of [other] souls threatened by numbers." This confusion between "philosophy and numbers," between one's own thought and the press of others, between a spot taken up in a museum and dozens of staring paintings, Sartre cannot seem to transcend: "Neither Consciousness nor the Concrete has the right to grow fat on such yeast."

Worse even than this resurfacing terror - "isolation fattened by numbers" - is the realization that this fear itself is not alone:"It immediately became magnified by the numbers of all those others whom he could identify himself with - and the burning of a tree became a conflagration of an entire forest in our philosopher." Sartre turns to himself one more time - "in being the Only One, I cannot be one of the many!" - and decides to resuscitate the Other whom he had previously annihilated philosophically - "rediscover, recognize, reinstitute, re-establish my bond with him!" He recognizes the Other's freedom, gives the Other the character of Subject, calls the Other into being. The horrifying consequence? "Our philosopher has found himself face-to-face with full numbers. He who took fright at the Parisian mob now saw himself facing all mobs, all individuals, everywhere and always."

Sartre presses on. Being and Nothingness is published. He throws himself into political causes, holds fast to the Sartrean pillars of responsibility and engagement, once again endeavors to "take humanity onto his shoulders."

And he might have made it, if not for this, if not for the fact that numbers had again mixed into the whole, including everyone, overflowing in a way that was really indecent [. . .] the number of copies of his work [. . .] the number of editions [. . .] the number of readers [. . .] the number of commentaries [. . .] the number of thoughts that hatched out of his thoughts and the number of thoughts hatching out of these thoughts [. . .] and the number of all the different variants of these variants.

(3: 42)

Far worse now than any "throng-crush" of "people-nonpeople" who approach or surround one on the street is the infinitely greater upsurge of readers, being besieged by whom (as Gombrowicz puts it in Ferdydurke) "is like being born in a thousand narrow minds (17)." To paraphrase Sartre's famous observation about Flaubert, on est lire - one is read.

The anecdote ends on a note of deflationary resignation. Sartre is distraught, wants to commit suicide, tries to commit suicide, but finally consoles himself with the thought that even though the swelling tide of readers is catastrophic because of the sheer numbers, at the end of the day it all comes to nothing "as a result of these same numbers," since dispersal actually hides a secret cushion: the more thought and language are disseminated, the less they're really understood: "people talk but no one knows about what, one about this, another about that, and somehow nothing comes of it" (3: 42).